Tell me I can’t possibly be the first person to think of this

So I got this book out of the library, about Babylon, and it immediately put me off by the way it talks about how the ancient Mesopotamians were the FIRST EVAR to want to IMPROVE THEIR LIVES so they made cities and it was a RADICAL BREAK from the past and has the author mentioned how they were the FIRST EVAR and all the people around mired in the past just doing things the way grandpa and grandma always did because it never occurred to them to improve their lives must have been astonished and everyone clapped?

Like, I'm here for talking up ancient cities and all, but seriously? Nobody else ever made cities? No one invented anything until Uruk? No one has since without following a Mesopotamian example? REALLY???

But then I came across this picture (I was flipping ahead to the glossy pages with photos, as you do)

It's a picture of a clay bowl. Clearly not made on a wheel, uneven, but with its own kind of charm to it. And the caption says, "The aesthetic deprivation of the non-elite: Crudely moulded bevelled-rim bowls are found all over Mesopotamia, dating from the Uruk era--fourth millenium BCE"

I just....I just can't. Aesthetic deprivation. Because it doesn't match your idea of Fancy. Because maybe you think non-elite aesthetics are just garbage.

I know nothing about the aesthetic goals of the potter who made this bowl, I just hate the person who wrote the caption too much to finish reading the book. It's absolutely on me. I'm sure he's a lovely person, I wish him well in his life, but I can't continue reading. Back to the library you go.

The book referred to here was published in the early 2010s. Seriously! But the next one is better, from 1992. Jean Bottero, Everyday Life in Ancient Mesopotamia. Translated from French, and it is striking me as very French, especially the chapter called "The Earliest Cuisine in the World." After talking about recipes we have--mostly fragmentary and hard to translate, but clearly the menu of the "elite"--we get this bit, in reference to the everyday foods of everyday, not rich, probably non-literate Mesopotamians:

There we go. That's the stuff. Pass me that salt.

[image id: a four-page comic. it is titled “immortality” after the poem by clare harner (more popularly known as “do not stand at my grave and weep”). the first page shows paleontologists digging up fossils at a dig. it reads, “do not stand at my grave and weep. i am not there. i do not sleep.” page two features several prehistoric creatures living in the wild. not featured but notable, each have modern descendants: horses, cetaceans, horsetail plants, and crocodilians. it reads, “i am a thousand winds that blow. i am the diamond glints on snow. i am the sunlight on ripened grain. i am the gentle autumn rain.” the third page shows archaeopteryx in the treetops and the skies, then a modern museum-goer reading the placard on a fossil display. it reads, “when you awaken in the morning’s hush, i am the swift uplifting rush, of quiet birds in circled flight. i am the soft stars that shine at night. do not stand at my grave and cry.” the fourth page shows a chicken in a field. it reads, “i am not there. i did not die” / end id]

a comic i made in about 15 hours for my school’s comic anthology. the theme was “evolution”

i dont know what came over me

Fuck you, Neil Gaiman.

I want to add on to this, because I think it's an important point: Right now, I'm seeing a lot of people retroactively construe the presence of darker themes in Gaiman's work as proof of his real-world abuses; that we should've known a man who wrote about rape would also be a rapist. This is bullshit for several reasons, but the one I want to highlight here is that, not so long ago, the inverse belief held true for many: that a man who wrote so empathetically about the human condition must naturally be a good person. And that, quite manifestly, wasn't true - because what someone says and does in fiction, whether good or bad, is not a yardstick for how they live their lives. Does this mean that there's no relationship between a creator's personal beliefs and their work? Of course not! But there is no inherent, one-to-one causative relationship between, say, depicting abuse in fiction and being an abuser, and trying to infer one is dangerous. Different people explore the same topics in fiction for wildly different reasons, such that the only way to definitively link elements of a work to the creator's life is if they tell us that link exists. Absent this sort of direct confirmation, we can certainly mount arguments inferring a relationship between this aspect of a creator's life and that element of their work, citing facts and thematic analysis to support our case, but as a general rule, it no more follows that an author who writes about bad things must therefore be a bad person than it follows that an author who writes about good things must therefore be a good person, not least because the default state of narrative, which exists to reflect the complexities of the human experience, is to describe both good and bad, or to contrast one with the other, or to explore what those things mean.

So, no: the presence of dark themes in Gaiman's work was not a secret smoking gun about his real-world actions, any more than the presence of empathy and joy in his work is proof that he could never have done the things of which he's accused. I understand the temptation to seek comfort in the idea of a doctrine of signatures for fiction, the better to reassure yourself that the predators are always easy to spot, but the truth is, people are complicated, celebrities are strangers to us, and no matter how much you know about someone's work, that's not a substitute for knowing them.

your unreliable narrator fucking bit me

thats not how they told it

A lot of writing advice says ‘throw the reader into the action’ and I respect where that’s coming from, but personally I kind of love an elaborate and unnecessary-to-the-plot framing device.

The credits before the grainy movie or long, dramatic anime opening; an endlessly looping videogame title screen; some hype man at the beginning of a renaissance play purely there to let the crowd know shit’s about to get real.

The following pages are transcribed from papers found in a cave thought unreachable by humans, and written in an ink whose chemical composition could not be determined. Something howls in the forest and the stranger at your campfire looks up from under the brim of their hat and strums their guitar to begin the Ballad of Howlin’ Joe. Reader, the tale you are about to read is entirely made up and every character fictitious, but each and every word of it is true.

Once upon a time! It was a dark and stormy night! Atmosphere IS story and you don’t have to cut out every moment of it to serve constant forward action. Give me a trope with absolute sincerity that sets a MOOD and gets me in the zone. I have a huge reverent soft spot for an opening that feels like beginning the ancient and intrinsically familiar ritual of storytelling, a ritual that spans the world and predates written text, endlessly iterating and evolving. Are you sitting comfortably? Let’s begin.

#OP you would love PH Lee’s Great Sweet Sea stories

So… I got a notification from the State Department at like 8 PM Pacific that my passport was approved, and I was quietly thankful and stunned bc my legal gender in Oregon is listed as X, or undeclared, and that's what's on my passport. I'm pretty sure someone(s) worked late to get the X passports done today.

I was already really grateful to whoever in the Seattle Passport Office worked late to get these things processed on the last Friday before That Man gets back into office... and then I got a notification that my passport shipped at fucking midnight Pacific and whoever got that shit out the door so it couldn't be picked up on Monday and like, denied and shredded?

They're my fucking hero.

So... I heard from a friend of 20+ years who works for the State Department who confirmed to me in so many words that they can assure me, without specifics, that "all of the suppositions you have made here are true."

So... yep. Passport folx at the State Department really did work incredibly long hours this week just... shoveling every passport out the door (and prioritizing the ones that might be A Problem come Monday) and yes, they did On Purpose make sure that all of them weren't just DONE but MAILED and out the door and in the hands of the USPS so that they can't be told to pull those passports back and deny/destroy them.

This also means they got the OK for the mountains of overtime from the Biden administration to get that done.

This is what I mean when I say that the Good Work is often not glamorous and that we have to prioritize things which actively and immediately better the lives of our siblings. The State Department worker who was still in the office last night at midnight Pacific time stuffing my passport into an Express Mail envelope and making sure that it was in the hands of USPS has done more liberatory work for the trans movement than 100 people endlessly auditing the language others use to describe their lives ever will.

These next years are gonna be real hard. Find something tangible to do for yourself and others, however small, and do it as hard as you can.

Post that also work from the perspective of the cat.

The Vulture article is extremely good reporting and utterly devastating. But it is absolutely one of the most trigger-y pieces of non-fiction writing I have ever read, and would be so even if he hadn't been one of my instructors at Clarion UCSD. It includes specific, horrible details of sexual, emotional, physical, and financial abuse of women and children.

You probably don't need anyone to tell you this, but just in case you do: you do not have to read the article if doing so will cause you harm.

It is enough to know that the allegations are severe, well-sourced, and that behind the kindly, cultured facade was an entitled monster.

No matter what anyone says, you do not need to bear witness. You do not need to harm yourself to be aware. It will not undo the harm he did. Your emotional safety is also important.

Be gentle with yourself and others.

“Significant”

In honour of the Radch AIs declaring themselves significant and Breq tripping face first into an unplanned coup d’état <3

(Embroidery by me using the Ancillary trilogy title font and Nicole Thayer’s emanation Vahn design)

I should know better than to reread this thread whenever it comes across my dash. I always cry.

Mr. Rogers was there for me when my parents materially COULD NOT be, and he taught me so much about being in love with the world.

I’ve got my tumblr inbox turned off so I really have to commend the person who actually emailed me to let me know they don’t like the things I’ve posted about the UnitedHealth CEO being murdered on their commitment to their beliefs.

But seen as how you emailed me from a dud email that appears to be bouncing back replies and I really wanted to address something you said to me about violence begetting violence:

My migraine medication, the medication I was given for my debilitating neurological disease that has gotten so bad I spent most of this year actively suicidal, costs $1300 a month.

My insurance covered it. But only because my doctors office went to fucking war for me because I’m a high anaphylaxis risk for the drugs the insurance wanted me to try.

Because that’s the thing.

My doctors knew, based on my documented medical history, I likely wouldn’t be a good fit for the “first line” of preventative migraine drugs, but because of insurance, I had to be given drugs that were contradictory to my other life threatening conditions, because otherwise insurance wouldn’t cover anything else.

I failed them. Spectacularly and with an anaphylactic reaction to one of them. And I was still warned insurance would fight me because I hadn’t tried the remaining drug they wanted me to try.

A drug which I would have to take in an ER waiting room because my mast cell disease is unpredictable but insurance wouldn’t cover in-patient treatment to let me try it safely under medical supervision.

Is that not violence?

Were all the times I was denied coverage for vital and necessary procedures that could have prevented my disabilities from worsening not violence?

Maybe not in the sense you mean. But I assure you it felt very much like violence to me.

Do I condone murder? No, obviously. But I’m also sick and tired of people pretending that what is happening to the American people every day isn’t eugenics through class warfare.

Violence begets violence.

It sure fucking does.

Maybe these insurance companies should have thought of that first.

there is no ethical consumption under capitalism

Years ago now, I remember seeing the rape prevention advice so frequently given to young women - things like dressing sensibly, not going out late, never being alone, always watching your drink - reframed as meaning, essentially, "make sure he rapes the other girl." This struck a powerful chord with me, because it cuts right to the heart of the matter: that telling someone how to lower their own chances of victimhood doesn't stop perpetrators from existing. Instead, it treats the existence of perpetrators as a foregone conclusion, such that the only thing anyone can do is try, by their own actions, to be a less appealing or more difficult victim.

And the thing is, ever since the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, I've kept on thinking about how, in this day and age, CEOs of big companies often have an equal or greater impact on the day to day lives of regular people than our elected officials, and yet we have almost no legal way to redress any grievances against them - even when their actions, as in the case of Thompson's stewardship of UHC, arguably see them perpetrating manslaughter at scale through tactics like claims denial. That this is a real, recurring thing that happens makes the American healthcare insurance industry a particularly pernicious example, but it's far from being the only one. Because the original premise of the free market - the idea that we effectively "vote" for or against businesses with our dollars, thereby causing them to sink or swim on their individual merits - is utterly broken, and has been for decades, assuming it was ever true at all. In this age of megacorporations and global supply chains, the vast majority of people are dependent on corporations for necessities such as gas, electricity, internet access, water, food, housing and medical care, which means the consumer base is, to all intents and purposes, a captive market. We might not have to buy a specific brand, but we have to buy a brand, and as businesses are constantly competing with one another to bring in profits, not just for the company and its workers, but for C-suites and shareholders - profits that increasingly come at the expense of workers and consumers alike - the greediest, most inhumane corporations set the financial yardstick against which all others are then, of necessity, measured. Which means that, while businesses are not obliged to be greedy and inhumane in order to exist, overwhelmingly, they become greedy and humane in order to compete, because capitalism encourages it, and because there are precious few legal restrictions to stop them from doing so. At the same time, a handful of megacorporations own so many market-dominating brands that, without both significant personal wealth and the time and resources to find viable alternatives, it's all but impossible to avoid them, while the ubiquity of the global supply chain means that, even if you can keep track of which company owns which brand, it's much, much harder to establish which suppliers provide the components that are used in the products bearing their labels. Consider, for instance, how many mainstream American brands are functionally run on sweatshop labour in other parts of the world: places where these big corporations have outsourced their workforce to skirt the already minimal labour and wage protections they'd be obliged to adhere to in the US, all to produce (say) electronics whose elevated sticker price passes a profit on to the company, but without resulting in higher wages for either the sweatshop workers overseas or the American employees selling the products in branded US stores.

When basically every major electronics corporation is engaged in similar business practices, there is no "vote" our money can bring that causes the industry itself to be better regulated - and as wealthy, powerful lobbyists from these industries continue to pay exorbitant sums of money to politicians to keep government regulation at a minimum, even our actual votes can do little to effect any sort of change. But even in those rare instances where new regulations are passed, for multinational corporations, laws passed in one country overwhelmingly don't prevent them from acting abusively overseas, exploiting more desperate populations and cash-poor governments to the same greedy, inhumane ends. And where the ultimate legal penalty for proven transgressions is, more often than not, a fine - which is to say, a fee; which is to say, an amount which, while astronomical by the standards of regular people, still frequently costs the company less than the profits earned through their unethical practices, and which is paid from corporate coffers rather than the bank accounts of the CEOs who made the decisions - big corporations are, in essence, free to act as badly as they can afford to; which is to say, very. Contrary to the promise of the free market, therefore, we as consumers cannot meaningfully "vote" with our dollars in a way that causes "good" businesses to rise to the top, because everything is too interconnected. Our choices under global capitalism are meaningless, because there is no other system we can financially support that stands in opposition to it, and while there are still small businesses and companies who try to operate ethically, both their comparative smallness and their interdependent reliance on the global supply chain means that, even if we feel better about our choices, we're not exerting any meaningful pressure on the system we're trying to change. Which means that, under the free market, trying to be an ethical consumer is functionally equivalent to a young woman dressing modestly, not going out alone and minding her drink at parties in order to avoid being raped. We're not preventing corporate predation or sending a message to corporate predators: we're just making sure they screw other worker, the other consumer, the other guy.

All of which is to say: while I'd prefer not to live in a world where shooting someone dead in the street is considered a valid means of redressing grievances, what the murder of Brian Thompson has shown is that, if you provide no meaningful recourse for justice against abusive, exploitative members of the 1%, then violence done to those people will have the feel of justice, because it fills the void left by the lack of consequences for their actions. It's the same reason why people had little sympathy for the jackass OceanGate CEO who killed himself in his imploding sub, or anyone whose yacht has been attacked by orcas - it's just intensified here, because where the OceanGate CEO was felled by hubris and the yachts were random casualties, whoever killed Thomspon did so deliberately, because of what he did. It was direct action against a man whose policies very arguably constituted manslaughter at scale; a crime which ought to be a crime, but which has, to date, been permitted under the law. And if the law wouldn't stop him, can anyone be surprised that someone might act outside the law in retaliation - or that regular people would cheer for them when they did?

"I’m very concerned about my client’s right to a fair trial in this case.  He’s being prejudiced by some statements that are being made by government officials. Like every other defendant, he’s entitled to a presumption of innocence. But unfortunately the way this has been handled so far his rights are being violated. And as you know, Your Honor, there’s a wealth of case law guaranteeing his rights to a fair trial, but none of the safeguards have been put in place yet here — in fact it’s just the opposite of what’s been happening. 

He’s a young man, and he is being treated like a human pingpong ball between two warring jurisdictions here.

These federal and state prosecutors are coordinating with one another at the expense of him. They have conflicting theories in their indictment, and they are literally treating him like he is some sort of political fodder, like some sort of spectacle. 

He was on display for everyone to see in the biggest staged perp walk I’ve ever seen in my career. It was absolutely unnecessary. He’s been cooperative with law enforcement. He’d been in custody for over a week. He waived extradition. He was cooperative at all accounts. There was no reason for the NYPD and everybody to have these big assault rifles — that frankly I had no idea it was in their arsenal — and to have all the press there the media there. It was perfectly choreographed. 

And what was the New York City Mayor doing at this press conference, Your Honor? That just made it utterly political. And as your honor knows under Loro v. Charles, the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit has held it to be clearly established that these staged perp walks to the media unrelated to a legitimate law enforcement objective is unconstitutional. And I submit that there was zero law enforcement objective to do that sort of perp walk. There’s absolutely no need for that whatsoever. 

And frankly, Your Honor, the mayor should know more than anyone about the presumption of innocence that he, too, is afforded dealing with his own issues. And, frankly, I submit that he was just trying to detract from those issues by making a spectacle of Mr. Mangione. 

And there are consequences to this. 

He has a right to a fair trial. And I just want to put on the record statements that the mayor made publicly about my client. Nothing saying “alleged” for example. And he said “I wanted to send a strong message with the police commissioner that we’re leading from the front. I’m not just going to allow him to come into our city. I wanted to look him in the eye and state ‘You carried out this terrorist act in my city, the city of New York that I love.’” And he wanted to show symbolism. 

Your Honor, he’s not a symbol. He’s somebody who is afforded the right to a fair trial. He’s innocent until proven guilty. And the mayor was talking to jurors — future potential jurors that elected him. Those are the people that elected him that he is talking to and calling this man a terrorist.

So, Your Honor, I just want to make a record of this and put everyone on notice that this has to stop, and my client is entitled to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence."