follow your dreams at a sustainable pace
500 words a day gets the novel written

⁂

★
d e v o n
Today's Document
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Cosimo Galluzzi

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

ellievsbear
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Peter Solarz
Monterey Bay Aquarium
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

Discoholic 🪩

JBB: An Artblog!
No title available
Stranger Things
Xuebing Du

seen from United Kingdom
seen from Argentina

seen from Türkiye
seen from Malaysia
seen from Türkiye

seen from United States
seen from Romania
seen from Argentina
seen from Russia

seen from Argentina
seen from Mexico
seen from United States

seen from Hong Kong SAR China
seen from Malaysia

seen from United States

seen from Singapore
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from Türkiye
@crisjim
follow your dreams at a sustainable pace
500 words a day gets the novel written
Art by arbor_draws.
@oldguardians making this answer a separate post because it’s kind of interesting*!
‘‘I cannot bear to hear that mentioned. Pray do not talk of that odious man. I do think it is the hardest thing in the world, that your estate should be entailed away from your own children; and I am sure if I had been you, I should have tried long ago to do something or other about it.’’
Jane and Elizabeth attempted to explain to her the nature of an entail. They had often attempted it before, but it was a subject on which Mrs. Bennet was beyond the reach of reason; and she continued to rail bitterly against the cruelty of settling an estate away from a family of ve daughters, in favour of a man whom nobody cared anything about.”
(In the interest of not getting bogged down in legal minutiae, I’ll keep this pretty general. Please note that I am vastly oversimplifying some legal concepts here for the sake of explaining the issue clearly. If you’re an attorney/barrister/whatever, don’t @ me - I KNOW it’s all much more nuanced than this.)
Pride & Prejudice is set somewhere around 1811. In the novel, the Bennets’ ownership interest in the family estate is famously said to be “entailed” away from the Bennet girls in favor of their cousin, Mr. Collins. This is specifically explained to be because Mr. Bennet has no sons, and thus his estate reverts back to his closest male relative.
In the real world, entailment could (and usually did) work that way. But there is an enormous, glaring issue: English entailments have long been very VERY easy to defeat** through a remedy called Common Recovery. If Longbourn was truly entailed away from the female descendants, as the novel indicates, Mr. Bennet could have hired an attorney (his brother-in-law?) to start the Common Recovery process at any time. Within a few months, the court would render a judgment giving Mr. Bennet the property outright and free from any entailment, allowing him to leave the property to his daughters upon his death*** and make them independently wealthy women. And this wasn’t just a possibility - it was a very common legal mechanism that would have been almost expected of a gentleman interested in preserving his family’s comfort. There are hundreds of cases in the English Chancery records (featuring many families that were much less wealthy than the Bennets!) invoking this very remedy whenever fathers failed to produce sons.
So entailment makes no sense - it had basically no power over landowners by the Regency Period.
Let’s talk alternatives. In 1811, the primary way of keeping property in the male line was through another estate planning technique called strict settlement. To GREATLY simplify a complicated form of ownership, strict settlement had the present possessor of property always hold a life estate interest (they own it only until their death), with their male primogeniture descendants holding a remainder fee tail interest (read: eventual outright ownership upon their father’s death). Each generation of life estate owner would then force their young male descendants (the fee tail owner) upon their coming of age to give the young descendant’s unknown future male sons the remainder interest, retaining a life estate for themselves (which they would receive upon their father’s death). Thus the ownership system perpetuates down a male line of descendants, each generation demanding the same restrictive ownership system of their own children.
If you followed that - and I don’t blame you if you didn’t, as this is all very deliberately obtuse - you might think “wait okay. That kind of sounds like the Bennets’ situation. Austen called it an entailment but maybe it was actually a strict settlement!” Several academics have tried to argue that, but it also fails for several reasons:
(1) With the Bennets’ seemingly comfortable current income, strict settlement would have provided for significant lifetime income + dowries for Mr. Bennet’s female descendants. But in P&P, it’s made very clear that the girls’ only possible inheritance is a tiny amount from their mother’s side and nothing from their father’s. If they do not marry, they will be destitute. That is extremely unlikely and would be very shameful in strict settlement ownership..
(2) It would have been inconceivable for Mr. Bennet’s father to have forced him to benefit a cousin over his own descendants, even if they were women. One of the fundamental points of strict settlement was to avoid this outcome (aka to avoid the entailment system). People did NOT want a distant male cousin to inherit property simply because there wasn’t a primogeniture male descendant - they knew that if anything, their own female descendants could always produce a male heir in their marriages. Plus, Mr. Bennet’s and Mr. Collin’s fathers apparently hated each other (ref Mr. Collins’ initial letter) - why would Mr. Bennet’s father force his son to benefit the son of a man he himself hates?
(3) For many many other reasons, a strict settlement does not match how the family talks about/treats the estate in the novel. There’s literally a whole law review article on this topic (cited below), and I’ll defer to that for a full discussion.
So we’re left with two possibilities: the land is entailed, and for some reason Mr. Bennet isn’t willing to pay a small amount in attorney’s fees to undo the entailment for the enormous benefit of his daughters (extremely unlikely, robs the story of all its tension), or the land is subject to a bizarre + shameful strict settlement that goes directly against everything that would have been normal at the time, and none of the characters know that (makes no sense in the story).
And then, of course, there’s the truth: the “entailment” is simply a narrative device that does not reflect actual law or historical transfer of property at death, which is perfectly fine. Jane Austen was not writing a law textbook or even a legal drama. And her underlying point remains clear: Regency-era women were often in economically precarious positions and forced to marry to maintain their social and economic standings.
((If you do want a version in your head that works under the law, maybe we imagine that Mr. Collin’s father actually owned the home but was in debt to Mr. Bennet so he gave him some kind of strange lifelong leasehold interest with income from the property included. And then we ignore the passage saying Mr. Bennet having a son would have “avoided” the home passing to Mr. Collins + pretend that the family lied to everybody about the home being entailed to save face))
For additional reading, I highly recommend A FUNHOUSE MIRROR OF LAW: THE ENTAILMENT IN JANE AUSTEN’S PRIDE AND PREJUDICE by Peter A. Appel (linked). His analysis reflects my own reading of Regency inheritance law, and I think his conclusions are generally sound. There is significant other scholarship on this subject, but I find Appel’s work the most persuasive.
—-
* At least to me, who admittedly studies this for a living
** For fun War of the Roses reasons!
*** Or much more likely, to a male relative conservator/trustee for their benefit (probably Mrs. Bennet’s brother, the attorney)
So we’re left with two possibilities: the land is entailed, and for some reason Mr. Bennet isn’t willing to pay a small amount in attorney’s fees to undo the entailment for the enormous benefit of his daughters
I don't think this is particularly out of character for Mr Bennet aka neglectful father of the year. I agree that it probably comes down to authorial decisions/plot reasons, but one of those reasons could be to express how bad a dad Mr Bennet is. It seems very in keeping with his general attitude of ignore it and maybe someone else will solve it.
yes yes I know Mr. Bennett is a negligent father. Please read the full article for a more thorough discussion of that: there's a difference between being neglectful (not paying much attention and hoping it all works out) and downright cruel (deliberately creating a situation where your daughters WILL be homeless).
We know he is not cruel, and there is substantial textual evidence that he is not completely negligent either. Upon Lydia's "elopement", Mr. Bennett immediately leaves to deal with the problem and is shown to be highly conscientious of the economics and social politics of the situation. He also is implied to have discussed quite frankly with Elizabeth the economics of saving for their allowances and dowries, suggesting that these issues are at least on his radar and he’s looked at how to remedy them.
In doing this kind of litcrit, you have to look a bit closer and more critically than accepting the trope. Yes, he is somewhat absent from his family, but he is never written to be a cruel man. And in the full context of probate law at that time, you will see that a failure to provide in this way would likely have been considered cruel and wholly unacceptable for a genteel father of five daughters. And there is no textual evidence for Mr. Bennett acting that way.
The far, far more likely explanation is that Jane Austen was writing a clever romance novel and not a law textbook.
I would HIGHLY doubt that Carnage is physically stronger than Venom in absolute terms.
Amazing Spiderman 363
I would say that he's probably not stronger in practical terms but that his lunacy probably has his adrenaline levels so pumped that he has a kind of berserker strength when he's attacking people
Like the symbiote has him permanently on Space PCP O_O
That makes sense. And (if I remember correctly and they haven't changed the continuity too much) the Carnage symbiote is a part of Kassady's blood so it might be pushing him super hard and then healing his meat body for bursts of strength
He is basically soup inside that suit O_O
The Soup Suit! (patent pending)
"I don't think we can patent this"
"not with that attitude"
A suit that makes soup? A suit full of soup? Who knows!
WHERE.
IS.
MY.
SOUP-ER SUIT!?!
Happy May the Fourth! I added a second page to this comic from last year!
So my beta reader for the Big Fics is an astrophysicist, right. Who is currently also writing a hard sci-fi novel about the exploration of Phobos (more power to them, I cannot with the physics required for that, best I can do is soft sci-fi/fantasy and that reminds me I should finish that story).
Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.
So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.
You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.
And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.
It's still in the debugging phase (last error fixed: every planet wants to have a population of exactly 5000 regardless of other factors, turned out to be a missing equals sign somewhere), but I'm psyched for this and trying to gauge interest for how high a priority 'make this an accessible web tool' needs to be.
@bucketofdeltav says the URL is here: http://tumblr.com/star-system-generator
Follow @star-system-generator and get more of the good stuff by joining Tumblr today. Dive in!
The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.
Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.
So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.
Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.
oh shit
As the OP of this post, I’m going to threaten that if this gets to one million notes by the 10 year anniversary on 1 June 2026, one year from today, I will get a lower back tattoo of the loch ness bear monster.
Y'all know what to do Tumblr.
Everything now tastes like bear
HAPPY STAR WARS DAY! | May 4th, 2026
I feel safe. Yes, it feels like that.
@swsource star wars week: day 6 – may the 4th be with you!
Man, comic books are so fuckin' sick.
Amazing Spiderman 358
You do gotta love a big crossover.
guess who just found out the difference between wax paper and parchment paper the hard way
wait what’s the difference?
one you can use in the oven safely and the other you can also use in the oven if the thing you are trying to make happens to be fire
Imagine if a like 8 foot tall guy that looked kinda like an alien species just kinda showed up at the house you rent a room in and crashed on the couch and at first everyone hated him but you kinda just accepted this weird massive kinda-human alien species thing as a part of your group even though he's like twice the size of everyone else there
Cuz that's literally happening to sea lions in San Francisco right now
So there's two species of sea lion in North America: the California sea lion, ranging along California (including Baja) but not ranging into the north coast or into oregon
And the Stellar's sea lion, which are WAY bigger and live in Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska
A male Stellars sea lion showed up in SF like a month ago and just kinda. Didn't know what to do, and joined a colony of California sea lions, and is just kinda chilling there now.
Weird vagrant species happen from time to time, but this is just a particularly funny instance of a highly social species getting very lost, and just trying to blend in with its closest nearby relatives
You KNOW it's gonna be a good team up when you have NEVER thought of these 3 characters in the same context in your entire life.
Amazing Spiderman 354
One of the fun parts of the 90's
SURPRISE GUEST STARS :D
Always a good time in any comic
It's so cool seeing funky characters from around the setting show up in new and cool ways :D
I want my blorbos to know each other, that's the fun!
I remember picking up most of the issues in this story at the local newsagent back when I was about thirteen. It was the first time I’d ever heard of Moon Knight, Nova, Night Thrasher, Darkhawk, The New Warriors and the Secret Empire. No wikis to check, no collected volumes in the library, just try and pick up what you can as we go.
I think I just used to be better at rolling with these things back then.
Some Akane break art. I love her.
For some reason my brain always pictures her as kinda stocky so thats how it feels most natural to draw her.
Absolutely crazy to me that the pro AI people nearly always think creative stuff is a chore that a machine needs to do instead of something that is actually fun.
dead dove do not eat in practice
People with low spoons, someone just recommended this cookbook to me, so I thought I’d pass it on.
I always look at cookbooks for people who have no energy/time to do elaborate meal preparations, and roll my eyes. Like, you want me to stay on my feet for long enough to prepare 15 different ingredients from scratch, and use 5 different pots and pans, when I have chronic fatigue and no dishwasher?
These people seem to get it, though. It’s very simple in places. It’s basically the cookbook for people who think, ‘I’m really bored of those same five low-spoons meals I eat, but I can’t think of anything else to cook that won’t exhaust me’. And it’s free!
by Rachel A. Rosen and Zilla Novikov || Food you can make so you don't die.
SPREAD THE WORD THIS IS FUCKING GOD TIER OH MY GOD, SOMETIMES I HAVE SPOONS SOMETIMES I DON’T BUT NO COOKBOOK OFFERS LEVELS IN THEIR RECIPES THIS ONE DOES!
also found here:
Life is hard. Some days are at the absolute limit of what we can manage. Some days are worse than that. Eating—picking a meal, making it, pu
the ebook is FREE here also