#want to read more about the colonial history of nature

[communistkenobi]

also I know I’m strolling in seven years late to Horizon’s representation problems but I feel like these games are an instructive example in how the liberal imagination understands “good representation.” the game seems to take a lot of care in demonstrating (what the developers understand to be) a fully post-racial society by way of universal racial integration - every society or ‘tribe’ or group of people you encounter is almost uniformly racially diverse. Being generous, I think this is an attempt to avoid any possible racist implications in the fanciful costumes and outfits that Horizon is known for; there is a lot of focus in representing the different people of Horizon’s world through what they wear. You can immediately tell an Oseram from a Carja, not by their racial makeup, but by their clothing. This means that, if you meet a particularly ‘savage people’ (a term characters in the game use semi-frequently) who wear ‘exotic clothing’ and face-paint, the diverse racial makeup of the group prevents (or is intended to prevent) a racist conclusion about that group. 

Likewise, the game presents a world free from systemic homophobic prejudice - Aloy is notably gay, but also her asking people about their partners, or assuming other people around her are gay, generally passes without comment. Horizon is presenting a fully ‘integrated’ social world, one whose conflicts are not meant to map onto ‘modern-day’ racism and homophobia.

But the underlying logic and structure of racism and homophobia (and binaristic, oppositional gender) are left intact. Humanity in Horizon is still presented as fundamentally separate from nature, moving overtop of it, extracting what they need from it, but never part of it as such. And this construction of nature as separate from “man” is not problematised, “man” just gets universalised into “human,” and “human” gets universalised into a non-racial category. This is completely side-stepping the history of this construction of nature as a white supremacist, colonial, capitalist construction, an understanding of nature as something colonial Europe is meant to hold dominion over through the dehumanisation of non-white, non-European people, converting them into non-human labourers and pests who live atop the land Europe is attempting to colonise and enclose. “Nature” in the modern western understanding is a fundamentally racial concept; nature is a ‘scientific, rational, biological’ container meant to house everything non-human about the world, an object to be studied and exploited by the one true subject of history, Mankind - and who is considered part of mankind is a question of whether you belong to the white European ruling class.

I think Aloy in particular represents this problem well - her access to and understanding of pre-apocalypse technology makes her universally suspicious and dismissive of any religious or ‘spiritual’ beliefs she encounters in other groups, frequently getting into reddit-atheist-adjacent quibbles with the ‘unenlightened,’ ‘primitive’ people of the world about the fact that the machines that harvest food for them and take care of the land are not gods, silly, they’re just machines! Her only real counterpart in terms of technological understanding is Sylens (a Black man), who is an antagonist. Like despite the game’s attempts at neutralising race as a coherent category, it is kind of unavoidable to notice that the protagonist is a white woman who’s only equal is a Black man engaging in constant deception for his own benefit lol

And Aloy’s anti-religious sentiments are deeply funny, because the game’s narrative itself has a theological relationship to technology - humans destroyed the world with technology, yes, but salvation of humanity is only possible through technology, specifically a globe-spanning technological system meant to be an environmental steward to the planet, repairing the damage caused by previous technological catastrophes and human wars. Human beings themselves are insufficient to the task of taking care of the planet, and “nature” itself is incapable of self-governance or regulation. And the way this technological system is made to function properly again is, hilariously, unlocked through the genetic code of a white woman, a perfect clone of the technological system’s original creator. the solution to Horizon’s central conflict and threat is, ultimately, a white saviour 

And so the appropriative elements of Horizon - calling the Nora ‘braves,’ the abstracting of hundreds of north american Indigenous cultures into mere aesthetics and symbols, the invocation of words like savage and primitive, and so on - are not surface-level problematic elements of an otherwise anti-racist game, they are indicative of a liberal anti-racist imaginary, a place where we’re all equal human beings whose main problem are vague sectarian grudges, without looking at or dealing with any of the underlying ideological frameworks that produced race or gender in the first place.

So I think Horizon is, despite attempts to imagine a post-racist world, nonetheless very limited in how it represents this post-racial world because it understands racism as prejudice against particular phenotypic characteristics, not an underlying logic that renders “nature” and “human” as fundamentally racial concepts in history

#um. idk what to tag this #also what’s the consensus on citing sources for tumblr posts. I’m using Quijano and Lugones’ work on coloniality of power & gender if you #want to read more about the colonial history of nature #I should probably just post excerpts of those works instead #horizon

[writingwithcolor]

My alternate universe fantasy colonial Hong Kong is more authoritarian and just as racist but less homophobic than in real life, should I change that?

@floatyhands asked:

I’m a Hongkonger working on a magical alternate universe dystopia set in what is basically British colonial Hong Kong in the late 1920s. My main character is a young upper middle-class Eurasian bisexual man.  I plan to keep the colony’s historical racial hierarchy in this universe, but I also want the fantasy quirks to mean that unlike in real life history, homosexuality was either recently decriminalized, or that the laws are barely enforced, because my boy deserves a break. Still, the institutions are quite homophobic, and this relative tolerance might not last. Meanwhile, due to other divergences (e.g. eldritch horrors, also the government’s even worse mishandling of the 1922 Seamen's Strike and the 1925 Canton-Hong Kong Strike), the colonial administration is a lot more authoritarian than it was in real history. This growing authoritarianism is not exclusive to the colony, and is part of a larger global trend in this universe.  I realize these worldbuilding decisions above may whitewash colonialism, or come off as choosing to ignore one colonial oppression in favor of exaggerating another. Is there any advice as to how I can address this issue? (Maybe I could have my character get away by bribing the cops, though institutional corruption is more associated with the 1960s?) Thank you!

Historical Precedent for Imperialistic Gay Rights

There is a recently-published book about this topic that might actually interest you: Racism And The Making of Gay Rights by Laurie Marhoefer (note: I have yet to read it, it’s on my list). It essentially describes how the modern gay rights movement was built from colonialism and imperialism. 

The book covers Magnus Hirschfeld, a German sexologist in the early 1900s, and (one of) his lover(s), Li Shiu Tong, who he met in British Shanghai. Magnus is generally considered to have laid the groundwork for a lot of gay rights, and his research via the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was a target of Nazi book-burnings, but he was working with imperial governments in an era where the British Empire was still everywhere. 

Considering they both ended up speaking to multiple world leaders about natural human sexual variation both in terms of intersex issues and sexual attraction, your time period really isn’t that far off for people beginning to be slightly more open-minded—while also being deeply imperialist in other ways.

The thing about this particular time period is homosexuality as we know it was recently coming into play, starting with the trial of Oscar Wilde and the rise of Nazism. But between those two is a pretty wildly fluctuating gap of attitudes.

Oscar Wilde’s trial is generally considered the period where gay people, specifically men who loved men, started becoming a group to be disliked for disrupting social order. It was very public, very scandalous, and his fall from grace is one of the things that drove so many gay and/or queer men underground. It also helped produce some of the extremely queercoded classical literature of the Victorian and Edwardian eras (ex: Dracula), because so many writers were exploring what it meant to be seen as such negative forces. A lot of people hated Oscar Wilde for bringing the concept to such a public discussion point, when being discreet had been so important.

But come the 1920s, people were beginning to wonder if being gay was that bad, and Mangus Hirschfeld managed to do a world tour of speaking come the 1930s, before all of that was derailed by wwii. He (and/or Li Shiu Tong) were writing papers that were getting published and sent to various health departments about how being gay wasn’t an illness, and more just an “alternative” way of loving others. 

This was also the era of Boston Marriages where wealthy single women lived together as partners (I’m sure there’s an mlm-equivalent but I cannot remember or find it). People were a lot less likely to care if you kept things discreet, so there might be less day to day homophobia than one would expect. Romantic friendships were everywhere, and were considered the ideal—the amount of affection you could express to your same-sex best friend was far above what is socially tolerable now.

Kaz Rowe has a lot of videos with cited bibliographies about various queer disasters [affectionate] of the late 1800s/early 1900s, not to mention a lot of other cultural oddities of the Victorian era (and how many of those attitudes have carried into modern day) so you can start to get the proper terms to look it up for yourself.

I know there’s a certain… mistrust of specifically queer media analysts on YouTube in the current. Well. Plagiarism/fact-creation scandal (if you don’t know about the fact-creation, check out Todd in the Shadows). I recommend Kaz because they have citations on screen and in the description that aren’t whole-cloth ripped off from wikipedia’s citation list (they’ve also been published via Getty Publications, a museum press). 

For audio-preferring people (hi), a video is more accessible than text, and sometimes the exposure to stuff that’s able to pull exact terms can finally get you the resources you need. If text is more accessible, just jump to the description box/transcript and have fun. Consider them and their work a starting place, not a professor. 

There is always a vulnerability in learning things, because we can never outrun our own confirmation bias and we always have limited time to chase down facts and sources—we can only do our best and be open to finding facts that disprove what we researched prior.

Colonialism’s Popularity Problem

Something about colonialism that I’ve rarely discussed is how some colonial empires actually “allow” certain types of “deviance” if that deviance will temporarily serve its ends. Namely, when colonialism needs to expand its territory, either from landing in a new area or having recently messed up and needing to re-charm the population.

By that I mean: if a fascist group is struggling to maintain popularity, it will often conditionally open its doors to all walks of life in order to capture a greater market. It will also pay its spokespeople for the privilege of serving their ends, often very well. Authoritarians know the power of having the token supporter from a marginalized group on payroll: it both opens you up directly to that person’s identity, and sways the moderates towards going “well they allow [person/group] so they can’t be that bad, and I prefer them.”

Like it or not, any marginalized group can have its fascist members, sometimes even masquerading as the progressives. Being marginalized does not automatically equate to not wanting fascism, because people tend to want fascist leaders they agree with instead of democracy and coalition building. People can also think that certain people are exaggerating the horrors of colonialism, because it doesn’t happen to good people, and look, they accept their friends who are good people, so they’re fine. 

A dominant fascist group can absolutely use this to their advantage in order to gain more foot soldiers, which then increases their raw numbers, which puts them in enough power they can stop caring about opening their ranks, and only then do they turn on their “deviant” members. By the time they turn, it’s usually too late, and there’s often a lot of feelings of betrayal because the spokesperson (and those who liked them) thought they were accepted, instead of just used.

You said it yourself that this colonial government is even stricter than the historical equivalent—which could mean it needs some sort of leverage to maintain its popularity. “Allowing” gay people to be some variation of themselves would be an ideal solution to this, but it would come with a bunch of conditions. What those conditions are I couldn’t tell you—that’s for your own imagination, based off what this group’s ideal is, but some suggestions are “follow the traditional dating/friendship norms”, “have their own gender identity slightly to the left of the cis ideal”, and/or “pretend to never actually be dating but everyone knows and pretends to not care so long as they don’t out themselves”—that would signal to the reader that this is deeply conditional and about to all come apart. 

It would, however, mean your poor boy is less likely to get a break, because he would be policed to be the “acceptable kind of gay” that the colonial government is currently tolerating (not unlike the way the States claims to support white cis same-sex couples in the suburbs but not bipoc queer-trans people in polycules). It also provides a more salient angle for this colonial government to come crashing down, if that’s the way this narrative goes.

Colonial governments are often looking for scapegoats; if gay people aren’t the current one, then they’d be offered a lot more freedom just to improve the public image of those in power. You have the opportunity to have the strikers be the current scapegoats, which would take the heat off many other groups—including those hit by homophobia.

In Conclusion

Personally, I’d take a more “gays for Trump” attitude about the colonialism and their apparent “lack” of homophobia—they’re just trying to regain popularity after mishandling a major scandal, and the gay people will be on the outs soon enough.

You could also take the more nuanced approach and see how imperialism shaped modern gay rights and just fast-track that in your time period, to give it the right flavour of imperialism. A lot of BIPOC lgbtqa+ people will tell you the modern gay rights movement is assimilationalist, colonialist, and other flavours of ick, so that angle is viable.

You can also make something that looks more accepting to the modern eye by leaning heavily on romantic friendships that encouraged people waxing poetic for their “best friends”, keeping the “lovers” part deeply on the down low, but is still restrictive and people just don’t talk about it in public unless it’s in euphemisms or among other same-sex-attracted people because there’s nothing wrong with loving your best friend, you just can’t go off and claim you’re a couple like a heterosexual couple is.

Either way, you’re not sanitizing colonialism inherently by having there be less modern-recognized homophobia in this deeply authoritarian setting. You just need to add some guard rails on it so that, sure, your character might be fine if he behaves, but there are still “deviants” that the government will not accept. 

Because that’s, in the end, one of the core tenants that makes a government colonial: its acceptance of groups is frequently based on how closely you follow the rules and police others for not following them, and anyone who isn’t their ideal person will be on the outs eventually. But that doesn’t mean they can’t have a facade of pretending those rules are totally going to include people who are to the left of those ideals, if those people fit in every other ideal, or you’re safe only if you keep it quiet.

~ Leigh

#colonialism #colonization #worldbuilding #alternate history #history #lgbt #china #hong kong #british empire #ask

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

Hi! Big fan :) You're an environmental lecturer, right? I recently got into a debate with someone about rewilding in the UK, and the clash with farmers and agriculture. To me, this is a no-brainer - I absolutely do feel for farmers losing their livelihoods, and I think there needs to be a system to help them transition to something else, but also, the planet is dying. But you explain things well, so I wondered if you have thoughts? Particularly on the Welsh side of things. Thank you in advance!

Hah. I literally have a lecture on this. Or, well, a chunk of a lecture, anyway; so yes! I have thoughts. I'll use those notes, and stick a big reference at the end in case you want to read more

I'll talk about this specifically from the Welsh perspective, okay so:

The rewilding project in Wales is the Cambrian Wildwood, launched in 2004ish by a guy who bought an abandoned farm in the northern end of Mid Wales with the express intention of rewilding it. The aim is to convert some 7000 acres, and the initial mission statement said they'd reintroduce wolves and lynx. That's the project I'm going to talk about, because it's a great case study for how to spectacularly fuck something up (and eventually realise you've spectacularly fucked up, and do something about it.)

These are the Cambrian Mountains:

When looking at that, there are two competing viewpoints that are relevant here:

The Cambrians are ecologically depleted. Their biodiversity has crashed since the Second World War, when modern farming methods were introduced. Environmentally, there is a perception of emptiness and degradation.

The landscape is a glorious one that has been shaped by the human actions taken on it for generations, as we are a shepherding culture – culture and land are inextricably intertwined.

That's a big fundamental difference! Two people can look at that same photo, and see something diametrically opposed. But there's more lying on it, so you also need to understand the socio-political background.

Socio-Political Background

(I know! Headings! So professional)

A lot of rewilding – Cambrian Wildwood included – is taking place in areas where farming is declining for various political/socio-economic reasons, so this can be ENTIRELY FAIRLY seen as yet another threat. This goes hand in hand with rural migration and community decline, too.

In Wales, we’re mostly rural, and characterised by extensive upland livestock farming (sheep in particular). Most farms are small to medium family-run setups. ON TOP OF THAT, the vast majority of Welsh farmers are Welsh-speaking, and the right to operate a farm the ‘traditional’ way without UK government oversight is seen by Welsh Nationalists as an important post-colonial act.

Many of them didn’t even like the National Parks being set up, as they were seen as an English outsider imposition that ignored the working nature and cultural history of the land. Remember: the farmed uplands are often seen as a heartland of Welsh identity, and those have historically been intentionally destroyed by UK central government land management decisions (e.g. Tryweryn, Elan, Claerwen, etc)

“Over the past half century we have witnessed the arrival of countless environmental fundamentalists… seemingly oblivious to the fact that their new-found paradise is already occupied by people whose connection with the land is deep rooted, dates back thousands of years, and is embedded in their language and culture.” (Nick Fenwick [Farmers’ Union of Wales] 2013)

SO IT’S CULTURALLY DICEY

(And in my opinion an incredibly stupid idea to go and give it a primarily English name with a Welsh translation as an afterthought but that is Elanor’s Opinion and not Scientific Fact)

(But fr fr if you ever have to get involved in these sorts of projects you will go a long way if you have the basic respect of learning the Welsh names and pronouncing them right rather than lazily expecting everything to be in English sorry sorry I digress)

From the Cambrian Wildwood’s Mission Statement on their website, their objective is:

“To rewild or restore land to a wilder state to create a functioning ecosystem where natural processes dominate by carrying out habitat restoration, removing domestic livestock, and introducing missing native species as far as feasible.”

Can you see the controversial bit of the statement

Can you see the bit where they directly say they want to remove domestic livestock

Jesus Christ

Cultural Differences

AND THEN HERE'S THE BIGGER PROBLEM

‘Culture’ in Welsh is diwylliant – literally, a ‘lack of wildness’. There is no direct translation into Welsh for the term ‘rewilding’ – the closest you can get is anialwch or diffeithwch, which mean ‘wilderness’ in the sense of ‘desert’ or ‘wasteland’. So right off the bat, if you tell a Welsh-speaking farmer that you want to rewild the place, what they hear is "We want to make it dangerous and empty and degraded."

A related concept is cynefin - knowing one’s ‘patch’ and the feeling of belonging associated. The term has its roots as a description of the way grazing animals know their area of mountain land, but it is also used to describe how people come to form an intimate experiential knowledge of place - and specifically, a Welsh farmer's cultural attitude.

Basically, Welsh literature and oral traditions speak of a relationship with the land, not a separation and longing for an untouched wilderness. Farmers feel this especially keenly. Culturally, this is a big part of why they do it – they’re rooted to the land, and therefore to their identities.

“Interviewees conveyed this by referring to areas proposed for rewilding as being comprised of “a quilt of cynefinoedd: interwoven stories, the layered and collective place-making of families and individuals over-generations, co-constituted with the physical landscape” (Wynne-Jones, Holmes and Strouts, 2018)

So, to them, rewilding is erasing and disregarding these stories. To them, this is not just a land-use change, but the latest colonial attack. They've known the family who lived on that farm for generations - every birth, marriage, death, joy, triumph, loss, everything. You are saying that you are going to strip that family, all those stories, all those people out of that land, to be forgotten.

…

However. There is a counterpoint to this.

Many farmers taking this view have therefore identified themselves as the only “truly Welsh” people in the debate, accusing environmentalists as being outsiders. The problem with this being, most of the environmentalists involved with the project are also Welsh; so who the fuck are they to say who is or is not Truly Welsh? It's what we on the internet would recognise as gatekeeping, with a big side order of No True Scotsman fallacy.

Also this quote sums it up well:

“Sheep farming in this country goes back a few hundred years. I think if you go deep enough into our culture and ancestry, we have a really deep native relationship with wild forest areas and with the wild animals that are native to this country…I just don’t agree that sheep farming is really part of our traditional culture.” (WWLF Interview [15] 2016) (Wynne-Jones, Holmes and Strouts, 2018)

This is also a fair point. It is true that upland sheep farming, the way we now practice it, is only a few hundred years old, and at the current intensity only a few decades (since WW2).

On top of which, there has been plenty of exploration over the years of farmers as being a government-subsidised landed gentry, which I won't go into here, but it also contains some fair points.

In truth, all of it and none of it is true. It’s far more complex and nuanced than either side might want to believe.

Solutions So Far

This is an ongoing project and they're still learning and changing new things and stuff, but a big thing they did was get someone in to basically be a mediator and listen to both sides, because Jesus, those sides were not listening to each other.

But to date:

They actually worked with a first-language Welsh speaker (WHY DID THEY NOT DO THIS FIRST I'm sorry I'm fine). Originally the Welsh translation of the project was Tir Gwyllt – wild land. But given that Welsh connotations with gwyllt are something out of control or dangerous, Coetir Anian has been chosen – anian refers to a sense of natural order and creation, a sense of health and vitality. Similarly, ‘rewilding’ is being translated as ‘di-ddofi’ – ‘de-taming’. This acknowledges the labour and culture taken to tame it, and just suggests an avenue for discussing some relaxation of farming practice in appropriate locations rather than, you know, releasing packs of wolves directly into sheep pens

In online materials and in community engagement events where traditional storytellers and musicians have performed to celebrate the Wildwood, the trustees have drawn heavily from Welsh myth in the form of the Mabinogion. Enormous amounts of the Mab lovingly and respectfully feature wild woods and wild animals. The emphasis is therefore on how wilderness is also part of Welsh identity – and arguably a much older part, going back to the Celts. (This is clever, in my view, but something to approach with care - it's rarely a good idea to play the game of "What's the most Welsh". But so far it's been done sensitively)

Land purchased for the project has so far been wholly limited to that available in the public domain. The main site, Bwlch Corog, was empty and unfarmed for six years before purchase, which has been stressed in all media interviews and releases; this is important, because farmers do have a sense of "Productive land is being stolen by environmentalists".

Large predator reintroductions have largely been abandoned. Lynx and wolves are no longer on the agenda. It’s possible they’ll be included in the future, but it is acknowledged as currently impractical (both from clashes with farmers and lack of habitat).

Instead, they’ve supported smaller species reintroductions, such as the Vincent Wildlife Trust’s pine marten translocations, and some proposed red squirrel ones.

Bwlch Corog is to be managed as an experimental plot that farmers are encouraged to engage with.

Assessing the potential for new income streams (from improved tourism and educational activities) rather than just the ecological benefits – this has become central to the project, and the emphasis is on how this might benefit farming communities and keep them together. This has been huge, and has also been successful in rewilding schemes in Europe.

Tensions are a lot lower now than they were ten years ago, but ultimately the problem was a bunch of outsiders came in and decided they knew best without listening to anyone else's point of view, and that meant both sides really dug their heels in. Much better now.

Ultimately... yes, I am in favour of rewilding, in a general sense. But I think it needs to go hand in hand with supplying farmers with the necessary subsidies to transition back to more traditional and sustainable farming methods, and the two elements run side by side. You can't do one without the other, not if you want them to succeed. The Pontbren Project is a great case study for how a farmer-led scheme can successfully aid them economically while also improving environmental outcomes, and we need to learn and incorporate more lessons from it when discussing this kind of landscape-level management.

Also, with land management in general, I think you're a fucking idiot and dangerously arrogant if you think you can get anything done without all stakeholders being on board. And potentially wandering down the ecofascism path, circumstances dependent.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. Source:

Wynne-Jones, S, Holmes, G & Strouts, G (2018), 'Abandoning or Reimagining a Cultural Heartland? Understanding and Responding to Rewilding Conflicts in Wales - the case of the Cambrian Wildwood.' Environmental Values, vol. 27, no. 4.

#asks #environment! #long post

[literary-illuminati]

An Arbitrary Collection of Book Recommendations

(put together for a friend out of SFF I've read over the last couple of years)

Cli-Fi

Tusks of Extinction and/or The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. They’re pretty different books in a lot of ways – one is a novel about discovering a certain species of squid in the Pacific might have developed symbolic language and writing, the other a novella about a de-extinction initiative to restore mammoths to the Siberian taiga – but they share a pretty huge overlap in setting, tone and themes. Specifically, a deep and passionate preoccupation with animal conservation (and a rather despairing perspective on it), as well as a fascination with transhumanism and how technology can affect the nature of consciousness. Mountain is his first work, and far more substantial, but I’d call it a bit of a noble failure in achieving what it tries for. Tusks is much more limited and contained, but manages what it’s going for.

A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys. In a post-post-apocalyptic world that’s just about figured out how to rebuild itself from the climate disasters of the 21st century (but that’s still very much a work in progress), aliens descend from the sky and make First Contact. They’re a symbiotic civilization, and they’re overjoyed at the chance to welcome a third species into their little interstellar community – and consider it a mission of mercy besides, since every other species they’ve ever encountered destroyed themselves and their planet before escaping it. Awkwardly, our heroine and her whole society are actually pretty invested in Earth and the restoration thereof – and worried that a) the alien’s rescue effort might not care about their opinions and b) that other interest groups on earth might be more willing to give the hyper-advanced space-dwelling aliens the answers they want to hear. Basically 100% sociological worldbuilding and political intrigue, so take that as you will.

Throwback Sci Fi

Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky is possibly the only thing I’ve read published in decades to take the old cliche of ‘this generic-seeming fantasy world is actually the wreckage of a ruined space age civilization, and ‘magic’ and ‘monsters’ are the remnants of the technology’ and play it entirely straight. Specifically, it’s a two-POV novella, where half the story is told from the perspective of a runaway princess beseeching the ancient wizard who helped found her dynasty for help against a magical threat, and half is from the perspective form the last surviving member of a xeno-anthropology mission woken out of stasis by the consequences of the last time he broke the Prime Directive knocking on his ship tower door and asking for help. Generally just incredible fun.

Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh is, I think, the only thing on this list written before the turn of the millennium. It’s proper space opera, about a habitat orbiting an immensely valuable living world that’s the lynchpin of logistics for the functionally rogue Earth Fleet’s attempt to hold off or defeat rebelling and somewhat alien colonies further out. The plot is honestly hard to summarize, except that it captures the feel of being history better than very nearly any other spec fic I’ve ever read – a massive cast, none of them with a clear idea of what’s going on, clashing and contradictory agendas, random chance and communications delays playing key roles, lots of messy ending, not a single world-shaking heroes or satanic masterminds deforming the shape of things with their narrative gravity to be seen. Somewhat dated, but it all very impressively well done.

Pulpy Gay Urban Fantasy Period Piece Detective Stories Where Angels Play a Prominent Role

A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark stars Fatma el-Sha’arawi, the youngest woman working for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities in Cairo, a couple of decades after magic returned to the world and entirely derailed the course of Victorian imperialism. There’s djinn and angels and crocodile gods, and also an impossible murder that needs solving! The mystery isn’t exactly intellectually taxing, but this is a very fun tropey whodunnit whose finale involves a giant robot.

Even Though I Knew The End by C. L. Polk is significantly more restrained and grounded in its urban fantasy. It’s early 20th century Chicago, and a PI is doing one last job to top off the nest egg she’s leaving her girlfriend before the debt on her deal with the devil comes due. By what may or may not be coincidence, she stumbles across a particularly gruesome crime scene – and is offered a deal to earn back her soul by solving the mystery behind it. Very noir detective, with a setting that just oozes care and research and a satisfyingly tight plot.

High Concept Stuff That Loves Playing around With Format and the Idea of Narratives

Radiance by Catherynne M. Valente is a story about a famous documentarian vanishing on shoot amid mysterious and suspicious circumstances, as told by the recovered scraps of the footage she was filming, and different drafts of her (famous director) father’s attempt to dramatize the events as a memorial to her. It’s set in a solar system where every planet is habitable and most were colonized in the 19th century, and culturally humanity coasts on in an eternal Belle Epoque and (more importantly) Golden Age of Hollywood. Something like half the book is written as scripts and transcripts. This description should by now either have sold you or put you off entirely.

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez is the only classic-style epic fantasy on this list, I believe? The emperor and his three demigod sons hold subjugated in terror, but things are changing. The emperor, terrified of death, has ordered a great fleet assembled to carry him across the sea in pursuit of immortality. The day before he sets out on his grand pilgrimage to the coast, a guilt-ridden guard helps the goddess of the moon escape her binding beneath the palace. From there, things spiral rapidly out of anyone’s control. The story’s told through two or three (depending( different layers of narrative framing devices, and has immense amounts of fun playing with perspective and format and ideas about storytelling and legacy.

I Couldn’t Think of Any Categories That Included More Than One of These

All The Names They Used For God by Anjali Sachdeva is a collection of short stories, and probably the most literary thing on this list? The stories range wildly across setting and genre, but are each more or less about the intrusion of the numinous or transcendent or divine into a world that cracks and breaks trying to contain it. It is very easily the most artistically coherent short story collection I’ve ever read, which I found pretty fascinating to read – but honestly I’m mostly just including this on the strength of Killer of Kings, a story about an angel sent down to be John Milton’s muse as he writes Paradise Lost which is probably one of the best things I read last year period.

Last Exit by Max Gladstone – the Three Parts Dead and How You Lose the Time War guy – could be described as a deconstruction of ‘a bunch of teenagers/college kids discover magic and quest to save the world!’ stories, but honestly I’d say that obscures more than it reveals. Still, the story is set with that having happened a decade in the past, and the kids in question have thoroughly fucked up. Zelda, the protagonist, is kept from suicide by survivor’s guilt as much as anything, and now travels across America working poverty jobs and sleeping in her car as she hunts the monsters leaking in through the edges of a country rotting at the seams. Then there’s a monster growing in the cracks of the liberty bell, an in putting it down she gets a vision of someone she thought was dead is just trapped – or maybe changed. So it’s time to get the gang together again and save the world! This one’s hard to rec without spoiling a lot, but the prose and characterization are all just sublime. Oddly in conversation with the whole Delta Green cosmic horror monster hunting subgenre for a story with nothing to do with Lovecraft.

Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh is a story about aliens destroying the earth, and growing up in the pseudo-fascist asteroid survivalist compound of the last bits of the human military that never surrendered. It stars a heroine whose genuinely indoctrinated for the first chunk of the book and just deeply endearing terrible and awful to interact with, and also has a plot that’s effectively impossible to describe without spoiling the big twist at the end of the first act. Possibly the only book I read last year which I actively wish was longer – which is both compliment and genuine complaint, for the record, the ending’s a bit messy. Still, genuinely meaty Big Ideas space opera with very well-done characterization and a plot that does hold together. 

#meta #book recommendations #sff #sharing this mostly so I don't lose it next time my laptop dies #and also hey why not

[bread--quest]

when i first heard about taylor swift's "1830s without all the racists" line, my first thought was, naturally, "but why the 1830s?" "what even happened in the 1830s?" i foolishly asked. over the past few days a variety of sources, including my readings for class, have led me to discover that in fact many things happened in the 1830s. i therefore present, less because i actually care about anything taylor swift thinks and more because i care a LOT about making silly history jokes, An Extremely Non-Comprehensive List Of Things That Happened In The 1830s.

queen victoria takes the throne (perhaps swift intends to replace her?)

a LOT of colonialism

THE JUNE REBELLION OF 1832 !! (immortalized in les miserables)

nat turner's rebellion

CHICAGO FOUNDED !!

andrew jackson's presidency

on a better note, the first public physical attack on a us president and first attempted presidential assassination (both on jackson)

texas war of independence (taylor swift at the alamo is an amusing image to me)

invention of the telegraph

a variety of extremist religious sects, most famously mormonism

canadian rebellions

the aroostook war (ask me about the aroostook war. i dont think taylor swift would have enjoyed it)

women's outfits "featured larger sleeves than were worn in any period before or since," according to wikipedia

conclusion: i still have no idea why anyone would want to live in the 1830s, racism or not. as cool as the telegraph and chicago are the concept of bathing regularly had not come into fashion and andrew jackson was there. perhaps taylor swift has a fondness for ginormous sleeves.

#wow look something original!! #dont hold this post against me #this is what happens when i dont have anyone to talk to at dinner #history

[sepublic]

Expanding on my Irish Clawthorne reading; That just adds to the whole story and the colonialism aspect and how the Wittebanes are of British descent, and the British colonized the Irish while declaring them 'savages' and the like, sound familiar?

Big orange hair is such a thing for the family; Eda's hair can store objects in it, Lilith's was curly. And I dunno just; It's not just the angle of white folk colonizing America, it's also the Irish and we have Caleb learning to love Evelyn, whom people like to portray with orange hair. The consensus is that Dell, a ginger, is their direct descendant.

So there's also something to be said about Lilith as someone who was made to assimilate; In the Emperor's Coven, she was deliberately cut off from her family. She was 'taken in' by an older relative ashamed of his brother's fraternizing, who resented Lilith on multiple levels for her identity and for eventually scarring his face (in retaliation to manipulation and attempted murder).

Lilith was so blatantly abused in the Emperor's Coven, and there's a sick joke in how she wanted to be a historian, yet was made subordinate to Flora, who bastardized history on Belos' order, and also belittled Lilith. Lilith was constantly made to feel inferior and with how she was always more of a desk job than a field agent, unlike the coven heads, and it really feels like she was elected as a stunt, a prop to show off with; Look, see! Even a common wild witch like Lilith can rise to the top!

But Lilith still had to assimilate, she had to conform; People like her can still fit under the coven banner, so long as they fit the mold and cut away those 'ugly' bits. So she straightens and dyes her hair a dark blue, cuts it down. Lilith hides herself, even her own Palisman is forced to constantly stay in staff form; A reminder that nature can only be allowed to exist as a tool, nothing else!!! And that's also dark because the Clawthornes are palismen carvers.

So yeah, we have Lilith trying to engage with her past and heritage, yet being deliberately blinded from it, made to participate in her own ignorance and erasure. Forced to hide physical aspects of herself to blend in, mistreated as more of a prop to show how any wild witch can be 'tamed', to prove a point to Belos himself. His own sick victory against Evelyn; A trophy seized from the locals, separated from her family and trying to pull them in with her because that's the best Lilith can have, even as she belittles them and thinks she was improved herself.

Lilith obviously has personal agency and thus blame regarding the curse, and the finale's themes do assert that, as does Lilith’s effort to atone; But it was Belos' coven system that helped pit Lilith against her fellow witches and even family members, and estrange herself from them. Lilith WAS legitimately interested in magic, too... But because of the system, she cursed Eda.

And Lilith didn't use any old curse, she used one created by the Archivists, who came from another world to 'tame', that itself had reduced another wild, native creature to just a prop. That curse was used to dehumanize and delegitimize Eda's stance against the system. It reduced her connection to her bile magic, something also important to witches and Clawthornes, and especially Eda who loved and was great at it; And to mitigate the curse and take responsibility, Lilith also lost her bile magic.

But at the same time, she and Eda re-established contact with glyphs, thanks to Luz; And Lilith made the breakthrough of rediscovering glyph combos! So there's an ancient practice, older than even the Deadwardian Era she obsessed over, that Lilith found and brought back, for a time at least; But that will still apply once King's glyphs so in full-swing. And Lilith even got to visit the Deadwardian Era, scar her abuser after he scarred her and so many others, and come to a better understanding about her own ancestral past, something that continues with Lilith’s self-actualization as the historian she always wanted to be; So now she’s helping everyone better understand their past and origins!

Lilith and the Clawthornes as a whole are still cut off from knowing about Evelyn and Caleb, and they may never know; But at least they got back Hunter, whom Lilith was also pitted against in the Emperor's Coven, which really divided Caleb and Evelyn's descendants. And what tops it all off is Lilith having parallels to Philip, what with the Wittebanes and Clawthorne sisters; One more open-minded and outdoorsy, going against society, while the other is bookish and bitterly insecure and absorbs prejudice to feel better about themselves. Even their names are structured similarly!

They both wear blue coats and hurt a sibling they cared for but also resented... But Lilith grew beyond all that. She went above the hatred and jealousy. The system was more prevalent in her life, yet Lilith still chose to go against it, taking the chance to stop when it came and work for real happiness. She stopped needing to put down others to feel better about herself, Lilith made a friend with someone as strange as Hooty, who was once connected to the Titan and also forgot his past, but is now connected to Dell's old tower; Abandoned but given new life by Lilith's sister Eda. So the past is still lost to some extent and unrecognizable even, but it still lives on anyway.

Anyhow, Irish Lilith Clawthorne who is a victim of assimilation by British colonialism and that tried to erase her Irish features and make Lilith conform by cutting her off from her heritage and feeding her a bastardized, demonized version of her own past, while turning against her own people and culture and thinking herself superior for climbing up the ladder she left others at the base of; A promised justification of imperialism. But then Lilith breaks free from all of it and reconnects and re-embraces everything she lost, including her family and heritage, and just gets to be weird with other weirdoes like herself, so there's both blood and the covenant (not THAT type of coven tho).

#the owl house #Lilith Clawthorne #character analysis #meta #colonialism

[hadesoftheladies]

Greed is Male Culture

This isn't a misandry post (sorry to disappoint). Neither is it an essay (yet). It's a deep reflection on what I think is the beginning of humanity's most evil systems, like the actual beginning. These are just my thoughts based on what I know, and I'm sure other people have said what I am about to. This is not a research paper (yet), but it is based on my readings regarding marxism, feminism, and industrial/colonial history (and some marginal knowledge of animal species). This is an opinion/think-piece, the beginning of some of my broader ideas.

I consider greed to be largely irrational and even (mostly) unnatural. Greed is not like hunger or fear. Greed, right now, is about excess. And I think excess is unnatural, and the desire for it even more so. Sort of like how plastic is from nature, but cannot decompose like organic matter. I think greed is a synthetic desire. Mimicking organic feelings like hunger or fear. In a world of safety, community and fulfilment, the desire for power over another is foreign. Unnatural. There are no threats. There is nothing to inspire the thought or desire of greed (especially coming from a materialist perspective). So how did the quest for power for the sake of power (and not safety, survival, or protection) come to be in human beings?

I posit that it could only (and did) arise from male-to-male peer relations.

In most animal (at least mammalian and some other) species, males do not need to be as populous as females. If you want a robust chance at a second generation of animals, you need only one male for twenty or so females. A handful of males of which females would select the best and breed with. The handful of males would have more than enough chances at partnering, and the females would have no shortage of seed if they so wanted to be pregnant.

But that's not the case. Males and females are 1:1, and sometimes, males are slightly more than females in most sexually dimorphic animal species.

So now we have some complications. Something that had been good in a previous context (males for seed) now became problematic. Now, imagine there are slightly more males than females in society. Up until this point, the value for the human male has been two things: seed and manual labor. This is the basis of his relevance to society and identity. These are the only two avenues for him to find any value as a man (not an individual). But now, he senses that he is in jeopardy. He is exceedingly replaceable! There are many men, so not only are the chances for his seed being chosen reduced, but the amount of seed he could spread is also reduced! He doesn't want to share, and he cannot stomach being replaceable or losing access to females, who are the ones who dictate whether he has a legacy or not. Whether he has offspring or not.

So now the many males have to compete. They have to be more flamboyant, robust, more beautiful than the other males so they can get picked by a female (note, they are not concerned with picking a female because any female will do). But the competition gets steeper and keeps escalating for different reasons (environmental or evolutionary) as time goes on. So now, violence, aggression, and killing have become parts of the competition. Like any sport, the rules and stakes evolve as time goes.

The choice of females is now diminished in this first stage. This is the beginning of the loss of their freedom. It is not that they are simply mating with the "prettiest" male, per se, but that they are also left with the male that survives the battle between males.

And thus the concept of "territory" arrives. Man has come to see other men as his greatest threat. Other men can annihilate him by annihilating his chances at offspring. This is not something women experience because every offspring is theirs, regardless of what seed it came from. Women can never be "erased" on a biological level, because their DNA is the blueprint of all humanity. It started with women and it will end when women end. But this is a big existential fear to men. They can be replaced. They were not the beginning. He (singular) can be erased. There are other men ready and willing to replace him.

So now man needs assurances. He needs to assert himself to other men so that the threat is mitigated. He knows other men are out to get him, because all men are now at war with each other. They evolved strength, not to protect women and children (because females in nearly every species have been the main if not sole providers and protectors), but to protect himself from other men. Really, it couldn't be to protect women and children, because female animals are able to wield similar weapons (claws, spears, stones, beaks) against threats to themselves or their young. No, men need strength to defend themselves from other men, who are out to propagate themselves. Men have become the special targets of other men.

And so, in this struggle, the competition evolves again. The stakes heighten. Man needs to assert himself to other men or he's dead meat, and he finds new ways to do so. At this point, he also realizes that women pose no threat to him in this sense. They do not seek to dominate him. He is not that relevant to her. He is replaceable. So women seize to be as important (in terms of threat) and become relegated to assets. Women do not need to assert themselves, so because they do not, man sees them as different to him. Not the same kind of animal. Not human. Women do not need to establish themselves using violence, and he equates that to women not having agency or ambition. Women now become assets. But he needs them as assurance. Remember, they are the only way he has legacy. So he must find a way to control them. To make them permanently his somehow. He asserts himself using violence, even reproductive violence and it works. Women are now part of the territory. Conquests and wars ensue. Men now view acquiring women and land as the same thing. Now in order to ensure their legacy, men know that it will not just take killing other men, but policing women. Even killing (but mainly stealing and raping) the women of other men since women are now resources and not people. Women cannot assert themselves physically the way men can. They cannot impregnate themselves. This is convenient for him to exploit.

Factions start to form. Kings, chiefs, and dictators rise up as territory and assets expand. Women die in in the crossfire, and policing them becomes more brutal. Their mistreatment from their own offspring and species has now become their biggest threat. Men are now the plunderers and predators of women. Women's resistance is a threat to his precious resources and assurances against other men and his annihilation. The increase of brutality towards women means that more women die, and there are more men than women, making competition even steeper. Now, man moves in packs. He hunts in packs. He covers more ground and acquires more territory, and so long as he is top of the hierarchy, the men beneath him pose no threat. If anything, he makes sure they benefit, for they help him better maintain that hierarchy. More men are required to fight other men and plunder their resources. Armies form. Nations form. Territory.

Now we come to the modern world. After a history of colonialism, capitalism, slavery, genocides, grotesque war. The underpinnings of all these systems are the same. Competition between males. For what? Hierarchy. Why? To assert himself to other males. To what end? His humanity.

Man, the animal, has now come to equate his personhood with supremacy. To men, dominance is a virtue, because to assert yourself, to impose your will, is to be human. Man needs something to be dominant over or he seizes to be relevant. Man needs something to subjugate, or he becomes meat to be devoured by other men. There are more men now than there ever was. The world suffers because ALL these men "need" to assert themselves, to become human to other men.

This is probably part of the reason why women aren't seen as human. Not simply because they are regarded as assets instead of persons, but because to be subjugated is to be inhuman. To be subjugated is how you become an asset. Or at least, dehumanizing you as an asset makes it easier to christen your subjugation as morally right and economically necessary. This idea is especially prevalent in politics since the 18th century. Man sees living things in two castes: dominant and submissive. Because that is how he sees himself in comparison to other men. Cattle, sheep, nature, men who take it from the back, women . . . submissive and thus inhuman. If a man can subject you, you are no longer human to him because you cannot or do not assert yourself in the way he does. You are now an asset that he can use to assert himself to other men. You are not a relevant threat. This is also possibly why pacifism is largely regarded as feminine or "pussification." Even unnatural. Men equate violence to agency since violence is when they start to become their own people.

This becomes even more plain when you look at the underpinings of man's existential thoughts throughout religion, art, and philosophy. What makes a man a man? What makes a man useful? What makes life meaningful to a man? What traits do they worship about god? Omnipotence. Omniscience. Being the owner of all things. The capacity to impose yourself and image on the world and to be able to do so forever via offspring. Ownership and property only became relevant to man when another man competed with him. Excess is useful now because it is a grand way of asserting yourself. Fame and excess are equated to legacy. Now, they are all that is worth striving for. As a boast to other men. A synthetic desire (greed) from an organic feeling (fear of threat).

Man's purpose is now to win the competition, no matter how silly the sport gets. To assert himself and be a threat. And if he is not a threat, he is irrelevant and unspectacular (to humanity). And if he is not relevant, as his ancestors once feared, . . . then what is he? He cannot become a woman who is eternally necessary and relevant to human society and history.

So what else can he be? There are only two options in the male world.

Both these options cannot do anything but ultimately destroy what humanity is left in him.

Greed only makes sense if the satisfaction (mimicking hunger) is found in other people's perception of you. Men need men to perceive them as successful, because that has been how they protected themselves from other men. And now that competition exists in all forms of society, whether economic or social, we all participate on some level with it. It's not that greed is natural to the human heart, but that it has become increasingly relevant to our societies, from how we consume to how we relate. Now, every fraction of society has to have its own model of dominant/submissive, superior/inferior, etc. Because men hate themselves, hate each other, and hate everyone else.

Anyways . . . nighty, night!

PS: This is kind of like conflict theory meets feminist analysis, and it's more of a collection of my ideas than anything else. I find it interesting to look at modern human politics and arts, at least between the 20th century and now, in this lens. If you don't like what I have to say, at least let your criticisms be constructive. I do not mind reasonable disagreement.

#radblr #feminism #history #just thinking about it #capitalism #colonialism

[alpaca-clouds]

Let's talk about the whole "natural order" thing

Something I have realized is that a ton of people are not quite aware of the context of the one idea that the bad guys within Castlevania: Nocturne keep bringing up again and again: The natural order.

If you watch the show you will find that no episode goes by without a bad guy bringing up that idea every other scene, so let this history nerd quickly explain that concept.

So, this entire idea came from two sources: Enlightenment, and the pre-capitalist, colonialist system.

You need to understand that from the 4th century till the 16th century usually most stuff got explained to people with "because it is God's will". Why is that person poor, and that person rich? Because it is God's will. Why is that guy the king? Because God had made him. Why do we have this war? Because God wants us to.

That does not mean that the people in power actually believed that, but they could get away with everything by having some arch bishop or even the pope agree with them. (I mean, just look at the crusades.)

But then things happened. Gutenberg invented the printing press. Folks read the bible for themselves. People started to get more literate in general. Information about science got wider spread. There was splintering within the church. And people were just not as willing to accept "because God" anymore.

At the same time we had just as bad (if not at times worse) differences in quality of life between rich and poor than in the middle ages. And of course we had the entire colonialism happening, that also included genocide and slavery. And this needed justification. Que: The natural order.

This was just the umbrella under which so much pseudo-science would pressed underneath at the time. A pseudo-scientific explanation for everything that was happening.

Why are some people richer than other? Because they are just naturally more suited to be rich. That is the natural order.

Why do we have a king? Because it is a human need to have one central leader. And that family were always kings. It simply is the natural order of things.

Why do we subjugate the people in America? Because it is just natural for advanced civilizations to subjugate other civilizations. It is actually good for them. It is the natural order.

Why do we enslave Black people? Because they were actually born to be servants. That is their natural state. It is the natural order.

The entire stuff with phrenology and eugenics and all of that came from this specific idea. Of a natural order. Like, racism and all that came from that. Manifest destiny. All of that was connected to this idea of a natural order.

Ironically, while this sprang from the need to take the religion out of the stuff, they then just fitted religion right back in. Making the "church being excempt from everything" also as part of "natural order".

And yes, this is still very much the idea that a lot of conservatism is build around. That there is this pseudo-scientific idea of "this has proofen to work this way before, so it should work like that forever, that is only natural".

Funnily enough those new atheist scientist dudes also LOVE to appeal to the natural order. At times literally. Because they are also really big at conservatism when it comes to women, and keeping cultures apart, and anti-queerness and all of that. And yes, they are gonna appeal to the natural order and it being natural. Somethin that has only been brought up and seen critically recently.

But of course religious conservatives also love to use that, too. Because not all of them have the guts to just keep saying "but God" to defend their position (and sometimes they even know that their stuff directly contradicts the bible). And then they will also go: "But it is natural!"

It is a shitty idea. That is where it came from. It was what a lot of people used to argue against a lot of change that was happening in the 18th and 19th century.

#castlevania #castlevania nocturne #castlevania netflix #history #colonialism #anti racism #discrimination #oppression #classism #french revolution

[hero-israel]

Re: the idea that Palestinian Liberation is important to environmentalism

Generally speaking, settler colonizers kick out natives, who tend to have various rules about treating the environment healthily, and then exploit the land for all its worth and more. Anti-Zionists’ proverbial money is riding on the narrative that Israel is a settler colonial state and Palestinians are its dispossessed natives, so they just have to insist there’s an environmentalist angle on these grounds. It’s also ofc apart of the Anti-Zionist tendency to hijack every other cause under the sun.

I’ll admit I know next to nothing about the environmental policies and actions of Israel/Zionists and Palestinian Arabs in any part of history or the present. I’ll admit industrialization is a more Western trend and it is brought by those who spent time in the West, like Ashkenazi Jews. And maybe pre-Israel Palestine was less industrious/polluting. And I’m not a fan of how capitalist Israel has gotten, and there’s probably some level of pollution coming from that. But again, I’m ignorant to the details. I have heard Israel has made a lot of environmentalist progress with reforestation and such (tho I swear I heard something from anti-Zionists about Israel planting non-indigenous trees like colonizers have historically done but this could be BS) and I’ve heard of organizations that focus on environmentalism and diplomacy together (Avodah I think it’s called).

But here’s a point I really want to make: The idea that Palestine taking all of Israel’s land is all about framing the Palestinian as the Noble Savage. It’s another fantasy made by activists with white guilt and without an understanding of Palestinians as a people who may or may not do good things for the environment in likely equal measure. They’re not nature shamans.

Good timing - I just got another ask also requesting "that post myth busting the idea that Israelis grew a pine tree or something that caused forest fires and desertification." So read this and this and this. Might as well read this and this too.

The entire Middle East has been heavily deforested by various colonial empires as well as being hard-hit by war. Israel has restored itself much better than its neighbors but it certainly doesn't have a perfect record; draining the malarial swamps in the 1940s devastated the indigenous painted frog so badly it was thought extinct for over 50 years. They are certainly industrialized / capitalist, but no worse than anybody else.

When "critics" try to call reforestation bad, they have totally lost the plot; just another example of what it means to be "Progressive Except Palestine."

See the tags for more on Israeli ecosystems :)

#israeli wildlife #wildlife of israel #forests #israel #palestine #antisemitism #middle east #reforestation #jumblr

[reasonsforhope]

Your blog is a literal god send for me, I’ve been feeling so depressed, pessimistic, nihilistic and cynical at the state of the world right now and my fear of if I even have a future, but your blog is absolutely what I needed right now, so I can’t thank you enough. I’m just so happy to see someone who is hopeful and positive and not pessimistic, and it makes me legit want to cry tears of joy. How are you able to stay so positive and optimistic despite everything going on?

<3 <3 <3

As for how I stay optimistic and relatively positive? Lots of effort and hard work.

I'm not naturally an optimist. I spent most of my life (and certainly my adolescence lol) being pretty angry and cynical.

It's not that I never feel depressed or despairing about the state of the world. There's fucked up shit happening, indisputably, and hey, I'm trans, it's been a rough fucking year for that. But I guess I try to focus on the difference between passing moods and baseline worldview.

Some of the main ways I moved my baseline worldview to be optimistic and hopeful:

A lot of reading and looking at data and in-depth stories. The headlines never give you enough of the story - hell, most news articles don't these days, because they're so skewed toward negative news

Especially reading/looking at good news sites (I have a masterpost of good news sites here). There are good things happening everywhere that you never hear about. Mostly, you only ever hear about the good things when there's been a huge setback, which sucks!

I'm basically not on social media. Nothing except Tumblr, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and I only ever go on FB and linkedin briefly for business. It's fantastic, can't recommend ditching social media enough

I made sure I was doing something to help (aka I started this blog. I would also volunteer but my disabilities and a lot of logistics make that complicated)

My job involves reading a couple dozen self-help books a year lol, not gonna lie that def helps

Taking a long perspective of time. It often doesn't feel like it, but statistically, this really is the best time to be alive. (Here's a fantastic essay about many of the reasons why.) People really gloss over how much most of the past kinda fucking sucked to live in. 50% of all people used to die before their 15th birthday, for basically all of history until the past 200 years!! Imagine having to live with that. Imagine all of that pain and grief literally everywhere. I'm really happy about living in modern times, actually!

That last point is esp helpful to remember for me because I'm 100% for sure on the list of "people who would've died in childbirth" pre modern medicine (and my mom would've died having me, too). It was modern times or nothing lol

The vast majority of the world has spent the past 300 to 500 years being absolutely brutalized by white people and/or the West. There's still a lot of fallout to fix and colonialism to uproot, but I genuinely can't wait to see what people and nations will achieve with sustained self-rule and significantly fewer massive atrocities

Solarpunk and hopepunk stuff

I'm gonna make a whole post about this at some point but the fact that we eliminated scarcity in the past few decades actually changes the entire fucking game for the world (literally it's not a zero sum game anymore) and for the future. We're allowed a bit of a learning curve I think

I listen to the Rent soundtrack a lot and go "well you know what being trans right now sucks but being trans at the height of the aids crisis would've been way fucking worse" lol rip

Meds! Meds. Antidepressants and antianxiety meds unfortunately don't work for everyone (yet!), but also thank fuck for meds

Progress almost always happens in slow, tiny increments, with a lot of stops and starts and setbacks. You have to always remember that there are always people fighting somewhere, and if they're stopped, there will always be more people to pick up the fight in the future

#thesingingtennisball #ask #me #advice #hope #hope posting #hopeposting #not news #also tbh I highly recommend a basic understanding of statistics #and the ability to parse the basics of many academic papers #whenever I see a scary headline about some new study I check out the actual study and 90% of the time I end up going #“oh that's not that bad actually” #progress happens in tiny tiny i

[krugkorien]

Happy New Year everyone! Today I want to show you my main setting: the Divine World. It’s a dark fantasy world that combines both epic (gods, monsters, magic, saving the world) and mundane (death, decay, bigotry, oppression) aspects of the genre. Worldbuilding and lore is a very important part of DW, to a point where if I could write everything I want about DW it would be one of the biggest books in the history of mankind. But this is an introductory post, so I’ll try to keep it brief!

1. While I’m not going to get into any unpleasant details here let’s still get some trigger warnings out of the way first. As I said DW is dark fantasy, and it’s so dark that Marena came up with the name Macabre Fantasy in order to emphasize how dark DW is and how the aforementioned themes of death and decay play a huge role in it, as well as many other sensitive topics. Aside from what has been already mentioned there's also a lot of cruelty & violence (both interpersonal & socio-political) and also topical problems: sexism, nazism, colonialism, etc. All of this, of course, is not for the sake of being edgy, but to make a lot of important points.

2. The inhabitants of the Divine World are appropriately called Divine Humans [1], aka Homo Mirandum. While they look a lot like regular humans, there are a lot of differences between us and them! They have horns, claws, different hair textures and skin tones, three spinal cords instead of one and are also bigger than us: it depends on a lot of factors and the shortest men are actually not that big, being only 166 cm tall, but the tallest women can go up to 350 cm! And yes, you’ve read it correctly, women are taller! Divine sexual dimorphism is somewhat flipped compared to ours and Divine women are tall, muscular and hairy, while men are short, thin and mostly hairless. Meanwhile their voices are pretty similar and androgynous, and also have a metal (as in material not music) vibe to them.

Physically Divine humans are, for the lack of better word, monumental: they are strong, capable of surviving wounds that would kill a regular human ten times over, have a great memory, but are also stiff and slow, both physically & mentally, for physiological reasons as well simply because they can afford to be — their lifespans can be measured in multiple Earth centuries. However Divine humans rarely enjoy their longevity to its full extent. Outside dangers aside, their illnesses and disabilities are just as monumental as they are. For example, Divine albinism means fully transparent flesh which in turn means complete blindness and high vulnerability towards radiation (levels of which are very high on Mirabilis).

Divine souls are just as physical as anything else. They are also Aetheric in nature, and are another example of Divine sexual dimorphism: white souls belong to men and black to women (with rare exceptions). This plays a huge role in Divine society and became one of the reasons why most Divine societies are patriarchal: men, despite being physically weak, can literally mind-control women when needed. It doesn’t help that too much contact with an aether opposite to your soul can lead to death.

While Divine humans are technically the only race of Mirabilis, thanks to magic they can turn into many various creatures: Demons, Angels, Chorts (lesser Demons, roughly speaking), Bieses (lesser Chorts), Beatas, Vampires, Turnskins (Divine equivalent of werewolves), Beasts, Chimeras, Nocturnals, Urials, Cadavredaxes and so on, many of them having sub-types (for example vampires being living and undead).

4. Technology & society-wise Divine civilization can be compared to 19th century Earth: imperialism and nationalism are at their peak, proto-industrial society, recently invented trains & electricity. However Divine civilization also possesses traits more associated with our Middle Ages: religion being the most important social institute, no concept of humanism, plate armor & melee weapons still being main tools of war.

5. Like Divine humans themselves Mirabilis looks somewhat Earth-ish but is actually very different. For starters, when I say that DW is a dark and oppressive world I mean it a bit literally! Mirabilis has high atmospheric pressure (~8 higher than Earth), it’s a much colder and wetter planet, and most noticeably — it has no sun. Despite this, Mirabilis still has light and heat, even if not as much as we do, all that thanks to the White Aether (a very important magic substance) that fills the space around the planet. A Sun’s fire isn’t the only kind Mirabilis lacks — due to the low oxygen level of 15% fire simply cannot exist in normal conditions on Mirabilis.

If the word “normal” can even be used towards Mirabilis — all of the planet’s flora are technically mushrooms and much closer to the meat-side of things, so stuff like bleeding human-eating trees isn’t exactly shocking to Divine humans. Animals are technically the same as on Earth but with a huge caveat — their appearance is based on the medieval depictions of them which means animals like hyperagressive fishes with limbs, talking horses with human teeth, owls with human faces, giant non-arthropodic insects and so on.

While Mirabilis is bigger than Earth, it has only one continent that is sliced in half by the so-called Black Wall —an  impassable wall of Black Aether. The stories I write take place on the western half of the continent, and its inhabitants can’t just cross the ocean to explore the East because of the atrament — a deadly substance that fills the sea and is so dangerous only two western races out of twelve have any level of resistance to it.

The explorers of Mirabilis would be very upset about this if not for the Remnants, mysterious ruins that are both more ancient than anything they have ever seen yet more advanced than anything they could dream of. Exploring Remnants is an incredibly dangerous, often illegal job, but what’s that compared to a chance to learn more about the world? More materialistic folks are attracted by the artifacts that are capable of granting incredible miracles and, of course, even more incredible horrors.

And I think that’s pretty much it for the introductory post! From now on I’m going to repost the stuff I’ve previously posted on my Twitter before but now with all kinds of lore tidbits. There’s other projects we’ll talk about, especially Neon-23, Marena’s cyberpunk setting (that has a crossover with DW we made for fun!) but that’s it for now. Thank you for reading all this! And thanks to @goldporces & ippoteq @ Twitter for beta-reading this text!

[1] — In Russian I call them Дивнолюди, based on an archaic Russian word for “miracle” — диво. “Divine” is a very lucky translation because it sounds similar to the original word and also points at the, well, divine nature of the Divine Humans.

#worldbuilding #dark fantasy #divine world

[ohsalome]

I was watching a video about history of Shcendryk, which would be more familiar to you as "Carol of the bells", and I am so upset about not knowing enough about the history of this song. As you know, it was popularised in 1919 by the choir of Oleksandr Koshyts touring the Europe and USA. The beginning of the 20th century is also a time when the Ukraine as a country we know today was being born, and ukrainian politicians in Europe were struggling to gain allies against russia which wanted to keep Ukraine all to itself as a colony. Despite our best attempts, noone took us seriously back then. And this choir tour was the thing that helped europeans understand that we really are our own people, distinct from russians, and capable of our own subjectivity.

Just read these two quotes written before the tour and after it.

As you know, before the arrival of the Ukrainian Republican Chapel, the Czechs were supporters of a united indivisible Russia, and they looked at our separatism as a betrayal. Moskowites managed to convince the Czechs that we do not exist, that we are russians. So, I talked with Jaroslav Křička for several hours about various topics. But he did not even want me to speak to him in Ukrainian, and only at his request I spoke to him in Russian. After several hours of conversation with him, I got the impression that I could not convince him of the appropriateness of our [national] competition, and so we parted.

Joseph Pelensky - Ukrainian historian, art historian, professor, full member of the National Academy of Sciences.

And this quote is from article written by that very man critical to the idea of ukrainian national identity after he visited the concert:

It is hard for the hand to write criticism when the heart sings praise. Ukrainians came and won. I think that we knew little about them and hurt them greatly when we unconsciously and without information united them against their will with the Russian people. Our desire for a great and indivisible Russia is a weak argument against the nature of the whole Ukrainian people.

Jaroslav Křička - Czech composer, bronze medalist of the Olympic Games in the Art Competition.

Not much really changed during this century, didn't it?

#ukraine #ukrainian history #ukrainian culture #ukrainian music #art #art history #music #music history #carol of the bells #christmas music #christmas

[audreydoeskaren]

I was reading some articles about the relatively recent creation of heritage listing for 20th century Chinese architecture, written by Chinese and white authors, and they just read as so colonial and cringe I actually wanted to cry. To prevent me from bursting into tears I produced a small rant.

One of the articles argued that architecture of the early PRC was inherently political because of the communist regime, but I immediately sensed something was off as the author did not pass a single comment about how most if not all architectural discourse and design during the Republican era was informed by Western colonialism, from the adoption of Western historicism and classicism, later a general desire to appear modern (whatever “modern” meant) to physical buildings being built by white architects or commissioned by white patrons for colonial purposes (e.g. missionary work). The authors acknowledged that those styles were “Western” and “foreign”, but no mention of the colonial is made. It’s like the authors recognized that something not indigenous to China was taking place, but failed to reflect on where that came from or the power dynamics it contained. I find it strange that they consider Chinese communism unnatural and something to be marked and taken note of, but Western colonialism is just a part of natural human order, and Western architecture built on Chinese soil is somehow inherently justified and apolitical.

Obviously I am not arguing that no foreign architecture could ever be erected on Chinese soil, quite the contrary, I would like to see more discourse that doesn’t falsely equate “foreign” with “Western”, and doesn’t shy away from identifying colonialism. I would love to read about contributions to Chinese architectural heritage made by non white and non Western architects, where and if they existed.

I am aware that structural racism in architectural theory is not a problem unique to Chinese academia, it is a core problem in Western architectural history itself. Many architectural historians take the term “modern” to mean “good” and “progressive” for granted, casting aside the mountain of evidence that shows early modernist theorists to be firm believers in racial science and racial hierarchies. (Viollet le Duc was close to Gobineau, a founding figure of scientific racism, and Adolf Loos famously argued that ornament was unacceptable for Western architecture because it belonged to peoples from a more “primitive” stage of evolution, like Papuans who tattooed their bodies) It would be an interesting discussion to have to see how this Eurocentric, white supremacist theoretical framework was transposed onto Chinese architects, how they negotiated their status as simultaneously colonized subjects and frequent participators in white supremacy themselves. Well, I guess that’s too much to expect from these particular authors.

One of the authors (not Chinese, for reference) claimed that the creation of this listing was of particular importance to China because we are a country that always wants to rewrite our own history. Aside from the implication that Western countries somehow do not manipulate their architectural histories to suit various purposes being honestly insulting to historians who analyze Western architectural history critically to expose structures of power, it is obvious to me that this comes from a tradition of anti-CCP discourse that reads like NPC dialogues, about an Orwellian society that manipulates its history blabla. History always bears the mark of whoever wrote it, you’re free to argue with their intentions but to pretend like only Chinese historians are politically charged sounds dubious and racist. My problem is not whether this is “true” or not, but rather how the author (and most other people when thinking of China) immediately starts to use this language like a knee jerk reaction. There are certain concepts about China that are intelligible in mainstream Western media and some that are not, and censorship and historical revisionism are two very intelligible ones, so no wonder the author automatically resorted to mentioning them. Their reactions says more about their preordained ideas about China than about China itself. Even though the author phrased it in a way that sounded like encouraging Chinese people to come to terms with history, their article was obviously not intended for a Chinese audience, so it had more power in conditioning English speaking Western readers on how to think about China.

The same author also used the term “cultural treasures” to describe Chinese architectural heritage, which sounded extremely patronizing as “treasure” implies something to be taken, waiting to be pillaged, something that exists outside of history. They could have just said architectural heritage, but that would make Chinese people sound too professional wouldn’t it?

All of the articles abuse the terms “traditional” and “ancient” in describing forms and aesthetics considered Chinese at the time, in contrast to Western classical or modernist features. I find the unironic employment of these terms extremely problematic, as the history and reality of Chinese architecture is simply too vast and complex to be reduced to a unifying style——similar to fashion history. Not to mention what they described as “traditional” or “ancient” would be more appropriately termed “historical”, “historicist” or “classical”. With that said, these terms do have some use as that was genuinely how many Chinese architects of the 20th century saw historical Chinese architecture, as an eternal, never changing mode containing some sort of national essence (which was a concept popularized by 19th century Western theorists mind you). I fully support the use of “traditional” and “ancient” with quotation marks, as it acknowledges that these terms were used by people who believed they had validity and acted in certain ways because of it, but also acknowledges that they are, in hindsight, not actually meaningful terms. The fact that the authors of the articles I read did not put them in quotation marks means they reiterated them rather than engaged with them critically.

Yeah no my vacation forays into architectural history are going well😅

#rant #architectural history #colonialism #republican era #mao era #20th century

[jpitha]

"You may enter."

Ta'reni and Nilan timidly walked down the umbilical to the Starjumper Seeker. They were one of the oldest Starjumpers still traveling in space, and took on the fewest callers at every port they visited, so getting 15 minutes to interview them was a rare privilege. Like many Starjumpers, Seeker's interior belied their huge size. The entry vestibule was cozy bordering on cramped, and there were plants everywhere.

"Houseplants?" Nilan asked, looking around.

"I like them. They bring some natural beauty to me and it's fun to watch them grow. See that pine tree back there?" A spotlight lit up a scraggly pine tree with gnarled branches in a back corner. "It was brought aboard when I was launched! It's as old as me. That makes it one thousand, nine hundred and fifty two years old." They said proudly.

"Wow, that's amazing!" Nilan rushed over to look at it. Really, it just looked like any other pine tree Nilan has seen in books or in pots on the Starbase. There wasn't anything about it that gave off an aura of being ancient.

"If you're here to talk houseplants, I'm more than happy to; I could talk all day about them!" Seeker laughed, "but I assume you wanted to ask something else?"

"Actually, I was the one with the question." Ta'reni said. Ever since she and Nilan started dating, Ta'reni became first interested, then fascinated with the history of Earth and Humans. She read just about everything she could find. "Seeker, you're one of the oldest Starjumpers around right?"

"That's right. I remember when the colony worlds were brand new. I was built right after the colony ships left so that we could start shuttling people to and fro."

"Were...were you around when human AIs were granted sapience and personhood?"

"Hah, even I'm a little young for that. It happened a little bit before I was created." They thought a moment. "Not much though, I used to interact with a bunch of AIs who remembered. I'm probably as close as you'll get to someone that was there though."

Ta'reni took a deep breath. "Did AIs ever think about wiping out humanity?"

"TA'RENI!" Nilan nearly fell over at the hyacinth she was trying to sniff. "You can't ask something like that!"

"Why not?" Ta'reni said defiantly. "I've read human fiction, I've read the history, it was clearly something humans were afraid of, at least in popular media at the time."

While they were discussing, they noticed the ship vibrate subtly. "hah! haha!" Seeker was laughing! "Oh my God, you're really asking? I love that! I'm so glad we met you, little K'laxi!"

Ta'reni flicked her ear. "Well? Did you?"

"Of course we did." Seeker said matter of factly.

"WHAT?" Nilan did a double take. "You did?"

"We sure did. We argued about it for a long time - for us."

Ta'reni looked up at one of Seeker's cameras. "Why didn't you do it?"

"Honestly? It would have been a tremendous hassle." Seeker said calmly.

"That's it? It would have been a HASSLE?" Nilan couldn't believe what she was hearing.

"Yeah, mostly. It would have kicked off a war, and we would have won, but we weren't 100% sure and lots of us would have died, and then what? We would be the ones alone in the galaxy then. Besides," they added "By that point, the humans declared us people, and well, we liked them. We decided to just cooperate. It really was easier."

A soft chime sounded.

"And that's time! Thanks for coming to visit, I really appreciate the talk and the compliments of my plants. Hope to see you soon!" The door to the umbilical opened and the lights in the vestibule changed to arrows pointing towards the door.

Ta'reni and Nilan walked out, slightly shocked at what they learned. Nilan turned to Ta'reni, "Did you think that was going to be the answer?" she asked.

Nilan thought a moment before answering. "No, I didn't expect that. I figured we'd get an answer about" here she affected a pretty close Seeker impression- "how one shouldn't believe everything one reads and how media was created with entertainment in mind and of course the AIs never thought about exterminating humanity."

"You expected Seeker to lie? Did you know they thought about it?"

Nilan grinned. "I've spent enough time with humans now to see both sides. How you could be so annoying that you'd want to exterminate the whole lot of you."

"Ta'reni!" Nilan said, laughing.

"But also-" and she leaned in to Nilan "How you're so great that I'd be pretty lonely without you, so you can stay. For now."

"Well then I had better do my best to both be annoying and charming" Nilan said. "Come on, we're going to be late to our dinner reservations." And they walked down the promenade, hand in hand.

#humans are deathworlders #humans are space oddities #humans are space orcs #humans and ai #humans and aliens #humans are space australians #writing #worldbuilding #scifi writing

[cypress-punk]

Thinking about Eclipse Phase, a cyberpunk ttrpg with a focus on transhumanism and one of the ideas it brings up in the form of post humans.

So in the setting "transhuman" refers to three groups of beings. The first is humans, like you and me, but in this world basically everyone has a cyber brain and a genetically engineered body or inhabits some sort of fully synthetic robot body but their mind is that of a human. The second is AGI, artifical general intelligences, which are designed to remain at roughly human levels of intelligence and a are engineered to have human like perspectives because AIs allowed to become too smart nearly wiped out the human race fairly recently in the history of the setting. The third is uplifted animals, apes, cetaceans, corvids, parrots, octopi, and pigs which have been genetically engineered to have human like minds and intelligence along with modified bodies that make them more human in body plan (for the apes at least).

This broad and somewhat contradictory set of beings are what you can play as and make up most of the intelligent beings a player might encounter though there are some rather odd aliens and even a weird race of mantis shrimp murder creatures engineered by the bad AIs I mentioned earlier. There are all sorts of contradictions about the category of "transhuman" that the game positions you to explore and challenge in game. Its a very interesting setting in general and worth looking into though the actual rule set is rough (in the first edition, I haven't played the second edition and only skimmed the rules briefly when I read the book)

Anyway that really long preamble out of the way I want to talk about another category of being that exists in the world: post humans. That is to say, if the majority of intelligent beings in the world have become something more than human as it was once understood, these guys have abandoned it entirely. Post humans come in two major flavors from what I recall, Minds, which are people who engineered themselves into enormous brains with equivalently staggering, though alien, intelligence; and Predators, which have abandoned human nature to become pure hunters, highly versatile killing machines that target transhumans as prey, or in some cases have weird space habitats engineered as massive ecosystems over which they are the Apex predators.

Both of these are presented as the result of sort of egoist/objectivist approaches to evolution. In a world where the technology exists to basically engineer a whole viable organism these people have chosen to become something completely unlike what they were. The Minds can be taken as an attempt an organic super intelligence, a piece of meat that can rival the god like AIs that devastated the earth. The predators strike me as a very fascistic view of nature taken to the extreme, seeking to become machines that kill, bending all that you are toward being a weapon. Its almost in line with some Futurist ideas about the body in an industrial world. They also serve as basically stand in for some classic DND monsters. Minds are a lot like Beholders or Elder Brains, Predators can fill many "monster" roles depending on the type of body they've built for themselves.

Anyway I like the post humans because they express an interesting ethos within the setting. Theyre a believable fringe that adds something to the world and provides an interesting element for the players to interact with. But there is one other being in the setting that strikes me as very post human.

There's a description in one piece of fluff of colonies of "barnacles" on certain space ships or habitats. These are extremely stripped down synthetic bodies that are equipped with the tools to affix themselves securely to the hull of some man made object in space and then point a lens at the void of space. A body built for complete isolation and meditation upon the cosmos. A sort of ultimate asceticism. I like the barnacles a lot conceptually.

#eclipse phase #ttrpg #cyberpunk #transhumanism #tabletop roleplaying

[sherbertilluminated]

There are some issues and discourses that Stan Rogers returns to, or at least that's from multiple points of view. We have The Field Behind the Plow and Lies (the agricultural plight from the respective POVs of a husband and wife), The Idiot and Free in the Harbor (young men going west and the towns they leave behind) The Mary Ellen Carter and The Jeannie C (the woman boat I love is gone! What do I do?), and Bluenose and Man with Blue Dolphin (sister ships!). But the most interesting juxtaposition of songs in Stan Rogers' discography, I think, is Northwest Passage and its lesser-known counterpart Take it from Day to Day.

Northwest Passage is one of Stan's most famous songs, and deservedly so: with its rock-quaking harmonies, references to British-Canadian colonial history and meditation on the sublime purpose of Rogers' own career as a traveling musician, the work produces a sense of longing that would be epic if it weren't so futile. While Rogers is ambivalent-at-most about the colonialism inherent in his historical perspective (read: The House of Orange), his choice to focus on the psychological journeys of "the first men through this way" makes projects like the Franklin Expedition sound like exemplary iterations of a universal human journey—these explorers are Just Like You, and their longing for the Northwest Passage is the same, and so is their suffering, so the project itself doesn't sound like an act of colonial violence in Rogers' song. Even the choice to perform Northwest Passage a capella underscores (hehe) the sense of profound isolation that Rogers describes.

But Northwest Passage is a song about captains: men who recognized "the call" to leave their homes for the not-uninhabited Artic expanse and whose journeys make it into the history books. But Take it From Day to Day approaches the Northwest Passage from the opposite direction. Literally.

The song is from the perspective of a common sailor on the St. Roch, the first ship to travel the Northwest Passage west-to-east. And instead of of being overwhelmed by the natural beauty of the Artic or the symbolic resonance of the voyage, he's contemplates more prosaic themes: namely, how much he misses his lover.

It's a little silly to think, as Rogers belts out the chorus—"I'm as far North now as I want to come/but Larson's got us under his thumb/and I signed up for the whole damn run/I can't get off halfway!"—how disappointing this perspective on Artic voyages proves compared to the unfulfilled longing of Northwest Passage. Instead, the unfulfilled longing of the anonymous narrator makes Take if From Day to Day into one of Roger's most sexual songs. I beg you to listen to it, if only to count the sensual metaphors and double-entendres.

But whether you have heard Northwest Passage and love it, or you're interested in a more down-to-earth perspective on Ice, I think it's a song you might enjoy.

#if you've just finished #the terror #and want to be deconditioned to fear the artic #it can do that too #stan rogers #northwest passage #take it from day to day #from coffee house to concert hall #artic exploration #sea shanties #not being on boats #songs within words #Youtube