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Sredni Vashtar@srednivashtar.bsky.social |
161 followers 352 following 1146 posts
Sweetmart, anarch, gallus. Generalised hack of all trades. Loud sound artist as Subaltern, Silence and Secrecy, etc. Sometime writer for THEM Anime Reviews. They/them, she/her, it/it.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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I feel like where you’re at in life matters a lot more than age per se. The two can be directly connected, and the disconnect can be rough, speaking from personal experience. But what most people are doing when they fret about this is conflating that with power, which as noted is a different thing.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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Got the mental image of Kendrick shrinking Drake into a homunculus and keeping him in a birdcage, feeding him lettuce. I am cursed with visions.
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🔻⭕️ - ذئب
@habibiwolf.bsky.social
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look at she!
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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German chocolate cake, my beloved…
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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I feel like I can guess who this is but it would probably be irresponsible.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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You are fine but bed is good regardless.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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I don’t think I’m quite so jaded as Lyotard was when he talked about “scepticism of grand narratives,” but I’ve always thought of it as a sound policy when dealing with history and questions of “human nature” especially.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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I think people get attached to theories which feel like they give you a complete explanation of history or progress or how to make change happen, but those theories are basically always this highly contextual narrativising of specific observations and not universally applicable.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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Related: I remember a particularly belligerent person on here losing it at me for saying I thought the Bōshin War made for an interesting counterexample to Lenin’s very Eurocentric model of the development of imperialism in how Meiji expansionism preceded the development of an industrial base.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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You ever think about how there was a period of over two centuries where the shōgun had a regent (the shikken), and near the end of that period they were also splitting power with their deputies (kanrei) so you had this situation where Japan was governed by a nested series of regencies.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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I genuinely recommend that people watch this one, because explaining exactly *how* it is deeply weird (and for that matter, even how deeply weird it is) is far less efficient than simply letting people experience it for themselves.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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Yes.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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If I drop dead after using this confounded application, you know *exactly* who to send the Mystery Machine Gang after.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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Should that soapbox be contingent on the approval of people who would tokenise you to deflect or neutralise criticism, I think that the good that can be done would be, at best, severely undercut.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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There comes a point where these compromises wind up negating what good can be done with that ostensible influence. You may believe right now that the good you can do outweighs those, but I am pessimistic of this in the long run. The Spectacle recuperates resistance. That’s the point.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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Appreciated, honestly. You have a lovely night.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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That’s a pretty disingenuous comparison, but if you want to engage in vulgar Marxism, the counterargument is self-evident: An opinion writer’s class position is very different from that of a superstore greeter. Reductive, but so are thought-terminating clichés.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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That’s not what I’m arguing. But regardless, Jamelle himself pointed out the moral compromise here, and that compromise is a fair bit steeper than working a low-rank desk job at an incidentally awful corporation.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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Please read the rest of the thread. There is context. If I’m going to be roasted by complete strangers on the Internet, it should at least be for what I actually *did.*
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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Have you seen how people who aren’t either very right-wing or, for the US, very left-wing have treated the NYT up until fairly recently?
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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“Probably not a great deal, although that’s not really what I’m getting at vis à vis power,” and, “A sardonic remark about the way that a particular comment implies certain values, however unfair, is not the same thing as spreading misinformation.”
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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Fair enough, my apologies for involving myself.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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Oh hey, I’ve enjoyed your podcast appearances. This is deeply odd. All this said, my issue is less with Jamelle himself and more with this entire interaction. I know the person he’s responding to and, frankly, I get why she’s angry. Hence my responding at all.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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That you might do any number of things with your power which could be of benefit to a group of people in whose brutalisation your employer is complicit? Or perhaps simply not respond to smaller posters on social media venting frustration at you for not taking your conclusions far enough?
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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That wasn’t the point of the original sarcastic remark, but even so, I was responding to the quip about left-of-centre people not using institutional perches to speak in response to the point about the NYT as a font of viciously anti-trans rhetoric.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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It really isn’t. Do you really expect, say, Pamela Paul to internalise criticism from her left, let alone harsh criticism, let alone from people she transparently considers subhuman? Of course people are losing their temper at someone who demonstrates some sympathy. It’s a needle that can be moved.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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Sir, the publication for which you work has been using its prestige and reputation for “unbiased reporting” to push narratives which actively harm people like us in the midst of an ongoing push by the right to eradicate us. Please understand why some of us might be frustrated by such rhetoric.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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My family moved a lot as a kidlin. Haven’t really left the East Coast ever, though. I’m tied to the sea and the mountains.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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I always say hello to people’s pets before I say hello to them. Some people don’t get it, but thankfully, many do. I also talk to deer and foxes and birds when I don’t expect it to scare them.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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I think it might be because transition tends to require a lot of self-reflection around gender and how you relate to other people, so there’s less insecurity once you’re There, as it were. This obviously isn’t universally true, but it’s common enough in my experience to be worth mentioning.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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Fair. I was more gesturing at, I think people wind up using kinda mealy-mouthed language reflexively because of how the discourse is framed, when I think a lot of people recognise the underlying issue is, "Babe, we're all freaks here, don't be a cop."
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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Also worth noting that men's and women's figure skating, one of the first sports to formally do this, became a thing because women kept trouncing men at the highest levels of the sport and weird sexists pissed and moaned about it.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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True! Hence why I tend to avoid that terminology. We're queers. We're the freaks. Because that's the line that the line-drawers want draw around us, and fuck 'em.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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Like, the whole "demisexuality is just normal female sexuality" argument, for instance, has so many *layers* of missing the point that it comes of wildly copbrained in the same way as certain aspec folks being wildly queerphobic in their own right.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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Understandable, although I think there's a further nuance that, I guess, queerness is definitionally deviance in the eyes of the default understanding of "normal sexuality," and people Discoursing about whether aspec people "count" are policing deviance and creating new norms. Which, gross! Bad!
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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I don't really know enough about either to have strong opinions. They are Famous Tweeters and I don't do Famous Tweeters, really.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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And hey, maybe Bill's more open-minded than he thinks! :P Either way, the very construction of "heterosexual" and "homosexual" as pure, deterministic, immutable binaries is rooted in the construction of sex, which is fundamentally fake and gay.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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Also tastes a little like tarragon, which is also a wormwood! There are a lot of wormwoods and mugworts.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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Technically, the one in absinthe is typically grand wormwood (Artemisia absinthium) or Roman wormwood (A. pontica), whereas sweet wormwood (A. annua) is, interestingly, the source of a common malaria treatment? Also you can make it into tea. It tastes kind of like camphor smells. It's neat.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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That said, wild carrot kind of looks like sweet wormwood (not poisonous but an odd plant) and water hemlock (*extremely* poisonous), although there are a bunch of tells for all of the above.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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Carrots are actually related to lettuce. Potatoes are the ones in the nightshade family which are dicey to eat any part of but the tuber. (Tomatoes, tomatillos, gooseberries and winter cherries are also nightshades but tomato plants in particular I don't think are gonna cause you problems.)
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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Horse Rotorvator is a wild record in general. Although my personal favourite records of theirs are the Musick to Play in the Dark duology from the turn of the millennium, which are *way* more understated, the first two Coil records are great and really ahead of their time in some ways.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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I could really lean into the visceral sadomasochistic aspect and post some of my favourite harsh noise and gnarly, skull-crushing sludge and doom metal, as I do think there is often a powerful, morbid eroticism to such sounds, but I’m also just a freak. :P
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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Maybe a bit obvious, but, as Swans were already mentioned…
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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Godspeed. I find reading ideological neoliberals uniquely intolerable, I must admit, so that sounds maddening.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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The turn makes a discomfiting amount of sense if you consider the similarity in class interests between the early neoliberal intelligentsia and certain party functionaries, if I'm brutally honest. A strong state guided by a technocratic élite serves the material interests of "ideas men."
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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The Cultural Revolution is weird because there's a tendency for Western commentators and modern party-line CCP boosters to erase context and, in the case of the former, indulge in a little Orientalism as a treat, but even with that in mind, that whole period was fucking batshit.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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Granted, I have many other vices which err on the side of maximalism, but I'd rather portray how someone says a thing or what they're doing as they say it than couch it in constant structural repetitions which clutter the page where I could be indulging in needless sensory detail. :P
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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I tend to take the tack that if you have two distinct enough character voices and clearly communicate the action and who's speaking when through context clues both in and outside of the dialogue, omitting tags wherever possible often feels cleaner. "It not perfect system," but still.
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Sredni Vashtar
@srednivashtar.bsky.social
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Honestly, I think even very experienced people make mortifying mistakes like that sometimes. Don't be cruel to yourself, just keep moving.
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