Math Dragon

The weird Oreos don’t sell… but the weird Oreos just being around and visible make people buy more regular Oreos.

me: QUIET! this is the deadliest ray known to man. one milli milli milligram of poison from its sting is enough to stop a grown man's heart in under a minute! and he answers only to me! behold your DOOM!

stingray: *nudges my hand*

My comic from @very-sincerely-yours-zine !

This was a lovely little thing to hop into after finishing last Summer after The Beekeeper's Picnic.

social ergonomics should mean looking at social structures and analyzing the outcomes they have re: human welfare, and then taking that information back to the design board and redesigning things to hurt people less.

agenda

peace, equality and simplicity in the streets

first of all that last tag made me snort-laugh, thank you for that. meeting for clearness on the implications of having hierarchies in the bedroom. can you imagine

(as i said in one of the other reblog threads, this is as much/more about what kind of thing i find sticky and interesting in fiction than about my personal life, but moving on from that...)

relevant context i think is that i am a medievalist who was thinking of quite specific epic and chivalric 'friendships' (in the expansive sense of the term) when i wrote this post, where a) physical violence is integral and they don't exist without it because the relationship is fundamentally a battlefield relationship and b) hierarchy is also integral. okay it's cú chulainn/láeg i was thinking about cú chulainn/láeg we all know i was thinking about cú chulainn/láeg. so. we have both hierarchy and violence at the heart of what makes the relationship what it is. it is a warrior-charioteer pairing. it exists because they play complementary roles in a fight, that is the entire definition of their roles and their relationship with each other. if they are not in a fight then the thing that defines them to each other collapses. so i do think in fact that there is no way to explore that relationship in a pacifist or non-hierarchical way, much as there is plenty of potential to think about the moments between acts of violence and the ways in which it subverts or flattens those hierarchies (which it does! textually! they're way more complicated than people think!)

that said i really love your image of brothers in arms in prison together for protesting war and one day when my fic-writing brain returns from the, uh, not war i guess, i would love to play with that idea more

i mean it's not like i haven't written fics that detached these characters from their context of Blood Murder Extraordinaire. but notably the one long fic i've written where there isn't this hierarchy or any murder happening between cú chulainn and láeg is also the one where that's not the pairing i'm remotely focused on, because it is precisely the juiciness of that hierarchy-that-isn't-what-it-seems and the mirror-and-match battle bro energies that make it interesting to me

agenda

peace, equality and simplicity in the streets

realising that i know a lot of quakers who are into hierarchical kinks, although that may just be that young quakers in particular are often more open about non-normative sexuality of all kinds.

but i also know a lot of quakers who are into martial arts or other martial/violent hobbies (like, for me it's archery and occasionally fencing, i know a lot of quaker wargamers, a lot of quakers who do contact sports, etc.)

and. idk. some of this may just be the massive overlap between "quaker", "nerd", and "queer". but I do wonder if there's something in there about using safe, consensual hobbies to explore "unquakerly" ways of being? like, subsuming violence and hierarchy into forms where you can experience them without them coming into serious conflict with quaker principles?

(I am also reminded that between Ratchet Screwdriver and Quakerball - the game we invented at summer gathering that was basically "what if rugby had no rules" - Quaker kids often lean towards games that are very much on the edge of physical violence, sometimes more so than comparable groups of kids. and that's not because Quaker kids are more violent, my experience was that if someone actually gets hurt playing those games then it is taken extremely seriously by all the children involved, but I think it might point to a related desire to push the boundaries of proper Quaker activities and explore why the lines are where they are?)

agenda

peace, equality and simplicity in the streets