I Don’t Know Much About Opera In General, But I Always Thought Stories About Power Struggles In The

I’m just reblogging this to tag on a recommendation for Gemma Files’ novel Experimental Film, a horror story about Lady Midday and the forgotten world of hobbyist silent filmmakers at the dawn of the 20th century. (Plenty of female characters to boot as well!)

The ray of blazing, scorching, devouring sunshine.

I’m a tad late but hey, first drawing for the Lin Beifong week!

Day 1: Youth

She must have been a lot to handle, but a hella cute baby

I still haven’t played the Mass Effect games yet, but these sound like the sort of things the Enterprise-D comes across in the middle of a normal planetary survey or supply run that turns into some delightful adventure about missing time, lizard aliens, and good old-fashioned space madness.

Mass Effect one is like, oddly surreal and full of little mysteries. Like you go on any planet with the mako, and you come across all sorts of stuff. Like debris from space ships, abandoned tents and rovers, and even dead bodies in the middle of nowhere??? Or a random beacon with the dog tags to some captain. Let’s not forget the mummified Salarian on some lifeless planet out in the middle of nothing remarkable space.

There’s a gas giant in a system in like Hades Gamma or Gemini Sigma or something with a moon notable for having the abandoned ship of a Turian general that served in the Krogan rebellions. All it says is that he was nowhere to be found, only a deliberately depowered ship was found. Like???? Or the gas giant with mysterious machines beneath the clouds that no one knows the origin or purpose behind.

Therum has a town of 13,000 on it for the mining, but we never see it?? The planet that’s 90% ocean also has a settlement and we don’t see that one either! In any of the games we never get to visit Elysium, even though it’s mentioned several times.

Another planet has some weird history and prothean ruins or something else super mysterious on it, and Earth universities want to study it but it’s stuck behind what could be decades worth or arguing with the council about it.

How did the Thresher Maws get scattered to so many random planets, and what they eat there??

And then there’s random outposts on these empty planets but we don’t know what they were researching?? The one planet where the mine is filled with husks, but we are never given any reason as to how they turned into husks in the mine. Or the occasional empty freighter ship orbiting a star that has some bizarre reason for it being abandoned and forgotten.

How did the pirates or scavengers get on these planets and appear in hideouts or trying to salvage some debris, but there’s no ship around? Did they get dropped off and someone was coming back to pick them up or what?? Where are the big pirate gangs based at? Some place akin to Omega or Illium or just a base on some empty planet?

Some of this confusion with logic, but most of these are like, so mysterious and I want to know all the answers.

i wish orson welles was here to run a toxic blog

The question I've been asking is why Sandra Newman decided to go with Julia instead of Winston Smith's ex-wife Katherine. Julia has the much bigger part in Nineteen Eighty-Four, but I've come to find Katherine interesting precisely because her presence in the story is so minimal. Winston describes her as a conformist who just recites whatever doggerel the Party puts out, but the stridency of this depiction makes me wonder if Winston himself was engaging in his own little bit of historical revisionism and narrative framing. Additionally, while Katherine and Winston are still technically married, by the beginning of the novel they are for all intents and purposes separated, and IIRC Winston's narration makes it fairly clear she was the one who did the separating. Perhaps there's room there for a story of the contradictions, complexities, and compromises of a true believer.

What do we think of the feminist 1984 retelling? Am I being kneejerk eye-rolling for no reason?

INTERIOR - CABIN JEAN-LUC PICARD: You’re...James Tiberius Kirk? Right? JIM KIRK: Yes, I am him. JEAN-LUC PICARD: Why? <puzzled silence> - a scene cut from the shooting script of Star Trek: Generations (1994)

what if after the five year mission, people treat captain kirk like they treat tony hawk?

like people don’t recognize tony hawk unless he has a skateboard, and people don’t recognize kirk unless he’s in uniform

This has clarified some things I’ve noticed about earlier generations of geek culture but was never able to articulate. I’m an elder Millennial, so while I ended up coming of age in the more modern online fandoms of the 2000s, I was exposed to just enough of older fandom culture that the whole edifice feels like a lost civilization to me, glimpsed through the stacks of used bookstores, on archived webpages, even in the atmosphere of the only Worldcon I ever attended. What I wonder about, though, is what exactly happened to what you called “bouba” geekdom. Fantasy-oriented, intuitive, pagan (or perhaps Christian with a pagan gloss), the side of fandom you describe as “WASP femininity...by way of Tolkien and Disney”. I can connect the dots and chart out how “kiki” geekdom evolved into a bunch of new forms across the 2000s and 2010s, but it feels like “bouba” geekdom suffered an extinction event during that time and modern corporate pop-feminist fandom moved into its vacant niche. A while back @prokopetz discussed the subgenre of “romantic fantasy” and how it disappeared early in the new millennium, and from his description it sounds like romantic fantasy was a very “bouba” type of literature. Given the timing, I wonder if there’s some sort of connection here.

The two 90s Geek Genders were Pagan Fantasy Medieval and Atheist Techie Futurist

Ok so… hear me out. 

There was this weird thing - I won’t say it’s as clear as outright male vs female as much as kiki vs bouba. Kiki in this scenario is roughly masculinized (sharp edged and all) and bouba is roughly feminized (soft edged) but in practice it just wasn’t as clear as that.

I experienced geek culture as being *very* gendered, and what’s more is that there was a hidden set of class and culture assumptions undergirding which of those two groups you’d end up in. 

Pagan fantasy fan and techie atheist were the two ends of the spectrum in the 90s and it’s weird to realize that a lot of my trying to be pagan when I was in my teens/20s was because of this weird gendered shit and most of it was around this platonic female ideal of female geek. I was trying to perform a higher status female role in my own community; all the popular girls were slender white girls named Willow or Heather or Rowan, who were into musical theater and had long, wavy Disney Princess hair and soft hands with long tapered fingers. (Yes, this archetype is THAT SPECIFIC.)  They needed to communicate in ways that indicated that all of their answers came from pure intuition and dreams, extra points if they perform divination of some kind. They couldn’t ever be definitive or “left brained” in their personalities. It was very WASP Femininity only… geeky flavored. WASP by way of Tolkien and Disney instead of WASP by way of idealized domestic figures.  Most importantly, they were NOT Jewish. They did not have “Jewish hair.” They did not come up in Jewish households where argument is a love language. They were not loud and did not talk with their hands. They had beliefs about religion and mysticism couched hugely in Christian-style faith even if it was cloaked in pagan aesthetics, and this was upheld as an ideal to perform.  (And what’s more is that in “bouba” flavored geek culture, I have actually encountered a lot of casual anti-Semitism, in addition to the aforementioned social pressure to conform to a gentile female ideal. I’ve VERY SELDOM encountered ANYWHERE near the degree of casual anti-Semitism in “kiki” flavored geek culture.)  When I’m in spaces where “bouba” is the female ideal, it often feels like I went from there being one normie cis female ideal I couldn’t perform, to finding the same female ideal upheld in a lot of geek spaces and having it be even *harder* to perform. Which is a big reason why I hung out in corners of geek culture that more often were atheist computer types who liked hard sci fi. (The “kiki” nerds.) 

But another thing is that *class* is why I was never able to find a place in “bouba” geek culture.

“Bouba” geek culture participation - actual subculture membership beyond being a casual - actually requires participation in hobbies and habits that can become as expensive as, say, being into ski trips and vacations, and one’s status in that setting depends upon how much they’re able to buy in. “Bouba” geek culture is HEAVILY gentrified, and always has been.

“Cyberpunk/computer kid/harder sci fi fan” culture wasn’t as hard to access. If anything, being in those spaces *made* me money instead of *costing* me money.

I *wanted* to be part of many “bouba” geeky things but… I *couldn’t.* Even when I started making enough money to do it, suddenly, I just *didn’t have enough time.* You have to have whole weekends to spare. Once I started making the money, I was spending my free time going to tech conferences, trade shows, etc. The resentment just grew and grew.

I feel like some geek spaces have always been heavily gentrified in ways outsiders don’t parse in the way that people just Don’t See Class. It’s for that reason that I actually don’t support that being the dominant face-forward of geek culture the way it has become. 

“We aren’t classist. But you must afford xyz activities and have the free time to do them, to be one of us. Because of your gender.”

It was actually much easier to move in kiki space than bouba space.

The unnamed battlefield medic who shows up to evac downed units also made her debut in Skies of Arcadia as Fina, though according to her ingame bio she’s actually three people in VC1: the triplets Fina, Mina, and Gina Sellers.

Watching you play Valkyria Chronicles I saw some familiar faces - Vyse and Aika are main characters from Skies of Arcadia. Vyse is kind of a tool but Aika's my homegirl. In said game they fight against the Empress of Valua, and I noticed there's also a city called Valua mentioned in passing during your video.

Oh I thought I’d seen those characters somewhere! I think one of the main dudes behind ValCro had a hand in Skies of Arcadia (it was also published by Sega too if I remember correctly). That’s a neat little thing. Thank you!