OK, just one more, then

okay but if you ever see a male creative who had a string of great work and then everything else he did was dogshit, go to the "personal life" part of his wikipedia and look at his relationships. you'll either find a major tragedy he didn't recover from (completely understandable) or, more likely, there was a woman in his life doing uncredited shit editing his stuff or contributing generally and she's not there anymore.

I told a friend about this phenomenon in literature and he called me weeks later like, I remembered what you said about women doing uncredited work when tim burton came up. he made a string of bangers then everything else just was nowhere near as good. the timeline matches perfectly to when he was with this german visual artist (lena gieseke). he's done some good work in collaboration, but if things were dug into I suspect we would find she did a lot more than people realise.

so yeah whenever you look around like wow women didn't work in history, or, women aren't auteurs, or, there just aren't as many great female writers - societal reasons for that aside, half the time they absolutely did.

Hell yeah

"it's all in your head" correct! unfortunately I am also in there

New York City ballet production of Midsummer Nights Dream

The fact this isn't a painting is a testament to one of the greatest feats of set design and production I've ever seen.

My god just look at this! The lighting, set design, photography... I've just never seen anything like it.

I think this is the first time I've ever been wowed by "this ISN'T a painting"!

god forbid 5000 year old girls do anything

holy shit bronze age pro sheep bone gamer girl

this is hilarious but also im gonna cry like this teenage gamer died and they buried her with her high score. no one took back the pot or divided it up because no one would play against her again. her family and friends buried her with her wins. im crying

Coolest thing about lord of the rings? The king of horses shows up. It appears he is no different from all other horses

King of the eagles shows up later. He can talk. Horse king couldn't talk.

He didn't want to talk to you.

Uh.

Point of order.

King of Horses ran 450 fucking miles at almost entirely a gallop, without more than a few minutes rest, in 4 nights and basically was like "wait why are we stopping?" when Gandalf took him into the city and he ended up in a stable.

This was not his top speed, nor did it push any limits on his endurance.

King of horses is very different from other horses, actually.

He just doesn’t do much about his administrative duties

But he didn't need to - his rule was stable, after all.

“Fringe”

Took me years to understand the "why the long face" punchlines to "so a horse walks into a bar" jokes because I just thought that's a normal sized face to have if you're a horse. It never occurred to me to judge a horse by the standards of man

"This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We've got extra pronouns here."

GNU Terry Pratchett

The full quote is fascinating though, and adds an interesting context as it's Angua (a werewolf) and Carrot (human, but raised by dwarves) discussing a dwarf colleague, Cheery.

"Female? He told you he was female?" "She," Angua corrected. "This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We've got extra pronouns here." She could smell his bewilderment... "Well, I would have though she'd have the decency to keep it to herself," Carrot said finally. "I don't think it's very clever, you know, to go around drawing attention to the fact." "Carrot, I think you might have something wrong with your head," said Angua. "What?" "I think you might have it stuck up your bum."

Sir Terry Pratchett - "Feet of Clay"

This is CARROT being the asshole. Carrot who has, throughout all the prior books, been depicted as basically the best of all possible people. He is noble, brave, considerate, kind. He is the good guy in the entire City...

... and yet, he grew up dwarf, and has picked up their more conservative views on gender identity.

Discworld dwarves start out in the books as basically a people without visible gender differences (thanks to the woman growing beards just like the men) and using "he/him" pronouns as their default. Anything else is seen as breaking the most basic of social conventions. (Dwarf dating is described early on as being two dwarves who like each other spending an inordinately long time trying to find out, as tactfully as possible, what gender the other dwarf is)

Carrot does immediately adopt the "she" pronoun for Cheery, which is but wishes she didn't make such a fuss about it. He's prepared to tolerate her choices, but he doesn't APPROVE of them, and thinks that that is enough.

Carrot, because he IS Carrot, does learn to open his mind on this subject, perhaps his final frontier of bias, but I do love that it's addressed as something he has to work on, and succeed.

And to Terry Pratchett's credit what started out as a throwaway joke about dwarf sex, gradually becomes a multi-volume subplot which is a fascinating exploration of gender and social identity as more dwarves start to "come out" as being female, and not just identifying as female, but changing their form of dress to something which matches who they are (they keep their beards though, because to a dwarf, that has nothing to do with gender, and everything to do with being a dwarf) and how their society has to adjust, with differing levels of comfort, to this new reality.

Carrot was also prejudiced against the undead early on as well. And the fact that he unlearns these views is a good example of a common theme in Pratchett's work

The overwhelming theme of Pratchett's work is change. Not good vs evil but progress vs stasis/going backwards. The protagonists of Pratchett's stories are people who can take on board new ideas and change and grow and adapt. Some of them start out as very stupid people with very stupid views in fact until they learn and grow and improve. The villains on the other hand are people who desperately want things to either stay the same or regress back to some imagined "Good old days" that they prefer.

While we're talking about Terry Pratchett gender, there's also golems, who are basically lumps of clay that have been brought to life but don't actually have any gender or secondary sexual characteristics so everyone defaults to male and he/him. As the books story goes on some of them decide to try being women just because.

Feet of Clay came out in 1996. I cannot overstate how pronoun discourse wasn't anywhere on the radar then. I'm fairly terminally online, active in fandom, and the first I can remember is some timid discussion of neopronouns in the mid-2000s, where "how could you tell other people to use them for you" was a major puzzle. (I still love neopronouns - zie/hir appeals to me in a way they distinctly doesn't, genderfluid though I am.)

ALSO also also

1) I don't have the book to hand, but when Cheery comes out she changes her name to Cheri, because "sometimes, when you shout who you are to the whole world, you need to do it quietly." It's such a beautiful expression of coming out being a process, and one that needn't be undertaken all at once.

2) Pterry had the best goyische take I've ever seen on golems, and I will die on that hill. It's not perfect, but it is really well-done, and it was done with respect, and to me that might be even more important than perfection.

I had the book to hand because I reread it recently. The quote goes:

THERE we go.

god I could be so wealthy if I had no ethics. that's so fucking frustrating. I'm living paycheck to paycheck because I'm not grifting vulnerable idiots on TikTok. I feel like I have the ability to very easily scam people. I could make a killing with AI. but god. I have morals and ethics and so I get to be poor as shit. I hate this fucking world

I could have made a killing as a psychic, but noooo I have to feel bad about lying to people ugh

I think abt this all the time because the thing is, evil rich people truly believe that they’re geniuses who have discovered a way to make money that the rest of us dummies haven’t…but the truth is that they are just willing to do evil shit that everyone else would prefer to not to because we have standards

the way sesame street, a pbs puppet show for literal babies, is pressing on with pride content despite vitriolic monsters descending on every post to insinuate they're pedophiles or demons while some of the biggest companies on the planet who could swim in olympic swimming pools of money like scrooge mcduck on steroids buckle and cave just emphasizes how completely and utterly pathetic these corporations are. they'd butcher a baby if it meant saving a penny.

where Starbucks and Target and Budweiser will be bullied into submission with the slightest push, puppets and people in your neighborhood stand tall

Sesame Workshop has been doing pride stuff since 2017. The Muppet Wiki has a nice list of stuff they've done:

Jim Henson supported his openly queer colleagues in the 1970s! The Muppet performer Richard Hunt was majorly influential on Sesame Street, the Muppet Show, and Fraggle Rock.

They also dumped Chick-fil-A in 2012 when CFA made their stance on gay marriage known.

It would be a dishonor to their memories for the Jim Henson Company to kowtow to queerphobic demands when their namesake always stood for diversity and acceptance of everyone, and it makes me proud to be a Muppet fan to see that insisted upon 💖🌈

do you ever think about dead versions of yourself that are fossilized in someone else's mind

i see that this one kind of fucked everyone up

to be fair, I was kind of fucked up already, but yes can confirm now more fucked up.

one time this nondescript guy came into my dunkin donuts and ordered a small black coffee with blueberry flavor shot, and for some reason that peculiar order stuck with me so much that when, seven months later, i saw him in the parking lot walking towards the door, i quickly made a small black coffee with blueberry flavor shot. he ordered it and i was already holding it. 

i would describe his demeanor that second time as “incredulous”

What the fuck who drinks that

it’s such a perfectly bonkers order because like, most unusual orders are maximalist and sugary but this one just combines the most basic drink with the most incongruous little add-on. it’s the order of a simple, regular man who has something wrong with him

this post always makes me laugh. this guy has the weirdest drink order and he probably never goes to this dunkin’ if it took seven months for the barista to see him again. so think about a coffee shop you go to so little you’re not even sure if you’ve gone there before and you walk in and the barista hands you the drink you were about to order before you even ordered it. he will remember that for the rest of his life

“it’s the order of a simple, regular man who has something wrong with him” gets me every time.

Official Post of Massachusetts

to this day i cannot BELIEVE aang called up and blew off like nine avatars just because they didnt offer any vegan options to ending the war

roku: my best friend assaulted me as a senior citizen :(

kyoshi: sometimes some murder is OK

kuruk: just punch people that disagree with you

aang: okay i’m starting to think that none of you took this avatar thing seriously

You're not wrong

Aang when he is told he’s the Avatar at age 12: *has a melt down because he understands the seriousness of this function and the consequences his new responsibilities will have on his personal life* 

other Avatars at age 16: I’m the avatar? Cool! Hey look it comes with a glowing eyes feature! 

aang: fuck this noise, i’ll get advice from the last air nomad avatar

yangchen: i gave up that hippie bullshit first chance i got, i love murder

I will never not laugh at the bit where Aang is like "finally, an Air Nomad, you get me, right?" and Yangchen just says "sorry bud, I also vote murder".

A close second on that note is of course the trial of Kyoshi in which she manifests in the courtroom just to say "Actually, I did murder him and I'd do it again. But consider: the bitch had it coming".

#tbh I think there's something to be said for the fact that Aang was 12 when he ran away from home#and how there's more than a bit of evidence that the adult airbenders had a less strict pacifistic approach#Aang was purposefully sheltered by Gyatsu to protect his childhood and so he has the ethics of a child#and when he awoke there were no other air nomads around to sit him down and have The Violence Talk#about how yes we're pacifists and murder is bad but there are exceptions#like Gyatsu was a kindly man of the highest order but uh#he didn't just lay down and die on a pile of skulls he just found#man went out taking like 20 fire nation soldiers with him#Aang: ''I could never kill! Gyatsu taught me to abhor all forms of violence“”#Gyatsu: deals out death to attacking soldiers like he's got a side hustle as a claymore mine

And the fact that he figures out a more technically complex and socially stable way to remove Ozai without making him a martyr just shows that he has a lot more skill at the problem at hand than most the previous ones.

To me, that whole scene was very much the previous avatars saying “when all you have is a hammer” and Aang going “okay, but what can I do with this Swiss Army knife?” and they don’t give very useful advice about it.

The night sky on Mars

I was wondering whether the constellations would look any different on Mars, so I looked it up, and apparently not; galactically speaking Mars is so close to us that the difference is imperceptible. However, I did find this neat additional bit:

See, our first mistake was trying to have a civilization in northern Europe between October and February. The darkest three months of the year should be for staying home under the blankets, midwinter festivals, and getting blind drunk when the sun goes down at 4 pm like the bog gods intended.

boss calling me asking why I left work early, and I’m sitting in the peat bog with the slime up to my neck. no, I’m not coming in tomorrow, I say. the ghosts of my Paleolithic ancestors are whispering to me. fine, I say. yeah, I’ll get a doctor’s note. a skeletal hand erupts from the depths proffering a swamp-blackened chunk of birch bark. someone has scratched a perfectly filled out Arbeitsunfähigkeitsbescheinigung in an unknown pre-Indo-European language. it’s for a whole week off, which is nice. i pour a little of my whiskey out into the bog, as a token of appreciation.

i speak to the bog in halting proto-germanic bc it’s as close as i can get, but that’s like six thousand years too late for most of the bog gods, who haven’t been paying attention to mortal affairs since the Neolithic. the corpse of a dead Wendish prince translates for me. he’s spent a lot of time with other bog ghosts, and picked up a pretty stunning variety of languages. but sometimes he has to ask the others for help for tricky concepts like farming or the internet that the bog gods don’t have words for. O Gods of the Bog, i ask, what wisdom do you have for escaping the ennui of modern life?

there are distant ululations and strange misshapen figures stir in the mist. sacrifice your king to the bog, the reply comes. strangle him and throw his head into the mire, with offerings of iron and gold. i sigh. It’s no use trying to explain we don’t have a king anymore. That’s their answer to everything.