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fine, i admit it polyphemus, my actual name is Odysseus. O-d-y-s-s-e-u-s. With a Y, it is very important that you know how to spell my name.

"why?"

because much like Polyphemus, it doesnt have an "i"

alexanderwales

If I had been in charge of The Office, the last season would have seen the release of the "documentary", and it would be a massive hit on Netflix or wherever, enough so that there was demand for a second iteration of it. But the impact of the fame would have completely warped all the characters, and all their interactions with and comfortability with the camera. Jim would be doing his smile at the camera in a self-conscious way, knowing that this was essentially his catch phrase. All the characters would change their appearance, and they would become influencers just because you can't not accept $10K to make a TikTok for Kraft. And the drudgery of working at a paper supply company would become the drudgery of working at a paper supply company while also being a public figure whose income from Cameo dwarfs the office worker money, but where continued employment is more about maintaining a brand identity. There'd be episodes about stalkers, obsessive subreddits, getting stopped by people on the street, and the whole thing would become an ouroboros of self-reference. And it wouldn't be funny at all.

apricops

The year is 1492. You are the Catholic Monarchs - both of them. Isabel and Fernando, tanto monta, monta tanto. You have just finished kicking all of the Muslim powers out of Iberia, and you’re feeling so pleased with yourselves that you expel the Jews about it. You have a problem, though - there’s this annoying Genoese moron named Christopher Columbus who keeps waving some bad math at you, insisting that the world is actually smaller than everyone thinks it is and he could totally sail to India by going west. He gets on your nerves so much that you just give him a couple of ships and send him off. He definitely won’t make it to India, but maybe he’ll find some little island and give all of your newly-unemployed hidalgos something to keep them busy. He’ll probably just starve to death in the middle of the ocean, and then he’s no longer your problem.

The year is 1519, and you are Hernán Cortés. You and all of your compatriots are stuck in the most effective way to make someone a bad person: put them in a situation where they must become incredibly wealthy and powerful incredibly fast or else they will die horribly. Transatlantic voyages are absurdly expensive. Anyone in the ‘New World’ who isn’t rich enough to afford their own army is deeply in debt, with no collateral but their own sword-arm. It is an environment that does not reward half-measures. It does not even reward full measures. It only rewards putting a brick on the gas pedal and crossing your fingers - if you kill one person then you’re a murderer, but if you kill hundreds of thousands of people then you're a paragon of glory and the Spanish crown will make statues of you.

The year is still 1519 and you are Moctezuma II, Huēyi Tlahtoāni (great ruler) of the ‘Aztec Empire,’ also known as the Triple Alliance, or the Mexica. You know a thing or two about half-measures not being rewarded, because you are in a process of rapidly expanding and consolidating a nascent Mesoamerican empire. You are quite good at your job - even before you ascended to the throne, you cultivated a reputation as a skilled warrior, a dedicated student, and a devout worshiper. Your name means something like ‘lord who frowns in anger.’ It’s a fitting name, because the process of ‘imperial expansion and consolidation’ generally involves killing lots of people. To make matters worse, some weird hairy white guys showed up out of nowhere and they keep demanding an audience with you. You try every trick in the diplomatic handbook - deferment, threats, flattery, bribes - but everything you do just seems to make them more single-mindedly focused on your destruction. Later, after you are dead, they will claim that you thought they were gods.

The year is 1545, and this whole ‘colonialism’ thing is starting to peter out. Trans-Atlantic voyages are still ruinously expensive, and the pickings are getting slimmer every day - it’s not like you can go loot Tenochtitlan a second time. You’re starting to wonder if it’s time for everyone to pack up, go home, and forget about… holy shit is that a mountain of silver? Is that an honest-to-god mountain with more silver in it than every other existing silver mine on the face of the earth combined? Yes. Some call it Potosí. Many will call it “the mountain that eats men.” In a single moment, colonialism goes from a plundering campaign for recently-unemployed soldiers to a permanent institution. The alchemists back in Prague and Vienna never learned how to turn lead into gold, but the mercenaries and taskmasters in Potosí found a much simpler equation to turn blood into silver.

The year is 1571, and the economy of the Ming dynasty doesn’t feel so good. Their experiment with paper money was a failure, to put it gently. It turns out when you try to have paper currency but you don’t have sophisticated counterfeit protections and there’s also a booming cottage industry of people making paper in their actual cottages, well, you can guess how that ends. So you’re trying to shift to a silver economy. But then you run into an even bigger problem: you don’t have enough silver. So if you start demanding taxes in silver, the price of silver will skyrocket, which means taxes will skyrocket when the economy is already ailing from the whole ‘paper money’ thing. Some hapless scholar-official in Guangdong is nervously watching a peasant sharpen his pitchfork when he gets word from a messenger: some gweilo just showed up at the port with literal shipfuls of silver and they want to buy silk, tea, spices, and porcelain at outrageous markups.

Within living memory, the world was still ‘medieval’ in many ways - slow, parochial, zero-sum, carefully arbitrated by tradition and precedent. Legible. And now Spanish sailors take Bolivian silver on ships guarded by West African mercenaries and Japanese ronin, sailing to their colony in the Philippines to rub shoulders with Chinese officials, Indian sultans, and Malay merchants. All because some dipshit from Genoa got his math wrong and wouldn’t shut up about it.

The moral of this story is that I’m going insane.

pansyfemme

maybe this is too woke but i really hate the trope of naked older women = scary or vomit inducing or gross or whatever. like you even see it used in horror on occasion like oooooo so scary theres a woman with saggy boobs and wrinkles. There is something to be said for unconsensual veiwing of nudity. sure. it’s uncomfortable and violating for someone to be nude in front of you that you don’t want to see. but rarely that’s seen as the issue and instead the real ‘horror’ or gross out joke is the very idea of a woman who does not have a body that is sexually desirable to men. The very idea of an older woman’s body is treated like it’s something that we should all know is gross, sick and wrong. It’s just something that really bothers me

darkcomedies

evoking bertholt brecht’s “the way people cast a play!” quote as a spell against prescriptive, stereotypical, fatalistic typecasting

darkcomedies

idk what to tell you except go look at the fishwives

dogpuppy

At the local hamburger shop and they said yelled out “order 167!” And three middle school age kids yelled in perfect unison “ 6 7!” Life is sometimes so beautiful

moisterpeggingchampion

If you reference 67 you deserve to be executed on the spot tbh

dogpuppy

If I was king for a day the first thing I would do would be to sentence you to a life full of love and understanding.

ozempicofficial

devilsskettle

i think about this part in gone girl all the time

st-just

Janet Lorel, the People’s Champion by Benjamin Ee

thoughts on little women (2019)

I miss Louisa May Alcott.

My Louisa, from the back of my pale green book, with her moon face and Civil War sausage curls. Not the authoress trapped without a mouth behind the Greta Gerwig movie, which was fine in almost every way except for the costumes and Emma Watson’s atrocious accent. My Louisa. Jo March.

I wanted to be Jo March. Doesn’t every girl wanna be Jo March? I wanted Jo to get with Laurie, too, up until I saw Timmy Chalamet play him and realized he was perfect for frosty Florence Pugh. I had hated Book Amy so much that I felt a pang of sisterly schadenfreude when she fell through the New England ice. I was a wicked little girl, and so was Jo, but we look kindly upon her wickedness because of its yummy feminist overtones. She’s “too impulsive?” “Too mannish?” Oh no! Somebody go buy Jo March a copy of Lean In.

I maintain that Jo March, were she teleported to the modern world, would wind up hale, flourishing, and happily non-binary. Beth would be fine (“Area Time Traveler Cured, Gives Entire Hospital Piano Recital"), Meg would be fine but we would find her significantly more contemptible, Amy would be…

Book Amy or Pugh-Amy?

Modern life would either enable the worst of Amy or horrify her so completely that she would run away to join the Amish. I do not see Amy abandoning herself completely, however; cars would enthrall her as much as Waymos, and the Sephora counter would terrify her at first, as much she might marvel at our celebrities — cheekbones lit from the inside! (It’s called highligher.) Like Beth and Meg, she’d distrust modern and post-modern art (Jo would be thrilled by it). Amy would kind of want to become an influencer, but hate the algorithm. She’d buy a bunch of beauty products and never use them. She’d film a video and remember some Transcendentalist aphorism of Marmee’s about self-abnegation and delete it.

Amy, you see, is a girl and a girl’s girl, and serves to show us everything bookish girls resent and disavow about femininity — everything others, fairly or not, see and criticize in girlhood. Sensitivity. Petulance. Love of beauty, love of art, frippery, participation in the silly social games that the enlightened Jos of the world reject wholesale. Jo’s cutting off her hair to feed her family; Amy’s getting whacked in ye olde junior high for caring too much about Labubus pickled limes. Obsessing about her nose. Was Pugh & Gerwig’s rehabilitation of her in line with the book? I don’t know. But if you really wanna get to know a girl, don’t ask her which March sister she is, she’ll say Jo. Ask her how she felt when Aunt March told Amy she was the March family’s last hope.

You know what? I can see Modern!Amy getting into video games. In fact, I can see her liking them better than movies, which would be Jo and Beth’s joint thing. Paintings you can play? Come on. Any modern adaptation of Little Women that does not have Amy meticulously copying Breath of the Wild concept art is not one I want to see. I don’t want to make the mistake of giving her Jo-flavored grace, though. Maybe she wouldn’t be good at playing them. Maybe she wouldn’t like FPS or RTS games. And that’s okay.

Louisa had to marry Jo off. She didn’t want to, but she did.

brehaaorgana

Greatest hits of FIFA cultural exchanges thus far:

Learning about flyovers and pyrotechnics at American games being a thing

Non-americans discovering the size of American football stadiums....for high schools in texas. Also the size of our stadiums in general.

Going to baseball games as a side treat! Lmao.

Non-americans losing their minds over "like, 100 petrol pumps," at buc-ees.

Related: Americans often forget how huge target and Walmart is.

People discovering American BBQ

Non-americans being obsessed with mid American restaurant chains like Golden Corral and Taco Bell

A lot of them really did feel god in this chile's apparently

The rightful obsession with waffle house

New understanding of American Big Drink With Ice supremacy as summer creeps in

Americans realizing we have a Team USA and we are not, in fact, just "hosting our friends" from around the world — mostly because we won our first match and our team is decent??? Not amazing but not the worst.

Side rant: us women's football team is legendary good and we should care about that more like. Hello???

Understanding that America really is that fucking hot and summer is just starting

Related: the english team did warm ups in Florida RIP, and also the there's a video of the French team just being like fuck the heat, fuck the sun, this is so hot...

Americans who do not normally care about international football but fucking love a sport and cheering so we're just hyping whatever team is nearby, like we see a party and just show up and learn the chant. Like sorry many of us don't know shit about soccer but if we see a bunch of people in viking helmets or kilts or holding a bunch of flags and cheering we're game.

TAILGATING!!!!

I already said this but American yellow school bus is an international celebrity

The Scottish drank Boston dry of beer apparently, like they quadrupled what Boston normally sells for fourth of July weekend. SAM ADAMS HAD TO GET AN EMERGENCY BEER DELIVERY.

Also the English team fans got kicked out of The Londoner pub in Dallas after drinking 5,000 beers and going over max capacity lmao

Free refill drinks, tortilla chips & salsa.

So many non-americans are going to be here for the 4th of July for our 250th anniversary which is going to be great and hilarious

Non-americans discovering ranch as a beloved condiment

Non-americans understanding American obsession with hamburger now

Japan's homebase is in Texas and the cultural differences are frankly great and also the Japanese fans are SO NICE and helped clean up the stadium after a match???

All the short videos with the eagle screech (which I think is actually a red tail hawk but whatever)

professionalowl

it is of course easier to performatively ban children from social media than to do things like "actually challenge and regulate the abusive tactics tech companies use to extract people's data and money via social media" but if we did the second thing we wouldn't have any excuse to force people to use digital ID :(

leviathan-supersystem

I get how the whole "listening to music as a dick-measuring contest for who can listen to the most obscure band" thing can get grating sometimes but I don't think people realize just how vital that phenomenon is for new up and coming bands to get a foot in the door. it's understandable to be annoyed by hipsterism but unless you want all music to be industry plants and former child stars you're just going to have to accept it as part of the social ecosystem.

leviathan-supersystem

most of your friends probably won't go around hyping up your amateurish self-released bandcamp project, but you know who will? the most insufferable hipster jackass you'll ever meet.

leviathan-supersystem

[your best friend playing your music in front of someone else]: yeah haha this is my friend's band... i know it's kinda weird and rough around the edges but i'm kinda into it... if you're not tho i'll turn it off.

[pretentious music guy you've never met before playing your music in front of someone else]: yeah so i found this on bandcamp and it completely blew me away, no one is making music like this today, it's so raw and experimental and interesting, i can't believe they only have 3 listeners on spotify, they're brilliant, frankly if you don't like this music you should kill yourself,

An Open Question!

The majority of the publications I read are devoted to describing the myriad societal reasons for sadness. Some of the other ones describe techniques for coping with said sadness. Some of the other ones go “I know it might seem naive, but here are some nice things to look at.”

Most of those nice things are fictional.

From the publications I have gleaned that many people my age are very sad. This tracks with people my age I know, though I myself am particularly prone to sadness, so there’s a strong selection effect at play. We are sad about the world’s problems and the impossibility of solving them and how those problems intersect with our own lives. We are sad about one of sixty-three potentially world-ending events. We are sad because the old rules and tools were good, and we carelessly threw them aside to make way for inhuman, anti-human nonsense. We are sad because the old rules and tools were terrible, but despite more than a half-century’s vigorous exorcism their arthritic ghost fingers still leave ugly prints on the mirror of the future.

What is going on? Why is everybody so upset? I’m going to go through basic, boring, stupid reasons until I get to the bottom of this.

Are you sure this isn’t a you problem?

When I refer to “everyone” I am talking about people in developed nations who can, broadly speaking, expect their survival needs to be met. These people presumably make up most of the writers and commenters of the publications I read.

All of the people who write for the news cannot be as “sensitive to negative affect” as I am. Otherwise nothing would get done. And yet all of them are really fucking sad.

They’re sad about actual problems that exist in the world.

There are a lot of reasons to be sad. The threats are real, their scale is new, and our awareness of them is correctly calibrated.

But we’ve done this before, yes? The world has always been terrible? The size and scope and scale of the threats has always been insurmountable, resources have always been lacking, there have always been unknown unknowns?

It’s the human condition, silly billy. Life is hard.

Some people I know are fond of saying that poverty is the natural state of humankind, and that wealth is a miracle. Maybe sadness is the same way.

Sadness is a productive emotion that shows us something is not right. It is how we register loss. Depression is the psyche meeting an obstacle it feels it cannot overcome, and deciding to conserve energy instead of throwing needless resources at the problem. The world is very big and very complex and there have always been many of these obstacles.

But haven’t things been getting better? Haven’t we coordinated to create beautiful things, like chocolate and tumblr and butterfly gardens? Don’t the writers and commenters I read take luxuries for granted that would melt the minds of our ancestors even a century ago?

Failing this, aren’t there spiritual and psychological traditions that can help writers get off the hedonic treadmill?

Easier said than done.

I know! But then why isn’t the majority of writing accounts of people becoming enlightened and learning to fight suffering? Isn’t that where all the value is?

Some people don’t want to be happy.

Spicy. Well, then, why?

Happiness is boring. Look at how many words you’ve spent on sadness despite being currently quite happy.

Oh my God.