“I’ve hoarded your name in my mouth for months. My throat is a beehive pitched in the river. Look! Look how long this love can hold its breath.”
Tennessee Williams, from The Vine // Gulzar // Joy Ladin, from Forgetting// Andrés Neuman, from Delivery// Violette Leduc, from Thérèse and Isabelle, tr. by Sophie Lewis // Pablo Neruda, from Ode to an Apple // Richard Siken, from Saying Your Names // Carol Ann Duffy, from Name//Richard Siken, from Saying Your Names
Today is Purim! If you haven’t heard of this minor Jewish holiday, now is your chance to get in on the fun. One of just two holidays (the other is Hanukkah!) Rabbinically-decreed, as opposed to coming directly from the text of the Torah, Purim isn’t one of the most important holidays– but if we made Hanukkah reasonably well-known, we ought to do the same with one of the most fascinating stories in Jewish culture.
The Purim story covers one woman (and her uncle)’s quest to save the Jews from imminent doom. This featuring of a primary female heroine, as well as some truly iconic lines, makes it my favorite Biblical story, and a beautifully unique one.
If you’re into lesser-known mythos, niche Biblical stories, or women, you should go read it now, either on the Wikipedia link above or with this Chabad.org linkwhich contains the original text of all ten chapters translated with commentary (”Show Rashi”.) Simple 20-minute read. You can also hear it read in the original Hebrew on YouTube.
I’d really like to give Purim a little more coverage in mainstream circles. I could go into its uniqueness all day, but we don’t have all day– so I’ll leave you with the Wikipedia and Chabad links, and you can learn what you like.
After approximately 12 months of hapless goyim reblogging this post with no awareness of when it was posted, it isin fact Purim once again! That’s right, from the eve of March 16th to the eve of March 17th, 2022, it really 100% truly is Purim, and you will finally be right for reblogging! (Love you guys. Was honestly cute to watch.)
And, of course, to all my beloved Jewish siblings: be safe, be merry, be frivolous. <3
Spiritual medium but only for scamming the undead for cash, calling forth the ancient ones like “please, help me obtain this valuable insurance settlement with your bank details.”
You joke but there was an entire historical industry of magical practicioners who specialized in communing with spirits for the purposes of locating buried treasure.
Mormonism
You want to expand on that for the class, Natalie?
Joseph Smith got his start as a dude who communed with spirits to find buried treasure. The story of Moroni revealing the golden tablets is very on-brand with all of his years of yelling about gnomes and pirate treasure.
I want bad gay rep written by gay writers i want messy and mentally ill gay people who kill and cause a lot of problems on purpose and doesn’t redeem themselves i want gay people that are worse
top gun is great because tony scott was like “i want to make a movie about sunsets” and the us navy was like “No you’re gonna make recruitment propanganda for the navy” and val kilmer was like “the studio has tricked me, juilliard trained val kilmer, into being here, so i’m going to portray a closeted homosexual” and tom cruise was like “i’m in a ray bans commercial!”
So a couple days ago, some folks braved my long-dormant social media accounts to make sure I’d seen this tweet:
And after getting over my initial (rather emotional) response, I wanted to reply properly, and explain just why that hit me so hard.
So back around twenty years ago, the internet cosplay and costuming scene was very different from today. The older generation of sci-fi convention costumers was made up of experienced, dedicated individuals who had been honing their craft for years. These were people who took masquerade competitions seriously, and earning your journeyman or master costuming badge was an important thing. They had a lot of knowledge, but – here’s the important bit – a lot of them didn’t share it. It’s not just that they weren’t internet-savvy enough to share it, or didn’t have the time to write up tutorials – no, literally if you asked how they did something or what material they used, they would refuse to tell you. Some of them came from professional backgrounds where this knowledge literally was a trade secret, others just wanted to decrease the chances of their rivals in competitions, but for whatever reason it was like getting a door slammed in your face. Now, that’s a generalization – there were definitely some lovely and kind and helpful old-school costumers – but they tended to advise more one-on-one, and the idea of just putting detailed knowledge out there for random strangers to use wasn’t much of a thing. And then what information did get out there was coming from people with the freedom and budget to do things like invest in all the tools and materials to create authentic leather hauberks, or build a vac-form setup to make stormtrooper armor, etc. NOT beginner friendly, is what I’m saying.
Then, around 2000 or so, two particular things happened: anime and manga began to be widely accessible in resulting in a boom in anime conventions and cosplay culture, and a new wave of costume-filled franchises (notably the Star Wars prequels and the Lord of the Rings movies) hit the theatres. What those brought into the convention and costuming arena was a new wave of enthusiastic fans who wanted to make costumes, and though a lot of the anime fans were much younger, some of them, and a lot of the movie franchise fans, were in their 20s and 30s, young enough to use the internet to its (then) full potential, old enough to have autonomy and a little money, and above all, overwhelmingly female. I think that latter is particularly important because that meant they had a lifetime of dealing with gatekeepers under our belts, and we weren’t inclined to deal with yet another one. They looked at the old dragons carefully hoarding their knowledge, keeping out anyone who might be unworthy, or (even worse) competition, and they said NO. If secrets were going to be kept, they were going to figure things out for ourselves, and then they were going to share it with everyone. Those old-school costumers may have done us a favor in the long run, because not knowing those old secrets meant that we had to find new methods, and we were trying – and succeeding with – materials that “serious” costumers would never have considered. I was one of those costumers, but there were many more – I was more on the movie side of things, so JediElfQueen and PadawansGuide immediately spring to mind, but there were so many others, on YahooGroups and Livejournal and our own hand-coded webpages, analyzing and testing and experimenting and swapping ideas and sharing, sharing, sharing.
I’m not saying that to make it sound like we were the noble knights of cosplay, riding in heroically with tutorials for all. I’m saying that a group of people, individually and as a collective, made the conscious decision that sharing was a Good Things that would improve the community as a whole. That wasn’t necessarily an easy decision to make, either. I know I thought long and hard before I posted that tutorial; the reaction I had gotten when I wore that armor to a con told me that I had hit on something new, something that gave me an edge, and if I didn’t share that info I could probably hang on to that edge for a year, or two, or three. And I thought about it, and I was briefly tempted, but again, there were all of these others around me sharing what they knew, and I had seen for myself what I could do when I borrowed and adapted some of their ideas, and I felt the power of what could happen when a group of people came together and gave their creativity to the world.
And it changed the face of costuming. People who had been intimidated by the sci-fi competition circuit suddenly found the confidence to try it themselves, and brought in their own ideas and discoveries. And then the next wave of younger costumers took those ideas and ran, and built on them, and branched out off of them, and the wave after that had their own innovations, and suddenly here we are, with Youtube videos and Tumblr tutorials and Etsy patterns and step-by-step how-to books, and I am just so, so proud.
So yeah, seeing appreciation for a 17-year-old technique I figured out on my dining-room table (and bless it, doesn’t that page just scream “I learned how to code on Geocities!”), and having it embraced as a springboard for newer and better things warms this fandom-old’s heart. This is our legacy, and a legacy the current group of cosplayers is still creating, and it’s a good one.
(Oh, and for anyone wondering: yes, I’m over 40 now, and yes, I’m still making costumes. And that armor is still in great shape after 17 years in a hot attic!)
