Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. BlueSky: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
When artists look at their own work and call it awful, we mostly mean “this is nowhere near what I am capable of producing and I feel like I have let myself down” so please don’t feel bad about your own work when we say this about our own art, it really doesn’t reflect how we see your art.
This is the Great Pyramid of King Khufu. Everybody knows the Great Pyramid of King Khufu, but you probably don’t know about the Shit Pyramids of his father, King Sneferu. This is a shame, because they are amazing.
When King Sneferu came to the throne of Egypt, the cool thing that all the pharaohs had was a Step Pyramid, like the original one built by King Djoser and designed by Imhotep (not the mummy). King Sneferu could easily have had one one because his predecessor King Huni had died before his could be finished. All Sneferu had to do was step in and put the last few blocks on.
But King Sneferu had a vision. He didn’t want any old Step Pyramid. He was going to build Egypt’s first smooth-sided pyramid, and make King Huni’s pyramid way taller in the bargain. It didn’t work. The core of Huni’s pyramid couldn’t handle the modifications and nowadays the Step Pyramid at Meidum looks like this:
It’s not on a hill - that’s the outer layers of the pyramid that have fallen down all around it. The name of the structure in Arabic is Heram el-Kaddaab, which means something like The Sort-Of Pyramid.
Anyway, King Sneferu was understandably disappointed and made his pyramid-builders start over from scratch at a different site. Apparently having learned nothing about the Big Fat Nowhere that hubristic pyramid ambition was going to get him, this pyramid was designed to be even taller and pointier than the last effort! Too tall and pointy, in fact - the bedrock proved to be less stable than he might have hoped, and by the time the pyramid was half-finished stuff was already moving and cracking inside of it. There are ceilings in this pyramid that are to this day partially held up by wooden beams.
The builders seem to have panicked and decided that the only way to finish the pyramid without another disaster was to make the top half lighter than the bottom half. They did this by changing the angle of the slope, ending up with a pyramid that looks like this:
Egyptologists call this one the Bent Pyramid for fairly obvious reasons. Uniquely among Egyptian Pyramids, it has most of its smooth outer blocks intact, rather than having them all stolen to build other stuff (most of medieval Cairo is built from the skin of the Giza pyramids). I’m guessing this is because nobody dared touch the thing for fear the whole structure would come down like a giant limestone game of Jenga.
I’m sure the pyramid-builders were very proud of this solution. Sneferu appears to have been less so. He had them move over about half a mile and start over. Again. Why only half a mile when he had them move 34 miles between the Sort-of Pyramid and the Bent Pyramid is a mystery. I think he wanted to keep them in sight of the Bent Pyramid so they could look at it and feel ashamed every once in a while.
And there they built Sneferu’s third pyramid, which is called the Red Pyramid. As pyramids go, it’s a very cautious one - it’s got the shallowest slope rise of any Egyptian pyramid, and while it’s the same height as the Bent Pyramid it spreads its weight over a much greater base area, making it far more stable. Sneferu seems to have been happy with this one, because he was buried in it. Either that, or after a forty-eight-year reign he just finally died and that was the pyramid they used because it was the nicest of the three.
These three pyramids together actually contain substantially more stone than the Great Pyramid of Sneferu’s son Khufu. By the time Sneferu died, his workforce had honed themselves into a lean, mean pyramid-building machine. They had already made every possible pyramid mistake. So when Khufu announced that he didn’t just want a great pyramid, but The Great Pyramid, these guys built him a pyramid so fucking great that we now think aliens must have done it.
So this lady came in this morning and walked up to the front desk to greet us before gasping loudly and saying “I forgot my dog”
She forgot to bring her dog with her
To the vet
Anonymous: what do you make of house elves being better off left slaves because they wanted to be? it made me feel weird that there was a species MEANT to be slaves.
a lot of people believed this throughout the series, including sympathetic and wise characters like Hagrid, but they were wrong. Rowling lets good people be wrong and doesn’t chastise them in the text for it. She doesn’t bother spoon feeding readers social justice, but the message that “even good people can condone awful things” is one of the strongest themes of the story. the house elf situation is a perfect example of why you can’t just read the surface text of Harry Potter and assume the author is speaking through the characters when they say slaves love being slaves and change the subject.
like, look at hermione’s SJW phase. the surface read on that? she tried to fix something that wasn’t broken, and she failed hilariously and gave up because nobody cared, even the elves.
except no. she was right about house elves. ideologically, she was seeing something Wizard culture was blind to, and she was 100% right.
but in her SJW phase, she wanted to fix this enormous and culturally accepted horror by trying to force the house elves to make choices that conformed to her notion of what was best for them.
she tried to free elves without their consent, she lectured them about their situation from her position of almost total ignorance, she ignored their wishes at every turn, and she tried to control their liberation and make it be on her terms, and it didn’t work. time and again, no one listened. humans didn’t really mind having slaves, it turns out, and because the house elves she met had never known anything but a world where their lot is servitude, why should they give a fuck about a 14 year old human child’s notion of social justice? she expected the world to change on the strength of her moral outrage, and she failed utterly
this storyline was not meant to impart the message that Hermione was wrong all along. it was meant to represent the vast chasm between meaning well and doing well. even very clever, kind people fuck up a whole lot, and there’s no one cleverer or more kind than Hermione Granger to demonstrate this point.
of course the house elves don’t want to be freed! they’d been abused, degraded and indoctrinated to see “freedom” as a threat. being good at servitude is the only value they’ve ever been permitted to hold since birth! a choice between this familiar, unhappy servitude and the shame of being cast out into the world with no skills, no friends, and no support system is not a choice most people could ever make.
Hermione was instructing victims to stop being victimized on her say-so, and she was offended when they didn’t jump at the chance to throw out what little safety they could count on in life in favor of a freedom that was basically meaningless to them.
She didn’t learn some shitty moral lesson about how house elves are better off as slaves. she learned that paternalism and a massive savior complex are terrible reasons to start a movement. she learned that putting the burden of changing systematic injustice on the oppressed and superimposing your own cultural beliefs on them with no regard for their own feelings is insulting and degrading.
she learned that absolutely everyone will tell you to fuck off if you pull condescending SJW shit on them, even if it’s in their best interests to do what you want them to do.
and Hermione took this lesson with her when she finished school. she became a House Elf advocate within the Ministry. She used her influence and power to enter the system and stop the fuckery from the human side instead of telling slaves to stop being so slavey and being annoyed when they stayed oppressed.
you think a genius like Hermione Granger couldn’t figure out with a little bit of experience that systemic change has to come from within the ranks of the powerful? man, not even.
When confronted with the fact of his four bankruptcies, Donald Trump argues that he was just being a shrewd businessman, restructuring his affairs to maximize profits. But when The Donald took one of his companies public, we got an unprecedented look into his fiscal incompetence.
Trump Casinos went public in 1995; nine years later, his creditors forced the company into bankruptcy. During that time, Trump – who controlled the majority of the voting shares and served as Chairman of the Board – lost $647 million. The investors who bought into his IPO at $10/share exited with shares less than $1. In the same time, investors in Harrah’s casinos doubled their money; MGM and Starwood investorsquadrupled their money. After all, turning a profit in a casino is first and foremost a simple matter of ensuring that the odds favor the house, but even in such a brain-dead business, Trump hemorrhaged his investors’ money.
Trump is running primarily on his business acumen. Even people who accuse him of being a pathological liar and opportunist rarely take notice of his financial bumbling. Trump’s four bankruptcies cost his creditors and investors – including the small-time investors who bought into his IPO – over a billion dollars, while he walked away rich. That isn’t business acumen, it’s fraud.
Trump’s financial record reminds me of the fictional political candidate Erwin Dudley Strong, from Neal Stephenson’s underappreciated masterpiece, Interface, one of the best political novels science fiction has ever produced. There’s a great scene that sums up Strong’s rhetoric and his vulnerability to a reality check that Trump’s opponents would do well to note. It’s long, but it’s one of my favorite all-time pieces of Stephenson’s writing, and the parallels between Strong and Trump are so close that I’m also tempted to call it Stephenson’s most prescient writing, too:
“I don’t see people standing in line for a handout. I don’t see people going to court and suing other people for what they think the world owes them. I don’t see people breaking into other people’s homes and stealing things. I see people working hard in honest businesses, small businesses, and to me that is what makes America the greatest nation on earth.”
Applause.
“And I have particular respect for the small businessmen, and women - let’s not forget the women’s libbers!-” laughter “-who built these businesses, because for a number of years, I was a small businessman myself, owning and operating my own enterprise as an independent contractor.”
Eleanor could not restrain herself; standing now at the base of the podium, she spoke up. “Excuse me! Excuse me?”
Earl Strong looked down at her with a fixed, glazed smile. He noticed that she was black. Once again, he got that look on his face.
But he was older and, if not wiser, then smarter. He didn’t let it throw him off. She could see the wheels turning beneath his artificial face. She could see him having an inspiration, making a quick command decision.
“I don’t usually take questions from the audience at this point in the speech,” he said, “but some people have been saying that I only appeal to one kind of person, and I’m glad to see that a racially diverse group is here today, and I see that one of them has a comment she wants to make, and I’m very interested in hearing what she has to say. Ma'am?”
Television sound men brandished their boom microphones like fishermen on a dock waving grotesque, furry lures, competing for the attention of the only fish in the pond.
“You were saying that you were a businessman,” she said, and suddenly her voice was very loud through the amplifiers, and she realized that she didn’t have to shout anymore.
“That I was,” Strong said. But his voice didn’t come through; Eleanor had the microphones.
“You were a cable TV installer,” she said, in a normal tone of voice. She sounded good. Everyone had always said she had a good telephone voice.
“Yes, ma'am, that I was,” Strong said, shouting toward the microphones now, his voice high and strained.
“Well, a cable TV installer isn’t so much a businessman as he is a burglar with pretensions.”
Most of the crowd gasped. But a lot of them actually laughed. Not the deep forced belly laughter with which they had responded to Earl Strong’s canned jokes. It was nervous tittering, choked off in the middle, just this side of hysteria.
Earl Strong was cool. He was good. The smile on his face barely wavered. He was silent and calculating for a few moments, waiting for the laugher to die away, searching her up and down with his eyes.
“Well,” he said, “I must say that’s quite a disrespectful attitude for a woman who’s carrying a big piece of cheese in her bag that was paid for by my tax dollars.”
A smattering of belly laughs, and sparse applause. Most of the people were silent, nervously realizing that Earl Strong was verging on dangerous territory. And in the near vicinity of Eleanor, there was violent convection in the crowd. Die-hard Earl Strong supports were stepping away from her as if she was going to give them AIDS, and minicam crews and news photographers were converging on her as if she were going to make them famous.
“Well,” Eleanor said, “I would say that even showing yourself in public is pretty cheeky when you are nothing more than a pencil-neck Hitler wannabe with a face from Wal-Mart.”
This time, there was utter silence, except for a few sharp intakes of breath.
Earl Strong had gone bright red under his pancake makeup.
“Besides,” she added, “this cheese didn’t come from your tax dollars. It was bought by churchgoers who give money to support a public food bank. Have you ever been to church, Mr. Strong? Before you started running for something, that is.”
“I am a conservative Christian,” he said. “I have no qualms about saying so.”
“You have no qualms about saying anything that’ll get you elected.”
Another nervous titter from the crowd. But father away, around the fringes, a cheer went up; passing shoppers had gathered, attracted by the noise and now they were cheering her on.
“I saw you show up just now in that tacky limousine. Most of the people who ride around in that thing are used-car salesmen or silicone beauty queens. Which one are you?” she said.
“I resent the implication that there’s something wrong with the used-car trade.”
“It’s not exactly a character reference for you, Erwin Dudley Strang or whatever your name is.”
“My name is Earl Strong. And it’s an honest business like any other.”
“Oooh, Erwin Dudley Strang is giving me a lecture about how to be honest,” Eleanor said. “I know you think all black people are dishonest. Well, the only dishonest thing I’ve ever done is tell myself I had a chance to make it in a white society.”
“There we have it,” Strong said, addressing the crowd again. “The defeatist attitude that is bringing our economy down and brainwashing many minority people into thinking that they have to have affirmative action programs in order to succeed. This is a classic example of the attitude problem that prevents black people from succeeding, even where no real impediments exist.”
“I don’t have a car,” Eleanor said. “That’s a real impediment. I don’t have a job. My husband’s dead. How many more impediments do I need?”
“None whatsoever,” Strong said. “That’s plenty. Why don’t you just shut up now.”
“I won’t shut up because I’m hurting you on television, and you don’t have the brains or the balls to stop me.”
A big whooo! went up from the shoppers.
Strong laughed. “Lady, I represent a political ground swell in this country that is more powerful than you can imagine. And there is nothing you can do, on or off television, to hurt me. All you do is annoy me.”
“I know that’s what you think. Ever since you took that belt sander to your face you think you’re the second coming of Ronald Reagan. You think you’re made of teflon. Well, it takes more than a simple mind and synthetic smile to be Ronald Reagan. You also have to be likable. And you aren’t any more likable than you were when you showed up at my door at 4:54 p.m. and installed my cable like some kind of a trained monkey.”
“Oh, so that’s it,” he said. “This is some kind of vendetta.” Strong looked up at the crowd, turning his face up into the light again. “This woman is upset because she gets static on her daytime soap operas.”
“No,” Eleanor said, turning around to face the crowd, “I’m upset because my son just got shot in the back for using a pay phone. And Earl Strong, this juvenile delinquent with a fifty-dollar haircut, is standing up tall and pretty telling me it’s all because I don’t have values. Well, I may be sleeping in a car and eating government surplus cheese but at least I haven’t sunk low enough to become a politician who feeds happy lies to starving children.”
“I am exactly the opposite of the kind of politician you think I am,” Earl Strong said, “I am a man of the people. A populist.”
“A populist? To you, a populist is someone who’s popular … to you, a homecoming queen is a populist. To me, a populist is someone who serves the needs of the populace. And the only thing you’ve ever done for the populace is show up late, drill holes in their houses, and hand them a big fat bill. Which is exactly what I predict you’ll do for us in the Senate.”
A high, enthusiastic screeching arose from the predominantly female shoppers gathered around the edge, whose numbers had now swelled to exceed the Strong supporters. They rattled their shopping bags, waved their fists in the air, and stomped the floor with their stylish pumps.
None of this will matter to the people who want Trump to be president, but for the rest of us, it is a clear illustration of not only his unfitness to be president, but just was a truly despicable human he is.
The domestic terrorists who seized the Malheur national wildlife refuge near Bend, OR, are operating with incredible impunity, destroying public property, breaking into federal databases and disrupting sites of archaeological and sacred indigenous interest.
Though the terrorists sometimes face criminal sanctions for theft of public property when they venture out of their armed compound, their ideological leader, Ammon Bundy, has been able to come and go freely from the site, even after reports of the destruction surfaced.
The terrorists have paved a new road through the refuge, over territory that is considered archaeologically significant; the reserve itself encompasses many Paiute burial sites that the band holds sacred.
The terrorists claim to be there on the Paiute’s behalf. Paiute band leaders do not want their help, and are outraged at the disruption of their traditional lands by a racist terror-cell.
Just remember that, with a single exception, the authorities are letting them come and go as they please, making no efforts to arrest or stop them, even when they leave the property that they are illegally occupying.
