so the glow club post is very much still making the rounds and today someone reblogged it saying something like “but Bilbo’s sword in the Hobbit was supposed to glow to warn him of danger, so if an orc was using it, it would only glow if another orc came by who was dangerous to that person”
which is, a sweet and generous interpretation of the glowy weapon trope! it would also be a really overpowered item and I wouldn’t let one of my players have it but also, there isn’t really a way to know whether Bilbo’s sword glows in the presence of any orc or only dangerous orcs, because in Tolkien “orc” is synonymous with “threat you should stab on sight.”
I am, very not comfortable with that worldbuilding!! There are parts of the fantasy genre that come out of straight-up racism and bigotry and a desire to glorify some really fucking horrifying eras of history! and I don’t want putting up with that shit to be the price of admission for playing certain games or telling certain stories. The characters should take damage, the players should not, and if I get that wrong I’m not doing my job.
if we want, we are going to tell stories about violence. if we want, we are going to tell stories about marginalization. we are not going to tell stories where the bad guys are ugly caricatures of ourselves, our friends, our families, and the good guys look like the people who slaughtered our communities way back when.
all of which is to say: Bagdurash’s club doesn’t glow in the presence of people who are dangerous. It glows in the presence of orcs. It was made as a tool of hate and exclusion. We’re using it for something else now.
A little girl and her mom were looking at me at the coffee shop this morning and I heard her mom say “go on, it’s ok!” and the little girl shuffled up to me and said “ex-cuse me please, do you have to put on your tattoos by yourself every DAY or does your mom help you?” I am d y i n g
My niece was in the bathroom when I was in the tub and she asked if my tattoos would wash off. I told her they won’t, I’ll have them my whole life.
She asked, “Even when you die?”
I said, “Yes”
She looked me dead in the eye and said, “When you’re space dust your tattoos will be stars”
“WHEN YOU’RE SPACE DUST YOUR TATTOOS WILL BE STARS.“
so i went to target earlier and i was looking through the men’s clothing section and was comparing two shirts and this woman came up to me and literally said “oh, how nice! you must be shopping for your boyfriend”. and i, without thinking, replied: “nothing i do in life is ever for the sake of men”.
there’s something endlessly hilarious to me about the phrase “hotly debated” in an academic context. like i just picture a bunch of nerds at podiums & one’s like “of course there was a paleolithic bear cult in Northern Eurasia” and another one just looks him in the eye and says “i’l kill you in real life, kevin”
I heard a story once about two microbiologists at a conference who took it out into the parking lot to have a literal fistfight over taxonomy.
have i told this story yet? idk but it’s good. The Orangutan Story:
my american lit professor went to this poe conference. like to be clear this is a man who has a doctorate in being a book nerd. he reads moby dick to his four-year-old son. and poe is one of the cornerstones of american literature, right, so this should be right up his alley?
wrong. apparently poe scholars are like, advanced. there is a branch of edgar allen poe scholarship that specifically looks for coded messages based on the number of words per line and letters per word poe uses. my professor, who has a phd in american literature, realizes he is totally out of his depth. but he already committed his day to this so he thinks fuck it! and goes to a panel on racism in poe’s works, because that’s relevant to his interests.
background info: edgar allen poe was a broke white alcoholic from virginia who wrote horror in the first half of the 19th century. rule 1 of Horror Academia is that horror reflects the cultural anxieties of its time (see: my other professor’s sermon abt how zombie stories are popular when people are scared of immigrants, or that purge movie that was literally abt the election). since poe’s shit is a product of 1800s white southern culture, you can safely assume it’s at least a little about race. but the racial subtext is very open to interpretation, and scholars believe all kinds of different things about what poe says about race (if he says anything), and the poe stans get extremely tense about it.
so my professor sits down to watch this panel and within like five minutes a bunch of crusty academics get super heated about poe’s theoretical racism. because it’s academia, though, this is limited to poorly concealed passive aggression and forceful tones of inside voice. one professor is like “this isn’t even about race!” and another professor is like “this proves he’s a racist!” people are interrupting each other. tensions are rising. a panelist starts saying that poe is like writing a critique of how racist society was, and the racist stuff is there to prove that racism is stupid, and that on a metaphorical level the racist philosophy always loses—
then my professor, perhaps in a bid to prove that he too is a smart literature person, loudly calls: “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ORANGUTAN?”
some more background: in poe’s well-known short story “the murder in the rue morgue,” two single ladies—a lovely old woman and her lovely daughter who takes care of her, aka super vulnerable and respectable people—are violently killed. the murderer turns out to be not a person, but an orangutan brought back by a sailor who went to like burma or something. and it’s pretty goddamn racially coded, like they reeeeally focus on all this stuff about coarse hairs and big hands and superhuman strength and chattering that sounds like people talking but isn’t actually. if that’s intentional, then he’s literally written an analogy about how black people are a threat to vulnerable white women, which is classic white supremacist shit. BUT if he really only meant for it to be an orangutan, then it’s a whole other metaphor about how colonialism pillages other countries and brings their wealth back to europe and that’s REALLY gonna bite them in the ass one day. klansman or komrade? it all hangs on this.
so the place goes dead fucking silent as every giant ass poe stan in the room is immediately thrust into a series of war flashbacks: the orangutan argument, violently carried out over seminar tables, in literary journals, at graduate student house parties, the spittle flying, the wine and coffee spilled, the friendships torn—the red faces and bulging veins—curses thrown and teaching posts abandoned—panels just like this one fallen into chaos—distant sirens, skies falling, the dog-eared norton critical editions slicing through the air like sabres—the textual support! o, the quotes! they gaze at this madman in numb disbelief, but he could not have known. nay, he was a literary theorist, a 17th-century man, only a visitor to their haunted land. he had never heard the whistle of the mortars overhead. he had never felt the cold earth under his cheek as he prayed for god’s deliverance. and yet he would have broken their fragile peace and brought them all back into the trenches.
much later, when my professor told this story to a poe nerd friend, the guy said the orangutan thing was a one of the biggest landmines in their field. he said it was a reliable discussion ruiner that had started so many shouting matches that some conferences had an actual ban on bringing it up.
so my professor sits there for a second, still totally clueless. then out of the dead silence, the panel moderator stands up in his tweed jacket and yells, with the raw panic of a once-broken man:
Oh no oh no oh no, I have been to a couple of Poe panels and I always wondered why Rue Morgue was never discussed but I’m a shush-violet in big crowds, so I never asked why? Now I know.
The next person who tries to correct me when I say “Happy Holidays” is going to be told Happy Hanukkah instead. Very tired of hearing, “No, it’s MERRY CHRISTMAS.” I’m pretty sure Judaism was around a lot longer than your Buckstar’s boycotting butt, Karen.
My boss once shared a great story about that. This happened when he was in a layover in North Carolina back when the “War on Christmas” bullshit was first becoming prominent. He had gone to get a pack of cigarettes, and after he paid for it:
“Merry Christmas.” “Happy holidays.” “No. I said Merry Christmas.” “Do you know what Hanukkah is about?” “No, what?” “Some people tried to make us worship their ways, so we rose up andkilled them. Happy Hanukkah.”
what’s the difference between ninjas and stage crew?
ninjas move silently around walls, stage crew moves walls around silently.
BUT YOU KNOW WHAT IS SO GREAT
The depiction of ninjas as dressed all in black comes from traditional Japanese theatre. Actual historical ninjas didn’t dress in black because it’s conspicuous as hell in the daytime and even at night in the dark a person dressed in solid black tends to stand out; dark grey or blue is better for hiding in shadows. Usually they just wore ordinary, like, people clothes which are far better for blending into your surroundings in than a specialised professional costume.
BUT YOU KNOW WHO DID DRESS ALL IN BLACK LIKE THAT
the stage crew in a theatre
and it was a generally accepted convention that the black-clad stagehands were invisible, so they could be on stage at the same time as the actors and move things around and the audience would just mentally CG them out
but then one day because a director was a GENIUS, during an otherwise normal performance of a play, suddenly a stagehand stepped forward, assassinated one of the main characters and then melted back into the background
THEY WERE A NINJA
AND THE AUDIENCE LOST THEIR MINDS BECAUSE IT WAS AMAZING
and eventually it lost its mind-blow value because after a while everyone had seen a play like that, so although the “stagehands wear black and are invisible” convention continued, the new “ninjas wear black and are invisible until they choose to strike” convention became established, and from then on fictional ninjas have just worn black because it looks so cool.
So in fact the answer to “What’s the difference between ninjas and stage crew?” is “You will never know until they stab you.”
so a racist got utterly demolished in less than 30 seconds on the New Zealand morning news on Monday and it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen
who knew a white guy could be capable of such an iconic response, he knows what’s up and is having none of that shit, every other white guy take notes tbh
I love that he said Pakeha
Can someone write what its being said in this?
Male co-host: We have had a whole heap of feedback regarding
Te Tai Tokerau MP Kelvin Davis’s proposal to institute a prison run on Māori
values into New Zealand. He’s looking at potentially establishing this prison
up north. It isn’t Labour policy just yet, it’s just an idea of Kelvin Davis’s.
And this has been really really divisive on our Facebook page this morning. (sarcastically)
Here I think we have the single greatest email, the single greatest message we
have ever had on breakfast.
(clears throat deliberately) “’Janice’ says: Good morning. I’m
sick of hearing that Māori need different treatment. If they don’t want to live
in our society, then maybe we should put them all on an island and leave them
to it.”
Male co-host: “Janice. That is LITERALLY what happened! That
is the history of our country. Last I checked, Māori WERE on an island, they
were left to it, and then Pākehā (Māori term for white New Zealanders) turned
up and look how that worked out. But thank you very much for that brilliant
insight. Goodness me. Unbelievable. Unbelievable, they actually-“
Female co-host: “Actually, you can’t even get angry, you
just actually need to laugh and then screw it up and put it under the desk.
Just when you thought-“
Male co-host: (mimicking letter) “’Put them all on an
island, leave them to it.’ Yeah. What a great idea that is Janice.
I really need “What a great idea that is, Janice.” to be a meme filled with those stupid complete cognitive dissonance bigoted statements.
yknow if romeo had just Cried on juliets corpse for a couple hours instead of drinking poison Right Then they would have been Fine
The moral of the story is: always take time to cry for a few hours before making important decisions.
So I’m more or less being facetious here, but this is actually a thing.
Hamlet is genre savvy. Hamlet knows how Tragedies work, and he’s not going to rush in and get stabby without making absolutely certain he’s got all the facts.
Except once he thinks he has all the facts – once he’s certain that it really is the ghost of his father and Claudius really did kill him, he rushes in and stabs the wrong guy, which starts a domino line of deaths and gets Laertes embroiled in his own revenge tragedy and ultimately results in the deaths of nearly every character other than Horatio.
That’s the irony and the tragedy of the story. Hamlet knows his tropes and actively tries to avoid them, and the tropes get him anyway. It’s inevitable, the tropes are hungry.
I want a sticker that says the tropes are hungry so I can put it on my laptop
Kimchi and Justice 