you all have permission to come to my funeral and give wildly conflicting accounts of my life
Please. I want nothing more than to be shrouded in a confusing mesh of myth and fact
Please publish as many different obituaries in as many different papers as possible.
Month: November 2015
imperial radch tumblr headcanons
(this has been done before, but who cares?)
breq: 90% reblogs of videos of ordinary people singing things, 9% earnest discussions of developments in the field of ethnomusicology and dry critiques of the colonialism and racism and anglocentrism and americentrism of same, 1% very subtle trolling. it’s a low traffic blog, so the trolling’s hard to spot
seivarden: the shitposting is fun, and the reblogs of pretty naked people are okay, but watch for the periodic public meltdown and deletion after she gets called out, no matter how mildly.
ekalu: carefully curated blog of things that she likes, notable for studiously avoiding tumblr drama
basnaaid: mostly sustainability and aquaculture posts, some reblogs of cute succulents. went through her blog and deleted all the embarrassing original poetry posts long ago, but the internet remembers, basnaaid!
uran: language learning and local politics. has a private tumblr for the anti-radchaai sentiment
kalr five: what do YOU think?
dlique and zeiat: every few months they do this thing where they change their urls to each other’s names without warning, and at the same time each posts the sort of content the other usually posts (both surrealist, but in different ways, in both cases running from subtly disconcerting to wildly disturbing and not safe for lunch) thus breaking everyone’s links
tisarwat: somehow wrested her new url away from anaander mianaai, who was using it to stalk breq after breq blocked her. is now making a very calculated (and successful) attempt to become Tumblr Famous.
sphene: hates tumblr, misses hating livejournal.
anaander mianaai: her first ever post was this inspirational graphic with the mantra I AM ALLOWED TO TAKE UP SPACE. which in most cases is a harmless and beneficial motto to have, but less so when the OP is anaander and she means she is allowed to become an interstellar dictator, clone herself thousands of times, and annex as much of known space as she can. there are twenty thousand reblogs. the first five thousand are all her.
Why is Thomas Jefferson getting a ton of heat lately? He’s my problematic fav
i mean, lately, it’s presumably because the hit broadway musical hamilton is out there reminding everyone that tjeff was The Worst. but i’m gonna take this opportunity to give you a run-down of every historic reason why tjeff was The Worst
- i could end the list at “slave owner”
- furthermore, he was even more racist than most 18th century racists. i don’t have the time or energy to list all the racists things he did, but there are a lot, just google it
- like when his pal tadeusz kosciuszko died he stipulated that the money from his american estate should be used to free and educate jefferson’s slaves and in response he was like. “i can’t read suddenly. i don’t know”
- he was a huge hypocrite who claimed to support the ~small independent farmers when the only interests he really cared about looking out for were – you guessed it – the interests of wealthy plantation owners, which is probably his biggest contribution to the legacy of american politics tbh
- also, remember how he wrote the declaration of independence – including the original draft where he waxed philosophical about how slavery is an abomination – even though #1-3
- sally hemings
- he had no idea how the economy works. a good deal of his political career was spent arguing with the federalists about why taxes are bad and banks are scary. one time he tried to ban exports, like, entirely, because he just didn’t foresee any negative consequences to that brilliant idea, apparently
- he was a generally obnoxious person who not only spewed baseless accusations against his enemies every time he was challenged on all his horrible ideology, but he didn’t even have the balls to do it himself, he usually employed a whole gang of followers to do his public shit-talking for him
- he actually kept a burn book where he collected rumors about people he didn’t like. i wish i was making this up lmao this actually happened!!!
- a big fan of indian removal and/or forced assimilation
- there’s gotta be a lot else i’m forgetting right now, i’m just thinking off the top of my head
basically he sat around at monticello spinning around in his swivel chair while his slave-concubine brought him bowl after bowl of mac and cheese, meditating on liberty and equality with so much moral myopia he could’ve been the antihero protagonist of an amc prestige drama
i’m too tired to source any of this hate right now but i can and will elaborate if anyone deems it necessary
im gonna need a source on the mac and cheese
I’ve got Breq + Max(ine) Caulfield + Abbie Mills and/or Ichabod Crane.
I think I’m good between the superhuman former Ship, time traveler, and professional apocalypse thwarters.
Susanna Clarke is a Norrellite!
Another interview with Ms Clarke, prophetically enough, on the BBC’s website on Sep 24, 2004, just before the publication of JS&MN. She was asked whether Strange, the Raven King and Mr Norrell were modelled after historical figures. Her reply:
Not really. Their antecedents are mostly literary. Strange has a touch of Byron in him, I suppose, and a little of the eighteenth-century rakes—Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses and so forth. I wanted him to have a little wickedness in him—or the potential for wickedness, at any rate.
The Raven King had an odd genesis. Ursula Le Guin has a magician in the Earthsea trilogy who has no name: the Grey Mage of Plan, whose magic was so dubious, his name was forgotten. And there’s a magician in The Lord of the Rings, right at the very end, who comes out of Mordor to do battle against our heroes, and no one knows his name because he himself has forgotten it. I thought this was rather cool, and when I was developing my magicians, I wanted one without a name. Unfortunately I hadn’t quite understood what would happen if I had a major character without a name. The consequence has been that he has acquired more names than most people: the Raven King, John Uskglass, the Black King, the King of the North and a fairy name that no one can pronounce.
Mr. Norrell is more difficult. The only person I can think of that he might be based on is me. We share the same hobbies: staying at home, surrounded by books and not answering the phone. I think I got him originally from a jigsaw puzzle. It was a really great jigsaw with a picture of a huge library and two or three old gentlemen with eighteenth-century wigs reading books. I carried the image of that library around in my head for years until I knew what to do with it.
I love the idea that Mr Norrell doesn’t answer his phone. Of course, he wouldn’t! He would have caller ID and/or Childermass to screen calls.
Check out the interview here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/nottingham/content/articles/2004/09/15/entertainment_books_susanna_clarke_feature.shtml
sqbr:
id wreak mayhem for a really good scifi where sight was considered as exotic and numinous as telepathy by the protag species
#everybody else uses sonar or long whiskers and that thing with the sensing electrical impulses#meanwhile: humans can ‘see’ which is a thing which is like and yet unlike ordinary perception#it would also only ever come into play in the same frivolous ‘VULCAN STRENGTH’ sort of way as Spock’s extra attributes#for maximum effect vision would be faithfully written as 100% an asspull in the best waywhat the fuck dude this is awesome i want this too now
Okay, but what about those deep sea fish that produce light at a wavelength that *only they can see.* Predators that can somehow sense you in a completely undectable and unfathomable manner to you; they might as well be psychic.
YES, EXACTLY–vision is SUCH an asspull?? Sometimes it’s “"dark”“ and we can’t see anything. And also we’re impaired for plot reasons! Sometimes ALIEN WEAPONRY or otherwise-innocuous ship components are ”“too bright”“ and we yell and try to hide, subject to some sort of obscure, tortuous imperative. The rest of the time we can UNERRINGLY tell when anyone is trying to play pranks on us, the names and emotional/physical status of EVERY SINGLE BEING IN THE ROOM (or, when outside civilized warrens, ”“line of sight”“)–and yes, of course, can’t forget about our nigh-mythical fighting arts revolving around insane dodging skills.
And SNIPING. And also, god, fuck–don’t forget about completely arbitrary “”””atmospheric disturbances””” (fog, smoke–the new “ionic interference”) ALSO plottasatically rendering our abilities moot.
Plus, some people have more powerful Vision than others, but some people have a very short effective range of Vision. However, humans have come up with devices that “change the angles of refraction” of the “light” so that the naturally impaired have their skills enhanced–but they can always be knocked off their faces or be broken.
Also some people are terrible at normal Vision work, but have excellent night vision and are skilled at working under adverse conditions.
Oooh, and human art is almost entirely Vision based. Think about non-seeing aliens trying to access the majority of human art!
IM!!! SCREAMING!!! GLASSES. Glasses are SUCH another great Weird Alien Gimmick. God–you get all used to your Human friend and their bizarre abilities, you just start to really trust in and rely on them in tight places and problem-solving a little bit, then you get fucken marooned on a fucken planetoid somewhere and they just in this very small little voice, after you have pulled them from the wreckage and sat down to go over your options, inform you that they’ve lost their glasses.
Oh my god and an episode where we’re up against Evil Humans and our heros turn to their humans like ‘you can see them, right, you can tell when they’re near? you can counter them?’ and our hero is genuinely shaken and worried— they’ve got high-tech military mechanical enhancers, the devices strapped to their heads let them see anywhere, they can operate in near-absolute ‘darkness’, they can operate in near-lethal ‘brightness’, they can see through walls— not doors, not glass, but walls.
Then we have a heroic scene where the crew’s human is the scrappy, desperate underdog for once instead of the cool and collected superbeing. It is super cool. The human and the captain probably mack wildly on one another in medbay after this. Roll credits.
Person 1: I dunno, dude. This ‘light’ stuff sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbo to me. I mean, how do we know it’s even real?
Person 2: Seriously, how can something be a wave and a particle? That doesn’t even make sense.
Mysterious Human: Even if you cannot perceive the light, you can feel its warmth–
Person 1: Oh my god, please shut it with the mystical hoo-hah. You’re insufferable.
Mysterious, somewhat exasperated Human: the ‘light’ enters the sensitive paired apertures in our faces, passing through biological lenses and chambers to stimulate specific nerves we call ‘rods’ and ‘cones’. one set of nerves tells us the volume of light we’re perceiving, while the other estimates the wavelength frequency. the total input creates in our mind a continuous sonarscape of immense complexity, where we can perceive ‘textures’ that are impossible to understand with mere sound or touch. this is why my people’s communication devices are small, flat, silent boards: we ‘read’ the patterns of light they emit as language and ‘watch’ the patterns of light they emit as sonarscapes.
Captain: okay…. sounds fake, but okay…
And they just keep on making up new bullshit rules for how light works, like
Navigator: Warp drive engaged. We are approaching 90% of the Lorentz limit.
Human: What now?
Navigator: Oh, uh, it’s really complex, but lemme try. So, matter can only move so fast through space, right? Like absolutely, nothing can ever ever possibly go faster than like about 3 hundred million meters per second–
Human: Ah yes. The speed of light.
Navigator: …oh for fuck’s sake.
Captain: My god! Time! Has… frozen!
Human: Fuuuuuuuuck.
Captain: What?
Human: Remember how light is a wave and a particle?
Captain: Yes, we mention this every episode.
Human: Yeah, light’s frozen along with everything else. I can’t see shit.
Captain: My god! Our sonar doesn’t work either! The soundwaves— they can’t propagate through this frozen air! We’ll have to use just our whiskers!
Human: Fuuuuuuuuck.
The fanfiction for this show has to be amazing.
“Shh. Don’t try to hide your needs, Captain,” Hue Mann soothed. “My sight has told me all about your traumatic memories of the war.”
“What?” Captain gasped. “But…how…?”
“The light knows all,” explained Hue. “Time slows down at the speed of light. It sees all of the past..and all of the future.”
“And what is it telling you now?” questioned the Captain.
Hue leaned in close. “It tells me, ‘Mate with them now, you lovestruck fool!”
“Damn you, Hue Mann. Damn you and your penetrating ‘eyes.’”
“Oh,” breathed Hue, voice husky and sexual. “That’s not all my eyes can…penetrate.”
The ship goes to the Planet of the Humans, and to everyone’s shock Hue Mann is treated like a second class citizen. It turns out the mutant superpowered “sighted” humans have taken over and oppress the normal humans (who they call “blind”) and even declare humans like Hue “legally blind” when their superpowers are considered inadequate. But of course the normal, unsighted people save the day and everyone learns a very special lesson about tolerance and equality: by experiencing a world aimed at sighted people the crewmembers understand that Hue isn’t just whining when he mentions the “blinding glow” of the photon engine etc, and the humans learn that their oh-so-special “Sight” is no match for good old fashioned sonar.
#disability #possibly relevant to this metaphor unless you really do want to imply that not having sight means you’re not human #also totally something this hypothetical show would make ham-fisted metaphors about #while ignoring real world disabilities like being born without whiskers #unless you count the guy with his whiskers covered in silver body paint pretending to be a cyborg #who has all the abilities of someone with whiskers because come ON how else would they even get anything done #social justice #complicated feelings about cheesy science fiction
daily life of a digital artist:
- is that a not coloured spot or a stain on my monitor
- I didn’t save for at least 2 hours god is real
- my playlist ended 1,5 h ago I’ve been drawing in silence this whole time
- ‘ “asdf11.png” already exists. Do you want to overwrite? ‘
- I resized this very part of a picture but now it looks too small so let’s ctrl+z ohMYGOD IT’S SO B I G
- this idea seemed cooler yesterday at 3 am
- I want to pee but right now I’m doing so well and if I go I will leavE THE ZONE
- opacity 67% or 68% I can’t decide
- well this pic looks nice //*flips it horizontally*// I regret having eyes
- where the fuck is my pen