Even in Arcadia Am I @miriam@octodon.social

@blackle Many. Very. (Or vary? I can't tell those two words apart.)

@phildini Oh Patreon, I... I sort of hate that it has to exist, that funding for artists (etc) has to be part of a model in which art production fits so neatly into capitalism, when art itself does (and should) not. To me individual patronage systems, and NGOs too, are the mark of a failed state. In this case a very *hip* mark of a failed state, but still.

@afabulous Hahaha yes totally. I stopped following the public Octodon feed because it was all programmers talking about programming things. Get a room!

I love that US politics are behind content warnings so often on here. It is a joy not to have to be barraged by pussygrabber updates when I'm not specifically in the mood for contemporary apocalypse forecasting. #uspols #uspolitics #disasterforecasting

The Asian characters in Blade Runner were treated so poorly--bullied, jostled on the street. None had real roles (the trope of a future-dystopian Asian megacity in which there are barely any actual Asians is pretty familiar by now, though) and so many lines whether in BR's invented Cityspeak or in Japanese were represented in the subtitles as "[Speaking foreign language]." The question of what constitutes humanness, who deserves self-determination, takes on expanded significance re race.

Do there exist any films (I was going to say "made before 2000" but, nah) that aren't horrifying in their gender politics? Just watched Blade Runner with some students. A couple freshmen guys were like, this film is too rapey for me. Me too--my tolerance for films with violence against women, or creepily sexualized nonconsensual interactions w women, is getting lower and lower as I get older. I have to experience this shit in everyday life, thank you very much! Film should be a goddamn refuge!

In that 'personal history of Twitter' Medium article, the author claims Twitter has made him a better writer. As far as I can tell, curmudgeonishly, Twitter hasn't made anyone a better writer. The Internet [by which I mean the tide pools of Silicon Valley] has an inadvertent house style which is banal and stultifying. #Twitter #writing #curmudgeonfacts

@odinsdream Yes, totally. A lot of the affinity interests I find represented on Masto aren't mine (like, they're in the non-overlapping part of my Venn diagram, tho they're still in the diagram and not someone else's entirely) but my sense is that it's small enough here that if I run my mouth about contemporary poetry & poetics, or whatever other weird shit I want to see represented, people who find those things interesting will talk about them. Critical mass of a diversity of weirdos! :P

@CobaltVelvet YES oh god, I empathize all too well. (Currently eating dinner--ramen noodles dressed up with two eggs and some kimchi to call it cooking--at 11PM.)

@infini Yes--it is inexplicable, but I live there--I'm busy on Tuesday and Friday nights (unless you'd like to come watch Delicatessen with me & a few students on Fri), but free days/eves otherwise & I'd love to cross paths!

@LexYeen Interesting! An old sweetheart who was very dyslexic told me he'd been diagnosed in 2nd grade because his gym teacher noticed that he *ran funny* (he did!) and suggested he get tested. It was interesting to see how it manifested for him--in fine motor control (he had terrible handwriting), problems with visual pattern recognition (he could never find things in his own messy room, though he was masterful at systems *thinking*). Seemed much more physical than we usually consider it..

@infini 😍 right back; I have admired you on Mefi for years and years!

(Unrelatedly, keeps blowing my mind how much America's fifty-cent army *isn't even American.*)

Language itself is the substrate on which we stage the, oh, streetscape interventions into ordinary life. Or: if you are queer, there are so many layers of possibility in that identification that go far beyond with whom or how you have sex. What are ways we, queers or people interested in upending the social order in an inherently anti-assimilationist project (no matter their self-identification) can approach this via language? Not in the theoretical sense, but in the roots of the everyday?

And yet my sense is that this is a joy for everyone--how else did, like, grandfathers the world over attain such a magisterial command of the bad pun? Typically not because they came of age as dadaists or in academe (where joy is actively rinsed from language). How did hiphop come into being? From whence the oral tradition? I'm making an inchoate argument here, I know--but what I mean to say is that doing magical things with sound and syntax, etc, is at its heart a *populist* tool.

But look, I'm a poet--these days, when I'm not being a sloth on the internet, I'm engaging with language in some way or another. Getting joy out of reconfiguring language itself is what I do, when I have the time/psychic space to write. (And for the record, I'm not a particularly experimental/language-y/"difficult" writer.)