recluse. obsessed. tired.

[asparoh]

Irina AKULENKO

Justice|Adjustment

From TAROT - Fantasy Bellydance

[antique-forvalaka]

What do you mean 'it's already 3pm'

[saltwaterandstars]

If you like the film Master and Commander: Far Side of the World, you should watch the great documentary about the making of it that's on youtube. They built a whole fucking ship from scratch! The cast went to Napoleonic War naval bootcamp! Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany actually learned the pieces of classical music they play in the film!

I think if filmmakers are going to spend many, many millions of dollars making a film, there should at least be a whole ass ship to show for it. No AI. No green screen. Just build a fucking ship and get hundreds of grubby men to run around on it, shouting and running each other through with swords.

While two idiots who love each other play duets.

[my-rose-tinted-glasses]

Duty First, Kiss Later - Upcoming JBL [Teaser with eng subs]

MDL | Premieres July 27th [vid source]

[prinnay]

marigolds and a smile c:

first attempt at drawing a few weeks out of arm surgery lol

[namchyoon]

tay is so 😭😭😭

[azrael-corvidae]

IM DONE. IM FINALLY DONE WITH THIS DUMB BIRDS AFTER TWO MONTHS. KINDA MID BUT IDCCCC

[draw-blog]

On Shopping While Fat 2: Son of Fat

[horreurscopes]

never forget the universal rule of the order of things: People Will Not Read It

[horreurscopes]

signs at stores? émail? menu ?? instruction ? post online ? caption with andswer to question ? group hand outs ??? street sign ??? no. The Written Word Is The Enemy

[lasrina]

#The number of compliments i have gotten for reading a thing

The ability to occasionally Read A Thing will make you a hero in your workplace, especially if it is for example an error message that tells you what you need to do differently, or instructions on unjamming a printer.

[stephaniematurin]

how dare you say we put jam in the printer

[berkelbites]

Ok reblogging this again because story time.

I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.

There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.

So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than "(software) is broken, help"

So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she's trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there's an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.

The error message basically says, "these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save."

So I take a few deep breaths.

Then I lie to her.

I message her back, saying "hey yeah, for some reason it's not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?"

She does.

I ask her if she still needs help.

She does not respond.

[samueldays]

I have similar story from tech support.

Client is reporting that Some Thing Program doesn't work. I ask if there's an error message with further information about what's not working. Client says "no". I go over and ask Client to open Some Thing. Client double-clicks on the icon for Some Thing, it starts to boot, an error message dialog flashes up on screen, Client closes error message before I can read it, Thing closes after the error.

"What did that error message say?" I ask.

"What error message?" asks Client.

I tell Client to open the Some Thing again and then not click anything else. Client opens Some Thing, error message appears, Client clicks it away again.

I tell Client to stand up, step away, and give me physical control of the computer. I open Some Thing, start looking at the error message without closing it, and Client says "You should close that." I tell Client that I am reading the error message. Client is apparently accustomed to treating error messages as a kind of spam email that should be deleted as fast as possible, and gets agitated that I'm reading it.

I read the error message. It tells me what the problem is. I fix the problem. Some Thing works now.

---

Later, I start thinking about how such an error message might perhaps be engineered to be more attention-grabbing and close-resistant as a way of making people read it. It's not important for some random program here, but there are more important systems (medical, etc) where it would be reasonable to demand the user's attention because people's lives depend on paying attention to the error message.

But then people with a perverted intellect would still be thinking about ways to avoid reading the message, like dragging it off edge of screen or hiding it behind another window. So maybe the dialog box could have an always-in-front feature to override other windows, and the alert could use the computer's hardware "beep" functionality that can't be switched off by muting the regular sound system, and keep beeping... shit, I realize I'm reinventing pain, and get philosophical about it.

[doccyuk]

Story from The Past about My Mum:

She was a computer programmer / analyst, a... Long Time Ago. Called in for a system she'd installed before, the office folk said they kept having problems where it Didn't Work Right (no error, a malfunction)

She investigated, and told them that could only happen if they did 3 specific things in a specific order, which they should not ever do.

So, she asked, did they ever do that?

No! Of course not, was the answer.

So she made a couple of small changes, packed up and said that should be fine, but they should call her if there were problems.

The next week

She had a call saying "We're getting a strange error message on the system, can you help?"

She said, of course, can they tell her the error?

And the message was:

"You Said You Didn't Do This"

[nocturnalsoph]

Why Me and Thee Swept the Nation: Lakorn Logic, Karaoke Nostalgia, and the DNA of Thai Media

Sophie

"Me and Thee" is the kind of phenomenon that lingers long after the credits roll.

After seeing the One Word clip from the finale, I took a deep dive into academic research on Thai television and karaoke VCD culture. These contexts explain exactly how Me and Thee—a BL series—managed to achieve the kind of nationwide viral success that most shows in the genre never reach.

This virality wasn’t an accident; it was cultural.

1. Lakorn: More Than "Just a Drama"

If you aren’t familiar with lakorn (Thai TV soaps), it’s important to realize how much they differ from what international audiences typically call a "series." Lakorns are loud, unapologetically melodramatic, and visually over-the-top. Think ear-piercing screams, dramatic slaps, intense zoom-ins, and plot twists that escalate at breakneck speed. Subtlety isn't the point—impact is.

In global terms, lakorn is closest in spirit to:

Makjang dramas (Korea)

Classic Latin American telenovelas

Indonesian sinetron

Indian TV serials

Philippine teleseryes

Turkish dizis

In Thailand, lakorn is not niche entertainment. It is prime-time, mainstream, national media, deeply woven into everyday life.

2. Lakorn as Cultural Transmission

Lakorn has roots far older than television. The word itself comes from Southeast Asian performance traditions, and its storytelling lineage can be traced back to:

Folk theatre

Court dance

Forms like likay and lakhon

Historically, these performances conveyed ideas about religion, kingship, morality, social roles, and community life. Modern lakorn inherits this function.

Academic studies of Thai television suggest that lakorn operates as a mechanism of cultural transmission. It doesn’t just entertain—it teaches:

Family structures

Respect for elders

Social harmony

Spiritual beliefs

Everyday Thai lifestyles (temple merit-making, festivals, communal living)

This is why lakorn often feels emotionally close to Thai audiences. They don’t see it as fantasy alone, but as an exaggerated mirror of lived experience.

This is also where the term “lakorn nam nao” (“polluted” or overly melodramatic soap operas) comes in. The “pollution” refers not to bad quality, but to:

Unrealistic luxury

Over-the-top acting

Intensified emotions

Yet these very traits make lakorn iconic, quotable, parody-able—and unforgettable.

3. Why Me and Thee Broke Out of BL Containment

Most BL series circulate within a relatively contained fandom space. Me and Thee didn’t—because it borrowed the visual and emotional grammar of lakorn.

Crucially, Pond Naravit’s portrayal of Thee draws directly from the archetype of the classic lakorn male lead: dramatic, intense, emotionally expressive, and visually coded in a way older audiences immediately recognize.

So even though the story is BL, it feels familiar to viewers who don’t usually watch BL. It speaks a language they already know.

4. Karaoke VCDs: The Other Half of the Puzzle

The second viral element—Pond’s One Word OST MV—makes sense only when you understand karaoke VCD culture.

Unlike in the US or Europe, VCDs were a dominant media format in Southeast Asia, especially in the 1990s and early 2000s. This is something even Gen Z Thai actors like Pond and Phuwin have mentioned: VCDs were how many children were introduced to music before they could even read properly.

Karaoke VCDs were everywhere:

Homes

Shops

Buses

Bars

Markets

Roadside stalls

Often pirated, cheaply produced, and endlessly replayed 😅

Their defining features:

On-screen lyrics

Simple visuals

Long, static shots

Warm, yellowish tones

Minimal editing

These videos weren’t meant to distract. They were functional media, designed for participation—for singing along.

5. Why Karaoke Resonates So Deeply in Thailand (and SEA)

Karaoke fits seamlessly into Thai social life because music and communal participation are central to social bonding. Singing happens at:

Family gatherings

Festivals

Local events

Casual hangouts

Thai music traditions like luk thung and mor lam emphasize emotional lyrics and storytelling. Karaoke VCDs allowed people to actively perform those emotions, not just consume them.

While there’s limited academic literature specifically on Thai karaoke VCDs, music history and regional media studies show similar patterns across Southeast Asia:

The Philippines (videoke culture, including Roberto del Rosario’s patented “Sing-Along System”)

Vietnam and Indonesia (lyric-heavy VCD-era music videos)

China, Hong Kong, Taiwan (karaoke-first MV formats)

Japan (early laserdisc karaoke)

Thailand, however, held onto this format longer, even after other markets transitioned to HD and streaming. And many luk thung and mor lam artists still intentionally recreate this aesthetic today for nostalgia.

6. The Aesthetic of Memory

That yellowish, vintage look people associate with old Thai MVs isn’t just stylistic—it’s technical:

Analog video formats (VHS, Betacam, Video8)

Tungsten lighting

Cheap cameras

No color grading

VCD compression and aging

Soap operas, commercials, and music videos all adopted this aesthetic. Eventually, it became the norm—familiar, and even comforting.

7. Why It Hit So Hard

Across lakorn and karaoke VCDs, the same cultural logic applies:

Media should feel close, not foreign

It should be emotionally explicit

It should be repeatable, quotable, singable

In the pre-streaming era, VCDs were a cultural staple. If you missed an episode, you just bought the disc. If you loved a scene, you could replay it until the player gave out. And if you wanted to sing along, the lyrics were right there on the screen.

When Me and Thee and One Word leaned into these formats, they did more than just excite the fans—they tapped into a collective memory. By embracing the dramatic flair of classic lakorn and the nostalgic "karaoke aesthetic" of the VCD era, they bridged the gap between generations. It made Thai audiences feel seen, capturing the exact media experience they grew up with.

[thefreeblog]

This makes so much sense. I knew after the first episode that Me and Thee is not the usual BL, but like some here, I never had any problems with it being overly dramatic.

Partly because I grew up around Indian TV serials. I don't like them, but they were essential part of my early media expose.

So if someone one gives me a BL Indian TV serial, I'll binge it no questions asked.

And that was Me and Thee for me.

Also, I love characters who are different, a little crazy , but are passionate about what they are. And Peach being empathetic and never questioning the way Khun Thee is was so refreshing to see.

I just love these type of characters.

[nocturnalsoph]

I haven't read the book, but was Kongdech from northeastern Thailand (Isan), especially somewhere around Sakon Nakhon Province or neighboring provinces like Nakhon Phanom?

The line about him saying, "Everyone is Catholic in my community," really stood out to me. That's unusual in Thailand overall, since more than 90% of the country is Buddhist. However, there are a few villages and districts in the northeast where Catholicism became deeply rooted and entire communities are Catholic.

His mother also mentioned that the trip took "eight hours to Bangkok." In the 1990s, an overnight bus ride from rural Isan to Bangkok commonly took around 8–12 hours, depending on the province and road conditions. Catholic missions in northeastern Thailand historically built schools, boarding facilities, and seminaries. For many poor rural families, education through the Church was one of the few paths to social mobility. These communities were also (and often still are) tightly knit and heavily dependent on mutual support networks.

So if I had to place Kong on a map, my ranking would be:

1. Tha Rae (most likely)

2. Another Catholic village in Sakon Nakhon Province

3. A Catholic community in Nakhon Phanom Province near the Laos border

4. Another Isan Catholic settlement connected to French missionary history

Tha Rae, Sakon Nakhon, is especially interesting because it is famous for being the largest Catholic community in Thailand. It was established in the late nineteenth century through the work of French missionaries and Vietnamese Catholic migrants who settled in the area. Even today, it is known for its large Catholic population, historic church, and elaborate Christmas celebrations. In a place like Tha Rae, a boy saying, "Everybody back home is Catholic," would actually sound completely realistic.

The history behind this is fascinating. Catholicism first arrived in Siam during the sixteenth century through Portuguese missionaries who followed early European trade routes into Southeast Asia. Later, French missionaries from the Paris Foreign Missions Society became much more influential. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they established churches, schools, orphanages, clinics, and seminaries across the region.

The northeast became a particularly important center for Catholicism because of its location along the Mekong River and its connections to Laos and Vietnam. Missionaries worked among Lao-speaking communities in Isan and also among Vietnamese Catholics who migrated into the area, especially during periods of persecution and political instability in Vietnam. Over time, some villages converted collectively, and Catholicism became part of local community identity rather than simply an individual religion. That's why many of Thailand's strongest Catholic communities today are found not in Bangkok, but in provinces such as:

Sakon Nakhon

Nakhon Phanom

Mukdahan

parts of Udon Thani

The poverty detail also feels historically accurate. The line about getting an ID card and a place to study is particularly interesting. If the story is set in 1996, that was before much of rural northeastern Thailand experienced the economic improvements of the 2000s. Many Catholic communities near the Laos border were farming villages where families depended on rice cultivation, seasonal labor, and remittances from relatives working elsewhere.

Church scholarships and boarding schools genuinely changed lives because they could provide:

education

housing

meals

religious training

access to official documents and administrative support

and sometimes a pathway toward the priesthood

The idea of a mother proudly sending her son to a seminary because it guaranteed an education, stable living conditions, and future opportunities would have been very believable for that time and place.

[nocturnalsoph]

I love period lakorns because there are so many cultural references embedded right inside the scenes.

Take the garland-throwing scene in The Edge of Horizon. It’s not just a romantic moment; it perfectly summarizes the entire narrative.

In episode 2, Phob tells his mom: “Love doesn’t have high or low status, Mom. It only has hearts.” He vows that if nobility, status, or heaven and earth stand in the way, he will destroy those barriers. While it sounds intense, it perfectly mirrors episode 1.

In that first episode, the Prince already chose him without caring about outward appearance or social status. This entire dynamic directly parallels one of Thailand's most beloved folk epics: Sang Thong (The Prince of the Golden Conch).

Specifically, it mirrors the classic "garland throwing" scene where a princess chooses a disguised prince based on his merit rather than his status. It’s brilliant how the show utilizes this traditional folklore to give the romance such deep historical weight.

To understand that scene, here is the full context. (Note: This is a retold overview, not a word-for-word translation).

The Story of Sang Thong (สังข์ทอง)

Long ago, there was a king with two queens. The older queen was kind and respected throughout the kingdom, while the younger queen grew jealous because she wanted her own son to inherit the throne.

After many years, the older queen finally became pregnant, and everyone expected the birth of a royal prince.

But when the child was born, she gave birth to a golden conch shell.

The court was horrified.

“This must be bad luck.”

“A curse.”

Seeing an opportunity, the jealous queen convinced the king that the older queen had brought shame upon the kingdom. Believing her, the king banished his first queen. She left the palace with nothing except the strange golden shell.

The exiled queen eventually found shelter in a poor village and worked every day to survive. Yet whenever she returned home, she found that food had already been cooked and the household chores mysteriously completed.

Curious, she pretended to leave one day and secretly watched.

To her amazement, a beautiful golden boy climbed out of the conch shell.

He was her son.

She named him Sang Thong (“Golden Conch”) and broke the shell so he could live openly. At last, mother and son were able to live together in peace.

However, word eventually reached the palace. Fearing that the prince might one day return to claim his birthright, the jealous queen plotted against him. Through deception and danger, Sang Thong became separated from his mother and was forced to wander far from home.

Eventually, he arrived at the home of a powerful giant woman.

Different versions tell this part of the story differently, but in Thai retellings she is often remembered as Phanthurat, an ogress who raised Sang Thong as her own son and cared deeply for him.

One day, she warned him never to open her treasure room.

Naturally, Sang Thong became curious.

Inside, he discovered magical treasures: enchanted clothing, magical weapons, flying objects, and a miraculous golden pool.

When he touched the water, his entire body turned radiant gold and he became extraordinarily handsome. Yet among the treasures was something unexpected—an ugly disguise in the form of Ngo Pa, a wild forest man.

Sang Thong eventually left, taking the treasures with him.

His journey brought him to another kingdom ruled by a king with seven daughters. The king announced that each princess would choose her own husband according to tradition: she would throw a flower garland onto the man she wished to marry.

Princes and noblemen gathered in splendid clothing, but among them stood Sang Thong hidden beneath the ugly Ngo Pa disguise, drawing laughter and ridicule from the crowd.

One by one, the princesses chose handsome and noble-looking men.

Only the youngest princess, Rojana, looked more carefully.

She saw something no one else could see.

Some versions say she recognized his true golden form beneath the disguise, while others say she simply saw his character rather than his appearance.

As everyone watched, she threw her garland.

It landed on the ugly stranger.

The court erupted in outrage.

“How could she choose him?”

But tradition could not be broken, and Rojana married Sang Thong.

The king resented his new son-in-law and repeatedly set impossible challenges—hunting dangerous game, retrieving rare treasures, competing in contests, and completing tasks no ordinary person could achieve.

Again and again, the handsome princes failed.

Again and again, Sang Thong quietly succeeded through wisdom and magic.

People began to wonder who he truly was and why the strange, ugly man always emerged victorious.

At last, Sang Thong removed the Ngo Pa disguise.

The ugly forest man disappeared, revealing a radiant prince with a golden body.

Only then did everyone understand that Rojana had recognized the truth long before anyone else.

The king apologized, Sang Thong revealed his royal birth, and in many versions of the story he is eventually reunited with his mother and justice is restored.

Source: Chulalongkorn University Library, Thai-Journal Online

[saturniandragon]

A new method for bypassing face scan age verifications.

PrivacyPuppet — Interactive 3D Avatar

Real-time interactive 3D human avatar with face tracking, blinking, and jaw animation. Built by PrivacyPuppet.

Interactive 3D avatar viewer with real-time head tracking, jaw animation, and idle breathing. Built with Next.js, React Three Fiber, and Thr

This should work on any web browser.

Use your mouse to control the head angle. Press M to toggle mouth open/close.

Don't forget to press I in order to hide your cursor and the surrounding UI elements.

It may or may not work on all sites, but worth a try.

Stay safe.

[vergess]

(That's an uppercase i to hide the UI, not a lower case L)

[kvothes]

i tend not to take museum photos of things unless i think i can take a good one, and this was in a glass case so it had a lot of glare, but the sargent exhibit at the met has the only know photograph of madame x before he repainted the shoulder strap and seeing that for the first time in my life made me feel like my body was made of static

[kvothes]

the met had a photo online. offering this to all of you (with the repainted one for comparison) <3

[justalurkr]

Truncated text of tweet from MrPitBull, Mar 11, 2026:

She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papers—and every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history.

Yale University, 1969.

Margaret Rossiter was a graduate student studying the history of science. She was one of very few women in her program.

Every Friday afternoon, students and faculty gathered for beers and informal conversation. One week, Margaret asked a simple question: "Were there ever any women scientists?"

The faculty answered firmly: No.

Someone mentioned Marie Curie. The group dismissed it—her husband Pierre really deserved the credit.

Margaret didn't argue. But she also didn't believe them.

So she started looking.

She found a reference book called "American Men of Science"—essentially a Who's Who of scientific achievement. Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont.

There were names. There were credentials. There were careers.

The professors had been wrong.

But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing.

Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams.

But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official histories—those same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased.

It wasn't random. It was systematic.

Women who designed experiments watched male colleagues publish results without giving them credit. Women whose discoveries were assigned to supervisors. Women listed in acknowledgments instead of as authors. Women passed over for awards that went to male collaborators who contributed far less.

Margaret realized she was witnessing a pattern that stretched across centuries.

Women had always been present in science. The record had simply pushed them aside.

She needed a name for what she was documenting.

In the early 1990s, she found it in the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage—a 19th-century suffragist who had written about this exact phenomenon in 1870.

In 1993, Margaret published a paper formally naming it: The Matilda Effect.

The term captured something that had been hidden in plain sight for generations. Once you knew the term, you saw it everywhere.

Her dissertation became a lifelong mission.

For more than 30 years, Margaret researched and wrote her landmark three-volume series: Women Scientists in America. She examined letters, institutional policies, individual careers. She gathered undeniable evidence that women in science had been consistently under-credited and structurally excluded.

Her work faced resistance. Many dismissed women's history as political rather than academic. Others insisted she was exaggerating.

Margaret didn't argue emotionally. She presented data. Documented cases. Patterns repeated across decades and institutions.

Eventually, the evidence became undeniable.

Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased:

Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structure—credit went to Watson and Crick.

Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission—omitted from the Nobel Prize.

Nettie Stevens, who discovered sex chromosomes—received little credit.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogen—initially dismissed.

And countless others whose names had nearly vanished.

Margaret changed the narrative. Science was no longer just the story of solitary male geniuses. It became a story of collaboration that included women who had been written out.

The Matilda Effect became standard terminology. Scholars used it to examine how credit is assigned, how authors are listed, who receives awards, who gets left out.

[nocturnalsoph]

If anyone asked me to describe episode 4 of The Edge of Horizon, I’d say it’s easily the sexiest episode a romance series could possibly pull off.

And I don’t just mean the nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat tension every time the Captain and the Prince have their secret reunions. I’m talking about the politically charged dialogue, too. Especially that conversation in the car and the scene toward the end¹. The way the show reminds us of Phob's history as a servant proves that the revolution isn't just some abstract intellectual conviction for him. It’s a reality he has lived through.

Let’s talk about the incredible realism of this script: a young palace servant falls in love with a prince, they’re caught, and the Prince's father frames the relationship as the ultimate act of lower-class ingratitude: "A servant dares touch his master's son." The Prince is forced to write a cruel letter to break things off, not out of a lack of love, but because it’s the only way to keep him save.

The servant goes on to live a brutally hard life under other noble landowners, but his brilliance eventually wins him a scholarship to study abroad. He spends eleven years away, returning right in 1932 with radical ideas about equality and constitutional reform. How insanely good is his psychological arc? His time in France gave him the intellectual vocabulary (liberty, equality, constitutionalism) but his own lived experience gave those revolutionary ideas their emotional gravity.

When Phob argues that birth shouldn't dictate privilege, he's not talking in abstractions. He's remembering the exact day he was taught that, no matter how brilliant or honorable he turned out to be, he was still just "a servant" at the end of the day. The way the Prince's father frames his accusation is so telling. It's not "You're unsuitable for my son." It's "You forgot your place." And that is the textbook language of a rigid, hierarchical society.

This is exactly what makes their argument so layered. When the Prince says, "The King kept Siam independent," he’s protecting the status quo he was brought up to revere. When Phob counters with points about taxes and unequal treaties, he’s doing way more than just winning a debate. He’s taking a hammer to the entire social order that once told him he wasn't even worthy of standing next to the man he loves.

So when he tells his mother, "It doesn't always have to be like that," he is literally talking on two different levels at the exact same time. Politically, he is signaling that the absolute monarchy's old order is on the brink of collapse. Personally, it’s a quiet, heartbreaking hope: that maybe one day, he will no longer be forced to bow before the man he loves.

There’s such a tragic irony to the Prince’s situation. He’s really not the villain here, despite his actions. From what we watched, he literally gave up his own happiness to keep Phob safe, playing along with his father's demands because rebelling would have put a target on Phob's back. He’s been living a total lie, forced to keep up appearances and maintain that royal facade for years. Imagine how completely hollow his life must have felt.

He’s just a victim of the exact same hierarchy, but in a different way. Phob suffers for being "too low," while the Prince suffers because, despite being "too high," he isn’t free to love who he wants. Poor Janthorn has no idea that the history between Phob and Tin is so much more nuanced than just "conservative vs. progressive." (Though whether Phob's revolution is truly egalitarian or partly motivated by his own heartbreak is something only Phob and the gods will ever know.)

One thing I’ve brought up before (and really want to highlight again) is how much I appreciate that this drama doesn't just treat 1932 like a textbook history lesson. The writing is just so sophisticated. It takes this massive constitutional change and makes it incredibly intimate.

Obviously, a constitution changes who runs the government. But changing the country also changes the dynamics of love, marriage, and who is allowed to stand beside someone else as a true equal. A huge historical upheaval is distilled down to a question of whether two people can finally share the same social space. Before 1932, they're defined by master and servant, Royal Highness and commoner. After 1932, at least in theory, they’re just two citizens of the same constitutional state. Whether society actually caught up to that overnight is a whole different story (it definitely didn't) but symbolically, the revolution carries the promise of erasing the invisible line that had always kept them separated.

NOTE:

¹The arguments toward the end of this episode are actually referencing real historical debates from the 1932 Siamese Revolution. Phob’s line, "Royals have assets for generations because commoners pay taxes" is a critique of the absolute monarchy.

Back then, there wasn’t a clear line dividing the King's personal money, royal wealth, and actual state finances. A lot of the revolutionaries who studied in Europe (both military and civilian) were furious that ordinary people did all the hard labor and paid all the taxes, just for that money to fund the royal court while commoners got zero political say. Phob is essentially pointing out the revolutionaries' biggest critique: that the aristocracy's generational wealth exists on the backs of regular citizens, which was one of the biggest catalysts for the 1932 coup.

When the prince responds, "But the King guided Siam so it was never colonized," he is invoking the classic royalist defense. His argument is simple: yes, the people paid taxes, but those taxes built a kingdom that fiercely guarded its independence.

Consider the geopolitical reality of the era:

1. Burma & Malaya: Colonized by the British.

2. Vietnam, Cambodia, & Laos: Colonized by the French.

3. Siam: Remained entirely independent.

Mainstream history generally credits monarchs like King Mongkut and King Chulalongkorn for this feat, pointing to their efforts in modernizing the state administration, abolishing slavery, and making calculated diplomatic concessions to Western powers. Ultimately, the prince is asserting that the monarchy earned its elite status by safeguarding the nation, a narrative that still heavily shapes Thai historical memory today.

Look at Phob's comeback: "Yes, Siam wasn't colonized, but we lost extraterritorial rights. We had to attend Western courts. It doesn't look good."

To put that into perspective, extraterritoriality was a system imposed on Siam through unequal treaties in the 19th century. Essentially, if a British or French citizen committed a crime within Siam, Siamese courts had no jurisdiction over them. Instead, they were tried in British or French consular courts. In other words, Siam's own legal system had zero authority over foreigners on its own soil, representing a massive blow to the kingdom's sovereignty.

Why did this happen? It comes down to the fact that even though Siam avoided being colonized, it still had to sign humiliating, unequal treaties, especially after the Bowring Treaty. Those treaties basically handed foreign powers extraterritorial rights, capped import tariffs, and gave them massive commercial privileges.

When Phob points this out, he's arguing that Siam's independence came at a heavy price: "Sure, we stayed independent on paper, but Western powers still forced humiliating concessions on us." And he’s historically accurate. Siamese officials literally had to watch foreign consular courts operate inside Siam's own territory. If a Siamese citizen got into a dispute with a foreigner, they often had to face a foreign court instead of their own. The whole point is that these foreign legal privileges severely undermined Siam's judicial sovereignty.

Many of the revolutionaries who studied in Europe genuinely admired Western ideas like democracy, constitutional government, modern bureaucracy, and equality before the law. But they also saw how unequally those same Western empires treated Asian nations. Because of this, the reformist position became a delicate balance: they recognized that the monarchy successfully saved Siam from direct colonization, but argued that accepting unequal treaties had left the country only half-sovereign. Their goal was clear: Siam needed a constitutional reform and a stronger modern state to truly stand on its own.

So, when the Prince claims that "the monarchy deserves respect because it kept Siam independent when nearly all our neighbors were colonized," he's touching on a massive historical gray area. Neither side of the debate is entirely right or wrong. Modern historians usually agree that Siam stayed independent thanks to a mix of smart royal diplomacy, major internal reforms, and the tense geopolitical rivalry between Britain and France. But they also acknowledge the dark side, that Siam had to give up territory and sign unequal treaties that heavily stripped away its sovereignty. The 1932 Revolution was born from these exact competing views: had the absolute monarchy fulfilled its historical purpose, or did the country now desperately need a constitutional government?

[lonestarflight]

Apollo 17 vs Artemis II

[mementochao]

Despite everything, it's still you.

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Also prev tags:

That's really cool actually

[tanoraqui]

#excuse me but are you telling me that the Apollo pic is made with the help of the SUN and the Artemis one with the help of the MOON??? #that's actually so poetic i want to cry

@gorandomshesaid wait i need to sit with this one. wait.