@gallifreanpotterhead / gallifreanpotterhead.tumblr.com
everyone agreeing with this tweet is so lucky because cell phones have absolutely been in my dreams, specifically DREAMS ABOUT TUMBLR DISCOURSE. I literally had a dream my mutuals made a callout for me i'm not fucking joking helppp
i still can't get over the sheer AUDACITY of iroh going to ba sing se. like did it work? yes. but ONLY because the dai li was too busy following around some bald kid looking for his dog to notice him
like i cannot emphasize enough how fucking stupid this plan was. the siege of ba sing se ended 5 years ago. people know what iroh looks like, to the point where he once got recognized by a random army captain at a hot spring and almost got his hands broken about it. and yet he rolls up to a city that has a vested interest in recognizing him and secret police force with zuko. zuko. like i could buy that no normal citizen would look at their tea shop guy and assume he was secretly an evil general, okay. but it's one thing to just be Mushi from the Tea Shop With an Unfortunate Resemblance to General Iroh, and another fucking thing entirely when Lee the Tea Server Who Looks Weirdly Similar to Prince Zuko is standing right next to him literally twenty-four seven!! like at least get different jobs hello????
every decision iroh makes is the decision of a man fully prepared to commit to the bit. will this succeed? who knows. but it will be very funny if i pull it off
It is really important to me that all of you learn about Al Bean, astronaut on Apollo 12 and the fourth man to walk on the moon, who after 20 years in the US Navy and 18 years with NASA during which he spent 69 days in space and more than 10 hours doing EVAs on the moon , retired to become a painter.
He is my favorite astronaut for any number of reasons, but he’s also one of my favorite visual artists.
Like, look at this stuff????
It’s all so expressive and textured and colorful! He literally painted his own experience on the moon! And that's just really fucking cool to me!
Just look at this! This is one of my absolute favorite emotions of all time. Is Anyone Out There? is like the ultimate reaction image. Any time I have an existential crisis, this is how I picture myself.
And then there's this one:
The Fantasy
For all of the six Apollo missions to land on the moon, there was no spare time. Every second of their time on the surface was budgeted to perfection: sleeping, eating, putting on the suits, entering and exiting the LEM, rock collection, setting up longterm experiments to transmit data back to Earth, everything. These timetables usually got screwed over by something, but for the most part the astronauts stuck to them.
The crew of Apollo 12 (Pete Conrad, Al Bean, and Dick Gordon) had other plans. Conrad and Bean had snuck a small camera with a timer into the LEM to take a couple pictures together on the moon throughout the mission. They had hidden the key for the timer in one of the rock collection bags, with the idea being to grab the key soon after landing, take some fun photos here and there, and then sneak the camera back to Earth to develop them. They had practiced where they would hide the key and how to get it out from under the collected rocks back on Earth dozens of times.
But when they got to the moon, the key was nowhere to be found. Al Bean spent precious time digging through the collection bags before he called it off. The camera had been pushing their luck anyways, he couldn't afford to spend anymore time not on the mission objectives. Conrad and Bean continued the mission as per the NASA plan while Dick Gordon orbited overhead.
Fast forward to the very end of the mission. Bean and Conrad are doing last checks of the LEM before they enter for the last time and depart from the moon. As Bean is stowing one of the collection bags, the camera key falls out. The unofficially planned photo time has come and gone, and he tosses the key over his shoulder to rest forever on the surface of the moon.
This painting, The Fantasy, is that moment. There have never been three people on the moon at the same time, there was never an unofficial photo shoot on the moon, this picture could never have happened.
"The most experienced astronaut was designated commander, in charge of all aspects of the mission, including flying the lunar module. Prudent thinking suggested that the next-most-experienced crew member be assigned to take care of the command module, since it was our only way back home. Pete had flown two Gemini flights, the second with Dick as his crewmate. This left the least experienced - me - to accompany the commander on the lunar surface.
"I was the rookie. I had not flown at all; yet I got the prize assignment. But not once during the three years of training which preceded our mission did Dick say that it wasn't fair and that he wished he could walk on the moon, too. I do not have his unwavering discipline or strength of character.
"We often fantasized about Dick's joining us on the moon but we never found a way. In my paintings, though, I can have it my way. Now, at last, our best friend has come the last sixty miles." - Al Bean, about The Fantasy.
There’s also Alexei Leonov, writer and artist and first person to conduct a spacewalk!
You can't forget this, the first art made in space.
March 1965, Alexei Leonov made this drawing only moments after narrowly surviving the very first space walk.
What I think is so fascinating is how clearly you can see the connection between that drawing and his later painting which is right above it.
My good sir I had a mortgage before any of those characters were published 💀
I know who exactly three of these people are. When I was a kid I wanted to be a Herald of Valdemar.
I wanted to be Menolly with her entire Faire of fire lizards.
I wanted to be a Starfleet officer.
Rolf Ohst (German, b. 1952)
Amnesia, 2016
Oil on canvas
La letra con amor, entra. (via)
if this post gets deleted on the 17th I’m going with it
I’m pleased to announce that after nearly a year since the great tumblr porn ban of ‘18 Those Books Are Pussys has survived the great purge
Official Cliterature Post
— Taylor on Clara Bow
You know how to ball I know Aristotle
A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie – Albert Bierstadt (detail) // Lofoten Island – Lev Lagorio // Rosenlaui – François Diday // Mount Elbrus in the Clouds – Nikolai Yaroshenko // Storm in the Mountains – Hermann Ottomar Herzog // Sierra Nevada – Albert Bierstadt // Rocky Mountain Landscape – Albert Bierstadt // Inkpot Gods – The Amazing Devil
Do you happen to know the origin of the fantasy trope in which a deity's power directly corresponds to the number of their believers / the strength of their believers' faith?
I only know it from places like Discworld and DnD that I'm fairly confident are referencing some earlier source, but outside of Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, I can't think of of any specific work it might've come from, 20th-c fantasy really not being my wheelhouse.
Thank you!
That's an interesting question. In terms of immediate sources, I suspect, but cannot prove, that the trope's early appearances in both Dungeons & Dragons and Discworld are most immediately influenced by the oeuvre of Harlan Ellison – his best-known work on the topic, the short story collection Deathbird Stories, was published in 1975, which places it very slightly into the post-D&D era, though most of the stories it contains were published individually earlier – but Ellison certainly isn't the trope's originator. L Sprague de Camp and Fritz Leiber also play with the idea in various forms, as does Roger Zelazny, though only Zelazny's earliest work is properly pre-D&D.
Hm. Off the top of my head, the earliest piece of fantasy fiction I can think of that makes substantial use of the trope in its recognisably modern form is A E van Vogt's The Book of Ptath; it was first serialised in 1943, though no collected edition was published until 1947. I'm confident that someone who's more versed in early 20th Century speculative fiction than I am could push it back even earlier, though. Maybe one of this blog's better-read followers will chime in!
(Non-experts are welcome to offer examples as well, of course, but please double-check the publication date and make sure the work you have in mind was actually published prior to 1974.)
My favorite example from there is Tinkerbell, but it also points to “Gods Need Prayer Badly” on TVTropes
Most of the responses in that Reddit thread are talking about the idea of gods deriving physical sustenance from sacrifices made in their honour, rather than the modern literary trope of gods gaining their miraculous powers from the strength of their worshippers' faith; the former is, of course, an ancient notion, but uncritically conflating it with the latter may result in misleading conclusions.
I had been thinking that in response to the original prompt, because it's an interesting difference, right? Modern religions often focus on orthodoxy, believing the right things; but ancient polytheisms didn't care about that. They cared about orthopraxy, which is doing the right things.
Ancient polytheistic religions were fairly functional and transactional. They didn't spend much if any time thinking about "belief"; at least in the Mediterranean, atheism basically didn't exist, and the closest you got was believing the gods didn't care about you. (Bret Devereaux writes about this, and other differences between D&D religion and real historical polytheisms, here.)
Cultures do ritual sacrifice because "it works". (Yes, it doesn't "work" in reality, but it "works" in the sense that the cultures are performing these sacrifices and surviving, therefore the sacrifices are at least compatible with surviving as a culture.) And that comes before the theory, honestly; but the purpose of ritual is to make things happen. They're tools. And "just as a hammer and a wrench do not very much care if you think the ‘right things’ about hammers and wrenches, so the ritual does not care if you ‘believe’ in it, or have the ‘correct’ doctrine of it, so long as – like the wrench and the hammer – you use the tool properly."
And then the sacrifice is an exchange.
Do ut des is Latin and it means, “I give, so that you might give.” ... The key here is the concept of exchange. The core of religious practice is thus a sort of bargain, where the human offers or promises something and (hopefully) the god responds in kind, in order to effect a specific outcome on the world.
So then we can ask, what was the theory for why this stuff worked? And that varied.
Now, why do the gods want these things? That differs, religion to religion. In some polytheistic systems, it is made clear that the gods require sacrifice and might be diminished, or even perish, without it. That seems to have been true of Aztec religion, particularly sacrifices to Quetzalcoatl; it is also suggested for Mesopotamian religion in the Atrahasis where the gods become hungry and diminished when they wipe out most of humans and thus most of the sacrifices taking place. Unlike Mesopotamian gods, who can be killed, Greek and Roman gods are truly immortal – no more capable of dying than I am able to spontaneously become a potted plant – but the implication instead is that they enjoy sacrifices, possibly the taste or even simply the honor it brings them (e.g. Homeric Hymn to Demeter 310-315).
Now you can see how e.g. the Aztec take relates to the "gods need belief" thing, but it's also very different, because the Aztec gods needed sacrifices. They don't care about the belief, they care about the stuff and the actions.
So the "gods need belief" thing is sort of a weird fusion of ancient polytheisms, which posited gods who needed or wanted sacrifice, with modern religions, with their focus on belief and orthodoxy. So it can basically only happen in a modern-invented pagan or polytheistic religion—which is, presumably, why we see them popping up in mid-century sword and sorcery stuff. It's a vague recreation of the shape of ancient polytheisms, but filtered through a very modern take on what religion is and how it works.
The short story "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Man_on_the_Subway" by Isaac Asimov and Frederick Pohl was originally written in 1941 and fairly explicitly posits gods powers as fueled by followers' belief, but it does so in a way that feels to me like it's exploring an idea from other fiction. So I doubt it's the first example, but being originally written even earlier than the previously cited A E van Vogt story (although it wasn't published until 1950), it might be useful to look at Pohl's other early stuff or extant work he might have been drawing on.
Well that's handy - someone actually just asked Neil Gaiman and got an answer which cites Deathbird Stories as expected, but also a book from 1888.
Interesting. I haven't read Richard Garnett's The Twilight of the Gods, so I can't personally speak to where it falls on the "gods derive physical sustenance from sacrifices made in their honour" versus "gods derive their miraculous powers from the strength of their worshippers' faith" continuum – it'd certainly be a considerably earlier example of the latter than I'd previously been aware of if it qualifies.
It's on Gutenberg!
Since I am procrastinating my thesis, I can say that it does seem to be a mixture of both. My memory of the greek gods (mostly from Percy Jackson...) indicates that the former is true in general, but I am definitely seeing shades of the latter as well.
So I see! Based on a quick skim I'd be inclined to consider it a transitional work rather than an example of the trope in its fully modern form – but then, if @jadagul's thesis that the trope represents a post-Victorian reinterpretation of Western polytheism is on the money, late Victorian popular fiction is exactly where you'd expect such transitional depictions to start popping up.
(A separate discussion thread initiated by @jakethesequel in the replies argues that the notion of the egregore as a collective thoughtform is also a late Victorian invention, from around the same time that Garnett's work was being published. I have to wonder which direction the influence flows – was Garnett drawing on ideas from contemporary occultism, or was occultism being influenced by contemporary popular fiction? Probably both!)
Deadpool & Wolverine | Official Trailer
I don't know what paddington is doing on that list, but it made me think of the time someone drew a picture of the queen with paddington after she died, and we had scores of people losing their minds at the idea that paddington bear wasn't the same kind of communist as them
I love the sorrow in which you wrote this
The tragedy of growing up british & left wing is realising all your beloved childhood animals in waistcoats were monarchists to the core
something about me is that my very first sex dream (as far as I can remember) was about the onceler. something else about me is that I didn’t regularly use the social internet until about 2017. so you can imagine my surprise when, about two years ago I discovered. well. you can imagine
So true
call that a skill issue. i have all 5 😎
ok you’re not gonna believe this. but my advisor
gonna buy this god-forsaken web site and charge all y'all $8 a month to edit reblogs.
'oh he's so funny now.'
mf i was always funny.
