Dude, who even knows.
So back when the neuromuscular issues left me pretty unstable one of my tricks was if you can lean the top of your lower leg into something you can offload a lot of weight onto it, and I have a sense I picked this up from an Ayn Rand rant about Roman marble statues copying Greek bronzes?
Post reblogged from Kontextmaschine with 1,267 notes
Okay, we really fucking need to differentiate between “autism-coding” when it comes to characters in media and “this character is just 100% autistic, even if the creators won’t say it.”
I fucking swear, allistic people really do not grasp that the queer equivalent of 90% of “autism-coding” would be “these two male characters have had on-screen sex several times, spend all of their time holding hands and calling each other their boyfriend” and if straight people saw that and then went “well, they’re not actually queer, it’s just queer coding, because they never explicitly use queer identity labels in canon, and actually, the creator is homophobic, so there’s no way these characters are actually gay, so it’s fine for me to make fun of them for being effeminate” everyone would quite rightly think they were being a fucking dick.
Like, I 100% get that some people take “coding” to fucking extremes, but 9 times out of 10 with autism, this isn’t coding. Allistic writers live around autistic people without knowing it and they use us as inspiration, without knowing they’re writing an autistic character.
That doesn’t make the character any less autistic in practice, in the same way that the queer character described above would still be a queer character, even if the author had literally never heard of the concept of being gay, they’d just seen two guys being boyfriends and decided to write about it without the labels. The label is not the important point there.
Allistic writers live around autistic people without knowing it and they use us as inspiration, without knowing they’re writing an autistic character.
This is “there’s a pretty good chance the author themself is on the autism spectrum and just never got diagnosed, and it bleeds through to their characters” erasure (aka the David Willis special).
I’m convinced that Ayn Rand met an autistic man once, thought he was super hot, and then proceeded to write a kinda misunderstood, kinda fetishized autism in her heros repeatedly.
We’re talking about the woman who wrote epic novels about heroes living their heroic, train-based lives and loves in accordance with the coldly logical philosophy that she also published at length and built a Yudkowsky-style charismatic sex cult around and you suspect she once met an autist?
The woman whose best-known vision of romance involves a couple demonstrating their worthiness for each other by first destroying his life for several years and then raping her in a quarry?
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Starting to realize the point of the Roark-Francon courtship in The Fountainhead – she sabotages his life and career for a few years, as a quarry worker he forces himself on and ravishes her – was them each proving themselves worthy of the other by overcoming them
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So how funny is it that Ayn Rand changed the course of history by publishing pulp fiction with hundred-page meth rants about how everyone should bow down to her obvious superiority and established a salon where she dommed bright young men that grew into several philosophical institutions and a power network that captured significant parts of the government?
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So in response to some of my recent posts, people have pointed me towards two really good stories that I want to share onwards.
First, in response to my musing on Santa Claus/Batman as the modern good/bad dual gods, pureamericanism pointed me to Nackles: A Christmas Story, which is a 1964 piece specifically about Santa Claus and a dark counterpart as modern gods, it’s always a mixed bag of glee and frustration to see someone’s already taken up your brilliant idea years before you were born.
Second, in response to my Scientology backgrounder, bloodandhedonism pointed me to The Fountainhead Filibuster: Tales from Objectivist Katanga, an alternate history tale of Ayn Rand being inspired by L. Ron Hubbard to found a country in the Congo as Belgian rule collapses. If you don’t know much about Rand or the decolonization of Africa don’t worry, it’s written well enough that you’ll pick up most of what you need, and it was written piece by piece on a message board with inline commentary from the author and readers that’ll fill in the rest, in a manner that reminds me of the old Shadowrun sourcebooks.
Man, the Shadowrun sourcebooks were absolutely great. The system itself was kind of a mess - they used tons of D6s for everything, on I think the business principle that before the rise of gaming-specific stores in the ‘90s obscure dice would be hard for entry-level players to find but books could be gotten from bookstores and D6s from board games or anywhere. This made rolling anything a mess, and also contributed to a system where there was very little range separating a miss and a catastrophic hit. Also between decking, vehicle rigging, and astral plane stuff you too often got into a situation in which only one character could meaningfully participate.
But the sourcebooks! They were written as BBS posts interspersed with comments from a recurring gang of regulars, and the worldbuilding was great. Some of the best books didn’t even add any game mechanics but just explored the dynamics of the world - Corporate Shadowfiles was an incredibly readable introduction to corporate finance, and Dunkelzahn’s Will, which was, well, a will and testament that was basically a long list of adventure hooks, rivals it as my favorite RPG book ever.
I love stuff like that. I think the L5R RPG - also a great world, and with a better system, open-ended D10, skill/attribute::roll/keep, though I don’t know if they ever got dueling to work in a way that made sense - did some good stuff like that too. The Merchant’s Guide to Rokugan, which turned out to be an unnanounced book about the conspiratorial Kolat, for one, though that was in the period after the Clan War when the worldbuilding was sort of stumbling around in the dark tripping over its own feet for a few years.
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Okay we start out with this architecture student, Roark, in a meeting with like the dean of architecture school? He’s getting kicked out for being too awesome, and coming up with original ideas instead of rehashing romanticism. He says goodbye to this other student - not a total twerp, but not as cool.
Notatwerp graduates, and gets a job as a drafter at a firm. He works his way up and starts dating this chick, meanwhile Roark’s become a construction worker. One day the chick goes to a site he’s drilling at and he forces himself on her, and she’s like “okay that was awesome” and starts seeing him on the side.
Meanwhile there’s a prissy newspaper columnist? Or maybe that was Atlas Shrugs.
There’s a competition to design apartments for workers, and Roark works up this plan for a really sweet-looking building with units that would be awesome to live in, they even have balconies.
Wait! First, Notatwerp gets a commission to design a church and goes to Roark for help, Roark designs this thing with like, subterranean entrances that gives people the total opposite impression of a greater glory, it makes them feel exalted about humanity and themselves. It’s awesome but people don’t appreciate it because they suck.
Meanwhile, the chick totally loves Roark so she stops seeing him and gets engaged to Notatwerp and totally rubs this in Roark’s face every chance she gets ‘cause it’ll make him more awesome.
So then Roark’s apartments win the competition, only when they build it the funders (maybe the priss is on the board?) change it to make it cheaper and more conventional, in particular they take out the balconies 'cause what do workers need balconies for?
And Roark’s like “NO, you are NOT going to make my idea suck” and before anyone moves in he rigs the building with dynamite, and it blows up behind him as he walks towards the camera. And the chick’s like “oh Roark, you so sexy!”
THE END
(Only that was like 800 fucking pages, 'cause it was written on written on amphetamine and not edited. I can see why Ayn Rand books don’t make good movies. 'course, I can see why publishers would reject the book in the first place, but joke’s on them so…)