A part of my brain is judging me super hard right now but
I saw a gif set for an anime a while ago of a bunch of like gothic looking guys all dressed in drag and doing a kick line in front of a bar or some shit like that??? Possibly butlers? But couldn’t say for sure.
We need more stories like this to be revealed. These “Hidden Figures” we never knew about have done so much that we can’t even imagine. And noone knows about them! People need to know their heroes. This is one more story , where we see the miracle when a black person is given a chance to shine. Incredible story. I want a movie about this ,too.
Bring back the phase of society where having your tiddies all the way out was fine but showing ankle flesh was scandalous
i know this is aiming at 17. and 18. and 19. century fashion, but i really wanna bring back those dresses that only basically start under the boobs, like that little number Minoan snake goddess figurine is wearing
that was actually what i was thinking of! ive been obsessed with that figure since i was her in a history book as a kid lmao
the ultimate look!!! 2 titties out 2 snakes in hand
titties out, snakes up, she’s ready 2 go
ankles: covered
snakes: up
titties: out
I am forcibly removed from the historical narrative
I’m working towards my ASL Interpreters Certificate in Texas, and so naturally I had the exact same question for my teachers. They way that my teachers (all Deaf) tend to sign “y’all” is with a ‘Y’ handsign facing the signer’s chest, then pulling it around like you’re signing “everybody” or “all you people” but with an ‘L’ hand instead of a general pointing hand.
That’s the technical kind of way. Most of the time though I’ll see people skip the ‘Y’ hand and go straight to just using a loose “L” hand to gesture outwards.
my favorite thing i’ve learned in college is that way back in ancient china there was this poet/philosopher guy who wrote this whole pretentious poem about how enlightened he was that was like “the eight winds cannot move me” blahblahblah and he was really proud of it so he sent it to his friend who lived across the lake and then his friend sends it back and just writes “FART” (or the ancient Chinese equivalent) on it and he was SO MAD he travels across the lake to chew his friend out and when he gets there his friend says “wow. the eight winds cannot move you, but one fart sends you across the lake”
On a hot day many years back, I was riding on a city bus when I noticed a blind man coming down the sidewalk. He climbed into the bus at the stop, patted his way to a seat across from mine, apologizing as he passed all of the people who had to stand, and sat back with every evidence of weariness. I was in a pretty crummy mood to begin with, and felt what could be described as a physical wave of cynicism when I realized that he was wearing an attractive watch. He’s not blind! I thought, scandalized.
I was young and stupid. That is not an excuse for thinking somehow that blindness was binary, that either a person could see or they were blind. But I felt a tiny outrage, at the idea that this man had faked needing his cane, that he’d bumped into that woman on purpose, so that he could secure a seat on a packed bus.
And then, eyes closed, he reached to his watch wrist with the other hand, pressed a button on the gold rim, and the watch popped open. He brushed his first two fingers across the face, frowned, and snapped the watch shut again.
And I felt like an idiot. Justifiably ashamed. I’d been so sure that I understood how life works, that watches only work for people who can see, that I’d actually felt superiority over a man who I thought was a liar. If I’d ever known a blind person, maybe I would have had a little more understanding–but that’s no excuse, and every bit of the fault was entirely my own. I made an assumption, based on no understanding whatsoever of what his life was like, and I deserved my embarrassment.
Perhaps somewhere along those lines, Slate has just dropped an article about sensitivity readers. For people who haven’t heard of them, a sensitivity reader is a sort of editor who will go through your manuscript to make sure you’re not saying anything particularly misguided or dehumanizing about a particular group. For instance, I’ve been a sensitivity reader for an acquaintance who wrote a story with a bisexual protagonist; the author was straight, and wanted to be sure that they weren’t making any ugly mistakes in their depiction of the character’s inner life.
There are even online forums dedicated to this sort of editing. You can find editors who are of just about any minority–different ethnic groups, religious beliefs, sexual orientations and identities, young teenagers and septuagenarian war vets. Basically, if you’re writing a character from a group you’re not part of, you can find someone to look through your manuscript and catch things that you didn’t think about.
(You wouldn’t write a novel about wartime Prussia without consulting historians, either through their own writings or through direct communication with them; it’s no less egotistical and wrongheaded to assume that you understand what it’s like to experience life as a blind Native American woman.)
I want to be clear that I’ve had a LOT of respect for Victoria Strauss’ hard work over at Writer Beware. She’s put an astounding number of hours in to protecting inexperienced authors from predators, and from making their own stupid mistakes. She’s clearly passionate about making publishing as a whole a safer place. And that’s part of why this is so frustrating. Because, frankly,
she should know better.
She put “offense” in scare quotes. But sensitivity readers aren’t about offense, they’re about not making ugly, stupid mistakes.
There’s a post going around Tumblr right now about how “male authors need to stop doing this.” In it there are a series of quotes from various male authors writing female protagonists, wherein the protagonists are just laughably wrong. Thinking constantly about the bouncing of their own breasts, about the way their tight skirts nip in just right at the waist, about their own full lips. You know, thinking about themselves through the male gaze, because their authors are incapable of imagining that women might see themselves differently than the authors do.
” which was pulled from publication when the author Justina Ireland got her hands on an advance copy and saw what somehow
no one else had noticed
up until that point; that the book was hideously racist and colonialist on several levels, so deeply flawed that the immediate reaction of the internet at large was one of rage. So many people protested that the publisher took the book back into the editing stage, and it remains to be seen if it will be released.A sensitivity reader or three would have saved Keira Drake the bad publicity storm, because the problems in the manuscript would have been caught before it ever got out to the public. A set of female eyes could have saved the laughably awful male writers from writing things that are now being roundly mocked by hundreds of thousands of readers.
Just like any other good editor, sensitivity readers aren’t there to
squash the author’s voice, to police their language, or to render the
text toothless. They’re not there to reduce a piece to pablum. A
sensitivity reader is there to tell you when you’re writing something
that is just flat wrong.
It’s not a matter of offending people or not offending people, it’s a matter of not fucking up. It’s a matter of not being so egotistical that you assume, without even thinking, that you understand what it’s like to try to navigate the world as a disabled EMT, or a fourteen-year-old biracial farmboy, or a Chinese-American college student. It’s a matter of understanding that there are a million things you simply do not know, and consulting someone who does.
Were there any books or plays famous for being badly written almost to an archetypal hilarity before My Immortal? Like were there any 19th century memetic gothic romances or?
Even just within SF fandom, The Eye of Argon (1970) is a classic viral example of hilariously bad writing from pre-Internet days; there were contests at cons to see who could get the farthest reading it without cracking up.
William Topaz McGonagall’s poetry was considered hilariously bad in his day (late 19th century); according to Wikipedia, “He found lucrative work performing his poetry at a local circus. He read his poems while the crowd was permitted to pelt him with eggs, flour, herrings, potatoes and stale bread. For this, he received fifteen shillings a night.”
I don’t know much more about the history of memetically bad literature than these two examples, but hopefully people can add more!
Also, “A Tragedy” by Theophile-Jule-Henri “Theo” Marzials, considered by some to be the worst poem ever written in the English language. (Obviously I am in love with it and intend to somehow incorporate it into my wedding vows.) http://homepages.wmich.edu/~cooneys/poems/bad/Marzials.Tragedy.html
There’s also Atlanta Nights, collaboratively written by a group of science fiction writers.
The primary purpose of the exercise was to test PublishAmerica’s claims to be a “traditional publisher” that would only accept high-quality manuscripts. Critics have long claimed that PublishAmerica is actually a vanity press that pays no special attention to the sales potential of the books they publish since most of their revenue comes from the authors rather than book buyers. PublishAmerica had previously made some highly derogatory public remarks about science fiction and fantasy writers, because many of their critics came from those communities; those derogatory remarks influenced the decision to make such a public test of PublishAmerica’s claims.
One chapter was written by a predictive text emulator.
I’d like to nominate Julia A. Moore, another awful poet of the late 19th century. A lot of her awful poems are about tragedy and disaster, but described in such a shallow way (and either bluntly matter-of-fact or super maudlin) that it does not exactly bring a tear to the eye.
The literary club J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were members of held competitions to see who could read the farthest into something by Amanda McKittrick Ros without laughing. She’s famous for incoherently purple prose, and Mark Twain called her first book
“one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of all time.” Sample:
“Speak! Irene! Wife! Woman! Do not sit in silence and allow the blood
that now boils in my veins to ooze through cavities of unrestrained
passion and trickle down to drench me with its crimson hue!”
I think my favorite is how she reacted to preps nd flamerz people criticizing her work; she called critics stuff like “clay-crab of corruption” and “bastard donkey-headed mite.”
can we have ‘classicists against white supremacy’// ‘classicists against patriarchy’ // ‘classicists against eurocentrism’ // patches
because we’re actually at the ground of what the hate groups and right parties are trying to claim as their own and use as a weapon against others – so it’s time to take back that narrative.
First draft. Hit me up if you have other ideas, keeping in mind I do not draw but I can use the Adobe Creative Suite
so apparently this coworker of mine used to play a lot of dnd and he had an orc rogue i think, who’s obviously supposed to be a stealth-centric character. But instead of channeling his abilities into dexterity or anything else stealthy, he channeled it all into charisma for the sake of intimidation. Essentially he, a hulking and undexteritous orc, would attempt to sneak into a building. If he was spotted, he would roll for intimidation (and win almost every time) and shout “YOU DO NOT SEE GROGG” at them and proceed.
Kimchi and Justice 