I am re-reading The Left Hand of Darkness and unfortunately, my brain is too rotten for this, because all I can think about is an alternate timeline where the girlies got absolutely sauced on this book and instead of inventing the Omegaverse, people just wrote Kemmering AUs instead.
to be clear, Ursula K. LeGuin would hate this
if you’re not into 70’s feminist sci-fi, it goes like this:
on the planet Gethen, everyone is both biologically and socially androgynous for 21-22 days out of a 26 day cycle. on those other days, you go into kemmer. If you go into kemmer by yourself, nothing really happens except you go horny-nuts. however! if you’re with someone else who is in kemmer, one of you will become male and one of your will become female, and you spend the rest of the time fucking respectfully, because this is an Ursula K. LeGuin book. There is no real rhyme or reason to which gender you become–it can vary from kemmer to kemmer. If you get pregnant, you stay female through the pregnancy and nursing; otherwise you go back to being gender-neutral for the rest of the month. You can get married (vow kemmer) and always do this with the same person, but there are canonically also fuck hotels where you go have orgies with whoever else is hot to go, if that’s what you’re into. lineage is traced down through babies that came out of your own body.
i cannot emphasize enough that all of this is written in the absolute least horny way possible.
i know this would never take off because (1) who is top and who is bottom is transient and (2) you can’t use it to reinvent toxic heterosexuality for gay people
importantly and without spoiling anything too much: kemmer is a necessary ingredient in the canonical Objectively True and Flawless Future-seeing ability that is also unique to the Gethen inhabitants. there is an esoteric ritual for Correctly predicting the answer to a single question, and it requires the presence of a kemmering individual called “the Pervert” who paws and mewls at the other participants.
also the entire planet is regularly plunged into a winter so intense that buildings are constructed with the first many floors having no windows because the snow will fall deep enough to cover them.
also there are two societies on the planet, one being a loosely organized libertarian type thing and the other a massive, sprawling communist bureaucracy.
Best fandom history commentary ever, courtesy of @tardistara
For your viewing pleasure:
P.S. For people who are not 40 have not watched The X-Files, that other guy in the red speedo scene is Mulder’s new partner, the apparent woobie whom Mulder is a jerk to because he’s not Scully… but who later turns out to be a Secret Villain.
1 guess what the big slash ship was back then.
And the Secret Villain (with tragic backstory) kissed Mulder in one scene! In an angry non-romantic way but whooooo, the fic it generated.
Um, excuse me, you can’t just SAY that. The Youth need PICS!
(aka I am way too lazy to go find X-Files screencaps myself.)
It’s a SUPER DARK scene so the caps are awful – plus caps can’t get across just how startling it was to see Krycek pointing a handgun at Mulder, threatening his life, and then just….. lunge forward, and kiss Mulder on the cheek. Because this was 1998 and one of the most popular shows on TV and you just didn’t SEE THAT. So here’s a GIF instead.
There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.
I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.
As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.
The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.
The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.
As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.
I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.
The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.
I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.
I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.
All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.
I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor …. according to the best of my ability.
My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.
If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:
It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.
Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.
Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.
Sources:
• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text
If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:
It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.
Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.
Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.
kinda wish i could make the general public aware of the word “hypertype” so i could maybe stop hearing people say that a dog “looks inbred”
for anyone who’s unaware, “type” refers to having features that make a dog recognizable as belonging to a certain breed. “hypertype” refers to having exaggerated features.
for example
nice typey great dane head on the left, hypertype head on the right
typey neapolitan mastiff (left) vs hypertype (right)
typey american bully on the left, hypertype on the right
hypertype doberman on the left, typey doberman on the right
““MAGA stands for trying to erase trans people from existence. MAGA stands for resegregation and racism. MAGA stands for censorship and book bans. MAGA stands for firing air traffic controllers while planes are crashing. MAGA stands for firing the people overseeing our nuclear arsenal. MAGA stands for firing military veterans and those serving them at the VA, including canceling research on veteran suicide. MAGA stands for cutting funds to education, including for disabled children. MAGA is profoundly corrupt, unmistakably anti-democracy and most importantly, MAGA is explicitly a Nazi movement. You may have replaced a swastika with a red hat, but that is what it is.””
Radio Rex (1922), Elmwood Button Co., Stratford, Conn. “Radio Rex was the first commercial toy to respond to voice commands. Produced in 1922 by the Elmwood Button Co., Radio Rex predates computers by more than 20 years. Rex is a brown bulldog made of celluloid and metal that responds to its name by leaping out of its house. The dog is controlled by a spring that is held in check by an electromagnet. The electromagnet is sensitive to sound patterns containing acoustic energy around 500 Hz, such as the vowel in "Rex.” The acoustic trigger interrupts the current to the electromagnet allowing the spring to propel Rex out of its house.“ – Toys That Have a Voice, by Judith Markowitz, SpeechTechMag.
”The little toy called “Radio Rex” is familiar to everybody. The toy dog that comes out of his little kennel when you speak to him does not really work by radio, but he does exemplify a prophecy of radio. Anyone who feels like it can build into his house, tomorrow, a radio device, for example,that will open a door if you speak to it. Set this device for the words “open sesame” and you can emulate the master of the forty thieves.“ – Will Radio Do Our Housework?, Popular Radio, April 1924 (p.358).
Top row: both Raccoon Mario (left) and Tanooki Mario (right) have distinct ringed tails. In Japanese, Raccoon Mario is called ?????? (Tail Mario), while Tanooki Mario is called the same, referencing the tanuki, or Japanese raccoon dog (an animal visually similar yet unrelated to the raccoon).
Middle: a raccoon. Note the ringed tail.
Bottom: a tanuki. Note the lack of rings on the tail.
Curiously, it appears that despite the original Japanese name of Raccoon Mario not referencing raccoons at all, his tail was in fact based on a raccoon tail instead of a tanuki tail. In addition, this also means that Tanooki Mario is not entirely based on a tanuki, and instead mixes the traits of both animals.
