#not because they view other people as subhuman or worse than they are but because they view themself as something *more* | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

redditreceipts · 2 months

Note

hi, I’m not sure how to word this right…I’m a transmasculine (NOT TRANSMALE) woman, it’s hard to explain exactly what it means but that’s the closest I’ve gotten, gnc works too I guess though doesn’t fully articulate it.

But I’ve identified as a lot of things since a really early age, generally always circling back to a trans man. Im a survivor of sexual abuse/exploitation, and I would always find myself identifying as the “stereotypical feminine woman” when I was in a worse state and wanted to be objectified, then identifying as a trans male when I wanted to be treated like a human. I figured this meant trans-manhood was what was really right for me, that womanhood was something I only went to as self harm, but recently I thought “would I want to be a man if women were treated like people too” and I realized I wouldn’t.

I support transgender and transsexual rights fully, but I really wish that there was more acknowledgment of sexism. Not just misogyny…sexism.

I thought I was above misogyny, but I’m only recently realizing at age 19 that I didn’t view women as human the way I viewed men as human, and I felt this way because of how I’ve been treated as a female all my life. The way people treat you from birth goes beyond anything a male could comprehend, and it’s so engrained that no one even notices it. We’re not allowed to express emotions or opinions because it’s “too much” and we’re “too loud” especially if we’re not white (which I’m not), we have to do so much more work to be considered an equal by men, we’re talked about in society as objects to be obtained rather than living breathing complex humans, we’re not given margin for error like men are, we’re held to higher standards, we’re constantly forced to prove ourselves in every single capacity in a way men never have to, we’re treated as objects and toys and constantly referred to only with degrading misogynist slurs, we’re aborted for our sex and not given the same education as male classmates and shut out of conversations and objectified before we can even walk, When it’s laid out like that, yeah it’s no wonder so many women (myself included) feel like manhood is the key to humanity. Because It is. Because in society there are people and women, and the current queer community is all too comfortable to bulldoze over this oppression and pretend there’s no such thing as sexism because acknowledging that means challenging their “everyone is valid uwu” shit. Im not saying there aren’t just actual trans men, of course there are, but come on.

Hey :) sorry for the late answer, I've been a bit busy so yeah

I think I kinda get what you mean when you say that you are transmasculine, and I personally think that if that's the best word to describe it, you should go for it! Identity is always a personal matter. I would however argue that identity does not override material reality, and in political terms, we are defined by our biological sex, amongst other things :)

And yes, you are so right when you say that there should be more of an acknowledgement of sexism in the trans community! Women are seen as subhuman, and a woman has to do much more than a man to just be considered a person. That is especially true in the intersection with race and sex.

And well, the trans gender community relies on upholding gender. How many transmasculine people do you see being annoyed when they're being called "she", and they say stuff like "You're calling me she? With my short hair? Dressed like this??"

the recognition of a member of one sex as a member of the opposite sex is much, much harder without gender steretoypes. Abolishing gender leaves us with the cold, hard reality of the oppression of the female sex. I feel like gender is all the pretty fluff and mystification of a brutal truth: Women are seen as less than human.

And yes, I also sometimes feel like I have to be super androgynous to be considered human. But I'm not, and trying to change your sex instead of changing the oppressive systems is like trying to be straight instead of challenging homophobia.

Anyways, I'm glad you're here :) Here's a cat with an octopus on it's head for you :)

27 notes · View notes

snowyslytherinowl · 4 months

Text

My Views on Coriolanus Snow and The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

This is a Harry Potter blog, but not even Harry Potter can capture my mind and soul like the Hunger Games can. I’ve read TBOSAS three times and I have some opinions to share. My conclusions will be based on the book since I didn’t particularly like the movie.

Note: I haven’t read the book in about 2 months so I apologize if anything I say is blatantly incorrect. I don’t mind if anyone disputes what I say, but please be respectful.

And of course, SPOILERS BELOW THE CUT!

Point 1: Coriolanus cared for Lucy Gray in his own weird way, but he never loved her

After reading the book for the second time, I thought that Coriolanus never loved Lucy Gray and that he was only ever using her. After reading it for the third time, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that he was only ever using her. I think that he genuinely cared for her before and during the 10th Hunger Games. For example, he felt disturbed at how she had nothing to eat and didn’t talk about what happened to Clemensia since she had bigger problems than he did. Also, Coriolanus kissing Lucy Gray in public during their final goodbye before the Games was one of the only moments where he broke from his true character (and this missing scene from the movie is one reason why I didn’t particularly like it). Coriolanus’s number 1 priority was maintaining his public image, so the fact that he kissed a District girl in public was a big deal.

However, I don’t think he truly loved her since he viewed her as a possession. Coriolanus admitted to having an obsessive nature, which extended to him being obsessed with her. The first huge red flag in his relationship with Lucy Gray was when he gave her a matching rose before the interviews as a “reminder of who Lucy Gray belonged to.” Throughout the novel and especially after the Games, Coriolanus continually refers to Lucy Gray as “his girl.” He was also perpetually jealous of Billy Taupe even though she assured him time and time again that she loved only him. The most profound statement that proves his possessive nature towards her is when he thinks, “In some ways, it had been better to have her locked up in the Capitol, where he always had a general idea of what she was doing.”

Coriolanus was someone who valued stability and control, while Lucy Gray was fiercely individualistic. So please stop thinking that it could’ve ever worked out between the two of them.

Point 2: Lucy Gray is not a pick me girl

At least for the first few months after the book came out, people were claiming that Lucy Gray was what we would consider a pick me girl. The first time I read the book, even I thought that she gave off the vibe of not being like other girls. Lucy Gray emphasizes that she and the Covey were neither District nor Capitol; they’re just the Covey. But after reading the book for the second time, I realized that she only held this view because she was proud of who she was. At the same time, she didn’t think that being Covey made her any better or that District people were worse than her. She also said, “People aren’t so bad, really. It’s what the world does to them.”

I think that the “not like other District people” view originated from Coriolanus. From the beginning, Coriolanus viewed people from the Districts as brutish and subhuman. He used Lucy Gray’s identity as Covey as an argument that she wasn’t like the subhuman District people; she was special and one could even argue that she was even Capitol. It was unfortunate that she and the Covey were rounded up into District 12. I think he developed this idea as both a way to gain sympathy from Capitol viewers and to convince himself that he wasn’t in love with a “worthless” girl. He also would’ve disagreed with Lucy Gray’s quote since he viewed only District people as truly bad to the core.

Point 3: Lucy Gray survived

I don’t think we will ever get an answer as to what happened to Lucy Gray. I think her fate is supposed to remain a mystery, just like Wordsworth’s Lucy Gray’s fate remained a mystery. Nonetheless, I personally believe that she survived.

Coriolanus hated the mockingjays because they were abominations that resulted from the breeding of high-tech Capitol jabberjays and the local District mockingbirds. And who is similar to the mockingjays? Lucy Gray. She was a songbird who wanted to be free and never wanted to be controlled, while Coriolanus wanted to control everything. Just like the mockingjays came to be and flourished in District 12, Lucy Gray also survived. She was a clever bird who survived the Hunger Games and tricked Coriolanus.

I know that my opinion is based all on symbolism, but many aspects of Suzanne Collins’s writing are symbolic.

Point 4: Coriolanus never cared for Sejanus

First of all, let me say that the movie did Sejanus DIRTY. They portrayed him as a pain in the ass (he was that in the book, but he was so much more as well) and I even saw some people saying that he deserved what he got. No one says that to my Sejanus.

Anyway, back to the point: Coriolanus always viewed Sejanus as the bane of his existence. Sejanus was going to steal Coriolanus’s fortune and he always stole Coriolanus’s spotlight. Coriolanus thought that Sejanus brought the tributes food to take the attention away from him; not for one moment did he think that it was because Sejanus had a heart of gold. He viewed Sejanus’s attachment to District 2 as stupid since he should’ve felt lucky to have a comfortable life in the Capitol.

Yes, Coriolanus jumped off his bunk and threw his arms around Sejanus when he arrived in District 12. But it was not because he was genuinely happy to see Sejanus; he was happy to see Sejanus because he reminded him of home. After their first conversation in District 12 was over, Coriolanus admitted that the news that the Capitol didn’t hate him was what brought him back to life. And while they were “friends” during their time as Peacekeepers, Coriolanus felt like he always had to get Sejanus out of trouble. Coriolanus was constantly watching over Sejanus to ensure he wasn’t communicating with the rebels and he was trying to convince Sejanus not to do anything extreme. This feeling got so bad that he wanted Sejanus out of his life.

One thing I will say is that I don’t think that Coriolanus wanted Sejanus dead, per se. When he recorded Sejanus’s plans using the jabberjay, Coriolanus thought that Strabo would donate tons of money and have Sejanus removed from District 12; he didn’t think he would be killed. I think Coriolanus felt slightly guilty for essentially putting the noose around Sejanus’s neck, but he also thought he was doing Sejanus a favor. He had saved Sejanus from dying multiple times before that, so it was only a matter of time before Sejanus died. So no, Anus^2/Snowjanus wouldn’t have worked out either.

Point 5: Coriolanus wasn’t completely evil from the beginning

I’ve seen people saying that Coriolanus was always evil or that he wasn’t even evil in TBOSAS. My viewpoint is in the middle between these two opinions. I think Coriolanus had messed up thinking from the very first chapter, but he wasn’t evil. He did have some morals, like genuinely caring for Lucy Gray’s well-being and feeling guilty over Clemensia’s snake bites. I don’t think he actually wanted to kill Sejanus or attempt to kill Lucy Gray, but he would kill anyone if it meant he would make it out alive and unharmed. I think Coriolanus would’ve eventually turned evil as he grew older even if the 10th Hunger Games had never taken place. However, I think that Dr. Gaul sending him to District 12 accelerated his path to becoming evil. By the end of the book, Coriolanus had devolved into the primal state resembling humans living without a social contract.

Point 6: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes isn’t a romance

Point 5 brings me to this point: TBOSAS is a piece on human nature and political control. There is romance and I will admit that I giggled and kicked my feet as I saw Coriolanus kissing Lucy Gray like a starving man (this was despite me already knowing everything that would happen). The main actions of TBOSAS actually revolve around Dr. Gaul’s points on chaos, contract, and control (which originated from Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes). Without a government and without a social contract, people are primal creatures and will kill at a whim. The only way to civilize people is to place them under a social contract, and thus there must be a strong government to enforce this contract and control the people. Coriolanus took Dr. Gaul’s lesson to heart and genuinely believed that only the Capitol could hold Panem together. Throughout the book, Coriolanus starts from a person with questionable thoughts to a person with no morals whatsoever. The downward spiral of his moral compass truly begins when he arrives in District 12, but he loses all morals once he leaves for the woods with Lucy Gray and abandons civilization. Therefore, Coriolanus fell victim to Dr. Gaul’s thesis.

GIF Credits

Intro: @aemondtagaryen

Point 1: @xthecaptainssaviorx

Point 2: @myrcella-lannister

Point 3: @kvtnisseverdeen

Point 4: @clemensiadovecotes

Point 5: @fyeahvillains

Point 6: @xthecaptainssaviorx

38 notes · View notes

randomnameless · 5 months

Text

FE 25 :

Uwu:(...) I question the way in which our society is designed. No matter what strength a person has, it is the station he is born into that controls his destiny. And you cannot control where you will be born. Do you believe that a person of low birth should simply endure the curse of his station? I think not. If you are stronger than those around you, you should benefit from your strength. This is why I will use my strength to remake this world. Class and rank will not matter. Human and sub-human will not matter. The strong will possess everything. The weak will submit to their will. Is this not the meaning of peace? A subhuman: Are you saying that the lives of those without strength have no value?

Uwu : If after all of this you believe the weak will still be weak, that is only because they are too used to relying on others instead of on themselves. A barbarian and potential subhuman lover : There are those who cannot live without their faith... and those who cannot go on once they have lost their reason for living. Your path will not be able to save them. It is the path of the strong, and so, it could only benefit the strong.

Uwu: That is the natural order. The only way for the weak to survive is to cling to the strong. Our discussion is over. Tell me, frail little bird who cannot fight; which do you choose? Submission? Or death? A subhuman: …Life proffered to me by your hand is something I would never accept! A barbarian and potential subhuman lover : (...) I finally understand…what you believe is right.

The context is different, Dimi has a special background with Supreme Leader and is her step-brother, so it makes sense trying to reach for her and at least try to understand what is going on in her mind, than Reyson, a frail and weak laguz by birth, trying to understand and reach out for Ashnard.

But are we really supposed to think Dimi's reply here is pretty different because he personally knew his Ashnard? Or because he isn't a weak and frail thing by birth, like Reyson, so he isn't as angry or as passionate in his replies?

I know this scene plays a role in Dimitri's arc - he tries to reach out for her (hand) when he earlier only wanted to end her life, because he isn't driven by revenge or vengeance anymore and wants to save people, even Supreme Leader.

So this convo is less about Supreme Leader and more about him.

And yet, imo, this always felt sort of wrong, because while Dimitri cannot do a thing for the people who are already dead (killing Supreme Leader won't bring them back, he has to think about the living now and not to avenge the dead) - Dimitri is still talking to someone who gave means and opportunities (and fodder!) to Izuka to create Feral Ones thus most likely knows there is a Gritnea Tower around, started a war and killed thousands, was involved (as far as he knows?) in the brutal killing of his family and has pretty biased views on Laguz.

Of course in the following scenes and maps, he resolves to put an end to the war thus defeat her, and we know Supreme Leader refuses his mercy and prefers to die - but the way this development is frailed is not a straight up rejection of her POV or her so called "IdEaLs", but it's framed as a tragedy because Dimitri couldn't "save" her.

No, kill that, it's even worse :

We have no choice but to destroy each other… Such is the destiny we were born to.

Now this fight - aka Dimitri wanting to put an end to Ashnard's war - is the result of fate, and not the will/choices both parties made to reach that point (which is, in a way, hilarious, because he mentions just after his line her "iron will", so pick your horse Dimitri, is this war the result of fate/destiny, or is it due to Ashnard's "iron will"?).

Ultimately, the themes and arcs of both games are different, so it's no wonder that the solution each Lord(s) offer is different - Elincia wants to avenge her parents and justice for her dead countrymen, Reyson wants to have the right to exist even if he is a weak thing by birth, Ike is out of the loop / Dimitri wants to accept Supreme Leader and "save" her because vengeance and justice drove him to a wall and got his close father figure killed, Dimitri now wants to protect the living, even Supreme Leader herself (or at least he tries).

So even if Ashnard and Supreme Leader share the same dubious ideals, keep a lizard in cage/captivity, used feral ones and started wars - the reaction to them is different, because the Lords have different character arcs and development.

That being said, even with all his character development, would a post-Rodrigue death Dimitri who, idk, is warped in FE9's Tellius, after befriending Laguz, witnessing racism, seeing Gritnea and the "wildlife experiments", witnessing Daein's army ruining civilians, learning about Lillia, Rajaion, etc etc, would that Dimitri still have reached his hand out to Ashnard upon his defeat?

If we want to stay in Fodlan, a Dimitri who befriends Nabateans (who reveals themselves to be Nabateans!), learns about the Relics, learns about Supreme Leader's goal to free the world from their existence because their race isn't allowed to have power over humans, seeing Gritnea or at least still giving fucks about the humans who were painfully transformed in Demonic Beasts (and maybe solving the question about who are they made from, random Adrestian civilians or war prisoners?), reacting to Ferdie's paralogue, learning about Rhea's zumba lessons in her 5 stars resort, etc etc, would this Dimitri still have reached his hand out to a Supreme Leader whose core belief (or least one of them) is Nabateans shouldn't be allowed to live in Fodlan, and Faerghus and Leicester should never have existed and should return to her?

Of course the game makes it so that we will never learn the answer to that second situation, because Hresvelg Tea and whatnot, but if we want to stay true to his character arc, then AM!Dimitri would still have reached out for her hand.

A Dimitri who becomes the kind of ruler Elincia is after her arc in FE10... wouldn't have at all.

#typing about the game's hresvelg grey made me think about this issue #to think the writers had the nerve to have Dimitri mention 'uwu destiny fault' when he took time to talk and understand Supreme Leader's PO #and 2 seconds later mention her own will #like you can see IS casually adding more tea in there bcs uwu maybe there's a path where everyone can walk together #plz cry it's a tragedy that you have to rekt Supreme Leader :(#no wonder why no one seems to give a fuck about her lizard prejudice it's not mentioned at all bar optional convos in SS and VW #or it's locked to her route #Baldo'n'Waldi? Who gives a fuck #sure Supreme Leader deflects the convo in the parley #but there's no fire against her uwu ideals #instead we focus on the personal tragedy between the two of them who cannot accept each other's reasoning #'i think a good nabatean is a relic they cannot exist in our world' 'wtf' 'agree to disagree' 'okay'#the writers knew it would look stupid and nonsensical so instead we get this scene #Supreme Reply replies yes to Reyson's question #and then the convo ends with Supreme Leader starting the 'ok agree to disagree let's fight later' and we have the dagger scene

12 notes · View notes

aftonfamilyvalues · 4 months

Note

I am terrified if men.

I mean my father did everything to me but rape me. And he’d assert dominance over me /threaten me because he didn’t want other guys to sleep with me, date me, didn’t want me to get married, etc.

I’m no contact and he knows better than to contact me because if he does I’ll take legal action. My mom died and she was the one protecting him.

I seek therapy because I want to heal and am repeatedly invalidated about my trauma and about the reality that most men are abusive, sexual predators.

I’ve expressed that I’m sad I didn’t experience ge t romantic love..

Which is only to say that I’m all about separatism and even though I’m not dating men cause I’m traumatized by them, I have this regret over not having been able to explore a healthy sexuality, and a fear of missing out.

The last therapist I had was malicious/emotional abusive. Would read and be on the computer during sessions and deny doing it. Claimed I talked to much, (bad luck with this super narcissistic, very misogynistic old woman, grandmother /in her 60’s,) she ignored me /was very devaluing, then perked up “it can happen at any age!” She either thought I was lying or l exaggerating about being abused, or/and definitely not listening because I’ve never expressed wanting a bf or a husband, ever. Of course I did as a teenager/child. It’s honestly so demoralizing when even a therapist views you as inferior and like your being single is a problem and thinks you’re talking too much and attention seeking.

I’ve never not had a female therapist downplay or invalidate my trauma and male violence. I wish there were more feminist based pyschotherapists / bare minimum, therapists who do not project their family values Bullshit. I’ve never not have had a therapist view me as the problem to all my experiences. I’ve therapists judge me and treat me as subhuman for being childfree and single.

I def need therapy as I’m so traumatized that I’m scared to sleep and not sleeping anymore and it’s impacting my health. I also can’t regulate my emotions well and I’m a fearful avoidant with ptsd, some folks say therapist isn’t necessary because most are bad. I’d honestly argue most therapists have very misogynistic beliefs…

Is there any way to ver that out. I get so gaslight I lost my sense of self/ I’ve had to recover from bad therapy but once out of therapy I start feeling less crazy… I do we’ll months on my own without talking to someone but then need therapi.

I’m legitimently scared of them at this point. I did give my last therapist feed back about her behavior, when I told her “I’m a person, and I don’t deserve this treatment” and then responded with “I don’t believe you” she raged and yelled at me, blaming me for her being distracted, telling me I talked too much.

I’m started to lose hope however that there are therapists who recognize patriarchy and oppression as a root cause to mental illness, rather than a partner as a cure for mental illness 🙄without claiming I’m the problem when I’m the one showing up to therapy for what happened to me. Therapists all just think their patients are mentally I’ll crazy women who can’t get a man. I feel insane when I go to therapy. Because I’m terrified of men and the focus is never on me as an individual, but (I shit you not, and tbh I even told her she was giving me harmful advice,) but tk shift the focus on my “distortion” of why I think I “can’t have that now.”

(I actually believe there are good therapists in just scared to open up now /be devalued/have a therapist not even treat seperatism as viable or even suggest it to me as an option. I don’t need a therapist to suggest it to me but I’d trust one much better who did. It sucks leaving a therapy session feeling worse because you don’t feel good enough.)

I really think most therapists are sexists because they have male bias

i think ive mentioned it before but therapy is more of a business nowadays. all these therapists arent people that actually want to help, very few of them do, most of them saw a growing industry and decided they could bank on it. they dont care to help and heal, they view therapy as a way to make someone (women) "normal" and fit in to society rather than working through trauma and have a healthy life, even if that life isnt the typical one. ive also seen a lot of therapists feed into bad behavior, validating the emotions and victim complexes of abusers all while teaching them a new progressive language to wield against their victims. i still think about how my friend went to therapy and the entire time going culminated into the conclusion of "your life sucks and theres nothing you can do about it" like what???? it seems like traumatized people come out of these sessions worse and i have no doubt that abusers are going into this field to extend their reach. i feel like the more people glamorize therapy the more this is going to happen.

#ask

11 notes · View notes

inhumanliquid · 4 months

Text

"It's not abuse if it doesn't break any bones" and other lies you can tell yourself

An incoherent(?) ramble(?) about the effects of certain "punishments" from the perspective of someone who realizes they didn't turn out fine

I was hit and yelled at from the age of about two to a time I have no memory of. I wasn't even a bad kid, I just didn't understand social rules (autistic) and got upset easily (little kid).

All I remember from when it would happen was the pain and fear. I don't know what I did to make them so mad. That's a problem.

Because they never bothered to explain what I did wrong, I didn't get that what I did was bad. I assumed that they didn't love me and that I was irredeemable.

Once, I was hit just because I was crying because I got yelled at for no reason. My mother likes to threaten punishments for showing emotions pretty damn often for someone who claims she's okay.

They used to lock me in my room. Now I do it myself so others can't do it for me. I'd love to feel safe going out without being scared of being forcefully isolated again.

I grew up with horrible self-esteem issues as a result. I hated myself and assumed everyone else hated me, too. I was suicidal from the age of around five (which I only know due to a diary my mom bought me and decided it was perfectly fine to snoop through). I got yelled at for that, too. It made it worse.

I still can't trust my parents because of what they did. Loud noises, especially literally anyone yelling, cause me to have panic attacks. I hate being touched unless I personally initiate it or the other person asks very specifically if the form of physical affection they're looking for is okay because it makes me anxious. I'm unable to communicate effectively with others and quick to resort to verbal or physical violence because, believe it or not, it's hard to get past things you internalize as a little kid.

Part of why I refuse to even adopt a kid is that I'm scared of being like my parents. I don't want to make another human being feel like they're just an object for people to take their anger out on or to teach them to view others in that way.

Because of how my parents treated me, I struggle to maintain stable relationships. I blow things out of proportion and make them the problem of people who were never involved to begin with. People are either totally evil (my parents) or completely perfect (the few people who actually stay around that aren't obligated to) with absolutely no in-between. I'm not a person, but a ceramic doll that's been completely shattered and then shoddily glued back together without all the pieces because some of them were either turned to dust or simply lost.

I dissociate a lot. Usually, it's derealization (disconnection from the world) or depersonalization (disconnection from the self), but it's also things like feeling like someone else got yelled at or hit or locked in that room for simply being alive.

Tangentially related to that point is that I just... don't have an actual identity. I can’t even answer basic questions like what my favorite color is.

My name is anything but my deadname, and my pronouns are any but the ones associated with my agab... which could easily be because of the association I have with that specific name and those specific pronouns, so I doubt myself on my own gender identity.

I could give you a list of things I do to waste time and call them hobbies, but hobbies are something you enjoy. I don't really enjoy anything at all anymore.

Online strangers, like MatPat and some of my Tumblr mutuals, and various fictional characters are more like family than my parents have ever been, or ever will be. Because they're actually nice to me.

So maybe think twice before treating a kid like they're subhuman just because they're young.

#written at 1-ish am my time (send help)#vent ish #okay to reblog #child abuse #parenting #childhood trauma

5 notes · View notes

drumlincountry · 2 years

Note

I looked up that chef lady and not believing in generational wealth is cool I guess but her rationale being "I am determined that my children should have no financial security. It ruins people not having to earn money." ??? rubs me the wrong way a bit?? EVERYONE should have financial security, actually? the problem with generational wealth is that only some people get security, the goal shouldn’t be “everyone should struggle for their own moral edification” it should be “we need to restructure society so that no one has to struggle”?

“it ruins people not having to earn money”..,…really conservative idk

(context: this is about nigella lawson).

Yeaaah I had that moment of pause too. Like I GET what she means but, it’s. off.

She’s misidentified the problem a bit? Like she’s right that power corrupts and that being mega rich within a system of inequality REALLY destroys the human soul. But poverty also ruins people? makes us afraid and sick and weak and exhausted? The system is bad for everyone and in fact 100000x worse for poor ppl than rich. she’s focusing on a relatively minor element of it.

I sure wish she had said something more like, ‘no one should profit off someone elses labour.’ or, ‘growing up with immense wealth and power makes people feel entitled to that wealth and power & causes them to view ppl without that power as subhuman’.

Because financial security is good actually.

A thing I heard recently (in the context of someone who was lucky enough to access really good medical care, and other people complaining about that, I believe) was "privilege is not a bad thing, the absence of privilege is a bad thing. everyone should have privilege". And like. YEAH.

(then again, it is a bit beyond Nigella Lawson, celebrity cook, to destroy capitalism and the british class system, to liberate us all to a world of true equality. Deciding her kids won’t be poisoned by the enormous power and wealth that poisons her peers is (possibly??) within her power).

Ultimately nigella lawson’s kids will be wealthier and more comfortable than I ever will be, even if she never gives them a red cent. They’re nigella lawson’s kids. They have power in the form of connections and knowledge and reputation-by-proxy .... which is also part of what “ruins people” in her social circle lol. it’s whatever.

#me fein #good stunt i guess???#i rambled so much in this #emergetransformed #no hate to nigella lawson i love a fellow foodie and hater of nazis #it's also a bit like. i know for a fact that welfare benefits for ppl under like 25 n the uk #take their parents wealth into account so #you can have a moral stance that people shouldn't be supported by their parents in adulthood but there is no other adequate support structur

5 notes · View notes

rantingcrocodile · 2 years

Text

The Rules of Biphobia

1. Bisexuals are responsible for what heterosexuals do.

2. Bisexuals saying no to others is oppressive.

3. Bisexuals speaking for themselves are exclusionary, manipulative and selfish.

4. Bisexual people’s views about bisexuality and biphobia are hateful to others, thus hatred towards bisexuals is justified.

5. Bisexuals must be useful to monosexuals or they are worthless.

6. Bisexuals who go around being bisexual in front of others and not putting themselves in the “heterosexual” or “homosexual” boxes “correctly” deserve punishment.

7. Bisexuals should always be grateful to monosexuals for everything.

8. Monosexuals are whatever they themselves say they are, and bisexuals are whatever monosexuals say they are.

9. Monosexuals always know the “real reasons” for everything bisexuals do and say.

10. The worst thing about biphobia is that it takes some attention away from homophobia.

11. Whatever bisexuals suffer from, it is worse when it happens to anyone else.

12. Bisexuals’ ability to recognise biphobia from lesbians and gay men is homophobia.

13. Angry bisexuals are crazy. Angry lesbians and gay men have righteous fury.

14. Bisexuals have all the rights they need: the right to remain silent.

15. Attraction to a single sex is the default. Bisexuality makes bisexuals strange and subhuman.

16. Everyone owns and controls bisexual’s bodies except the bisexuals themselves.

17. Monosexuals understand bisexuality and bisexual experiences better than bisexuals because they decided that bisexuality isn’t real, but just a mix of their own sexuality and what they see as the “opposite” sexuality.

18. Monosexuals decide who is and isn't bisexual (either through designating a non-bisexual as bisexual or through deciding whether or not an established bisexual is really bisexual).

19. All discrimination that bisexuals face as a group or that any individual bisexual experiences is misdirected homophobia, and therefore only really harms lesbians and gay men.

20. Bisexuals are the only existing group that can opt into or out of oppression (via their romantic relationships).

21. Everything about bisexuals is straight or gay; their relationships, the sex they have, their crushes, their oppression or privilege, their "lifestyles," their "functionality," (i.e. bisexuals in opposite-sex relationships are "functionally het"), but bisexuals must call themselves bisexual and take no issue with everything else about themselves being referred to as straight or gay.

22. Bisexuals do not experience real love like monosexuals and date only to fulfil ulterior motives: they date the opposite sex to access privilege and they date the same sex to win oppression points and pity.

23. Bisexuals are liars. Any studies, censuses, or meta-analyses showing bisexuals are under-represented or disadvantaged are dismissible, because bisexuals must be lying about their orientation to result in under-representation, or else lying about the discrimination they face. If they have not slept with or dated the same-sex yet, they are lying about being bisexual.

24. Bisexuality revolves around men. Bisexual men are secretly gay men and bisexual women are secretly straight women.

25. It is okay to group bisexuals with their oppressors, but it is not okay to group gay people with their oppressors (bihet vs monosexual). It is okay to conflate bisexuality with heterosexuality (bihet), but it is not okay to conflate homosexuality with bisexuality (bigay).

26. Bisexuals are to blame for every issue they face.

27. Bisexuality is not a real sexuality, but a label for people that don't have real human emotions and connections. Only bisexuals can actively choose who to be attracted to and who to actively "fall in love" with, but bisexual attraction and love is only real if a monosexual deems it so.

#crocodilian ranting #The Rules of Biphobia #adapted from The Rules of Misogyny by Rose and linked in the title

87 notes · View notes

cyanidelacedvodka · 3 years

Text

You wanna know how insidious EDs and body dysmorphia are?

I'm in full support of the body positivity movement -- every person is deserving of love and respect no matter what they look like; no body is ugly.

Except.

I can't apply it to myself. No matter how hard I try, no matter what helpful tips and strategies I use from pro-recovery blogs and articles and websites, nothing changes the fact that when I look in the mirror, I feel hideous.

I've been trying so hard. Trying for years. There are brief moments I look in the mirror and think "I look okay" when I really try, when I'm buzzed from alcohol, when I get a haircut or dye it. But I don't ever look in the mirror and think "damn, I'm good-looking!" I don't think I look attractive. I don't even think I look average. Every time I stare at that goddamn slab of glass in front of me, I hate the person I see. I feel so detached from them, so tired of their face and body. The slightest exertion makes my face go red and I look like every caricature of that gross, fat, sweaty conservative white man that screams about the liberals destroying our moral foundations or whatever. I look down and all I see is stubby, stretched skin and a gut that hangs out so far that I have to lift it out of the way when I shave around my pubic area. The flaky redness from my eczema that makes me look like I have some dirty disease. The way my hair sticks out when I get too humid; the double chin; the red spots from irritated skin; all the stubble everywhere; every time I look at my reflection all I see is a fat, ugly, disgusting creature.

And it's only me.

I have friends that weigh more than me, and when I say they're hot, I'm not even being a "performative ally supporter" -- they're attractive. I find a lot of bodies of a lot of sizes attractive because they are! Even for the people I don't personally find attractive, I don't look at them and think "they should lose weight"; I don't hold this standard to anyone else. I actively encourage people around me that voice self-consciousness about their bodies to embrace and love their forms.

But I cannot, for the life of me, find myself appealing in the slightest. When people express interest in me I never think it's because of my looks -- it's my personality (the outer, public one anyway). It's my interests. It's how I write or how I talk. It's how I dress. But it's not that my body looks good. When anyone says they think I look physically attractive, I don't believe it. It just sounds like they're giving me pity compliments because they know how appalling I look -- they can literally see it -- and want to boost my self-esteem. It never works. I never believe them. And the moment they begin pointing out what they find attractive, I begin to silently list everything I hate about those areas, how much I hate them, how much I want them to change. It never makes it better; oftentimes, it makes my whole disposition worse. There's no winning.

I would never be so critical of anyone else the way I am with myself. Even if their parts looked identical to mine. On them, it looks good. On me, it looks horrific. I feel permanently disfigured, subhuman rot.

My ED makes this feel less hopeless though. It's proof I can change my body. It's proof I can see in numbers on a scale. It's a goal -- however unrealistic it may be -- that I can strive for, with the promise that once I reach it, I can look in the mirror and finally, finally feel attractive. It's become my maladaptive coping mechanism for the deep-seated self-hatred I feel: I may be grotesque now, but I can change my body -- I can change myself, and finally not despise the person staring back at me. I know when, if, I ever reach that goal, there's a good chance that won't actually change, but the rush of excitement, of pride when I step on the scale and see the number lower than before is addictive. I don't think I've ever felt so positive about myself in years. I can't even recall I time I believed I looked good. Perhaps I never will -- perhaps I'll die never having changed the idea that I'm ugly. But this thing, it's the only thing that's given me hope that maybe I can like myself one day. After all, it makes me proud of myself when seeing the empirical results from it -- if it can make me proud of myself, who's to say it couldn't get me to love myself someday?

And those around me only solidify this belief. The number of compliments I get commenting on how I've lost weight, how I've slimmed down, how I look more masculine with the weight loss. Even my doctors comment in a positive manner about my weight loss. And it may seem that I hold other people's opinions in high regard -- but the truth is, those compliments, those positive comments? They only become believable to me whenever I see that change myself. They only seem genuine when I start to see a difference. It's a confirmation bias.

Even with the progress we've seen in body positivity (something that we should continue to work on improving), my self-view has not changed. In fact, it seems to have gotten worse over time. I don't look at plus-sized models and think "they look like me" -- I see plus-sized models and think "how do they look so good with the same features as me, and yet I look absolutely gross?" At this point, I feel like I could meet someone that looks identical to me, and see them as someone beautiful, someone who should love their body because there's nothing wrong with it -- it's not any specific trait or quality I find ugly. It's just... me. I don't know why, but it's just me.

The way psychological illness impacts the way we view ourselves is... terrifying, because there's no good explanation for why I hate myself so much. I just do. And I don't know if that will ever change.

#body dysmorphia #body dysmorphic disorder #bdd #eating disoder thoughts #disordered eating #ed vent

26 notes · View notes

absolutepx · 3 years

Text

So I've been playing Death Stranding lately. Wait, that's not what this post is about. Well, it kind of is. Hang on. What is Death Stranding about?

A: Norman Reedus getting bare ass naked B. Sneaking around ghosts with the help of your sidekick, an actual baby C: Carrying 50 Amazon packages up a hill while trying to not topple over D: Waking up in the morning and drinking 5 Monster Energy™ for breakfast

For those following along at home, the answer is actually none of the above. Despite the set dressing being bizarre to the point of near absurdity, what the game is actually about, like thematically, is actually really simple.

See, the development of Death Stranding was actually quite a trip. Hideo Kojima is the video game world's equivalent of an auteur director. He has a very recognizable personal style. It's thoroughly horny – he caught a bunch of shit for the design of Quiet in MGSV, but like, a lot of Kojima characters are just -like that-, including the dudes. Also, this is going to possibly be important later.

Anyway, so Kojima was going to do a rebootmakequel of Silent Hill, and the demo actually made it to the PS store and I could actually write a whole side essay about why P.T. (it was called P.T. for some reason btw) was brilliant game design for how it used the same hallway over and over and it was somehow beneficial to the overall feeling of horror. So Konami it turns out kinda sucks nowadays and they like, fired Kojima (they were huge dicks about it behind closed doors, too) and scrapped the project and kicked him out on the street and kept the Metal Gear series which was his baby (literally the baby in the sink in P.T., he snuck a bunch of messaging about the Konami situation into the demo like a breakup album) and Kojima would go on to form his own studio and poach some of the people who worked with him to boot. So the thing about Kojima is this: he's got a reputation for already putting some wild shit in his games, like a ladder that takes like 10 real time minutes to climb in MGS3 for dramatic effect, and a boss in MGS3 that summons the ghosts of all the people you were too lazy to stealth past and killed, or a sniper battle with a really old guy that he wanted to have last two weeks or some shit until he died of old age but he was "told that "this was impossible and not recommended." That is a real quote I just looked up. So he's coming off the heels of making this hugely successful game with MGSV and the hype of the P.T. Demo and he fucking, he like took all the people that were going to be working on P.T. Along like Guillermo Del Toro was going to co-write it and Norman Reedus was going to star in it, and he's like, I'm going to make this game called Death Stranding. And the first trailer comes out for it and it's completely nuts. Norman Reedus wakes up naked on a beach crying with a baby and there are floating people in the sky? So we're all like hooooooly shit, there's no one to tell him "this is impossible and not recommended" anymore. What's he going to make now!?

So the whole time the game is in development I keep seeing these tweets where it'll be like, Kojima and one of his homies smiling with some saccharine message about being spiritual warriors and changing the world. And not just Del Toro and Reedus, there was Mads Mikkelsen (another guy Kojima puts in the game just because he apparently loves him), and the band Chvches, and also like, Keanu Reeves at one point? You know how everyone has just kind of accepted that Keanu is a being of light? Here he was endorsing Kojima. The hype was pretty confused and frantic.

The game eventually comes out. A lot of game journos hate it because I think there was this expectation it was going to be, you know, less weird and have more of the conventional structure of a video game. That's not to say the average gamer wasn't also dismissive of it, but I think on the ground level there was more of an understanding that like, yeah, Kojima just be like that sometimes.

Because the game was a timed console exclusive and your homie don't play like that, I spent the first year or so cautiously viewing Death Stranding from a distance. I wasn't sure I was going to like it – except for being really impressed with P.T., I wasn't actually a big fan of Kojima's games as games – but I -was- sure that I was going to buy it, because of the way Konami fucked him over, just out of support. And the shit I was hearing was really out there. The primary mode of gameplay is just delivery packages. You collect Norman Reedus' bathwater and pee and use it as grenades. You get a motorcycle that looks like the one from AMC's The Ride with Norman Reedus, and when you sit on it, his character in the game says "Wow, this thing is like the one from AMC's The Ride with Norman Reedus!"

youtube

But I didn't really want to know that much about it. Something has that much fucking crazy person energy, you want to go in mostly blind, right? So maybe people just weren't talking about this, or maybe I wasn't seeing it, but then I watched Girlfriend Reviews' video about it and they came right out and said it (link provided if you want to hear Shelby say it more articulately than me):

youtube

Death Stranding is basically about the exact opposite of Twitter. It's about remembering how to be kind to each other, how to reconnect in a world where people are so often hostile to each other by default. Prophetically, it's about a world where people are afraid to go outside or touch other people and how damaging that is. It's not a game about carrying packages, it's a game about helping people by being brave enough to walk through a wasteland carrying their burdens because they can't. It's about rebuilding the lost connections between people, about restoring roads and giving people hope. I bet, for Kojima and the people close to him, it's about how to answer hostility with compassion. You can't kill people in Death Stranding. You can and are absolutely encouraged to fucking throw hands with people sometimes, but all the tools and weapons are nonlethal. So I think Kojima took all the Twitter heat he got over the Quiet nontroversy, and all the feelings of isolation he had from Konami separating him from his team during the end of the development of MGSV, and all the support and encouragement he got from his bros Del Toro and Mads and the rest, and decided to channel that into making a game that was a statement about all of it. And sure, it's a little heavy handed, and sure, it's a little saccharine, and sure, the gameplay sometimes borders on miserable in service of creating emotional payoffs. For me, especially in 2020, this message is a huge success. Social media should be an opportunity for all of us to feel more connected to each other, yet primarily it feels like one of the main forces driving people apart. Why is that? Why is the internet of today such a hostile place? I'm old enough to remember web 1.0: I can haz cheezburger memes; YTMND; the early wild west days of Youtube... What happened to us? I've thrown the blame at Twitter in the past, and I think the architecture of the user experience on Twitter is absolutely a big piece of the puzzle, because it fosters negative interactions. But in terms of the behavior, people have observed that 2018 Twitter was actually almost exactly like 2014 Tumblr. (For the record, Tumblr is now one of the chillest places left on the internet, because so few fucks are left to give.)

I think part of it is the anonymity. The dehumanizing disconnection of the separation of screens and miles. Louis CK, before he was cancelled, had a great point about cyberbullying, and why it's so much more savage than kids are IRL. When you pick on someone in person and you are confronted with seeing the pain you caused them, for most sane people it causes negative feedback and you become disgusted with your actions and eventually learn to stop being a shithead. Online, at best you can "break the wrist, walk away".

youtube

At worst, you can become addicted to "clout chasing" and the psychological thrill of being cheered on by your social ingroup. It's even worse if you feel like it's not bullying and your actions are justified because whoever you've targeted is a bad person so you don't have to feel bad about what you do to them. This is where reductive, unhelpful catchphrases like "punch a nazi" come in. For every argument, one or both sides have convinced themselves that the other side is subhuman because their beliefs are so disgusting. And sometimes it's even true! A lot of times, especially these days, people really are acting like animals or worse online. Entire disinformation engines are roaring day and night, churning out garbage and cluttering the social consciousness. (Kojima talked about this bit, too, way back in MGS2. As if I wasn't already in danger of losing my thread through this.)

youtube

The human brain was not built to live like this. You can't wake up every morning, roll over and open your phone, and be immediately faced with a tidal wave of anger and indignity. It wasn't built to be aware of fully how horrible the world is at any moment ALL AT ONCE, ALL THE TIME. And you will be. Because of another way that our brain works – the way we are more likely to share negative opinions. And because of the cottage industry built on farming outrage clicks, and because of constant performative activism.

It's not that I don't agree that being informed is important.

It's not that I don't agree that the causes people get riled up about are important.

They are. They absolutely are.

But we can't keep living like this. The constant, unending flood of tragedy, arguments, and hot takes. How much of the negativity we associate with online culture is the product of this feedback loop? What if the rise of doomer culture has been, if not entirely created by, has been nourished and exacerbated by our hostile attitudes toward each other? Incels and TERFs, white supremacists, radfems, tankies and Trumpers – it seems like on every side of every issue, there are people simultaneously getting it wrong in multiple directions at once and there are more being radicalized every day. They are the toxic waste left behind by the state of discourse. And any hill is a hill worth dying on.

So what am I actually advocating? I don't know. There are a lot of fights going on right now that are important and we can't just climb into bunkers and ignore our problems hoping that Norman Reedus and his fine ass are going to leave the shit we need on our doorsteps. We need to find the strength to carry those hypothetical packages for ourselves sometimes - and hopefully, for others as well. Humans are social creatures. We need interaction and enrichment.

We need love.

So just try to remember the connections between humanity. Try to put more good stuff into the world when you can. Share more shitposts and memes. Tell your friends and family that you love them. Share good news when you hear it. Go on a weird fucking tangent about Death Stranding. Find a way to "be excellent to each other, and party on, dudes."

youtube

#death stranding #hideo kojima #video games #cancel culture #essay #oc

53 notes · View notes

dangermousie · 3 years

Text

Seeing the way that world would set up, I’d say GOOD except you read on and:

So he didn’t kill off everyone (though I think the reason “the whole world perished” is what that hiding cultivator thinks is because to him non cultivators might as well not be human so he doesn’t even think of them.) I find it deeply fitting btw and not just because Yue Wuhuan hunted down all those that participated in tormenting him for years and he was very popular back then so it’s a lot of people. It’s because their justification back then was that he’s not a cultivator (after they stopped him from being one, glorious loophole) so we can treat him as a thing and do what we want, might makes right and he’s beneath us to such a degree we don’t need to view him as human. OK, by that logic, now that Yue Wuhuan is a deity, cultivators are so beneath him he can treat them as things and kill them at will. You reap what you sow.

If anyone thought YWH got any better mentally, you thought wrong. Also, he always has issues about his looks (because all they brought him is torment) and cleanliness (he was born neat and then because Golden Phoenix manor found out his cleanliness fixation and used it to torment him it got worse) and of course he can’t bear of anyone to think about his past so...

Hahaha yes congrats you figured it out. Also congrats, it’s 100% you people’s fault that the deity running your world seems to make your average Aztec deity a calm and gentle pacifist. This is a very different novel with 2ha with basically no intersection other than both are xianxia danmei but it’s the same thing that 2ha says - if you treat enough people as subhuman, eventually you will get someone who will be able to snap back at you and you would have created your own monsters.

OK. Okaaaaaay. It’s official, Yue Wuhuan is the most unhinged ML in any web novel I’ve read and seeing the stuff I read that is saying a lot. Yes, why don’t you party by the light of the thousands of tortured souls of your abusers and other evil doers? That is a great atmosphere for romance!

He is literally the most powerful being in that world now and he still worries he’s unworthy and hates himself and honestly, it’s wonderful he has the power to protect himself and get revenge and what not but psychologically he hasn’t gotten any better which makes total sense - psychological wounds are this way.

There is not enough therapy in the whole universe.

#cnovel #mistakenly saving the villain

8 notes · View notes

dramarising-replacement · 4 years

Text

To all of those in the forums and elsewhere that struggle with ACAB and other antipolice sentiment at times like this: Think of it this way- there way very well be individuals you know in the police force who you respect as good people. However, the American policing institution* has reached a point of internal corruption and racism where black people can be hunted for sport by individual racist cops and then entire cities have their citizens unconstitutionally abused, battered, and held hostage by their police forces instead of those organizations capitulating to calls for justice for the officers at fault. The level of internal collaboration and support for racist murder and police brutality within the police is horrific, and years and years have been spent in efforts to cut budgets, limit abuses, and restructure policy with little to no effect until people took to the streets to protest. Across the nation these past few weeks, police institutions have made it clear: they would rather fight their own citizens than face deeper internal scrutiny. When something stinks that badly, even 'good cops' deserve to come under scrutiny, because even 'good cops', just to do their job, will be responding to orders to tear gas innocent civilians (and worse!) in defense of murderers among their own ranks. It's hard to see people you love facing criticism, but it's also hard for many people to understand, right now, why any cop who is morally upstanding would continue to work for bosses who, overwhelmingly, are not. There comes a point at which an organization becomes harmful enough that you become complicit by silent agreement if you choose to remain within its ranks, your personal actions or beliefs aside. When even the FBI is wary of working with state and local law enforcement because of the amount of sway white supremacists have inside these ranks (google it, its easy to find sources), maybe the moral implication of remaining a cop right now become important. Maybe its fair for black citizens to distrust someone who chooses to remain. I'd also challenge you to think more about how, especially if you are white with white policemen as family members or friends, how invisible their racism might be to you. A lot of militant racists are perfectly 'nice' people around other white people! It's not other white people they view as subhuman or deserving as punishment! Do not judge the actions of people based on how nice they are to you personally- the horrible, ugly truth of racism is that people who genuinely love you may be completely, horrifyingly devoid of love to people whose skin is a different color. When you are upset due to the suspicion being thrown there way, I urge you to think about this, and to ask yourself how much you know about how they are around those that are different than them, and you. I do not mean any salt by this; I just hope, perhaps, it's something that that people can think on, because right now, the future safety of being black in America is being decided.

*Police institutions elsewhere have just as many problems, dont get me wrong, but I wanted to point out the specific intense reaction people are facing in the US right now

#Long post #Updates #No salt #submission

82 notes · View notes

oddlyunadventurous · 3 years

Text

BOOK REPORT 2020

I’ve always been a sparse reader but 2018 and 19 had me accelerate my reading habits to the point that I think I’ve read the most books this year that I ever had. I suppose I’ll count them all here, just to make sure!! I said something or other about the Moomin books at the end of last year’s Inkt*b*r so, this being the month of traditions, let’s make a new one by tallying up my literary “yays” and “nays” at the end of the season.

Video game text boxes don’t count, online publication articles don’t count, psych/aesthetic papers and 1000 page biosemiotic textbooks don’t count, but they have sure pursued me in my sleep during the year as well. This list is really mostly for my benefit (and no I won’t get a Goodreads account tyvm), so under the cut you’ll find a list of titles in roughly the order I read them, along with short notes. I’ve done longer reviews of these books elsewhere and I need not bore you with them here.

K. Stanislavski - An Actor Prepares (1936) I started reading this book in 2012, then dropped it because I couldn’t understand it at the time. Kostya attends acting school and gets lessons from The Director. He learns to sleep like his cat.

K. Stanislavski - Building a Character (1949) Supposed to have been published along the first one in a single volume. Kostya continues his lessons. A lot of thoughts on walking, gaits, eloquent speech, phrasing, etc. Both these books are wonderful looks into the author’s artistic life. It’s very heartfelt and down to earth, considering it’s quasi-fiction made to edutain. Very inspiring.

M. Polanyi - The Tacit Dimension (1966) A book on the origin of knowledge, the integrated performance of skills, the emergence of life and other phenomena in the universe, marginal control between levels of reality, the moral death of the communist regime caused by the unbridled lucidity of the Enlightenment, the responsibilities of science, and thoughts about open societies of the future. This is one of the two shortest books I’ve read in the list, it covers all of this under 130 pages and manages to do it well.

B. Rainov - Eros and Thanatos (1971) A communist propaganda book attacking western mass media and escapist culture. It gets no points for being correct, as the author mostly swiped the truths from french philosophers. Very variable in its intellectual prowess, almost as if it picks its arguments in order to push an agenda. Informative but also infuriating. Also expectedly homophobic.

J. Hoffmeyer - Signs of Meaning in the Universe (1997) A somewhat pop-sciency book about biosemiotics. Forgettable but also humbly written and explicative.

A. Noë - Varieties of Presence (2012) An unimpressive book about sensory perception. Noë’s theory on sensorimotor action is worth considering but the book is poorly edited and mostly spent arguing with peers.

E. Fudge - Quick Cattle & Dying Wishes (2018) A look into a registry of last wills and testaments from the period 1630 - 1650 in Essex. The book is about early modern people’s relationship to their animals and what they meant to them in life, as well as in death. Fudge’s argumentation is sharp and her style is modern. Being a scholarly book it is really overwhelming with the footnotes sometimes, but otherwise satisfying. One gets beautiful glimpses of family relationships, thoughts and feelings that people now dead for 400 years once held.

G. Márquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) The Buendia family get all their sons killed. The Banana Company sucks. People love each other. A lot happens, generally. It is a hundred years, after all. The upper class sucks.

K. Polanyi - The Great Transformation (1944) The Industrial Revolution sucked. England sucks. It reduced all its workers to subhuman wretches. Every single decision made after the empiricists made labour and land fictional commodities has been a band-aid to the essential contradiction that the market economy wants to annihilate its human host. Laissez-faire sucks. It caused WW1. Fuck everything. Fun book.

R. Coyne - Peirce of Architects (2019) Talks about architecture and the ideas of logician/father of pragmatism Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). Informative about both. Brisk and not very in-depth, but to its benefit rather than its detriment.

R. Williams - Culture and Society (1958) A survey of the 18th and 19th century England, and the emergence of the concept of “culture” as defence against the horrors that the Industrial Revolution inflicted upon society. Consists of some two dozen outlines of contributors to the romanticist tradition, from Adam Smith, through Ruskin, to Orwell, their beliefs, contributions and literary works. Very eloquent and interesting.

E. Fudge - Brutal Reasoning (2006) A fantastic book about much: early modern views of the difference between a human and an animal, the Christian discourse of reason, the logical fallacies that lead to its implosion, the advantageous use of dehumanisation by imperialists in other to genocide natives, Montague and Shakespeare, and the ethical hell of animal murder that led Descartes to deem animals as machines so as to allow his buddies to perform live vivisections on dogs without feeling guilty about it (this is the real reason, don’t let anybody tell you otherwise). There is even space for an entire chapter about an intelligent horse who could tell a virgin from a whore and learned Latin at Oxford. This is my favorite book I read this year, so it gets an extra long review.

R. Williams - The Long Revolution (1961) A sequel to Culture and Society that’s worse. The start and end are brilliant but the middle sags. It contains some historical reviews of English cultural elements, like the newspaper industry, the Standard English vernacular and the realist novel of the 19th century, but honestly if the book was just about about the creative state (intro) and Marxism (outro) it would’ve been fine, if not better.

P. Klee - The Thinking Eye (1956 & 1964) Bauhaus boy in 1920s Germany! Love you Klee, xoxo. You really have to read his thoughts to understand his work imho. You can appreciate it just fine on the surface level, but his completely eccentric (though very self-consistently logical and sharp) views on art creation open a new outlook into his primitive approach.

F D.K. Ching - Architecture: Form, Space & Order (1979) A staple book for architecture students. Or so I hear. Steeped in gestalt psychology. Very good, though not necessarily stuff I don’t know already. Very nice looking pencil illustrations, Ching looks to be an accomplished technical draughtsman.

H. Wölfflin - Principles of Art History (1915) A strong contender for second place in the tier list. The book examines the transition between Classical to Baroque in Italy and Germany (and all the Germany clones, like the Netherlands). It is a systematic, precise aesthetic treatise that reveals much by conceptualizing and grouping characteristic art features in which the two styles differ, then explaining their bearing on their decorative content as well as the outlook on life that they embody. Lovely.

M. Porter - Windows of the Soul: The Art of Physiognomy in European Culture 1470-1780 (2005) A historiographical treatise about early modern views on physiognomy. The book deals mainly with the extant literature on the subject and tries to gleam what it could mean for the customs at the time - palmistry reading, occultism, persecution of the “gypsies” and the Christian scientific project of attaining meaning. Macro- and microcosms, as above so below, hermeticism, that sort of stuff. It’s an interesting read but it’s too long, the quality of writing varies greatly from chapter to chapter, and it is far too expensive. Wouldn’t recommend it.

S. C.Figueiredo - Inventing Comics: A New Translation of Rodolphe Töpffer's Reflections on Graphic Storytelling, Media Rhetorics, & Aesthetic Practice (2017) This is the shortest book I read, mainly translating Töpffer’s 1845 "Essay on Physiognomy" along with giving his biography and some other paraphernalia. It’s not worth the price for the content contained within, but Töpffer is the father of the modern comic book, so I thought I’d learn what his philosophy was. On that front, at least, very interesting! If only I knew French I’d save myself the trouble and read the original, which is now public domain.

D. Bayles - Art & Fear (1985) A useless self-help book. Not entirely bullshit but completely banal from all angles. Shouldn’t even be on this list but I did read it, so...

I. Allende - The House of the Spirits (1982) A child rapist gets a redemption arc. Well, kind of. All women are queens. Men are awful. The poor are wretches and it’s their fault. Oh no, the communists are going to take our land! Pinochet’s concentration camps sucked. Overall a better magical realism book than 100 Years of Solitude, to be honest. Very well written characters.

R. Arnheim -To the Rescue of Art: Twenty-Six Essays (1992) What it says on the tin. Wide range of subjects, from art appreciation, to schizophrenic and autistic child art, to gestalt psychology, to philosophy of science, to Picasso’s Guernica and the fate of abstract art, to reflections on the 20th century and the writer’s life in pre-nazi Germany and America. I love Arnheim, I’ve read many of his books and I’m glad I picked this one up.

R. Arnheim - Film as Art (1957) A book about cinematography, one of his earliest, actually, mostly a personal translation from an original German book he published in 1933. Somewhat outdated, but foundational. Not as informative to me but I don’t regret reading it.

G. E. Lessing - Laocoon; or, On the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766) A book by a greekaboo about a fucking dumb poem and a statue of a naked dad and his two sons getting fucked by snakes. It’s misogynistic and authoritarian in several places, and altogether awfully full of itself. 100 pages of interesting observations stretched over 400 pages of boring Greco-Roman literary discourse.

L. Tolstoy - Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (1852, 1854, 1856) One story serialized in a magazine then later collated in three separate books. Aristocrat boy grows up in pre-revolution Russia. A very, very relatable coming-of-age story. Tolstoy is a lovely writer.

F. Dostoevsky - Poor Folk (1846) An epistolary novel consisting of letters between literally Dobby from Harry Potter and his maybe-niece, whom he wants to fuck. Starts bad, gets better by the end. A bit rough and tumble for Dostoevsky’s first, so I forgive him for wasting my time a little bit. A decent character study of the middle/lower classes, at least.

L. Tolstoy - Family Happiness (1859) An amazing romance novel for the skill employed in writing it. It is very short yet delivers so much emotion. Rather simple narrative at its core, but executed with such bravado one cannot help but be impressed.

F. Dostoevsky - The Double (1846) In which the Author starts swinging. A pathetic, neurodivergent old man gets used and abused by the people around him and nobody cares. Satirical and biting, better than his first.

A. Lindgren - Pippi Longstocking (1945) I last read this when I was 6 years old so I thought I’d refresh my memory. I remember disliking the book then and I can see why. Pippi’s kind of an asshole. Still very enjoyable to read. I know it’s meant for a younger audience’s reading level yet I cannot help comparing it with Tove Jansson’s books and how much better the prose in there is. Sorry.

***

I think that about rounds them up! That’s about 30 books, give or take. For next year I’m hoping to:

Finish Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s bibliographies

Read more econ and marxist writing (low personal priority but i have to, in THIS economy *rolls eyes*)

Finish the Tintin and Moomin comics, as well as Jhonen Vasquez’s collection of edgy humor

Read more about botany and biology in general

Get started on Faulkner’s and William Golding’s bibliographies