@nick-nocturn, Isn’t This Basically What Keratin Garden Was?

Honestly, you’re actually one of the most interesting people I know, and I’m glad I got to know you.

i know im not very interesting but i try so hard that you should all humor me

Incredible, but true: @coppermarigolds deserves to have a good day today.

Just to jump on the bandwagon, “thot” is actual title used by the Breen, but it’s not certain if it’s a military rank or a political title. In DS9′s defense, they came up with it in 1999, long before thots were ever a thing. The Breen also dress in Leia’s Ubese bounty hunter disguise from RotJ, and their speech is an electronic riff on Metal Machine Music. They’re the weirdos of Trek.

one of my favorite tropes of all time is when the author tries to replace curse words with a more ‘family friendly’ alternative or invent new words for worldbuilding purposes but they use existing words that make the whole thing unintentionally hilarious out of context

Can and should! All those polar bears sitting around up there, thinking they’re better than me! I’ll settle their hash!!!!

As the kids on Tumblr say, “big mood.”

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.

Forgive my bluntness, but isn’t the Myers-Briggs system based off of a deeply simplified interpretation of Jungian psychology that mental health professionals (Jungian psychologists or otherwise) consider littler better than a horoscope? Are companies actually using the test as a way to judge candidates? (Mind you, we could probably say the same things about IQ tests.)

Study Myers-Briggs and learn to fake out the test to thinking you’re an “SP” or “SJ”, preferably extroverted type, depending upon the job that’s giving you a personality test. I suspect that lots of non-professional jobs and non-tech jobs are specifically weeding out people who would map to Myers Briggs NT or NF types, and using iNtuitive Thinker traits as a proxy for autism. Make sure you can fake the test out to your cisnormative personality type expected of your gender; that will be T if male and F if female. I highly suspect that iNtuitive (Thinker or Feeler, but especially Thinker in any retail setting) personality traits are being mapped to unemployable neurodivergence by employment related personality tests.

Welp, I did it.

I finished playing Silent Hill 2 for the first time. Even though I’ve seen tons of LPs over the years, the game still hits like a Mack truck.

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.