Neurotically Meta

I love gregory Macguire. He literally said I'm going to make my AU Fanfiction everyone else's problem

so don’t get me wrong because a lot of arthurian stuff is super misogynistic. but it’s never really in the damsel in distress way you expect. like the most helpless damsel is lancelot trapped and crying in a tower, completely useless, until this random girl who made him behead a guy in front of her fifty pages ago rolls up with a pickax and rope and is like “ok I’m minecrafting you out of here.” and this works.

Another direction you’ll see this go is, like… okay, so in Arthurian texts, violence is very much The Province of Men. But women often want violence done for one reason or another, so they’re out there asking knights to fight such-and-such for them & the knights are of course honor-bound to accept under certain conditions, which by genre convention are easy to engineer.

All of this means that one of the standard female roles in Arthurian romance is “quest-giver”. And in some texts, this can drift from “these are damsels in distress and the knights must help them in various ways” to “it kind of seems like the women are the ones who actually know what’s going on & the knights are just being led along to wherever they’re supposed to be”.

It’s still ultimately an example of misogyny and strict gender roles, but it ends up often looking pretty different from the stock “damsel in distress” scenario people expect.

...Is the woman in Arthurian myth who Wants Violence Done but must conscript a man to actually do it the literary ancestress of the modern Femme Fatale? Discuss.

She slipped into my office that night like a demon into the mind of a pious monk, seductive and dripping with heresies. Her gown and headress were of rich silk befitting a maiden, but her eyes were cold and sharp as the executioner's sword, and her lips as red as the apple that tempted Eve. Her legs, presumably, went all the way up, but the aforementioned gown was floor-length, so it's hard to say. Also she'd ridden a horse into the building for some reason, which was quite distracting.

"Sir Knight," she said, dismounting and retrieving something from her saddlebag, "I have a job for you." She tossed a severed head onto my desk.

I peered at the severed head. It had noble features, and had managed to land exactly on top of one of the stains left by previous severed heads. "How did you find me?" I asked. "I swapped my red shield for a blue one; the disguise should be impenetrable."

"The hermit told me where you'd be", she answered in a voice like the bells on a horse's harness before battle.

That tracks. Those hermits are always poking their noses into my business. "How may I serve you, fair lady?" I asked. "I'd kneel, but my armor's gone a bit rusty in the legs."

"The Baron D'Iverjoure has slain my lover," she said, gesturing at the head, the rings on her fingers clinking like manacles in a wicked king's dungeon. "I need you to avenge him."

"I have no quarrel with the Baron D'Iverjoure," I said, knowing as the words echoed in my helmet that I was saying them just for the form of it and I'd end up taking this quest regardless. "I have heard he is an honorable man."

"That may be," said the damsel, in tones as lovely as a reliquary and just as filled with death, "but you took an oath to obey the next lady to ask you a favor, and I'm calling it in."

I silently cursed my habit of swearing rash vows. They always get me in trouble. But you know how that goes. "Your wish is my command, milady."

She nodded and remounted her horse with the help of her two servants who I hadn't bothered to mention before now. "I will listen for news of your success," she said as she left.

That's the way it is with damsels; they always know about the oaths. Even the ones you spoke into a dented chalice, empty of wine, after everyone else had left the feast. And now I've got another quest I can't turn down without losing my honor.

#as lovely as a reliquary and just as filled with death is a BANGER OF A LINE

I'm glad you appreciate it. I was wracking my brain trying to come up with enough "beautiful but dangerous" similes to fill this out in the over-the-top way I wanted -- the reliquary one was the only case where I stopped and thought "that's actually not bad; i should remember it." Probably needs workshopping, but I like it in concept.

It’s so fucked up how tiktok culture has made clout-poisoned people turn the public into content, every day I see people minding their business have their entire faces put online for thousands of likes, a couple kissing on the train, a lady dancing across a cross walk, a guy nodding his head to the music at a club, a lady buying a banana at the store, ring camera footage of the neighbors kids being stupid. Just let people live jfc

I think I may have made it seem like this is about wholesome content (which my sentiment towards that is the same) but most of the time when I see this stuff people are being ridiculed for being completely normal. And I didn’t make up any of these examples btw, I couldn’t find the dance one but only because there are too many videos of people being recorded at cross walks

(Faces censored and additional text added by me)

Im gonna add this to every post about this i see im never gonna shut up about it. This will get people killed. This will ruin lives. More people live in hiding than you think. So many people are one post away from having to abandon their whole lives. Dont ever post anything of anyone without their consent, stranger or not.

I am a photographer. It is my job to go into schools and take candid photos for the yearbook.

The number of kids that are on a 'do not photograph' list isn't large, but it is a non-zero number. If that kid is even out of focus in the background, we do not use that photo.

If a child shows even the tiniest bit upset that there's a person in the room with a camera, I do not take their photo.

At pop culture conventions, I ask people if I can take their photo. Or if I take a candid of them, I track them down and give them my info and get th3ir consent before posting.

At events like parties, concerts, performances, consent is generally implied because these are photographed events, but if an attendee approaches me and tells me to crop them out then I crop them out.

This makes street photography tedious, but I learned in my very first job as a camp counselor that people have very good reasons for not wanting their photo publicized. There are kids in the foster system with abusive parents. There are adults with stalkers. There are people who might be a witness to a crime.

Even outside of this- I've seen how private persons become memes against their will just by going out in public. Some people are super not normal about meme fame.

Leave people alone. The world is complicated. Make your own content.

January 1, 2025 - A stray dog in Petea receives applause for being the first to cross the newly visa-free border between Hungary and Romania, as Romania joins the Schengen area.

hate when people are like "trust your gut! listen to your intuition!" like okay well my gut is telling me every person i lay eyes on is hunting me for sport and my intuition is saying i should find a secluded cave and live there forever so what do you suggest i do with that information

(Semi-serious answer to joke post incoming) If your gut is sending you endless “UNSAFE!” signals in a situation your logic brain knows is safe, then you trust it by kind of treating it like a conversation with a screaming parrot.

Like going “ok, Gut, what feels unsafe?” And it’ll say “PEOPLE IN THE GROCERY STORE”

and you go, “huh, ok. People in the grocery store aren’t usually dangerous…what makes them scary in the grocery store?” And it’ll go “LOUD AND RUSHED AND BUSY”

and you go “ok, people in the grocery store are probably not dangerous but they’re loud and rushed and busy. Loud and rushed and busy makes me feel stressed. How about we wear earplugs to make it less noisy and go at a less busy time of day?”

And then sometimes you try that and your gut goes “HMMM GROCERY STORE SAFER?” And you go, “yes, grocery store safer.”

Your gut isn’t necessarily correct that the SITUATION is unsafe but it’s usually right that your body/brain FEELS unsafe in the situation. You can trust it by approaching it with curiosity and usually learn something.

Opal kittens!!:3

no credit needed

x

told my mom my feet are cold & all my wool socks are dirty & she said “how about THESE” and pulled out of her pocket a pair of wool socks that apparently took 3rd place in the Delaware State Fair, which I know because the ribbon is still attached

reading the tags I realize it wasn’t clear:

Magic item: Mom of Holding; can summon 1d4 random items from the Batshit Stuff to Have in Your Pockets table

I think that one of the most common and most harmful tendencies which a lot of people fall into when thinking about politics is outgroup homogeneity, the idea that there's a much wider diversity of opinions among those close to our beliefs than there is among those far from our beliefs.

This is most commonly exemplified by the foolishness of "horseshoe theory," which places Centrist Liberal Democracy in the middle of all political thought and then argues that the various ideas diverging from this viewpoint are all basically the same. But virtually every ideological tendency has their own versions of this. Large portions of the right think that there's practically no difference between Hillary Clinton and Karl Marx. Meanwhile, on the left, there's often very little effort made to distinguish center-right liberal democrats, conservatives, libertarians, and reactionaries from one another.

But fascism is not communism, social liberalism is not Marxism, and conservatism is not white nationalism. These are all different ideas with different ways of viewing the world, offering different solutions for different problems. Being able to distinguish between them is very important for understanding the world! The conflicts, tensions, and overlaps between seemingly-allied ideological factions have huge implications!

I've always found a lot of value in the idea of an ideological Turing test: can you describe a given political ideology's viewpoint on an issue in such a way that a neutral observer would have trouble telling the difference between your description and one offered by an actual believer in that ideology? If not, you might not understand that ideology as well as you think

Ai Weiwei, “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn,” 1995

An astonishingly irreverent piece of work.  This triptych features the artist dropping a Han Dynasty (206 BC - 220 AD) in three photographs.  

When questioned about the work, he suggested that the piece was about industry: “[The urn] was industry then and is industry now.”  His statement, therefore, was that the urn was just a cheap pot two thousand years ago, and the reverence we feel toward it is artificial.  One critic wrote: “In other words, for all the aura of preciousness acquired by the accretion of time (and skillful marketing), this vessel is the Iron Age equivalent of a flower pot from K-Mart and if one were to smash the latter a few millennia from now, would it be an occasion for tears?”

However, the not-so-subtle political undertone is clear.  This piece was about destroying the notion that everything that is old is good…including the traditions and cultures of China.  For Ai Weiwei, this triptych represents a moment in which culture suddenly shifts (sometimes violently), shattering the old and outdated to make room for the new.  

As someone who works in a museum, I basically make my living keeping old stuff safe (among other things). So this photo series is kind of hard to look at, but it’s so worth thinking about! 

When you work in a museum, it’s not just “we have to keep and protect every single old thing just because they’re old and therefore valuable.” We spend a lot of time thinking about how something can have value today, even if it’s something that didn’t have value in the past. We consider what our visitors could learn from these objects- whether it be historical facts or just insight into what life was like for people of the past. “Is this book better off behind glass? Or would it serve a better purpose on our library shelves for people (with gloves) to look through?” The book will slowly get damaged over time, but nothing lasts forever, we just have to decide whether it’s worth it. What’s the point in keeping a book perfectly preserved for all time if no one ever gets to read it again? 

In a sense, this photo series is doing the same thing. Weiwei may have “destroyed” that urn, but in doing so it’s now serving the larger purpose of making people think about this stuff. Compare that to the urn’s other possible fate, being passed from collector to collector until someone eventually breaks it anyway. I think this outcome is much better. 

if american CEOs were killed at the same rate as schoolchildren, they would all be dead in a few months.

if american CEOs were killed at the same rate that police kill unarmed people, they would all be dead in a couple of weeks.

if american CEOs were killed at the same rate that life saving treatments were denied coverage, they would all be dead in seconds.

So I have this headcanon about Larry...

Ugh, it says they attempted delivery but "Nobody was home."

Odyssey [Explained]

Transcript Under the Cut

want to see a take on the greek gods that’s focused on like. all the olympians are complete whackadoodles because. zeus grew up in isolation on a hidden island with a centaur, training to kill his father.

and all his siblings grew up in their father’s stomach.

and then once they got out they leapt right into a war! there’s no way these people should be remotely well-adjusted! their formative life experiences were utterly whack!

poseidon hates closed-in spaces because Stomach. hades is agoraphobic for the same reason. (because people can have wildly different responses to the same trauma.) zeus doesn’t like being in small or dark or wet spaces because he was never swallowed but he sure grew up aware of the possibility.

(or if you want to be fucked up swap poseidon and hades’ issues and watch them lose their minds, since their jobs were supposedly determined by drawing lots, but hades is kinda noted for his stability so i doubt he hates being underground. the lots were fixed, come on.)

zeus is the only one with anything remotely approaching social skills, due to not having grown up in a stomach, and everyone in his family thinks he’s really smooth but in fact he is zeus.

hera has regular anxiety meltdowns about zeus’s general behavior because when Rhea married Chronos he was the one who’d overthrown their tyrant dad and taken his place, and she didn’t expect the child-swallowing, what if zeus comes up with some new idea about How To Be The Worst and she doesn’t notice in time???

it took rhea five kids to come up with a workaround, you can’t be that slow.

demeter avoids her whole family whenever possible because they had way too much Togetherness in their formative years and whenever she’s around her sibs too long she gets the bad kind of nostalgia, and also she’s even more claustrophobic than Poseidon and refuses to even go in buildings.

this makes persephone’s marriage particularly hard on her, as she cannot visit.

hestia takes her obligations as the eldest child very seriously even though nobody else does, and has the persistent feeling she should have solved the Being Eaten problem back when it only affected her.

she overcompensates by trying to take care of everyone all the time now they’re full-grown neurotic adults.

of the second-gen Olympians, athena relates best to the older set because of her Birth By Migraine experience, and the fact that by sewing her dead mom into his body Zeus saved her life was like. huge for him in processing his ongoing issues about his dad. reenact the trauma backwards.

they’re very close, in a ‘we don’t have that much in common so we don’t talk that much, but we don’t really need to’ sort of way.

ares got a particularly large dose of generational trauma by way of hera’s overinvolved and anxiety-riddled parenting, and his main coping methods are repression and finding something to fight so he knows what he’s worried about, and that he can kill it. also sex. 

(aphrodite only married into the family, but she’s still been dealing with their issues enough from an early enough age that they’ve left an imprint, mostly in her draconian patrol of her own boundaries and refusal to set them where anyone else thinks she should. even if their opinions are eminently rational, which does happen.)

artemis and apollo mostly grew up with their mom and escaped the lion’s share of the olympian dysfunction; apollo is actually smooth, which makes him a family legend.

the fact that artemis has trusted two men ever and apollo didn’t entirely deserve it is definitely driven by the fact that zeus is a massive improvement on the previous two generations of patriarch, tho.

hermes takes the common and relatable step of being home as rarely as possible and having an excuse to leave immediately, so he only gets endurable amounts of family time.

whichever parent threw hephaestus away for being ugly, their feelings about having done so (and made his physical problems worse in the process) are all tangled up with their chronos issues, and he knows this.

so his adult relationship with them involves a lot of complicated stepping around the gulf of Not Talking About It, because he also knows he wouldn’t get enough satisfaction out of airing his frustrations to make up for then having to deal with Parent unbottling their own repressed daddy issues.

see i saw someone tagged this with objection to the effect that the greek gods are really shitty and that should never be ignored, but you see that is the point.

i see a lot where they’re shitty, per their various recorded behaviors (which is tbh from a very few texts by specific individuals and the older i get the less Seriously i take that Written Canon; this was not a Book Religion, we are missing many thousands of stories and the attendant perspectives here) and i see a lot where they’re reinterpreted to be actually decent according to the writer’s personal metric, or some of them are and others are made worse as if to compensate.

this take here does not engage with whether they are shitty. they probably are. they certainly make each other pretty miserable a lot of the time.

the point however is viewing them as people who exist within linear experiential time, with their established traumatic early lives and attendant poor socialization having a meaningful impact on their adult identities. rather than their origin story existing at a remove from the essentials of Who They Are.

because that’s not really how people work. and if we’re going to be treating them as people it’s a damn waste not to buy the whole cow.