Astrea

Lefty, transgender, furry, and (sigh) podcaster

Overthinking media, model building with overly detailed paint jobs, and dabbling with game design junk.

Avatar by @cupsofjade


Twitter (lol, lmao, this probably isn't too long for this world)
x.com/AutomaticTiger
Dreamwidth (DO NOT expect this to get used but I'm covering my bases)
automatictiger.dreamwidth.org/
My personal website (it's down here for redundancy!)
automatictiger.neocities.org/

swordbroken
@swordbroken

Something I've only just come to realize via Swordtember (annual appreciator) and hundreds of LARP fight videos and sword guy youtubes (having a weird time in my life)—wherein alarming sword guys who own a wide variety of murder tools teach me endlessly illuminating things about historical swordsmanship, bodily movement, society and stuff—is this:

My good old curmudgeonly, party-pooperist distaste for crazy swords of the imagination has always totally missed the point of what swords even are. It's more than a self-conscious, smirking, compulsive need to point out that "a sword shaped like X wouldn't do Y effectively," or whatever. It's actually an even more impossible desire for an imaginary thing; a sword ideal. It misses the much more difficult truth that swords take infinite forms based on a bewildering interaction of insular social context, etiquette, superstition, recursive logics and arbitrary mutual agreements, privileged sword jock panache, schools of zealots, rigid cog-in-the-machinification of people into armies for heterogeneous contest, and a never-ending arms race of geographically contextual materials science, economics and legal maneuvering. To name just a few things.

Swords are crazy because we are crazy. To imagine a sword one way is deadening. Many things are possible. The reality of things is a delirium, and the sword you imagine, any sword, is a kind of clarity the same as the clarity of a more literary fantasy.


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