green ruins and brigadoon

To distinguish the other cities' qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit.

[oarfishcouncil]

World Oarfish Day is June 24th!

[megthemaggot]

[oarfishcouncil]

Thank you for this important addition! Signal boost!

[drumlincountry]

If your life is horrible and you need a new source of meaning and direction.... Do NOT find religion. Learn to identify plants.

[motherfucker-somewhat-limited]

girl help they're putting "modern people under capitalism work more than medieval peasants" posts on my dash again

[motherfucker-somewhat-limited]

your rented hovel:

indoor plumbing

windows with glass panes to keep the weather out

electricity

probably a carpet or a rug or two

building codes

medieval peasant's owned hovel:

dirt floor

cooking and heat rely on a single fireplace that you have to chop your own wood for

have to choose between keeping the cold out in winter or letting light in because windows are just holes in the wall

shit in a hole in the ground outside

[kurganfilledwithbearbones]

medieval peasant obligations for lord: 200 days

medieval peasant obligations for own subsistence: 200 days

length of year: 365 days

somebody who is got at the economy please help me my family has rickets

[nerianasims]

How much of your time is spent spinning thread? Sewing and repairing clothes? How often are you pregnant? How long does it take you to prepare a meal? How many of your babies have you watched die before age five?

[rootless-cosmopolitan]

Outside of “medieval obligations to Lord” you have to actually…work for your own survival. Like oh great, only 55% of your time goes to fattening up your Lord! Now winter is here and you have zero food in your stores because you gave it away to your Lord but at least you got a nice two month vacation!

And the number of girls/women who buy into this is hilarious. Oh baby no, that 200 day thing doesn’t apply to you. You have to work from sunup to sundown, 365 days a year, or the entire household falls apart. Rise before everyone else to get the fire and breakfast started, break your back lugging water and heating it and scrubbing laundry over and over and over again.

My great grandmother lived her entire life in a rural Ukrainian homestead with zero running water, heat, or plumbing. There is NO such thing as free time. If you are not actively farming or feeding animals or cooking/cleaning, you are sewing or mending or weaving or canning or salting to prepare for winter. And it had absolutely nothing to do with the structure of the government either; she did all of this through an empire, a soviet dictatorship, and eventually a democratic capitalist nation. Turns out, when you have no nearby stores or infrastructure, it doesn’t matter a damn if you live under communism or feudalism or capitalism. Someone’s gotta do the cooking and washing and mending and it’s probably gonna be you.

[hidden-but]

Look, I have men in the family with goodwill and chainsaws and carts that connect to cars and circular saws ... and still,heating up a room and cooking on a firestove is still So Much Hassle and So Much Hard Work just carrying the Shitton of Wood it takes to just cook a lunch.

Go and keep yourself warm and fed in a house with a wood stove and a solid fuel boiler for a weekend and then come and tell me how much easier life was before the invention of powered saws.

[certifiedsophist]

All these modern things are great yeah none of this is actually engaging with the criticism that bringing up medieval working hours is meant to point to, other than the "hours worked for lord bit" which is frankly just talking out of one's ass. The statistics for working hours comparison do try to account for hours working for subsistence, making clothes, etc.

The point of this criticism is not that medieval peasants had it so much better than us and we should go back to that exactly. The point is there are real ways in which we are less free and more exploited than fucking medieval pesants. The point is that we're supposed to be living in some kind of futuristic society were machines and computers do tons of the work and instead of that letting us rest more or spend more time doing things we care about, it's all being used to force the average persons face to the grindstone to work god awful, Victorian sweatshop fucking hours. The point is that modern technology is not inherently freeing, that just because you shit in a toilet instead of a hole, that doesn't mean your life is better in ways that are important and we should be pissed off about.

[kurganfilledwithbearbones]

I'm a medievalist. You're a dipshit.

There are no ways where we are "less free and more exploited than fucking medieval peasants." None. We have not been forced to maintain subsistence pescatarian diets as a class or status divider from our meat-eating overlords, nor have we been beheaded and used as grave goods.

We do not undergo torture and facial mutilation for minor property crimes.

We do not all live in obligate high carbon monoxide environments that are so toxic from wood smoke that they decrease lung capacity within days.

Jewish people are no longer the direct property of the Crown.

Any quibbling about the exact numbers of the lord/personal workday misses the fucking point, which is that subsistence agricultural labor is backbreaking 12-14 hour workdays during the warm seasons and starvation during the cold, and the slightest fuckup in subsistence productivity - such as needing to dedicate more hours working the lord's fields - could kill. The yield of medieval livestock and farmland was greatly truncated compared to today, the grain-based medieval European diet was so abnormally high in fiber that it caused chronic diarrhea, and none of the annals from the sixth to the eleventh century mention more than one year of "great bounty."

Women do objectively have more rights nowadays than the average peasant of the Middle Ages and to act like this is not the case is so stupid that it's not even worth entertaining. Hey, did you know that one of the theories for the start of the Viking Age is that there was so much female infanticide among the elite that aristocratic young men had to raid in then-untouched areas to acquire enough of a bride-price to pay for the increasingly scarce resource that was wives?

And I'm not a Victorianist, but it is easy to find evidence that the typical Victorian sweatshop workday length was 9-16 hours and included the labor of children as young as four. It's almost like the 8 hour day was the culmination of decades of protest and campaigning, or something

And ah, the bucket. Have you heard of this thing called cholera? Dysentery? Norovirus? Typhus? Did you know that access to toilets is a key concern of every developing country? Lack of toilets is a major public health issue and poor sanitation kills 1.4 million people a year.

If you truly think that modern technology isn't freeing, then maybe the problem is that you don't see things like washing machines or space heaters or IV saline or synthetic insulin as technological innovations.

You are 30. At this age, you are choosing to be ignorant. Maybe work on that and don't do this stupid, fascist-friendly nostalgia wishcasting. You can point out that aspects of modern life are bad and advocate for change without cheapening your argument by insisting they're the Exact Same as being a peasant in 1092. If you are having problems with time management or depression, perhaps see a mental health professional instead of wallowing fruitlessly in the idea that you are a serf. You're not. I can tell you're not, because you're not riddled with parasites

[cetaceous]

Obsolete Manipulator, Dragon Reactor, Winfrith, 2023

Gas Circulator, Advanced Gas-Cooled Reactor, Torness, 2023

Refuelling Cavity, Reactor Sizewell B, No 2, 2023

Window No 10, Irradiated Fuel Cave Dounreay Prototype Fast Reactor, 2023

Pile Cap Detail, Reactor 2, Dungeness A, No 1, 2022

The Nuclear Sublime photographs by Michael Collins published by RRB Photobooks, Bristol, UK 'Documenting infrastructure spanning a period of seven decades, the photographs in The Nuclear Sublime depict the present state and future of Britain’s nuclear industry— usually hidden from public view' image credits: Michael Collins via: The Guardian

[hungwy]

Driving is my shower thoughts time. 100 beautiful ideas thought every minute

[hungwy]

and i cant even write them down. this is one way to appreciate the fleeting quality of all beauty

[queershakespeare]

OOF 

(original text from article by devon price)

[queershakespeare]

YIKES

[oarfishcouncil]

What is the #truth? The truth is that this is a very long fish.

[stele3]

I feel like. Part of the reason we're seeing hot takes like "video games like Stardew Valley are bourgeoisie and you should feel bad for playing them" and "if any actor in a TV show even hints at supporting any part of Israel then we need to boycott that entire show" and stuff like that is.

Online activism does virtually nothing. It does virtually nothing, guys. You can reblog and repost stuff all day and it does nothing. And so there's this desperate need in people's minds to Do Something, but social media platforms have so thoroughly trapped us into the idea that This Is How You Connect With People, that we think blogging = activism.

But nothing we've reblogged thus far has made a significant difference in the world. So we keep reblogging, desperately, convinced that if we root out the real evil in our media consumption or if we pare down our beliefs to the One True Ideal and force everyone around us to share that ideal, then finally Something Will Change For The Better.

Log off. Go give blood; there's a critical shortage right now. Help someone in your community; it might not fix wars that are thousands of miles away but it'll help that person. Call or email your local representative about issues that matter to you. Fucking vote. Do something in the not-online space. It'll matter more than 100 posts in a row about Important Things.

[willabee]

willatote

[psychoticallytrans]

A lot of sentiments I see online about "just standing up for yourself" fall apart when considering that a common consequence of "standing up for yourself" is losing a key part of your current support network. It's hard to tell someone to stop being transphobic to you when you carpool with them to work, and it'll get a lot more expensive without them. Can your budget tolerate that cost, or is it the expense that stretches you too far? It's hard to tell someone that they need to be more polite to you when they're the one who helps walk you through legalese. Can you find someone else to do it for you, or are you left floundering? It's hard to tell someone to stop being sexist to you when they're the one writing your reference letter. Do you have someone else who can be your reference, or are they the only one whose letter would be accepted?

In order to be able to stand up for yourself, you need to be able to bear the potential consequence of that person leaving. You need to either have redundancy in your network, or be able to pay for what they did for you. Safety is about more than if someone will hit you.

[gender-trash]

so i complain a lot about low build quality of modern durable goods, but i do think there's a lot of freedom in having durable goods that (while they meet or exceed a minimum level of functionality) you aren't tempted to Keep Nice.

i don't care if my cat sharpens her claws on the couch because it's an ikea couch i got for free off a friend who was moving away. i don't care if my car gets scratched because it's already dinged up and it doesn't make it any less drivable. i don't care if my desk chair upholstery gets stained; it was cheap and who gives a shit if my chair is grungy. in many cases i actively disprefer the Nice version of the thing (like, say, a fancy expensive car) because it's emotionally a lot harder to blow off incidental damage.

this is also a thing that's really nice about DIYing/thrift flipping furniture and shit: i don't care that much if i scratch up the finish on my desk because -- well, it's a desk. who cares if a desk is scratched?? but also, i built the damn thing, so i can just sand it and refinish it with the exact same varnish. i could reupholster the various cat-scratched furniture, if for some reason i wanted to do that. i CAN, in fact, Fix Him.

i grew up in a house with a bunch of Nice Furniture, including (most frustratingly) antiques where you absolutely could not leave anything wet on them ever. a couple times, in the course of lighting birthday candles, the kitchen table accidentally got match-scorched, and my mom STILL tisks over those burn marks every time she remembers they exist. and i have to say, constantly Being Careful of the Furniture did and still does drive me up the wall. it's exhausting. like -- you don't have to spend mental energy on that!! you can refinish the dang table! you can, idk, lasercut some clear acrylic sheets to put on top of the antique dresser set! you can also decide to just not care about your stuff displaying the ordinary signs of wear and tear from being lived with, instead of trying to make a home a furniture showplace. every time i look at the scorch marks on my parents' kitchen table, i remember eating birthday cake.

[retroactivebakeries]

going to the nemuro memorial hall elevator would fix me

[triflesandparsnips]

Live from the workshop, trying another batch of soap of neroly, and GUESS WHAT FOLKS

WE GOT

GOO

[triflesandparsnips]

You know what? Fuck waiting

GET ALMONDED

[triflesandparsnips]

MOAR ALMOND

[triflesandparsnips]

It started to stiffen!

but crucially... has it stiffened enough for the mortar?

NO

has it stiffened enough for me to try and roll?

VERY NO

is it time to put it back into the tin to maybe dry some more?

GUESS

[triflesandparsnips]

Some important commentary:

CORRECT @beradan and it is a FUCKING PUZZLE.

Good question @guarshroom -- yup, it does, but it keeps its integrity a lot better than, say, Jell-O. For a sense of history here this engooification has happened once before and it was equally unexpected.

As to how it happened... the only ingredients at this stage of the game are:

Nabulsi soap -- which should itself only contain olive oil, soda ash, and water

orange blossom water -- which is a slightly acidic hydrosol of bitter orange flowers

Some other factors that may or may not have nothing to do with any of this:

the soap was grated and then dried for a short period before being covered completely in orange blossom water and stirred to ensure there was complete coverage

my workshop is extremely variable in temperature but largely very warm -- it's heated via radiator, so there may be humidity in the air as well

the last time this happened, there was a hurricane coming up the coast and pushing odd weather ahead of it

the tray was covered, but only lightly-- still, though, maybe that trapped some heat/humidity in there?

the other soap mix I made this time only partially jellied-- it was both further away from the radiator (...largely by being on the Other Side of the goo batch) and also was a mix of orange flower water (pH 4.5-6.5) and rose water (pH 4-4.5)

and, of course, it's possible that the base soap was adulterated (the hydrosols are imported as foodstuffs, so they better not be adulterated)-- if that's the case, though, I'm a bit fucked until I start making my own

If you can make any theories out of the above, I would very much like to hear them.

....and ngl, now I want to maybe get some distilled water and do small batch experiments

PUN JAIL @gardenharuspex

I mean... valid, @optimistinchief. EXTREMELY FUCKIN VALID.

That being said... for all that it was ugly as sin the first time it happened, the jellified soap mix led to genuinely the best sudsing soap I've produced yet. So... so if I can only figure out how these damned things WORK we might be in business...

[gardenharuspex]

Honestly, my thought from half a tiki drink in is whether or not the almond is the right answer or what happens when you add other nut meal. As for the puns, you'll never catch me alive!

[homunculus-argument]

The type of parents who argue that simply putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their kids' head is sufficient parenting are always so shocked when their children no longer want to deal with them once they've got their own place and can buy their own groceries. Like what else did you expect to happen? You told the people who had no other choice than rely on you for food and shelter that asking for any more than that is unreasonable of them, and then they don't go to you for anything once they can get those some other way. What would they go to their parents for?

They've got food at the house.

[the-real-seebs]

Wow. That's... Huh. I never quite thought about it like that, but yeah, if you want people to be friends with you, you gotta be some kind of friend.

[borgevino]

the allergy i am seeing grow up around small talk in any form is troubling to me. do you know how to make friends with people in your physical environment? it typically starts with small talk. do you want to live in community? small talk. do you want to have the type of relationship with your neighbors where you can run over and borrow a battery for your smoke detector when it starts beeping at 10pm? small talk!! do you want leeway from your coworkers when you fuck up something small? you gotta be able to build a relationship and that's small talk, baybeee.

"but i don't need friends and i don't care about community!" okay, lone ranger, what about the people in your community who need you? "but i have social anxiety!" me too, bud! we simply must soldier on. making up lists of questions to ask people helps. and people are predisposed to be generous, i've found. even if you make some kind of mistake, what is this but the natural give and take of human interaction? nobody is perfect.

you were not put on this earth to live by yourself and then die. you need people and people need you. treat those around you with curiosity and generousness of spirit and you will gain so much goodwill in return.

[12u3ie]

me, whenever my friend experiences the most minor inconvenience or slight: kill? I kill them? I kill for you? kill? yes? murder? kill? bite? kill?

[earhartsease]

[sera-moving-time-deactivated202]

based on something I saw a bit back