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birdfeeding2025-11-14 01:27 pm
ysabetwordsmith) wrote2025-11-14 01:26 pm bluapapilio) wrote2025-11-14 01:23 pm
ysabetwordsmith) wrote2025-11-14 12:43 pm dialecticdreamer is running a Magpie prompt call that will stay open until Friday night. Leave prompts, get ficlets!alisx) wrote2025-11-15 05:43 amI’ve noticed — especially in my life, I’m not sure if it’s commonplace for everyone else — you kind of go in a circle. You start off liking all this shit as a kid, and then you’re told to grow up a little bit, and you go until you reach a point. Then you go back to the shit you used to like as a kid and realize, Hey, you know what? This is more me than I have been for the past couple years.
Giallo Julian on becoming .
The next lines of this quote link this feeling to nostalgia, which . . . kinda? But as someone who is a known Nostalgia Disliker, I actually think this whole phenomenon is something else.
When I was a kid I had this folder of quotes, and one of them — which, ironically given the above, I think I got from a Vampire: the Masquerade sourcebook, and they got from somewhere else in turn — was something along the lines of we don’t really change as we get older, we just become more the people we are. And I think this progression some people go through, of “enjoy The Thing, discard The Thing as cringe/childish, rediscover The Thing,” is more related to that than it is nostalgia per se. Particularly for people who were in some sort of alt subculture in their teens, then shed that to “fit into” the corporate adult world in their twenties, before realising that was making them feel miserable and false, to the point that, by the time they’re in their thirties or later, they run out of fucks and just go back to what they really had always enjoyed.1
The reason I wouldn’t call this “nostalgia” exactly, is because nowadays “nostalgia” tends to be a toxic force in pop culture. It’s wanting things to return to a false past, to a childish lack of accountability, and to undo aspects of (specifically) social progress. But the rediscovery I’m talking about isn’t that. People who go through it — and I’d say Grim Beard, the guy being interviewed in the linked article, is a pretty Ur-example — are usually pretty upfront about the fact that a lot of the things they enjoyed as a kid were, uh. Not always great? Both in quality and in attitude to, for example, marginalised people. And rediscovery isn’t a return to how things were so much as it is picking the things that were cool and did work and bringing them forward in ways that discard the parts that weren’t and didn’t. Like, you can wear leather coats in summer and sunglasses at night without all the weird fucking racism and misogyny and shit. You can enjoy your old 90s eXXXtreeeme!!! media for the fun schlock it is without going to bat to defend its gross bits and/or creators. Like. I promise these are things you can do. That people are doing! And, importantly, you can make new things with modern sensibilities that nonetheless have the same vibe and joy as whatever it was that made your heart go hell yeah as a child.2
Like I said, I don’t think this is nostalgia, exactly. I don’t think we really have a word for whatever this is. But it is definitely a thing, as I think a bunch of middle-aged Millennial goths, punks, emos, metalheads, weebs, and furries are discovering . . .
bluapapilio) wrote2025-11-14 12:37 pm purpleyin) wrote in holly_poly2025-11-14 05:03 pmtroisoiseaux) wrote2025-11-14 12:29 pmbuttonsbeadslace) wrote2025-11-14 11:32 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
smbc_comics_feed) wrote2025-11-14 11:20 am
Hovertext:
Anyone claiming this comic has any actual perspective will be accused of being in league with JSquatch.
Pre-orders for my new book Sawyer Lee and the Quest to Just Stay Home have begun!
Sawyer Lee is an illustrated middle grade novel starring an unadventurous kid who'd rather dig a deep dent in the couch than make a mark on the world, as many in his illustrious family of astronauts, scientists, spies, champion athletes... blah blah blah... have. He has decided that after generations of effort, it’s time to spend one lifetime relaxing.
The
problem is that Sawyer keeps getting caught up in the exhausting
expectations of his wicked aunt Celia, his complex relationship with his
ambitious other friend, Angela, and the shenanigans of every else
in town hoping to win the yearly Gourd Thump festival celebrating
nature’s dullest vegetable.
In this tale of mystery, treachery,
conspiracy, plant husbandry, and an imaginary love triangle, Sawyer
knows it will take a regrettable amount of energy to escape these
entanglements and find a way back to his happy place on Gary’s couch,
with a cozy throw blanket, a steaming mug of chamomile tea, and an empty
schedule.
You can check out the first chapter here along with pre-order links!
pensnest) wrote2025-11-14 04:27 pmnopseud (and her sterling chap, of course) along with chalcopyrite. We went to Compton Verney for a 'yarn fair' which was essentially a marketplace for some very lovely crafting. There was also actual yarn, and I refrained from purchasing any! Which I think was exceeding strong-minded of me.brithistorian) wrote2025-11-14 09:23 amFor as long as I can remember, I've disliked sleep. It seems like the biggest waste of time there could possibly be. I've used sleep as an argument against intelligent design — not necessarily against "design," but at the very least against "intelligent": Designing a mechanism that has to be shut down for at least 1/3 of its lifespan in order to function doesn't strike me as a very good idea. Combine this with my perfectionist/workaholic tendencies and you end up with someone who goes full tilt until they just can't anymore, at which point I end up going to bed several hours early, regardless of what I'm leaving undone, because I just physically cannot stay awake any longer.
I know it's not the healthiest way to do things, but I just can't seem to help myself, and until they come up with a chemical substitute for sleep that has fewer side effects than meth or cocaine, well. . . there I am. Or, well, there I was. As we were driving home from the dentist yesterday, A. came up with a way to weaponize my perfectionism against me: Make rest a quantifiable plan/goal for me to work toward (quantifiable both so that I can be sure that I'm doing it and also so that I can know when I've done it enough and don't have to do it anymore). She managed to get me to commit to two 10-minute meditations a week along with one night a week where I don't write (as writing is the last thing I do every day, so it often delays my bedtime). She tried to get me to commit to two meditations and two nights of not writing, I tried to talk her down to two meditations and one night where I try not to write, and this is what we settled on. I'm willing to concede that it's possible that taking this additional rest will make me so much more productive in the time that I'm not resting that I won't resent the time spent resting. On the other hand, if 52 years of sleeping almost every night hasn't reconciled me to the necessity of sleeping. . .
oursin) wrote2025-11-14 02:51 pmI don't think we actually have to claim she invented science fiction, because to the best of my recollection and without going and looking it up, various people in the C17th were doing similar things. Also, honestly, why can we not claim women among the Great Eccentrics of History? What we like about Margaret Cavendish is that she appears to have heartily embraced this identity rather than having it plonked upon her by a judgemental world: The Duchess Who Invented Science Fiction.
Though I am slightly muttering under my breath about the women of the time who were also Doing Science and Being Intellectual in a rather less flamboyant fashion e.g. Lady Ranelagh, and indeed women in the Evelyn circle....
***
Quiet persistence and a lucky combination of first husband dying after a few years of marriage and sympathetic second husband (see also Mrs Delany): Mary Somerville – the first scientist - she taught Ada Lovelace, plus she lived to be 92. (You know, I am sorry for those women in science who died tragically young, but we hear a lot less about the ones like Dorothy Hodgkin who had a long and spectacularly effective career in crystallography while suffering from rheumatoid arthritis and actually GOT THE NOBEL. I also mark her up for persistence in humanitarian concerns.)
***
Okay, Amy Levy did die, by her own hand, distressingly young: but her personal archive, up till now in private hands, has now been acquired by the University of Cambridge Library: The archive of enigmatic 19th-century writer Amy Levy has a new home at Cambridge University Library
linaewen) wrote in writethisfanfic2025-11-14 08:46 am
