@bifilthatonthatseson / bifilthatonthatseson.tumblr.com
love characters who are like "this is how the world works. this is how it has to be (because if i'm wrong i have to face what i've done // if i'm wrong i have to face whats been done to me) "
This trait is much more endearing in fiction than in my mother.
Today, on the last day of my visit to my parents' house, a relative announced that "all this transgender stuff is only happening because of the Chinese government trying to kill us all with COVID," and I am SO DONE with being here
You can only reblog this on the 3st of January
the 3st huh?
“You need to believe in things that aren’t true. How else can they become” - Hogfather, Terry Pratchett
it’s seasonal lads
IT’S SEASONAL AGAIN LADS
‘Tis the season so I’ll reblog my absolute favorite Terry Pratchett quote ever
Happy holidays folks
welp
Hello! I have a student who is interested in recent queer Arthuriana, and I wondered if you had any particular recommendations? I'm afraid my expertise is limited to the Middle Ages!
A few, but my first one is that you should really ask Kavita Mudan Finn! I'm also guessing you've already told your student to have a browse through Arthuriana, much of which is accessible through @jstor
Tracy Deonn's Legendborn trilogy (YA) would be one recommendation. Another would be A Garter As A Lesser Gift (@kivrin's rec to me), which is a charming SGATGK-based novella. If the student is trying to get a whole paper out of this, I'd recommend pairing AGAALG with The Green Knight, where pretty much everyone wants to kiss Dev Patel; who, I ask rhetorically, can blame them?
I'm leaving BBC Merlin off this list, as it manages to generate a lot of queer fanon despite pretty aggressively forestalling queer possibilities in canon.
M' learned colleague @qqueenofhades is impressively committed to her fiction-reading in ways I often do not manage to be, and might have more ideas.
Ahem. If you are looking for recent queer Arthurian fiction, please allow me to eagerly recommend my favorite novel of the past several months and indeed, possibly of the summer (published in May 2023):
It was literally written by a PhD student dissertating on queer interpretations of Arthuriana, and it's really, really good. It's funny, but it's angry, and it's savage, and it pulls no punches, and holy fuck the ending made me CRY (in a good way). There's gay Sir Lancelot (and also gay immortal secret agent Christopher Marlowe), and African/black Sir Kay (the protagonist) and a Muslim heroine and a lot of pitch-black satire about post-Brexit Britain in a near-future era of climate collapse, and questions about how the Arthurian legends can have relevance in this world, whether we should in fact hope for King Arthur waking up to Fix Everything (this book says uh no, we fucking shouldn't) and how those myths intersect with and inform the fight to create a new world, even in the ashes of the old one.
Bought it on my 10-day UK trip (Waterstones in London, huzzah) and finished it before I left for home. So. Yeah. Highly recommended.
Likewise, if you will allow me to toot my own horn: I wrote a lengthy (as in 5,000 words with bibliography) meta of the Dev Patel The Green Knight film, which focuses heavily on its queer readings vis-a-vis the poem and how this fits into a larger tradition of queer interpretations of both SGGK and the Arthurian legendarium:
Thanks for the tag! Hopefully this is helpful.
This is so helpful and you are both wonderful. Thank you!!
I have two students this semester who regularly come to my office for no reason, just to talk about their latest D&D session or whatever, and it's sweet and flattering but also this is my workplace, the reason your essays are not graded is because you never leave
[Image description: a tweet from First generation home renter (@InternetHippo) reads:
In my wildest “I’m rich” fantasies I’m still doing all the same stufd as now, I’m just more relaxed. I don’t even have a new car]
Or even, “What’s the unseen barrier stopping me from doing this?”
[ID: A post by Psychology Peers @psychologypeers. It reads:
My mental health really changed when I stopped asking myself “why am i so lazy? and started asking myself “why does my body need so much rest right now?” /End ID]
Look, if you want to have a child-free wedding, you can do that, but what you CANNOT do is decide to have a child-free wedding and then get mad at your friends with children when they can't be there
Mister Rogers
Like imagine you’re a displaced ex-space marine struggling with a drug addiction and some mysterious stranger shows up and saves your life multiple times, helps you quit, you’re pretty sure she’s like CIA covert ops recovering you for some grand purpose, but along the way you learn how to be humble, how to love and trust others, how to challenge your antiquated views, and you realize you’re in love with this strange, constantly singing mysterious woman and when you finally get to your destination and have council with your supreme ruler you find out this woman you’re in love with is a fucking BOAT YOU USED TO DRIVE and also you’re NOT EVEN HER FAVORITE CAPTAIN
I think that, with AI rapidly becoming a man-made horror beyond our comprehension, we need to establish a baseline for sentience and when something is considered a new species of its own. I propose a two-step process:
If the Pope would baptize it, it’s sentient.
If it can become Pope after being baptized, it’s its own species.
“He never forgot. He just put the memories away, like old silverware that you didn’t want to tarnish. And every year they came back, sharp and sparkling, and stabbed him in the heart.” ― Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
Today I answered "ten weeks" to the question "how old is your baby," and then promptly bluescreened because that's two and a half months, right, two and a half months of which I have basically no procedural memory. Two and a half months during which I have not slept more than two hours at a time. Like, it would be considered torture to do to me on purpose what having a newborn does all on its own
When I think about American attitudes to parenting there's something that always comes to mind, but I don't know whether it's a real thing. All my life in American films and TV I've heard child characters addressing their dads as "sir" or being told off for not doing so.
Is that really a commonplace thing in American families, or is it just a shorthand way of showing that the character is a shitty dad?
There's still time to increase the sample size!
