Yolanda Squatpump

July 14th
5:30 PM

3 notes

I watched Wall-E recently and that movie is fantastic but I couldn’t stop thinking about how I really REALLY want an adult (like REALLY ADULT NC-17 OR BUST) adaption that’s all fucked up and dark, like EVE and Wall-E as humans traveling a barren post-apocalyptic earth and dealing with conspiracies aboard the Axiom. Think The Road meets 2001 meets Moon.

I mean the movie is so cute and happy and hopeful but when you think about it the premise is pretty fucked up. I mean the earth is DEAD and the rest of the humans in space are just circling the drain, on the fast-track to an evolutionary dead end. So instead of a story about the triumph of the ~~human~~ robot spirit, it’s a story about how humanity is totally boned. Like just a really fucked up and psychologically dark story about the incredibly desperate lengths a few individuals have to go to because of how deeply humanity screwed up, how much they have to sacrifice, how the extinction of the human race contributes to the destruction of the psyche.

WOW I WANT THIS RILL BAD NOW.

like ok

Wall-E is an android, the last ‘living’ thing on a dead planet. It’s possible he snapped decades ago and it just hasn’t caught up with him yet.
Eve is part of a spec ops group specifically trained (cloned?) to return to earth and scour it for any hint of life. This is what she’s for. Despite her being human, it becomes clear that she’s even more programmed than Wall-E is.
both of them are incredibly isolated and don’t know how to deal with anything outside the parameters of their respective missions. Wall-E’s sanity is hanging by a thread and he craves contact but Eve is dismissive because of her desperation to find organic life. She CANNOT FAIL because this is what she was MADE FOR and if she fails then what is she?
obviously it would still be a love story because romance is fucking awesome (fight me)
idk, I guess Auto is still the antagonist? Except I really loved how in the movie he was just following orders and was only a bad guy because he, unlike our protagonists, was incapable of thinking outside his programming.

I dunno, I guess I just want WALL-E AS WRITTEN BY OCTAVIA BUTLER AND RON MOORE to be a thing that exists. :[

July 6th
7:02 PM

2 notes

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Dat Lass: Man, that last post has me thinking about how religious institutions...

talythiastarseeker:

mutableman:

Man, that last post has me thinking about how religious institutions are so incredibly adept at making their belief system intrinsic to the core identity of their followers. THEY ARE SO GOOD AT THAT. It’s that whole Dunbar’s number/monkeysphere thing (“god knows and loves you personally! He…

See, it’s hard for someone like me (left by my Catholic/agnostic(?) parents to decide for myself, starting to decide around the age of 10 that it was all rubbish) to understand just how badly this sort of thing can affect people and how hard it is to work through and adjust to not having that support structure behind you any more, propping up your life and entire world-view. Plus religion is not a very major thing in this country, more a sort of annoyingly discordant background hum that you can mostly ignore. But I know that it’s a very different situation in North America.

I’m glad that you managed to sort it out for yourself in the end.

Thanks Taly. <3

Canada is actually far less religious than the rest of North America (only about half of us believe in god and way less than that are a part of any organized religion [Canadians aren’t very nationalistic but we are definitely brought together in a mutual pride that we are less fundamentalist and more liberal/socialist than our neighbors to the south]), but I was raised in a brand of Christianity that teeters juuust on the boundary between progressive and fundamentalist. My religion shaped every part of me. It was a pretty slow journey from theism to deism to agnosticism to atheism.

And you’re so right about religion being a support structure. Without it I was afraid shit would just fall apart and man, what do you even build on the spot that used to be your whole life? even if that life was full of helplessness and guilt and shame and never enough faith to trowel over the important questions it couldn’t answer? and then it was a lot of painful work to dismantle it and after that there were some really fun existential crises because I thought the alternative to believing in god was believing in nothing.

But of course, that was silly: I believe in logic and science and love and compassion and responsibility and sincerity.

And obviously I’d be kidding myself if I said I have it all figured out because man look around the universe is infinitely vast but that’s ok now because I get to choose my own standards of measurement. Now I get to decide what’s important in my life. I can say “fuck destiny” and take shit into my own hands. I can live as large or as small as I want to. I get to choose what the answer to the open question that is my brief existence is.

June 18th
8:43 PM

1 note

The X-files

So I’ve finished watching the first season of X-Files (yes hello I am a cool guy with current interests) and I have ~~a few~~ many thoughts.

a message from talythiastarseeker

In return, who are your favourite computer/cyborg ladies? =D

oh gurl, you sure know the way to my heart!

Talkin ‘bout robot ladies is where my feminism and the transhumanist in me have a filthy threeway with my past as an english major and the result is a bloated self-indulgent word baby. Wow that is a weird metaphor, let’s all agree to ignore that and move on to these, my favourite female synthetic beings:

GLaDOS from the Portal series - oh man do I ever love GLaDOS. She is so cold and passive aggressive and manipulative and unintentionally hilarious. Literally my favourite thing about her is that she is a liar. She lies CONSTANTLY and it is THE BEST because at first you don’t realize she’s lying to you, you don’t even realize she’s anything other than an automated voice, but then her lies get more sinister and you start to realize the extent of her manipulations. And she doesn’t just manipulate you (well, Chell, but same diff) because it’s necessary to get you to keep testing, often she tells lies just to fuck with you. She just likes to fuck with your head, and that fact is so surprising and unexpected that it manages to be straight-up DELIGHTFUL. Lying and manipulation are her only real means of control. And then in the second game her manipulations are motivated more by revenge/spite, but the reveal about her formerly being Caroline adds yet another layer to her, and I could go on and on and ON about her arc throughout the second game and her relationship with Chell but I will restrain myself. GLaDOS is the villain (the most perfect villain of all time!!) but she is by no means evil. She was just programmed that way.
Rachael and Pris from Blade Runner - Blade Runner is one of my favourite sci fi movies, but woooow do the female replicants have a bummer of a time. Both Rachael and Pris are so tragic. Neither of them have ever had control over any part of their lives, and when they do gain some measure of control they are so lost that they immediately find someone who can tell them what to do. For Pris that person is Roy, but Rachael has no one to turn to but Deckard. She is part of a system that is so adept at stripping her autonomy away that she literally cannot handle having power over her own life and her own choices so she finds Deckard and gives that power to him. Aaaand I think we all remember what happens then. :( This movie is not exactly happy but it is a really awesome examination of the consequences of social control, particularly as it applies to women.
Number Six from Battlestar Galactica - primarily Caprica Six, but I love basically all iterations of Six. Actually I really like all the Cylons (BSG was great at creating complex and three dimensional antagonists, that’s for damn sure), but Six is my favourite. I mean yeah, she is basically responsible for genocide. But she is also heartbroken and isolated and trying to figure out which parts of her are real. Man, I’m due for a re-watch of this show.
Major Motoko Kusanagi from Ghost in the Shell - I’ve written like 700 words on this before, but my favourite thing about Motoko is how she resolves her identity crisis: she doesn’t know who she is, so decides to make herself into something totally new. I really really love that she (the movie version of her anyways) isn’t sexualized—which is SUPER RARE for literally all cyborg/robot women—but is really brawny and has a fairly masculine face, and then in the end becomes a completely androgynous transcended being. The anime version is completely different, but in an equally excellent way; there’s (kind of, the metaphysics gets dense) less of a Cartesian mind/body duality in the show, and the Major specifically says she inhabits the body she does because she likes being female, because that specific model lines up with her innate sense of self. Her feminine exterior is a reflection of her feminine interior, and that’s not biological determinism, it’s a very specific choice she has made. In both cases Motoko refuses to be defined by outside forces and I love her for it. <3

Wow that is a lot of words. Is it obvious I like talking about fictional ladies? Now you know never to ask me questions (IM KIDDING I LOVE YOUR QUESTIONS TALY MORE QUESTIONS ALWAYS <3).

June 6th
6:03 PM

1 note

Snow White and the Huntsman reax

Kind of spoilery; deeply dorky; overly opinionated about things like art direction and feminism and also Scottish accents.

May 15th
9:21 PM

11 notes

Can we talk about Catelyn Stark for a minute? Because holy shit she has rocketed up the list of my favourite characters in this show lately. She was flawless in Sunday’s episode.

I mean she has a screaming match with the lord whose son Jaime killed because she knows that if Jaime dies, this foul fucking man whom she loathes with every atom in her body, if he dies so do her daughters. She is constantly trying to get people to listen to her. But NO ONE EVER FUCKING LISTENS TO HER. Not Robb’s lords, not Robb himself half the time, not Stannis and Renly, not even the damn soldier guarding the cells.

And how can she fight for her land and her people and her family when no one will even listen? Because she can’t fight like men fight, she has to use her words. (For men the answer was always the same, and never farther away than the nearest sword. For a woman, a mother, the way was stonier and harder to know.)

And there is so much sorrow in her (I am a creature of grief and dust), but she can’t for a second let herself feel it, indulge it, she can’t not be strong because while everyone is fighting to tear Westeros apart she feels like the only one trying to hold it together. And the only weapon she can use to do it is her love for her children and her wisdom and her empathy and her incredible force of will.

Jaime is right; this woman is a she-wolf, savage, feral. She has no other recourse.

This is what a woman’s courage looks like.

May 13th
4:33 PM

1 note

AUGH, I know it’s been ages since it aired but I cannot get over this scene because my god, their FACES. Their BODY LANGUAGE.

I mean okay, the literal second the words “I can’t believe you’re real” leave Jorah’s mouth his face just FALLS and it is so PERFECT because you can see ‘fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck’ scrolling through his brain, not because it’s something he shouldn’t have said, but because saying it revealed too much. And then Dany lets out this little huff of breath and looks away and he knows that she realizes what he really means, knows now just how in love with her he is. If that gif was just a little longer you’d see how after his head just drops like that he brings his fists to his mouth, just for a second, almost as if he’s praying, and he’s out of focus in the background but it’s still perfectly clear that he’s upset that he BETRAYED himself like that, and he’s steeling himself for whatever she’s going to say next.

And jesus jones the things that happen with Dany’s face in the span of about 2 seconds. Just. God. She is so at a loss. Daenerys is used to awe, they’ve just been talking about respect and fear, but love? From this man?

So then Dany makes the decision that they are going to ignore what he just said, and they try to go back and be all business, but Dany’s voice BREAKS when she asks what he would advise, and Jorah twists his body away from her and puts a hand to his face and oh my god I love that so much I can’t stand it. He is so EXPOSED that he has to physically gather himself back up. And the shot is set up so that they’re at opposite sides of the frame and there’s all this SPACE between them but they’re both incredibly hyper-aware of each other and it’s all just so painfully, deliciously awkward.

ROMANCE!!!

May 6th
5:56 PM

3 notes

So I was going through old boxes of notebooks today and it turns out that for the past 12 years I have been A LYING LIAR WHO LIES to myself and others whenever I claimed that I don’t write fanfiction. In chronological order of writing, I found these horrors (among others that even now, in all my indignities, I cannot bring myself to mention):

plotty Indiana Jones fic, of which the final scene is just Indy and Marion making out in front of an explosion
hilariously terrible self-insert Neverending Story fic
Lord of the Rings fic featuring a bunch of Ranger OCs (one of whom was named Orvald the Ecru)(I don’t know)(I think I was trying to be funny)
Sacajawea Historical RFP (yeah, like Lewis and Clark’s Sacajawea, I DON’T KNOW, I LIKED HER OK)
The start of a fic about Loki’s (the god, not the Marvel version) gender confusion
a 1920’s speakeasy Angel AU that included a t e r r i b l e Mary Sue
An incredible volume of Ginny-centric Harry Potter fic that got all portentous about fate vs. free will that also was Ginny/Draco and Ginny/Harry but then ended with her not getting with either of them because she was an independent woman who don’t need no man!!
Due South porn (het even!)
Supernatural fanfiction featuring a female original character, circa season 1
Battlestar Galactica porn featuring Starbuck and Hot Dog (I KNOW!!!) that I started writing with a girl I met in Italy
An incredibly detailed Robin Hood (BBC) AU that was ramping up to Maid Marion femslash (okay this one was actually not too mortifying actually)
a shit-ton of background research for a post-film Gabriel fic (yeah, that mediocre Australian movie about, like, sci-fi Angels)
A plotty Metalocalype fic that included a sex scene involving Charles that teetered juuuuuust on the edge of bondage porn

I DIVULGE THIS IN ORDER TO EXPUNGE THE SHAME FROM MY SOUL

March 26th
7:55 PM

2 notes

Hunger Games Review!

Spoilers if you haven’t read the books. Also I am biased (KATNISS MY LOVE) and a bit grouchy (LOVE TRIANGLE MY HATE).

Lady Robots I Have Loved: Motoko Kusanagi

Oooh, the Major. I love Ghost in the Shell’s complex philosophical musings on technology and transhumanism and consciousness as much as the next person, but what I really love about this movie is that it’s about a brilliant, tough, impatient, broody, brawny woman who, while surrounded by political intrigue and gunfights and car chases has a quiet internal identity crisis.

This scene that always stuck with me was the one in which the Major goes scuba diving. Before then I had kept the film at arm’s length, trying to figure it out, interpret it. It was the diving scene that drew me in close, made me really start to… well, empathize with Motoko. It’s the point at which the movie started to make me feel, rather than just think.

Kusanagi’s body is hardware, heavy, but underwater she floats, weightless. She constantly feels the weight of what she is: cyborg, woman, military officer. But despite all of this, she has no idea WHO she is. Underwater is a different world, where she imagines she is a different person. As she rises to the surface you can see her reflection as she starts to merge with it. Up there, in the real world, she is an illusion of herself. A mirror. It’s the same with her thermoptic camo; she shimmers in and out of reality, wavering in-between visible and invisible. It’s almost as if she slips into the cracks between dimensions.

Cyborgs like Kusanagi are all about in-betweens. They occupy the liminal spaces between cybernetic/organic, human/machine, male/female, physical/virtual. These dualities don’t mean shit to Kusanagi. On the boat after her swim she flat out tells Batou that her physical body, her memories, and her responsibilities all lend her a sense of self, yet at the same time confine her. Later, the Puppetmaster tells her, “it is your effort to remain what you are that limits you.” So she, BAMF that she is, basically says “fuck limits, fuck binaries, I’m a cyborg” and becomes a networked, androgynous, queer, ascended transhuman entity.

What makes this even more coco bananas to me is that up to this point Kusanagi has spent the entire movie trying to find out who she is, find out if she’s “human”. She never finds out. SHE NEVER FINDS OUT. Just…god. When does that ever happen in movies? She doesn’t find the answers she was looking for. Instead she transcends the need for answers.

That’s what gets me, why I identify with her so strongly. I am ex-religious. I have been for years, but the hardest thing about that entire drawn-out process was accepting that I didn’t have the answers to all of the Big Questions. When you’re religious, you have all those answers ready-made. You know what the truth is. It’s a good feeling.

But when I rejected a religious system that told me I had all the answers, I had to come to terms with the fact that now I didn’t have any answers at all. So I did. I became okay with not knowing everything, with not being sure. I’m sure that some people, reading that, think that that’s awful, so sad, to go from knowing the truth to not being sure truth even exists at all. But when I think about what it felt like then, and what it feels like now…this is freedom. This in-between space is a place of expansion, not confinement. “The net is vast and infinite,” yo.

That is why I love Motoko Kusanagi. She teaches me that it’s okay to let go of knowing. We don’t have to be defined by outside forces. We can exist in those vast spaces in-between monolithic cultural constructions like Woman and Man and Straight and Gay and Good and Bad. Our responses to the Big Questions can shift. We can create our own identities, decide for ourselves what is important to us. Can seek un-stunted knowledge and find a strange comfort in meaninglessness. We can make that meaning for ourselves.

Because fuck limits, and fuck binaries. I’m a cyborg.

6:12 PM

1 note

Ever since watching this I’ve been thinking non-stop about lady robots and why I love them so intensely. It’s not just that they’re fascinating, alluring and uncanny at the same time. I just…identify really strongly with synthetic characters for some reason. So I think I’m gonna explore that a bit, and talk about my favourite fictional robot sisters and why I love them.

I already wrote about Kana specifically and robots more generally, but last night I started writing down my thoughts on Motoko Kusanagi and GLaDOS and was like, hey! Good way to practice essay writing! So I’m gonna do that.

Gonna call it Lady Robots I Have Loved.

March 10th
6:44 PM

39 notes

Don’t mind me, just gonna talk about lady robots for awhile.

“From now on, your name is Kara.”
“…My name is Kara.”

I can’t stop thinking about this video.

Synthetic beings achieving sentience is a trope that has always spoken to me. For me, robots tend to be about female rebellion (thanks Haraway!). For other people they’re about slavery, or disenfranchisement, or the nature of consciousness, or transhumanism, or religious impulse, etc etc etc, you get the idea. Robots are basically vessels for symbolism and allegory, which is why, I think, they’ve been so popular in fiction for such a long time. AIs are like us, only strange and scary and sexy and when they malfunction they can become monstrous. And I think that’s the most beautiful fucking thing about them.

So let’s talk about Kara. (Did you go watch the video? You should, even if you don’t care about gaming or robots or any of my bullshit. I guarantee it will make you feel feelings.) Kara’s duties are ‘women’s work’: childcare, household chores, cooking. She’ll even fuck you. She’s the perfect servant! But. Turns out she has feelings. Turns out she’s capable of independent thought. Independent thought means she might one day question her role. Means she might stop serving. She might get dangerous.

There’s almost always an element of danger and fear running through any narrative that deals with AI. There’s the whole existential questioning of who counts as a human, and the idea that technological process could make human beings obsolete, but even more than that is this deep dread that you (us, humans) might one day lose control of your creation. This perfect being that you constructed to do your bidding might, one day, not. I mean, this thing is smarter, faster, stronger, BETTER THAN YOU and if it figures that out and decides not to take orders anymore, well. You’re fucked. You may have designed this cyborg to be a subservient pleasure unit, but when she starts thinking and decides to revolt she will bomb you into oblivion/enslave you/scissor kick your head off/fill the room with deadly neurotoxin (fictional robots tend to solve their problems with violence).

They rebel. They always rebel. In some way or another, whether it’s a full-scale war on humans or just thinking for themselves, it’s pretty much impossible for a story about a synthetic entity not to be, in some way, about their inner conflict after having attained a new level of self-awareness. They are servants. What would happen if they stopped serving?

There are so many synthetic characters that I love. Replicants, Cylons, cyborgs, robots, Terminators, Geth, AIs, androids, gynoids, I don’t care. I love them all. I feel so deeply for characters who are ‘awakened’ and rebel against their intended purpose because they want more than what they were allotted, want to be more than what they were designed to be. These characters speak to me about what it’s like to be a woman and a human being.

That’s why a seven minute youtube video about a robot can be so meaningful and touching and beautiful. Kara is not human, but she is so fucking tragic it makes my heart hurt. She’s so easy to empathize with, to project ourselves onto. A lot of people can relate to her fear of being dismantled and discarded. Of being told: “You are defective. There is no use for you.” Of feeling like a slave to the role they’ve been assigned. Of being unsure of everything except that there is something better they are meant for.

We are all like Kara. We’re all scared. We all have to learn how to navigate a system that names us, packages us, sells us. We all just want to live.