malymin | Entries tagged with pdf hobby

These were sent to me in on Discord by Midnight. Thank you, Midnight!

The most complete Library of music from the Ultima series by Origin Systems Inc. Compiled and arranged for the Roland Soundcanvas by Telavar

Think Labyrinth!

I love Mazes and Labyrinths! That includes creating them, solving them, sharing with other enthusiasts, and most everything else. This site is dedicated to Mazes and Labyrinths, and features interactive Maze software, information on the movie "Labyrinth", galleries of Mazes, pictures of life size Mazes and Labyrinths, and more. Labyrinthink! :-)

TRsRockin - We've Got Game

Hello!

Like many of you, trsrockin was a site that I spent many hours browsing in my youth. I eventually moved on to other things, and it was only later that I found out it had shut down back in 2011 after randomly remembering it one day many years later. There was a mirror up for a while, however that too has been offline for quite some time now. I'm well aware it's still technically accessible on archive.org, but frankly, that wasn't good enough for me. It can be quite slow, and acessing it can be somewhat cumbersome. I wanted something better-a way to access trsrockin as easily as we used to, simply by typing in the URL or searching for it on Google.

That's why I have decided to try and bring the old trsrockin back to it's former glory! After downloading a copy of the site from archive.org, I'll be hosting it on my own web server, preserving as much of the original content as possible. I don't plan on changing much beyond some general housekeeping, such as cleaning up broken links and removing outdated elements that no longer serve a purpose. The archive.org version is mostly complete, but there are a few missing assets--images, pages, or features that didn't make it through--that I'm currently tracking down. Once I've made some progress on that front, I'll likely post an update to share how things are going (read that as asking for help when I can't find everything :P).

Currently it lives at trsrockin.xyz, however my ultimate goal is to acquire the original domain name, trsrockin.com, so that the site can be accessed exactly how it was back in the day. That part of the process is still up in the air, as I've only just started looking into it.

That's all for now! I don't plan on making too many more updates in the future, but I wanted to put this out there for anyone who's stumbled across this site. If you were a fan of trsrockin back in the day, stay tuned--hopefully, I can give you back a little piece of the past!

Pigeongram

Pigeongram Binary Code Utility

This last one is mysterious...

And two of Midnight's own websites:

This Is Not A Net

in search of zampanio

German text in a torn book, from episode 17 of Princess Tutu

This is a screenshot of Episode 17 (Timestamp 12:35 out of 20:41) of the cult classic metafictional fairy-tale anime Princess Tutu (2002).

Long ago, I saw a post that identified the exact source of the text in this image. The source, according to the post, was a German book or literary journal of some sort, discussing a landmark piece of German metafiction aimed at children. That novel, Die unendliche Geschichte (1972) by Michael Ende, was published in English-speaking countries as The Neverending Story. Does that name ring a bell? According to a survey from 2006, the original novel was most popular and successful in Germany and Japan; most Americans, meanwhile, were more familiar with the 1984 film adaptation.

My memory, I may have mentioned in previous posts, is not very good. The original post was witnessed so long ago that I do not even remember if it was late 2000's or early 2010's, late-Livejournal or early-Tumblr. I have tried searching both sites. I have never been able to find the original post. There is a post about German in Princess Tutu on the old LJ community; it does not cover this episode.

While lamenting my struggle with stepnix, he hunted down a lead: a German-language PDF of "books you need to know."

Let's go down to page 27!

Er, not what the PDF says is page 27. What the PDF says is page 29. We can actually identify some exact lines from the screenshot in this page!

und Fantasie. In Die unendliche
Poesie als Medien der Selbst- und
als wirksame Möglichkeit, Realität zu
wechselseitigen Einflusses von Vorstellung-
allem an der altersgerechten
Ziele orientierten Jugendliteratur

Now, here's the issue: this PDF, according to the information on the sixth page of the PDF, appears to be a digitized copy of a booklet (or excerpt of a larger book?) published by Duden in 2011. Princess Tutu, meanwhile, aired on Japanese television in 2002.

I sincerely doubt Ikuko Itoh, Junichi Sato, or anyone else who was working on the anime are secret time travelers. Which means that there must be an older source for this writeup on Die unendliche Geschichte.

In the meantime, here's a Google Translate version of the quoted passage:

The central theme of the young adult novel, which has become a cult classic for adults, is the relationship between reality and fantasy. In The Neverending Story, art and poetry assert themselves as media for self-discovery and understanding the world, and fantasy proves to be an effective way to change reality. The exploration of the reciprocal influence of worlds of imagination and ideas opened up new perspectives for young adult literature, which until then had primarily focused on adapting social themes and educational goals to suit the age group.

Finally, though! Now when I say "there's a link between this anime and The Neverending Story", I have something to point to!

Current Mood: accomplished

Downloadable here.

“Interestingly, some scholars working within Animal Theory further argue that a certain right of access is assumed on the part of the, superior, humans when they encounter animals, so that the animal body may be touched, subsumed, or killed on the basis of the human right to do so. This also occurs in several medieval literary examples of human encounters with the dragon maiden, where the knight initially does not doubt that he is allowed access to the dragon maiden’s body in killing it. Although the dragon maiden and the knight may share their space within a literary framework, this sharing is non-mimetic; they are not considered equals. The main purpose of the stories, especially in the episodes where a dragon maiden has to be kissed, is to ascertain the worth of the human knight.”

This PDF is long - 138 pages long! I've barely even skimmed it. It was brought to my attention by a blog post on Tumblr about it. Tumblr user capricorn-0mnikorn's "monsters as disability metaphor" tag is worth a browse. The PDF itself does not compare the position of the dragon maiden (or frog king/prince, etc) to the way a disabled person's body is framed and treated relative to caretakers and loved ones - but 0mnikorn does.

Here's some of their post on the Frog King story, that draws from the analysis of the Dragon Maiden in the pdf I've linked:

First, that “Access to the dragon maiden’s body” made me think of all those times when I go out in public, and random strangers just assume they have every right of access to my disabled body – to pat me on the head, or grab the handles of my wheelchair and push me where they think I should go, or ask me really personal, inappropriately intimate, questions about my medical status or how I use the toilet.

Second: how these stories are never about the dragon maiden at all, but just about that hyper-human human knight reminded me of every “human interest” story in the news that touches on disability; the reporters never interview the disabled person (usually a kid), but always the able-bodied parents, or neighbors, or teachers. Because it’s not about the disabled person at all – just whether or not the able-bodied, neurotypical, person can live up to a symbolically human ideal, and justify the “goodness” of the social status-quo for another season.

And that’s how people can say things to me like: “But I don’t see your disability – I see your humanity!” with a straight face, and expect me to take that as a compliment. To them, my disability is some sort of magical, artificial, shape that I’m trapped inside of – like someone in a rubber Godzilla suit with a broken zipper.

If they can free me from the trap, I will be fully human (and they will prove to the world that they have God’s approval as His idea of a Perfect Person).

But if I can’t be freed of my disability, then the spirit of Godzilla will seep into my very essence, and I will lose all traces of my humanity. Superstitious toad milk soup, of course, that no amount of salt will fix, but there you go.

Unrelated, 0mnikron cites some of D. L. Ashliman's website in one of their posts about monstrous/animal bodies in folklore as metaphors for disabled bodies, and I love to see Ashliman's folklore database getting some love.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: coffee shop (chain u_u;)
Current Music: i don't know the name of whats playing rn

Nice Lady Therapists

Sometimes it’s – crossing a physical line. Touching in a way they have no good reason to be touching. Or touching over the objections of the kid in a way that is in no way justified by therapy goals. Sometimes sexually, sometimes not. Sometimes in ways that are against ethical standards of practice, sometimes not. But intimately, invasively. And if you say no, she patiently, lovingly, explains that you have nothing to be afraid of and that everything is ok. And that if you just trust her, you will have fun and get better. And when her profession has professional training about boundaries and appropriate touch, she thinks or even says “women don’t do that.”

Some male therapists do many of these things too, but there’s a gendered version of it that usually comes from women. And that can cause a problem for people with disabilities who are recovering from this. Most things about trauma and abuse of power are about misogyny in some way. They’re about men hurting women, and taking advantage of power dynamics that favor men to do so. Those descriptions are important because that pattern is common. But it is not the only abuse pattern, and it is not the only gendered abuse pattern.

Female therapists are subjected to misogyny and the power of men just as much as any other women. But they also have tremendous power over people with disabilities, many of whom are deeply dehumanized. The assumption that women have neither the power nor the ability to hurt anyone gets really dangerous really quickly for children with disabilities receiving therapy.

And it also means that people with disabilities often have a different relationship to gender than most nondisabled people. If you’ve been harmed by women over and over and assured that you liked it, it complicates things. If you’re a girl, it can make it hard to see a group of women as a Safe Space, especially if they think the thing making it safe is keeping the men out. If you’re a boy who has been repeatedly harmed by women who believed they were powerless, it can be hard to understand that the gender hierarchies that feminists and others talk about actually do exist.

This article is from 2014, but I think it's still relevant today. It feels frustratingly difficult to talk about how the sexist positioning of women (specifically cis white women - trans white women, cis women of color, and especially trans women of color are usually not afforded this kind of assumption of passive, doe-like innocence) not only enables the abuse of women by men, but also allows specific kinds of abuse by women (to other women, to certain men) to be taken less seriously or assumed nonexistent.

It makes me uncomfortable when I see people position women and girls as "more good" or "more pure" than men and boys, and that's Why We Need Feminism - rather than that oppression and gender essententialism is fundamentally wrong. (And let's be real - when nonbinary or genderqueer people are even acknowledged, they're arbitrarily sorted back into a binary box based on the speaker's own biases.) Because I was mostly physically abused by boys and mostly emotionally abused by girls - that's what bullying is, it's abuse of children by their peers. (Though I was also physically abused by a girl a grade younger than me, in first grade. I considered her a friend at the time because, unlike other girls, she was willing to be physically near me.) And I don't think the abuse the girls did caused less damage just because it didn't leave visible bruises. I don't think my kindergarden teacher locking me in a dark closet (a thing I don't even remember, but that people in my life remember me telling them about at that age) is made better because it was done by a woman. When a next door neighbor, or second cousin's dad, was physically and/or emotionally abused by their wife, I remember hearing adults implying it the man's fault for being weak-willed and spineless, for letting her walk all over him.

I don't really see myself as having a gender, but I was assigned female at birth, and I let people perceive me as a cis woman because it's easier to not assert myself. If I started taking testosterone, and was perceived more as a "man" than a "woman", would the things I've experienced suddenly become less serious? Would they have turned out, retroactively, to not have been serious? I already feel like such a burden on other people, like I take up too much space, being perceived as a girl. When I make characters for TTRPGs, I gravitate towards small characters - kobolds and the like - I want to take up less space, that's my power fantasy, not being strong or sexy or popular. Or I gravitate towards being the token non-humanoid, because it's easier to be a mascot or a pet than a person. It feels less bad if I don't know how to relate to my peers or be taken seriously if I'm just everyone else's crusty little white dog. I'm only afforded any grace as a human (a failed human, autistic, a dog trained to walk on its hind legs) in that I'm perceived as harmless, despite all the ways that I know I'm not.

The Only Good Wolf: Hunting Culture and the Medieval Werewolf

Introduction

Though werewolves are traditionally portrayed as rapacious and murderous even back to antiquity, several stories in the late twelfth century instead portray the werewolf in a sympathetic light: a chivalrous knight trapped through some deceit in the form of a wolf. Most modern scholarship interprets these unusual stories as representing medieval attitudes toward metamorphosis and hybridity, or as part of a wider cultural exploration of the boundary between human and animal. Little has been said, however, about the relationship between the sympathetic werewolf story and the increasing importance and popularity of hunting and pet-keeping during that same period. This paper redresses that gap by contextualizing three stories, “Bisclavret,” “Melion,” and “Arthur and Gorlagon,” within the broader medieval literary tradition of pet-keeping and hunting. This contextualization demonstrates that these werewolf stories are very much a reflection of medieval attitudes toward wolves and dogs. Examination of four key scenes appearing in each of these stories shows that the representation of the “tamed” werewolf in these stories parallels the representation of wolves and dogs found in a variety of contemporary sources including historical records, hunting manuals, ethnographies, hagiographical stories, bestiaries, and fables. Moreover, a close reading shows that the tamed (were)wolf is described in terms similar to those used to describe a well-behaved dog; and, in turn, the well-behaved dog is described in terms similar to those used to describe the ideal knight. The emphasis these stories place on the civility of the tamed werewolf therefore challenges traditional readings that stress the boundary these stories purportedly draw between human and animal; rather, these stories productively collapse those very boundaries.

Monster Culture (Seven Theses)

Most people have already read this one, right? I assume? If not, it's a classic. Published 1996.

Rather than provide an abstract, here is a list of the Seven Theses:

The Monster's Body Is a Cultural Body
The Monster Always Escapes
The Monster Is the Harbinger of Category Crisis
The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference
The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible
Fear of the Monster Is Really a Kind of Desire
The Monster Stands at the Threshold . . . of Becoming

Not every part of the essay perfectly describes every individual instance of a monster, especially the "domesticated" monsters we might see presented in children's media, erotica, and comedy; but on the whole, they help make sense of the forces that tend to bring life to monstrous archetypes and shape their continued evolution, as well as the ways in which monsters as purely fictional beings overlap with the dehumanizing cultural "monsterfication" of ostracized groups, historical figures, etc.

For a fun application of the ideas present in this paper to a fandom context, see this Madoka Magica meta posted on Ao3 about how "witches" and "incubators" function as monsters within the context of the original show, its spinoffs, and its fan culture.

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: Liminal Space
Current Music: New Ghost - Viscera (Bit Smug Ambient Version)

Monster as Victim, Victim as Monster: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder,Redemptive Suffering and the ‘Undead’

Abstract:

When surveying the vast pantheon of monstrous incarnations, from Frankenstein’s creation to Godzilla, it is nearly impossible to find a creature in the definitive works of fictional monstrosity that doesn’t, in some way, owe its creation to a violently traumatic event. This paper analyses the monster as victim by comparing the symptoms of monstrosity to the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. It would appear that monsters, most specifically the undead monsters such as vampires, zombies, and Frankenstein, are merely hyperbolic representations of human post-trauma symptoms. The persistent presence of violent trauma at the birth of the monster, as well as a violent death at his end, implies that these monsters were purposely created as a way to manage society, as examples of how not to act in the face of overwhelming personal catastrophe. The fact that we, as consumers of monster stories, do not recognize monsters as victims and cannot pity them is due to our cultural belief in redemptive suffering. We believe, innately, that all suffering results in redemption, that all stories have a happy ending. The possibility that this might not be true is may be the most horrifying thing that we as human beings could be made to face. Either the monster deserves his fate, or our long-held belief in redemptive suffering must be called into question.