“I never got the appeal of the misfits/the Ramones/blahblah” yeah you and everyone else who got into punk/hardcore when they were grown ass adults
jabronies
Shit seems to be getting real(,) overdetermined lately
Shit seems to be getting real(,) overdetermined lately
You ok, bro?
In my case it’s manifesting as a pleasant and productive smooth crystalline mania, but… well I was going to say that every one and everything seems to be in a really meaningfully eerie place right now and the air feels pregnant with destiny.
But then I looked up at the two parts of that thought, the “I am reading multiple levels and dimensions of meaning into every person, utterance, and occurance I encounter, and seeing in them intricate networks of connections and portentous omens” and the “I am in a manic state right now” and went “oh, huh.”
swag won’t pay the bills but apparently neither will your degree
I followed a social media account on an unspecified platform (NO SHAMING) because it was named after Wollstonecraft and promised to have socialist sympathies.
It’s basically all about how “the revolutionary girl” “despises” everything, and most especially how she “despises” and/or is better than…
Little one, who bears up alone in such deep sorrow, never lose that strength or nobility, even when you grow up.
(but was that really such a good idea?)
The pro and the con: so the pro is total equal access to the means of distribution to everyone in the country where people, whoever they are, whenever they have an idea, they can spread it as far and wide and hopefully to some degree those ideas are picked up based on their merit…that sea-change invention of technology on par with the invention of the printing press, in terms of revolutionizing the way that we communicate as a species versus…sometimes people write you a mean e-mail? Yeah, I’d say let’s just burn the whole thing to the ground.
Adam Conover, on the Internet and trolls on Episode #6 of Two-Book Minimum with Rachel Fershleiser and Dan Wilbur
(via betterbooktitles)I’ve touched on this before but let’s expand on it here. George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is an epic tragedy in the classic sense, in which a succession of characters bid for the world before being brought low by their inherent personal shortcomings. What’s particularly interesting in this is that the Starks of Winterfell embody tragic flaws that are typically presented in fantasy fiction as virtues, the very traits that both signal that the protagonists deserve to win and enable that very triumph. As such, they serve as a critique of the fantasy genre and, implicitly, the audience drawn to it who see in such protagonists an idealized vision of themselves.
Ned Stark opens the series with a tableau engineered to position him as the Good Ruler, executing a man by his own hand, illustrating a firm will, capable hand, merciful heart, eyes open to the realities of power, and shoulders to bear the burden in service of others. He is Duty, Honor, Loyalty - to Robert, to the Old Gods, to (with his incessant focus on Winter) the realm as a whole rather than any factional interest. He could plausibly have contended for the Iron Throne after the overthrow of Mad King Aerys, but left the duty - and the corruptions of court life - to Robert and returned north to the “real things” of life.
He’s the noble, capable, masculine (but not macho) hero of so much fantasy, which of course is why he fails. He doesn’t play the petty sycophantic influence-peddling games of court - so when Robert dies he has no true allies in court, no knowledge of the power dynamics at play, no ability to see the manipulation of false allies. Concerned with the formal lineage of succession - as if truth and propriety matters more than appearance and power - but insistent on working through proper channels and unwilling to act without formal legitimation, he gives his enemies all the delay, forewarning, and opportunity they need to outmaneuver him and he ends up executed by the henchman of the most Unworthy ruler.
Sansa Stark is the feminine hero of romantic fantasy - like Ned, she’s enchanted with nobility’s self-mythology and given to mistake that for actual practice. She wants to marry a prince when she grows up, and orients the entirety of her selfhood to this end - acting proper and saying the right thing, above all striving to cause no offense. Like the heroine of so many romantic fantasy novels, she finds her prince. Like the plot of so many romantic fantasy novels he’s a ruffian in need of reform who takes what he wants. Like the readers of so many romantic fantasy novels her dreamy passivity does nothing to reform him. Like the plot of so many of their lives she finds herself paired off with a succession of alternatingly abusive, ugly, and lecherous men.
Arya Stark is I’d say two things - first, she’s the classic fantasy figure of the heir to the unjustly deposed Good Ruler, who has to go off on a quest, take on a mentor, make allies, et cetera et cetera, James Frazer. Except you realize she keeps doing this but given that the world doesn’t stay still while she’s off questing, she never accomplishes anything. She doesn’t make it to Winterfell, she doesn’t make it make it back to her mother, she keeps getting sidetracked and diverted. She finds mentors in Syrio and the Kindly Man, finds allies and travelling companions in Gendry and Hot Pie and Jacquen and the Hound, but none of it amounts to anything. She revenges some of her suffering but after years has 0 influence on the actual contest for the Iron Throne and has mostly just become an increasingly cold-blooded killer.
Second, Arya is the Strong Female Character, that archetype popular in the girl-power ’90s (and before) as superior to Sansa’s “weak” femininity. She’s not into sewing and delicacy, she ‘s into sword fighting and dirt. But for all that, she ends up dragged around and at the mercy of men as much as Sansa - yes, in an idiom that allows her to consider herself as more of an agent, and with an ability to hurt people who hurt her. But it doesn’t really keep her from getting hurt. (For a series with so much rape, especially in the early books of girls noted with an increasingly eyebrow-raising regularity as being exactly thirteen years old, the Stark girls sure do spend a lot of time at the mercy of abusive men without it quite going there, don’t they.) And by the “present day” she’s spending a lot of time hanging out with the demimonde in seedy bars down by the docks. Not that she’s a prostitute, oh no. She’s a rogue. Though she does take some pride in the fact that she blends in. Look, I did renn faires in middle school. Hell, I live in Portland. There’s a certain kind of girl… look, I’m not saying, I’m just… wait, no, I am saying.
Catelyn Stark is the good mother, who wishes the boys would put down their swords and realize what’s important is family, and the real force in this world lies with the generative potential of women. She’s ’70s-’80s feminist fantasy in the Marion Zimmer Bradley mold. She cares for her children, the girls as much as the boys - which is why she releases Jaimie in hopes of returning her daughters, thus forfeiting the Stark leverage against Lannister treachery. At the same time she respects her children’s autonomy, unlike Cersei not just as means to the ends of power, failing to compel Robb to marry for dynastic advantage. Which is her undoing, dying with her beloved child at the hands of a man who treats his wives as disposable incubators. The female power of generative blood proving ultimately vulnerable to the male power of destructive steel.
Robb Stark is the charming young hero, a less seasoned Ned. Capable but burdened with a sense of honor, duty, and obligation, he could have saved a whole lot of trouble by maintaining a distinction between the loving woman you use for sex and the woman of social position you marry to start a family with.
Bran Stark I think if anything is a standin for GRRM himself - he’s incapable of doing anything directly, but as a skinchanger he can inhabit anyone, see through their eyes, act through their bodies, in a manner paralleling the series’ regular cycling through POV characters. I’m not really sure what Bran’s arc “says” about that dynamic.
Rickon Stark is like three, dude. And Jon Snow? Is not a Stark.
Now that we’re here might as well touch on some other characters.
Daenerys is another critique of audience naïveté, thinking that oppressive hierarchy is a matter of bad morality rather than economic function. She frees slaves only to realize that oppressing the lower classes generates power and supports a fellowship of upper-class allies, while freeing and raising them up costs power and makes enemies. Also, even if she crosses the sea and conquers the Seven Kingdoms what of it? As an infertile woman, she can’t found or restore a dynasty.
Jaime is kind of a reverse of the Stark dynamic. They had virtues as flaws. Jaimie is defined by the vice of narcissism - his love for himself, which defines everything he does. Even his incestuous relationship with Cersei is an instance of self-love, beginning in childhood where, she says, if they switched clothes they were indistinguishable. But it’s that very narcissism that leads him, on joining the Kingsguard, to reform himself from within, to go from Kingslayer to Goldenhand. And thus a character first defined by defenestrating a child while incestuously cuckolding the King might well prove the realm’s noble salvation.
Tyrion obviously, is the character most suited to rule the realm, his tragic flaw being the repeatedly wounded pride that keeps him from accepting that he can only rule on condition of receiving no respect for it. Had he waited out his father’s plans he obviously would have found in Tommen a malleable figurehead.
Cersei’s flaw is her inability to distinguish between her person and her role. She thinks herself a master strategist because of her track record of success as a seductress; she thinks of herself as beloved because flattered by sycophants as regent. A Feast For Crows was hacked out. I’m a writer, I know the signs. GRRM split one book into two when he really had 1.5 of material and to maintain the “850 pages of setup, then main characters die and shit gets real” structure he had to force the middle half, which took years. She overestimates herself but even she’s too competent for the cabinet of toadies, the “I’m a good queen for not punishing my servants too bad for my getting fat” bit. Cartoonish. What should’ve happened was she intercepts a letter from one of the young nobles she thinks she’s seducing as part of a power scheme and learns that he’s been seeing the thing the other way around.
And that’s what I think about that.
Stopped by Ground Kontrol on the way back from Powell’s, forgot it was free play night. God damn, it’s like a manic pixie geek girl convention tonight.
(Alt. joke “enough hair dye to turn a yeti red”)
in chris onstad’s view, marriage is Good for chris onstad as a hetero man because it connects him to a cultural tradition he craves legitimacy and respect from being part of. his strips where cornelius and roast beef interact about Married Life (which are surprisingly frequent and which i feel are…
you’ve got an awful lot of confidence first that you’ve got an accurate understanding into the life of roast beef and the dynamics of his marriage and second that this understanding you’ve derived exclusively from what chris onstad has put on display in the pov of roast beef is contrary to chris onstad’s understanding
Crowd of metal bros getting out to flowy drunk-dance to Linger at karaoke at The Alleyway. “This is my JAM”
i really want to do a really in-depth review of the exile series, the community that grew around it, and the life and work of jeff vogel sometime, because the more i learn about jeff vogel the more fellow-feeling i have with him in both good and bad ways.
i was doing research for a let’s play…
I mostly remember him as a subpublic figure being pissy about piracy, to the point I’d occasionally see his byline on a obscure sites I wasn’t expecting
On the other hand I got everything up to Avernum maybe 2 off Hotline downloads and keygens from monthly Serial Box releases
Goddamit I just want to find a picture of Ryo-Ohki to reblog but the #ryo-ohki tag is all basketball anime and some j-pop boy band and the #cabbit tag is all cats and some guy in a pink fursuit.
Geh, seriously?
Decent account of Appalachian backwoods poverty. It’s not too different in substance from anything in its genre, be it contemporary or from the ‘30s or '60s “discoveries” of the rural poor or 18th century English travellers’ accounts, but then “same as it ever was” is the genre.
It is at National Review so there’s that but it’s mostly too honest to get that bad - quickly and delicately notes that marriage doesn’t much help and the lack of abortion maybe hurts, gets into a discussion about how welfare systems are gamed to keep the whole thing running without pretense of having any better idea, notes how it all works out nicely for the local elite. (And nice they didn’t give it to VDH who sometimes does “rural life” dispatches that are literally complaints that people are on his lawn with a few references to Ancient Rome.)
I traveled across the country east to west once, but mostly 8 hour/day drives on I-80. Some nice scenery with occasionally an eyebrow-worthy moment on the radio or local diner’s newspaper, but the main point of cultural contact outside of the big cities was national parks or, well, services for interstate travelers.
Then down in LA I got an old motorcycle and came to appreciate the windy mountain and back roads, took her up to Portland and then as far as Seattle, then east to Missoula and back on different routes.
Wow, was that an education.
