@stygiusfic / stygiusfic.tumblr.com
Pinned
This blog has evolved from a Hades blog to a general mix of whatever has got my brain in a chokehold at any given time. Some useful links for navigation:
Abigail Thorn on transition & loss, Ophelia (1851-2) by Sir John Everett Millais, L. A. H., draft of THE ONE AND ONLY UNIVERSE OF KAY RAINIER by yves., Tragic Accident by yves., All is Vanity (1892) by Charles Allan Gilbert, The Missing Person by Jennifer Finney Boylan, Symphony in White, No. 1 (1861-2) by James McNeill Whistler, We Only Come Out At Night (2014) by Stephen Mackey, Tragic Accident by yves., The Missing Person by Jennifer Finney Boylan.
flash fiction. slipstream. 650 words.
After I read the Abigail Thorn @realphilosophytube quote at the top of this post, I had the strangest dream. Everything I'd ever thought about transness, suicide, agency, family, and duty was in it, and, predictably, it was in fiction form. That dream is now out, in the form of the piece Tragic Accident. Women in the walls! Transition as suicide! Ambiguously historical setting! Tragic Accident has it all, in less than a thousand words.
Obviously, this piece is very close to my heart. It's one of my favorites I've written so far. I'm very happy to be able to share it (and another weird flash piece, The Scar) with a community of people whom I hope will very much enjoy it—first with $5+ Patreons, and now with everyone. Thank you so much for supporting strange transsexual writing.
Support the author: all writing | book | ko-fi | Patreon behind the scenes on Patreon original two drafts on Patreon
every single discussion about the fucking signal groupchat makes me feel so insane. "what a display of incompetence! what a failure! let's all make accidental groupchat mistake jokes now" what the fuck are you talking about. it worked. the fact that THIS is the conversation now is literally the point. jeffrey goldberg literally did it again. selling the bombing of the middle east to the public is the entire purpose of his career as a "journalist"
former iof prison guard who spent the past year fully deepthroating the genocidal boot and famously sold the invasion of iraq as something that "will be remembered as an act of profound morality"? "journalist" who literally built his career on manufacturing consent for bombing arabs "accidentally" invited to a top secret group chat about bombing arabs oh no how could this happen? what are you TALKING about. fork found in kitchen! likely place for him to be! my god
Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, has been at the center of a national story after he was “inadvertently” included in a group Signal chat with administration officials as they planned a deadly bombing in Yemen. Much of the coverage has focused on the mishandling of military secrets, rather than the impact of the bombings themselves, targeting the poorest country in the Middle East, which the United States has helped bomb and blockade for over a decade. Goldberg is not just an observer: He is contributing to this disregard for Yemeni lives, and his dismissiveness sheds light on why he was an administration media contact to begin with.
In an interview that aired on March 26, Deepa Fernandes, one of the hosts of NPR's “Here and Now,” interviewed Goldberg about the “group chat heard 'round the world” that included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and Vice President JD Vance. During one portion of the interview, Fernandes did something few other journalists are doing. She asked Goldberg about the Yemeni people who were killed in the bombing, which took place on March 15.
Deepa Fernandes: There's little talk of the fact that this attack killed 53 people, as we mentioned, including women and children. The civilian toll of these American strikes. Are we burying the lede here?
Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, those, unfortunately, those aren't confirmed numbers. Those are provided by the Houthis and the Houthi health ministry, I guess. So we don't know that for sure. Yeah, I mean, obviously we're, well, I don't know if we're burying the lede, because obviously huge breaches in national security and safety of information, that's a very, very important story, obviously. And one of the reasons, you know, it's a very important story is that the Republicans themselves consider that to be an important story, when it's Hillary Clinton doing the deed, right? So that's obviously hugely important.
But yeah, I think that covering what's going on in Yemen, the Arab and Iran backed terrorist organization, the Houthis, that are that are firing missiles at Israel and disrupting global shipping and occupy half of Yemen, and all kinds of other things in the US, you know, and the Trump administration criticizing the Biden's response and Europe wants Trump to do more. I mean, yeah, there's, there's a huge story in Yemen. But Yemen is, as you know, is one of the more inaccessible places for Western journalists. So maybe this becomes like a substitute for a discussion of Yemen. I don't know.
Goldberg not only seems unconcerned about the death toll and eager to cast doubt on its veracity, but he also appears unprepared for the question. It’s as though it didn’t occur to him that the substance of the Signal exchange itself—the bombing—might be a legitimate topic of conversation, and he seems eager to move on.
This is despite the fact that there is evidence in the exchange itself that the United States hit a civilian site in the bombing. Waltz wrote in the Signal chat that the US military had bombed a residential building. “The first target—their top missile guy—we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed,” Waltz wrote in the chat, to which JD Vance replied: “Excellent.”
Yet, as Nick Turse noted for The Intercept, “So far, however, there has been little focus on the specifics of the attack, much less discussion of the fact that one of the targets of the March 15 strike was a civilian residence.”
The story of US belligerence in Yemen should be a huge one. Since 2015, the US-Saudi coalition has used American manufactured bombs to hit wedding parties, factories, a school bus, and a center for the blind. It’s difficult to know the exact death toll, but around three years ago, the death toll from direct and indirect consequence of war surpassed 377,000. Direct bombings by both the Biden and Trump administrations threaten a wider war, and have occurred in lockstep with US support for Israel as it has ruthlessly bombed and attacked Gaza since October 7.
Goldberg, of course, was included in that group chat because he was a contact of someone on the administration’s thread, and his history of laundering the US military’s mass atrocities is a good indicator of why. In the lead-up to the US-led war on Iraq, Goldberg was central to peddling the disproven conspiracy theory that Iraq had ties to al-Qaeda, a key lie of the George W. Bush administration, used to justify the invasion. One month before the US started the war, he went on NPR to discuss “Possible Links Between Iraq and al Qaeda and Evidence That the Iraqis May be Trying to Evade Weapons Inspectors.”
Goldberg has a long career of uplifting the media narratives of the United States and its allies, including a big piece in 2010 where he floated justifications for a possible Israeli war on Iran. Like many of the Iraq War pushers, Goldberg’s lies about Iraq did not harm his career, but marked its ascent. Under his tenure, the Atlantic has shut out Palestinian voices and stories, as the US has helped Israel wage genocide in Gaza.
Goldberg’s dismissal of Yemeni deaths is not a small detail of this blockbuster story, but a central component. One way to get on the speed dials of high-level officials is to have a proven career of doing their bidding.
As we see wall-to-wall coverage of the Signal leaks on supposed liberal networks like MSNBC, it’s important to remember that the primary scandal is the bombing of Yemen, a reality that the network has long obscured. As The Column’s Adam Johnson noted in July 2018, at that point it had been a year since MSNBC had mentioned the US backed destruction of Yemen. Yet during that same period, MSNBC had done 455 segments on the Trump-Stormy Daniels affair. As media reports and House Intelligence Committee hearings ignore the human toll of US military attacks, we continue to see the ascent of those who have built their careers on directing public attention away from the people the United States kills.
I think the best most human thing in the world is strangers doing a silly thing together
Examples:
- guy at work "Yes, and -" ing the bit me and my coworker were doing where we pretended to be owners of a fantasy medieval tavern not minimum wage retail staff
- at the gay club when Die Young by Kesha came on and two hundred people, all dancing and drinking separately, jumped up and down to make the "- beat of the drums *STOMP STOMP*" as loud as possible
- person who watched me stomp round the beach singing a made up song about breakfast foods to name a cat after and suggested more breakfast foods that would be good cat names
- guy who started a dance off with everyone across the road while waiting for the lights to change
- very tiny girl at the pharmacy interviewing everyone in the queue and every single one of us in turn sat down and answered this toddler's questions like we were on Letterman
The three pillars of humanity, in no particular order, are Joy, Absurdity, and Sharing
love shakespeare. did a hamlet run tonight, looked someone dead in the eye to say “am i a coward?” during a speech and the fucker shrugged and nodded
we literally ruined society when we invented the fourth wall. let’s bring back call and response. heckling, even. fuck you hamlet you dumb piece of shit kill your uncle or shut up
"When we took Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” into a maximum security woman’s prison on the West Side… there’s a scene there where a young woman is told by a very powerful official that “If you sleep with me, I will pardon your brother. And if you don’t sleep with me, I’ll execute him.” And he leaves the stage. And this character, Isabel, turned out to the audience and said: “To whom should I complain?” And a woman in the audience shouted: “The Police!” And then she looked right at that woman and said: “If I did relate this, who would believe me?” And the woman answered back, “No one, girl.”
And it was astonishing because not only was it an amazing sense of connection between the audience and the actress, but you also realized that this was a kind of an historical lesson in theater reception. That’s what must have happened at The Globe. These soliloquies were not simply monologues that people spoke, they were call and response to the audience. And you realized that vibrancy, that that sense of connectedness is not only what makes theater great in prisons, it’s what makes theater great, period."
Oskar Eustis on ArtBeat Nation
I was in the front row of a Hamlet performance where the "Am I a coward?" was directed at me and I, being a no-impulse-control gremlin, hollered back "Yes!!" (they'd primed us ahead of time that audience interaction was encouraged). Hamlet got right up in my face as he kept talking and just kept going until I gently pushed him back; I forget what line it was on when it happened but he took the direction of the push and reeled away across the stage.
This meant that I had marked myself as someone willing to be fucked with, and so during the graveyard scene later he approached me again. "Here hung those lips that I have kissed--" he booped my mouth with the skull's "-- I know not how oft."
I have stories related to me from those at Blackfriars, the American Shakespeare Center (they play in a replica of the original Blackfriars, with modern safety conventions like lightbulbs in the chandeliers, but a great dedication to the way structure shaped the original work in the original Blackfriars. Their house is only about 45 ft deep (roughly 15 m I think), which is about the max distance two sighted people can be from each other and still make eye contact. They play with the stage and house equally lit, they talk to the audience, they enter from the audience, they whip up crowds from within the audience. It’s fantastic. But anyway, on to the stories.)
#Oh I have SO many stories from peak audience moments at the American shakespeare center#I have been to plays there that legit felt more like rock concerts#And I don't even mean the parts of the show where the cast is also a live band and they play#Covers of songs relating to the show#Fair maid of the west with Ginna Hoben#We were all SO on her side we absolutely lost our whole shit any time she even entered or exited#Knight of the burning pestle where Rick would pick a random audience member to be his lady love he was fighting for every night#And one time (I saw it thrice) he picked an older lady#And there's a part of the show where iirc he like gets almost defeated?#And he calls out to his lady love to like inspire him to keep fighting smth like that#And she Got Up Out Of Her Seat and went over to him and kissed him on the cheek#And no one was expecting that least of all Rick#And we all lost our shit whooping and hollering#They did a hamlet where...I forget who was polonius that year but there's a line where he's like 'what was I gonna say again'#And he paused SO long on that line you were legit unsure if he the actor had actually forgotten it#And once someone in the audience called out the next line and he was like 'oh that's right' and carried on#It was scripted though there were other nights no one said anything and we all sat there#In wonderful horrid awkward silence#Until he resumed#Please go if you get a chance#And sit stateside (via @rootingformephistopheles)
I was in a production of Hamlet in a small black box theatre, when a drunk guy came in from from outside, wandered onstage and started singing "We built this city on rock and roll." The guy playing Hamlet just went with it until the stage manager and crew could usher the drunk guy back outside. Then Hamlet continued with his next line, which was (no joke) "Now I am alone." Brought the house down.
#shakespeare#this is the kind of shit that gets me hyper#I love it so much#best production of hamlet I’ve seen to date was in an historic home where the actors guided you through a house built in the gilded era#and the basement was entirely marble for cooling purposes because it was pre-refrigeration obvs#and the way Hanlet’s howling ECHOED#when he realized Ophelia was dead#it was primal#it made people take a step back#and also you had to stand and watch Ophelia drown in a claw foot tub as she reached out to you offering flowers#it was fucking insane#I loved it#I’m giddy just thinking about it @thebibliosphere please please please say more about this!!!
I was actually scrolling my blog to see if I’d talked about it before but I can’t find it, which is shocking because it was truly one of the best performances I’ve ever seen.
I forget what year it was, but the play took place in the historic James J Hill House here in St Paul. Hill was a railway tycoon during the gilded age, with all the disparity of wealth and privilege that implies. He was so successful and obscenely wealthy he became known as The Empire Builder and the grandness of his home reflected that. The walls in the dining room are literally gold. It’s breathtaking. It’s obscene. It’s perfect for the kind of corruption and rot that takes place in Hamlet under a gilded veneer.
The play started in the viewing gallery, with actors walking through the literal gilded halls of the mansion, the leather wallpaper stamped with gold filigree glittering in the gaslamp—the perfect setting for the wedding scene. As the opening progressed the lights were dimmed until only Hamlet was visible illuminated from the upper gallery by harsh modern lights above, just this chillingly beautiful cold light after all the warmth of the gaslamp and gold.
As the play progressed we were led further through the house, witnessing Hamlet talk to the ghost of his father on the grand staircase—the stairs further used to show hierarchy among the characters with Hamlet spiraling ever lower until we were invited to descend into the bowels of the house through the servants quarters, an area just as vast as the rest of the house but infinitely colder and utterly devoid of the opulent grandeur above.
The space is also nearly entirely marble, which leeches the warmth from the air, so even huddled together the audience grew colder and colder the longer we were down there.
It also meant the echo was amazing, and listening to Ophelia sing forlornly as she descends into madness was absolutely bone chilling. Watching her climb into a claw foot tub that had been placed in the center of the long hallway was also hair raising. She just kept singing, strewing flowers around the empty floor as we stood around her in a circle, helpless to stop her as she purposefully slipped under the water, holding her hands above the lip of the tub even as her head slipped under the water and the last echoes of her singing faded.
It made the Queen’s account of how Ophelia died just so… the lie of it. Like we were still standing there, she was still in the tub (head now above the water) and we’d witnessed the truth of it, and there was Gertrude telling any one of us in the circle who would listen how the poor maid “fell.” Anything to absolve themselves of the sin of her suicide.
We were turned around for a bit after that, led to the end of the hallway near the boiler room where the gravediggers leaned on gilded age coal shovels, and Hamlet got to do his bit with Yorick, the echo of the marble hallway dampened by having brought us back toward the stairwell, his voice soft and intimate. Showing his quiet resolve and return to sanity.
Only to pull us back moments later to center as he ran to where Ophelia’s funeral was taking place, and when I tell you, Hamlet’s howl of grief echoed. It reverberated. It was terrifying. It was amazing. People took instinctive steps away from him. It was just raw emotion bouncing off the walls of this cold, dark basement, entire worlds away from where we’d started.
The play ended back in the ballroom, the dead lying strewn amongst the wealth that couldn’t save them with only Horatio illuminated in gold by the lights. When Fortinbrass arrived he looked around the space like it was nothing, like the way we’d looked around the empty void of the basement. The wealth meant nothing to him. It was just another graveyard.
It was brilliant. I keep hoping they’ll host it again. It was such a good way to literally walk us through the story and use the environment to set the atmosphere. It was all I could do not to put billing flier in my mouth and eat it.
inception is a decent movie but there's so much horror tragedy potential written into its premise and the implications of its worldbuilding and being able to see that and do nothing about it makes me feel deranged
dream technology was developed by the military "so soldiers could practice shooting, stabbing and strangling each other". the only way to escape a dream before it ends is by killing yourself or convincing someone to kill you. you can live entire lifetimes in a dream, only to wake up to the disorientation of realising that only hours have passed in the waking world. prolonged exposure to dream-sharing tech carries the high risk of inducing psychosis to the point that you can no longer tell the difference between dreams and reality. you can carry a "totem" that behaves differently in a dream to counter this, but if anyone else gets their hands on it and figures out how it works, it's game over. dreaming is so addictive that some people sacrifice their waking lives to keep dreaming for longer. people can be hired to break into your mind and take anything they want from it, down to your most intimate parts, and sell them for profit. if that's not paranoia-inducing enough, entering someone else's mind carries the risk of being hunted down and torn to pieces by manifestations of their own psyche in a subconscious act of self-defence that cannot be controlled, because what you are doing is invasive and violent. the premise of the film rests on a superrich man hiring a group of people to fundamentally alter a man's identity because inheriting his father's corporation has the potential to make him a BUSINESS COMPETITOR. the leader of said heist team is so haunted by the suicide of his wife that he (unintentionally) caused by violating her mind to the point of madness that he locks the rest of them into a labyrinth of his own guilt, stalked by the minotaur her vengeful ghost. oh, and on the right cocktail of drugs, you can't wake up from a nightmare, and will instead end up in pure unconstructed unreality, surrounded only by decaying structures built by those who inhabited it before you, whose intentions and regrets might still haunt the landscape like a malevolent physical presence.
and you still have to go to work in the morning!
every time I see some bigshot scientist revealed as a fraud my knee-jerk reaction is "hell yeah elisabeth bik got 'em good" AND IM RIGHT
She is not directly paid for her work to vet papers, she has been hit with legal action & death threats by scientists who hate that she's exposing them and their financial fraud, and she keeps at it every single day, combing through thousands of papers to make science more fair. Please consider supporting her!
The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg called the Trump White House's bluff, and published all the explosive details (paywall) about a private Signal group chat that, contrary to administration LIES, did indeed contain sensitive military strike plans.
They called him a liar. He posted the receipts.
Shit is flying.
an article from PBS that only has a snippet, but is not paywalled
Edit: here's MSN, which has more details
I'm really glad they unpaywalled it.
It is a HELL of a read. There are screenshots!
The comments over at the Fox News site, of all places, are overwhelmingly upset and angry at Hegseth & Co. I fully expected to see them supporting the "it wasn't a war plan" lie, but they are laying into Trump White House staff.
This makes Watergate look like a kid accidentally telling mom what dad got her for Christmas.
Daring Fireball's latest today shares an observation from Hannah Arendt about how the ranks of authoritarian governments inevitably wind up being filled with “crackpots and fools” because they’re the people whose loyalty is most assured:
Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
The Fireball article goes on to say: "When The Atlantic’s initial story hit, everyone responsible in the Trump administration, right up to the president himself, just immediately began telling bald-faced lies about what happened, despite the fact that they knew Jeffrey Goldberg literally had the receipts to prove otherwise. That works, until it doesn’t."
It may seem obvious and not worth mentioning, but apparently it is.
*
jennifer willoughby, the sun is still a part of me
From chickens to chicken people, my collection of vintage poultry is clucking along.
Good morning! I’m salty.
I think we, as a general community, need to start taking this little moment more seriously.
This, right here? This is asking for consent. It’s a legal necessity, yes, but it is also you, the reader, actively consenting to see adult content; and in doing so, saying that you are of an age to see it, and that you’re emotionally capable of handling it.
You find the content you find behind this warning disgusting, horrifying, upsetting, triggering? You consented. You said you could handle it, and you were able to back out at any time. You take responsibility for yourself when you click through this, and so long as the creator used warnings and tags correctly, you bear full responsibility for its impact on you.
“Children are going to lie about their age” is probably true, but that’s the problem of them and the people who are responsible for them, not the people that they lie to.
If you’re not prepared to see adult content, created by and for adults, don’t fucking click through this. And if you do, for all that’s holy, don’t blame anyone else for it.
This needs to be reblogged today.
Consenting to see adult content doesn’t mean you should have to see a bunch of shit romanticizing incest and pedophilia you walnut
Except this is the last line of consent before the actual work. So if you’re at this button you have already done the following:
1) chosen to go onto AO3 in the first place
2) chosen the fandom you wish to read about
3) had the chance to filter for the things you do want to see like a specific pairing or a specific AU
4) had the chance to specifically filter out any tags you don’t want to see like, oh I don’t know, incest and non-con and dub-con and paedophilia
5) had the chance to set the rating level if you wish to remove any explicit content at all
6) have read the summary of the story, which aren’t always great but are the only indicator of what the story will be like writing wise so something about it was good enough for you to click on it.
7) have read the tags of the story which will tell you what is actually in the story. If you have used filters to remove stories with things you don’t want then there shouldn’t be anything in here that’s a shock to you but maybe there is. That’s why the tags are there for you to check for yourself.
8) Then you have to actually click on the story. You cannot see anything other than the summary or the tags without personally deciding that you are going to open and read this story.
9) Only here, at step number nine, do you get to the adult content warning pictured above. You have been through eight different steps, the last six of which have also been opportunities for you to see that this has adult content. And AO3 has *STILL* stopped you to ask one last time “are you sure you want to read this because it has things that only adults should see in it”.
If after this point you are reading incest and paedophilia then it’s probably because you specifically went looking for it.
You walnut.
This is the most beautiful thing that I have seen about ao3
Back on my Durgetash bullshit. I'm very patiently waiting for patch 8 to come out to do my definitive Dark Urge run. In the meantime I have so many thoughts and little stories about them running through my head. Hopefully I'll find more time soon to write and/or draw some of it.
I actually enjoy the Gortash face that I drew here, so I'm including a close up.
hello friends 💕 hate to have to do this, but don’t really have other options at this point. my bank balance has been in the negatives for a few weeks and with another credit card charge coming up & absolutely no income or way to pay it for the foreseeable future, i’m really worried about incurring more late fees and overdraft charges. my partner and i are moving in a couple days and their limited income from their disability check has all gone towards the move and we have nothing leftover after moving costs. i’m hoping to raise $300 to cover the negative balance + the next credit card charge of $90, and give myself a bit of breathing room.
paypal or e-transfer: jrkushinka@gmail.com
venmo: @jkushinka
truly anything helps, and reblogging if you can’t donate would be much appreciated ❤️
(silly picture of my cat as a thank you for reading this far)
Next in my series of pin designs for the BG3 companions: Lae'zel, with her Rebellion and Ascension endings. Might do Wyll next! Let me know if there's another companion or ending you really want to see.
I'm also considering some one-off pins for the other characters like Halsin and Minthara, similar to the ones I made for the Origin companions. So let me know if there's anyone you'd really want to see for those too :))
I know it’s been a few days but I need you to know how fucking funny it is that the first durgetash post after your Guy Interlude(tm) was Disney villain Gort 😂 Nothing could have been a more perfect return to regularly scheduled programming
(Also thank you for all your art and writing. Any time you release a new fic chapter it’s legitimately a highlight of my day <3)
(late reply cause I wanted to respond with this specifically lol)
RIGHT back to the schedule baby!
