the continual discovery of fresh types of nonsense

it’s very easy to tell which critics of elden ring have serious points to make about game design and which have simply never seen a work of art before

what i would have given for a reaction shot of chrisjen watching drummer’s declaration of war...

like something something evil lesbians as the exposure of the seams of heteropatriarchy in the story that isn’t being told but also isn’t not being told, the melancholy of lesbian attachment to the untold story of the evil lesbian, something something, i don’t know i don’t have it yet but i’m getting there. 

most important b5 reboot opinion is let delenn be trans and weird

my father, historically ultravigilant as regards english usage, has begun in his old age to develop a tendency toward malapropism; today’s is a complaint that his glasses fell on the floor because ‘the zeitgeist is against [him]’

a lot of reasons to want bobbie draper to develop rich relationships with drummer and naomi but a big one is so that chrisjen avasarala knows that bobbie has friends who are at least as scary as she is :)

there are few things i’ve been thinking in re: things that the expanse does that i just simply have not seen on television before, and one of them is that even compensating for the distortions of my absolute derangement about bobbie and chrisjen, i really think their story is a pretty extraordinary thing. even putting aside some of the truly remarkable specifics, just thinking in barest archetypal strokes, i can’t think of any sustained intergenerational relationships between women on television that are not either mother-daughter relationships or, and this is the key piece, rivalries of some kind. it’s essential to bobbie and chrisjen’s dynamic that there just simply isn’t any of that psychosexual all about eve shit that obtains to one degree or another in every other such relationship that i can think of. the conflict between them is specific and motivated and earned, and is never about any of the stock petty resentments that tend to define the limits on imagining intergenerational attachments between women. what a fucking relief!

i am somewhat uncharacteristically really in a mood lately for good rich romance but also find most things that fly under that genre banner pretty alienating. wonder if anyone has recs for f/f romance writing that you think i, specifically, would actually like. it seems to me likely that such things would come from outside the publishing genre of mass market romance, but anything’s possible. looking probably for novella- or novel-length stuff, but stories are welcome too.

one requirement is a reasonable degree of literary quality, which is to say: some complexity and nuance, and—this is absolutely non-negotiable—a fine prose style. so that should be a helpful initial eliminating factor....

more things i want in romance stories: 

any ideas?

the thing that drives me craziest about the depiction of vulcan ‘logic’ on star trek is that ‘logic’ almost always denotes an ideological position and almost never a thought process. the answer to the question ‘what is logical?’ pre-exists any given scenario, and it is the vulcan character’s job in any given scene to point to that answer. it is almost never the answer one would arrive at by process of dialectical reasoning.

in one of the very best scenes in all of disco to date, michael burnham argues the shenzhou’s computer into letting her out of her cell in the brig by presenting it with a reasoned argument that its ethical programming accepts as valid. the scene works because it’s funny—everything outside the cell is going to hell very rapidly and the woman inside it, protected from the vacuum of space only by forcefields that are about to fail, is having a calm conversation with an automated system—but also because michael out-computing a computer is a brilliant demonstration of something essential about michael’s character that we have been told repeatedly but so far not actually shown: that she is a human who has mastered vulcan mental discipline and vulcan ways of approaching knowledge. 

it’s a depiction of logic that works on several levels precisely because it’s functioning as dialectic rather than as ideology. i love it. i love it! if star trek systematically did the work to commit to portraying vulcan logic like this all the time, it could get so rich and complex. i want that version so bad! so bad.