Heracleum Mantegazzianum

Not exactly a giant hogweed, any sort of parsley or other kind of phytophototoxic vegetal lifeform, but I couldn't resist a dumb musical reference. 30-ish, from Chile, this is an alt account but I barely use the ones with my real name anymore. Here for fun fandom, shitposting, webcomics, and feigning (without any success) that catastrophic news aren't there.

[menoftiktok]

Flora MMA | the ultimate bromance fr fr

[wholesomepostarchive]

9/28/2023

[queer-joy-detector]

Queer joy detected!

[latitude-sims]

Horrible timing but I'm had this urge to get back lol in the game. My game imploded a few updates ago, I was having problems with the game not loading, and the school I was building kept getting reset, I got enough energy to redownload my CC and update my mods, which resolved most issues but I'm still combing through my remaining CC as the culprit seems to be some corrupted files, probably because of my failing SSD.

So anyway, while I took some time off this game, played and finished Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, became wayy to involved in Hansry, a few other games, like Age of Empires II, which apparently I had left forgotten since 2019, and most importantly, travelled a bit, where I got this urge to recreate what I saw, this was my second time going abroad and I got the idea to start a save where I explore the different typologies of buildings here in South America, as this time I got to visit neighboring Perú and Ecuador, and last year Argentina, Paraguay & Brasil.

I feel there's much architecture worth exploring in this continent and just a few Simblrs dedicated to showcasing it. As for Chile's, I think there's pretty much no one, as far as I can tell, so this is where I step in.

Fair warning, I tend to yap a lot about things I care about, so I hope you get to the end of this post and learn a bit about a very random a far-away topic, like a palace, its family's history, and Chile's tendency to get catastrophic earthquakes every so often.

Palacio Vergara, Viña del Mar

Left: Watercolor diagram by Ettore Petri, crop from Municipio de Viña. Right: Ca' d'Oro, photo by Tommao Wang on Unsplash.

So, getting to today's WIP proper, the Palace at the Quinta Vergara Park (which you might have heard is the seat of Chile's –and Latam's– Eurovision equivalent, the Festival de Viña, that had its LXV Edition this past February), which is now an art museum, and completely renovated after getting damaged in Chile's 2010 earthquake. (It also had to be repaired after another earthquake in 1985)

The palace in 2017 & 2022 a year after its reopening in 2021. Photos by me.

Heavily inspired by renaissance & neogothic Venetian palazzi (palazzos?), (The Ca' d'Oro in particular) it was built by the daughter of Viña del Mar's founder, the socialité Blanca Vergara Alvares de Errázuriz, after the 1906 Valparaíso earthquake leveled the city, and the family mansion that stood on the same grounds. Commissioned to Italian architect Ettore Petri, being inaugurated by Chile's Centennial in 1910.

The Alvares family was of Portuguese origin, with generarch Francisco Alvares settling in the burgeoning port of Valparaíso, buying the Hacienda (Estate) de las Siete Hermanas and the Hacienda of Viña de la Mar, colonial-era estates that sat on oposite banks of the Marga Marga estuary, South & North respectively.

These estates would be subsequently acquired by José Francisco Vergara after marrying Mercedes Alvares, Francisco's granddaughter, and therefore the Siete Hermanas would become known as the Quinta Vergara. José Francisco, a surveyor engineer responsible of the Santiago-Quillota (and later Santiago-Valparaíso) railway, congressman, member of Chile's Radical Party, journalist, freemason, War of the Pacific veteran, being Minister of War and Navy while the the war was ongoing, and founder of Viña del Mar's 1st Fire Company.

Having lived in Viña for a bit, you really get to know him a lot, and the lasting impact he had despite a quite short lifespan. He suddenly died at 55 of heart failure, and oddly enough, I found two conflicting moments of death, yet there's a marker on the spot he died, which was here in the grounds of his very Quinta.

Left: José Francisco Vergara as Minister of War, Photo from Fotografía Patrimonial, MHN/SERPAT; Right: Blanca Vergara de Errázuriz; Bottom: Casona Alvares, before and after. Photos from Archivo Brügmann Restauradores

1906 was a horrible year seismically, if you happened to be within the Ring of Fire. You've probably heard about San Francisco's, Valparaíso and Viña del Mar, (which are twinned cities) experienced a similar fate. There were also extreme earthquakes in Ecuador that very same year, and on Alaska's Aleutian Islands, which happened just 30 minutes before the event in Valparaíso but without correlation. The old Alvares villa did not stand a chance.

Top: Extent of damage cadaster, including fire damage. Wikimedia Commons. Left: View of the former Del Roble St. with the ruins of La Merced church on the background. Center: Lea Poudensan y Cía. building after the earthquake and subsequent fire. Right: Collapsed Gobernación Marítima building on Sotomayor Square. Fotografía Patrimonial MNH/SERPAT. Fun fact: The latter is the first build I ever posted about, but I would redo it completely now with better sets.

The reconstruction of the Valparaíso was bureaucratic and slow, where the El Almendral quarter was by far the most affected, and the most populous. The neighbours' Comisión General de Vecinos, the landlords' Comité de Propietarios, and the government's Reconstruction Board, which ultimately took all design decisions, had taken the chance to end a long-debated issue, which was to rebuild the city with hygienist ideals, paving over creeks, carving new parks and squares, drafting wider streets over the old colonial layout, and brand-new crisscrossing boulevards.

In Viña del Mar, conversely, the rebuilding was swift, under the influence of the Garden City movement that made Viña earn their nickname "Ciudad Jardín". About 500 new detached garden mansions were built by 1913, with the Vergara palace being one of them, while El Almendral was still on their way, well past its Centennial goal, pushing the still homeless towards the city's many hills.

The loss of her father in 1889 will not be Blanca's only grieving, though. Her husband Guillermo Errázuriz would die of tuberculosis soon after in 1895. Blanca will lose 11-year-old Hugo on a horse-riding accident, and her namesake daughter will murder her spouse, an American football player, coach and businessman John de Saulles, who was 15 years her senior, over the custody of their son in 1917 overseas in the US, a scandal that would get attention (and gossip) in Chile, the US and abroad. Her brother Salvador will die the same age as their father José Francisco that same year, after spending his life continuing the work of their dad, developing Viña.

Acquitted after being championed by suffragettes and feminists as a victim of chauvinism (and grooming, since she was 16 when they met each other), her daughter Blanca would become estranged with her own son John, after remarrying and returning to Chile, and will later take her own life with barbiturates in 1940 in the palace, with her son would die as well soon after of unknown causes. Later Guillermo, her only remaining son would take his own life because of struggles with gambling and adultery, being spurned by Peggy Hopkins Joyce, an actress in a film about her sister's heavily sensationalized story. Of her remaining daughters, Manuela had become a nun, with just the youngest Amalia still living with her.

The Woman and the Law (1918), by Raoul Walsh, the film based on Blanca's case. Image from IMDB, Public Domain.

She found solace in the patronage of the arts, and in pompous get-togethers at her manor for socializing with eminences and entrepreneurs alike. A gregarious, learned woman, and a liberal like his dad, became acquainted with the intelligentsia of the era, and fairly well travelled, frequented Europe often (especially Venice), which influenced her views and style. A graceful lady that tried to keep her head high despite a very tragic familiar life. The First World war had eroded saltpeter profits after the synthetization of nitrate, and with that, the Vergara family's wealth.

Blanca, with her remaining Amalia, dwindling fortune, and ailing health due to her advanced age, she decided to part ways with her palace, and her pinacotheca. Some 14 years later she would die in her remaining estate in neighboring Limache, at 89.

An art collector, Blanca amassed some 60 paintings from European artists. When the Quinta de las Siete Hermanas was sold to the city of Viña del Mar in 1941, it became the permanent collection of the city's new Fine Arts museum at the Palace. Photos from Memoria Chilena, Biblioteca Nacional Digital de Chile.

Lesson done, let's get to the interior.

While the front façade is about ~90% done, with a few details missing mainly on the wings, the interior is still pretty much barebones. I had to cut the suplemental, easternmost wing because it wouldn't fit on the 64x64 lot, and the most important rooms are on the western and central wings anyway. It did feature an indoor pool and the house help's quarters, which were built before the rest of the palace.

The other façades are still missing as well, as I'm still figuring out the proportions of the rooms based on a single floorplan available online, luckily of the ground floor, but I'll have to guess the floors above and below, though the latter is just storage space, with a trap door, so not the most replicable in Sims 4.

The entrance hall. While the original has yellow-tonned Oregon pinewood for the wainscotting, ceiling, door paneling, I switched up the colors because the palette for both the flooring and walls was less versatile than I thought. Maybe I'll edit them to match the real house better, but Felixandre doesn't really appreciate recolors at all.

Oregon pines were common for construction in port areas like the Valparaíso Bay, no matter if rich or poor strata. Used in ship stowing, they were abundant as the ballasts were thrown out while cargoing ships.

The Palace's Ballroom, or Gold Room. The blind arches shouldn't be truly blind, as behind these arches there should be a mezzanine (called a minstrel's gallery) where musicians would play through tiny windows, but that's pretty much impossible to achieve in TS4 without messing up the scale, so the result is a bit less grand, but I think is my favourite room so far.

The Red Room, with a massive skylight that IRL is a bit more detailed, and the gothic blind arcade supports smaller, but they're really hard to work with, and again they lack the right swatch, but it's fine. I think I got the perfect paintings for this room; I just have to check if the game will open with them lol.

The Blue Room and one of the hallways. The room is when I realized this wouldn't be able to be a perfect recreation, as in real life is a quarter-circle bay window, but you can't do that either in The Sims.

The loggia, with a view of Del Sol, I mean, Viña del Mar. In reality the Palace is at the bottom of a creek's valley actually, which feeds the Palace's gardens.

Left: The mansion c. 1925 with the pool annex added. Archivo Histórico de Viña del Mar.

That's it for now. See you sooner than last time, except if there's some miracle and I can finally get a new SSD so my PC stops dying on me. I've already made some changes, but I don't think they're worth redoing the photos, editing, etc. Plus, I don't know if they will stick. Like Harrie's Copenhagen doors are the exact style of the interior doors for the manor, except they're way too wide, and come in less variants that I would need. I've never used Felixandre's Georgian set, which matches the doorframes, but the handles are cartoonishly simple, so they put me off. Currently I'm using the Chateau set, which is comprehensive, but the doors don't really convince me either, but comprehensive is good to make a house feel cohesive. I wanna use Lili's Palaces' so bad but they're tiny tiny, only her Enfilade set features medium and tall doors, but they don't match Felixandre swatches. It's a doozy.

This is kinda long for a post, I hope it wasn't too overwhelming, lol. I couldn't even fit more pics to show the actual interior. Maybe it was too much info for a Sims build, but as I was looking for pictures since I didn't had the chance to enter the museum and even if I did I can be sure I wouldn't had taken enough pictures to cover every possibly relevant or replicable, I began to learn how this house is basically imposible to understand without its context... Well, that goes for architecture in general, no?

I have another house in the works too, the one where I decided where this new save would be going. That I'll be showing out next. And where I managed to Frankenstein some doors (and windows!) because transom windows are really rare both in vanilla and CC. I don't have as much info on the other house, so it will be a shorter post, maybe.

[latitude-sims]

Hacienda Alfalfares, La Serena

This is the build that started it all, or at least this new set of builds (I'm heasitant to call it a "save" since I probably won't be able to share it completely without requiring about 10 gazilion terabytes of CC). It's a place I see often travelling through my city but since is private property (It was set to be the headquarters of a mining operation that failed to pass environmental checks so it fell through), even getting near it is pretty much impossible (there's a big wall blocking it from the street), I can only admire the house from afar.

I can't remember if I managed to figure out the best day to post. But I want to get this post done this Saturday so it's a bit more abridged than last week’s. By the way, I don't think I've thanked everyone on the reception of last year's last post (haha), if things go well I hope to be more regular over here. It's so much better to be able to write about all the ins and outs without being limited by letter counts like Twitter or Bluesky. And also, as sad as it is, I found Bluesky kinda dull, and now I'm back on Twitter (and Reddit even), but just talking politics and occasionally trying to be funny. I'll move my Sims business over here.

Now, a bit of history:

View of the farmstead from the Santa Lucía hill. Photo from Chile Patrimonios.

Built in 1876 and located in the Southern Elqui riverbank, it formerly looked over vast plantations of alfalfa, giving the estate its name, but also olives, grazing areas and a clay mine. In fact, it was the third biggest hacienda (estate) in the former La Serena department (roughly comprising of the communes of La Serena, Coquimbo & La Higuera today). It was also known as the Casona (manor) Marín, because of its owners. Nowadays most of these plantations have been built over, but some still remain, subdivided.

An Italian architect, Eusebio Chelli, was responsible for its design. He was in the area doing work for the Basilica Minor at Andacollo, a major pilgrimage site in Chile, when contracted by the Marín family to build a manor house for their recently acquired lands to the Mercedarian Order, who used the land to produce altar wine and roof tiles, of which they had a monopoly given by Spain. Once Chile achieved independence, the Order would lose this status and sell off their lands.

Left: Chelli's first work in Chile, the Neoclassical Recoleta Dominica nunnery in Santiago (1853, inaugurated 1882), photo: Wikimedia Commons. Center: The Basilica Minor of Andacollo, (inaugurated 1893), photo by me. Right: The Errázuriz Urmeneta Palace, now Embassy of Brazil (1873), photo by Santiago Adicto in Instagram.

Later the Marín family would adapt the farmland for dairy, and would start manufacturing bricks alongside clay tiles, and these bricks would be used in contemporaneous buildings around the city, such as the nearby Divina Providencia cloister.

There's this one house tour on YouTube where they show off most of the manor, I haven't been able to find more pictures since they do very limited, private tours afaik and the art and furniture of the house was mostly somewhere else in storage. Because the post would almost exclusively be screencaps from said video I think is best to post a link to it, it's in Spanish of course:

The exterior of the build is mostly finished, I just need to wrap up the western section, (Where there's a service staircase) I haven't found proper references to complete it. The house, in Italianate style, features bicolor friezes, windowsills, lintels, columns, pilasters and other details, but alas in Sims 4 it would have involved a lot of z-fighting in the best of cases, so I kept them white, and there is a lot of layering already to make what I had available into the doors and windows of the house, which are quite tall and feature transom windows which almost none of the doors had.

The landscaping is very minimal, the manor had an orchard and some very large Washingtonia palms overlooking a driveway for barouches (rather than cars, so it's small). The palms are a bit larger than I could manage in The Sims, but I still like the result very much. Some terrain paint and it should be pretty much complete.

The windows are by @lilis-palace but enlarged with TOOL, since she doesn't have windows taller than short height, and filling a hole cut by a Felixandre window, covering the seams with his Berlin window and Estate door frames, for example. The doors are simpler, Grove doors with Chateau frames and a mesh edit by @peacemaker-ic of some Growing Together windows, which fit perfectly over the doors, and a balcony piece by @khakas-cc that I'm using as window guards. The piece that made me not scrap this whole build is also by Khakas, the Painted Ladies frieze that circles the house. When I started the build I thought we had something similar in the game, but turns out it was in TS3 (and CC at that).

The ground floor interior is pretty much done as well, except for decor, which is still barebones on most rooms, as again, I have little reference of what was in these rooms, and in what styles, but Lily's sets will do, for the most part. On this floor you will find all the major rooms, and also a little chapel, as well as the kitchen, but I have no references of the latter.

Let's get inside, in no particular order, because organizing pictures in Tumblr is damn cumbersome:

The Mirror Room

Probably the most complete so far. I kinda went all-in on green on this one, very much like the original. This house is dimmer than it should, but I like the ever so slightly moodier light.

The Dining Room

It is supposed to have a very particular wallpaper, but this red one is the most similar I think, the original is fading and the video lighting wasn't the best either. I found a double width table (technically a modular one from that cursed site, not the one you're thinking of, the other one, Mod Collective), that fits much better than the Victorian banquet table I had before. (I retook this pics once I remembered about it lol)

The Chapel

Dedicated to Our Lady of Mercy (for the land's link to the Order). I know I'm mixing out about 3 types of Christianity at least, but I'm working with what I have (and is Maxis-match enough lol, which is another hurdle). It features a confesionary and a picture of Pope Leon XIII, under whose approval the chapel was built for private prayer.

The Kitchen

This is completely made up, using the space that seemingly none of the rooms shown in the video are. I also managed to fit a mudroom, pantry, and bathroom. A perfect opportunity to use @pierisim's Domaine du Clos kitchen. It's probably a tad fancier than it would have been, but I'm imagining it renovated and still in use.

The Drawing Room

This room seems to have the chimney built into the wainscotting, but I think that's some serious fire hazard in The Sims so I think I'll rather finish up populating the shelves and moving on. The wallpaper should be toile but again, the reference is very faded, and there's not much CC I could find that did not made my AI meter go off.

I usually hate to leave things on their default swatch but this time I think they do work very well in this very earthy palette and I especially enjoy the Lovestruck's painting flowers blending in with the real ones. Well, the 3D ones.

The Billiard Room

With no pool/billiard table that would fit the style, I'm thinking of readapting the room into something akin to a rather unstately rumpus room, with a bar and some gym equipment.

The bedrooms are located in the upper level, but so far, I haven't really started them yet. The last piece of this house with significant progress is the glazed hallway, much akin to Galician balconies, a common feature in La Serena and in neighboring Coquimbo, as ubiquitous as is its tin roofing. The lighting in the hallway is truly majestic.

And that's all folks. See you on the next post, finishing up the Quinta Vergara, which I plan to upload before my birthday on April 6th.

[lesmana-enterprise-ltd]

WIP: Lesmana - Nordhaven Opera House (no CC)

Phase 2 Completion: Lesmana-Iverstad MRT Station

6 May 2026 WIP Update:

Lesmana Enterprise’s engineering team has completed Phase 2 construction of Lesmana–Iverstad MRT Station, marking a key milestone in improving direct public transit access to the Lesmana Nordhaven Opera House district.

The new station is designed to support smoother visitor flow, reduce surface traffic around the waterfront, and strengthen Nordhaven’s growing cultural and commercial corridor.

MRT Easter egg:

We added a small elevator item on the peron of the Lesmana-Iverstad MRT Station, so that when your sims visits the Opera House, they will spawn on the platform of the MRT station and have to make their way up to the ground.

Stay tuned for the official release of Lesmana Nordhaven Opera House, as the Lesmana Enterprise team moves closer to the final phase of completion. More previews, project updates, and release details will be announced soon.

Sul Sul!,

The Lesmana Enterprise Co., Ltd.

[latitude-sims]

A day late but still! Happy birthday to me! 🥳🥳

I really wanted to finish up the Quinta for this post but things got in the way, it was also a lot more work than I thought, and I did quite a lot of changes that may be even invisible to you but brings me peace of mind, like reducing the shades of white (barely if any noticeable under Reshade and Photoshop), and some things of the like.

Anyway, here's the progress on the palace, I've been sorting all the art I have for pieces that match either in color or spirit the paintings at the museum, so mostly bucolic, pastoral and religious pre-modern art, there's a few pieces of modern art here and there, but I think I'll be saving them for the Valparaíso Fine Arts Museum, located in the Art Nouveau (quite influenced by Secession Style I'd say) Baburizza Palace, which its full of modern stuff.

The Baburizza in question:

I don't really know if I can pull the style off, so I'm not sure I'll publish this one, but I'm tinkering on it (I remain firm on my position that Art Nouveau must be the hardest style to pull off in TS4) Pic from little me back in 2017.

The Entrance Lobby

You know, IRL the front desk and lockers are a very 2015 Sims 4 Harbinger style red and steel, and would you believe that was the year the repairs began? Yeah, I chose something a bit less loud to compliment the traditional interior better.

The Grand Corridor

Paintings are not final, just to see how it could look like. The statues, however, are as close as I could match them with @thejim07 stock.

The Red Room

I decided that I was gonna do the double height anyway, and while it is massive, I think it still works. It's just the spotlights that became meaningless so I removed them but kept the rails for detail, they were making the room wayy too dark anyway, and with the skylight it was already quite dark. This contraption on the side is meant to be the Vergaras' altar, which is on display in this room.

The Mirror Room

Similar to how it already was, but I found a recolor of the Vampires parquet floor that matched @lilis-palace's Neoclassical floors better and I found another sculpture with a lyre (two Apollos, which IRL are women).

The Purple Room

Not much to say about this room besides it being lower than the others in real life because the mezzanine for musicians is supposed to be above it, and it having a very intricate floor that I'm still figuring out how to do. This room is meant to have wainscoting and purple walls but I don't think I have a wallpaper like that, and Lili's panelling doesn't have half tiles either.

The Blue Room

This room has the most sculptures of any room, but they're mostly busts and heads on the massive bay window, of which I have very little that match their styles. The walls' wainscotting is meant to have vines and grapes so, the garlands are standing in for them. There are some bronzes in the other wall but I've hit the picture limit on Tumblr lol.

Most of these paintings are by Sforz who deactivated last month but I think they're all archived in case I decide to upload this build to the gallery.

The Back Façade

Pics I took in 2022. The patio was enclosed with a glass fence for the virus, not sure if it still there.

I moved a fountain which was on the garden below, otherwise the area looked a little bare. The detail in real life is in the new pavement, but none of the paving options I have look both 2015 enough or have the pattern options basegame floors have. I'm very proud of the dupliceta (twinned columns, which the front facade should also have, but I don't think would work as well), and the blind arches over the windows, which were covered by petition of Blanca Vergara shortly after construction had concluded.

Fun fact, during restoration they discovered that the interior pillars are still there, but hidden inside the stucco.

More of the back with the real life inspiration. As I said on the original post, I had to cull the wing with the swimming pool and workers houses but to make a newer west façade I decided to wrap the workers houses (last picture) around, which has a different stucco treatment and adds quoins to the mix.

That's everything for this entry, I'd say the build is about 80% done. I've done a few tricks with the roofing, but seeing James do constrainfloorelevation on Sims 3 makes me wish platforms worked like TS3 friezes and let you place roofs on top of them.

[wayfire-official]

Sex should have a secondary gameplay loop where you build bases, manage resources, and expand your territory

[flammableengineering]

polycule

[hmantegazzi]

I must say that the British cast with British accent makes it relatively easy to imagine that they went just a bit further with the alternate history and that these are British communists going to the moon.

[hmantegazzi]

And now the coastal scene with the submarine! I'm headcanoning that Marx and Engels managed to bring the revolution to England and that's the big communist enemy of the US. It's just as plausible.

[hmantegazzi]

I must say that the British cast with British accent makes it relatively easy to imagine that they went just a bit further with the alternate history and that these are British communists going to the moon.

[milkwithginseng]

[captain-price-returns]

Elon Musk accidentally revealing his mom's account is one of his alt's means that he has both impersonated his own infant child and mother online.

Which also means when she posted to try to end the fight rumors between him and Zuck it was actually him.

And when she posted “stop being mean to Elon” it was also him.

[captain-price-returns]

[gunsandfireandshit]

Remember kids, don't post while you're high as fuck on ketamine like Elon

[toloveviceforitself]

First screenshot is real, second is fake. Which is too bad because it is pointing out something real: that first tweet he really clearly meant to post from his dad's account, so he def is sockpuppeting both of them.

[andmaybegayer]

Obviously lots of women's rights and economics reasons for the demographic transition but a big one is probably just "even if you want to have kids, when 98+% of kids make it to adulthood the error bars mean you can just have exactly as many kids as you want, and for a huge number of people that's 1 or 2" and that's not enough for population growth.

Like the acoup about peasants pointed out that on average peasant lifestyles would give you about 2.8 kids, but the huge error bars on that due to child mortality mean some people are going to end up with 0 or 1 adult children and some people are going to have 4-6 adult children pretty often.

[loki-zen]

I mean doesn't this imply though that the average desired kids for the peasant families might have been closer to 3? Than 2 or 1. Obviously we don't really know what they desired as far as I know but go with it a sec - if that's true, then people having exactly as many kids as they wanted would be fine if it weren't for the fact that that number has changed, which gets us back where we started.

[andmaybegayer]

oh yeah I think the economic and women's rights things here are probably the main part of why the "target" number of kids is lower, like, you don't need kids for Farm Labour and without a dedicated childrearing parent it's more expensive to raise more kids. Also like you say in the tags there's definitely something about how All 👏 Kids 👏 Are 👏 Valid 👏 now so you don't have to keep going until you get a boy as much.

I think my main point is that since I'm not really open to compromise on women's rights and economics I do kind of think that "getting the birth rate above 2" is actually way harder than some people seem to think it is. A lot of the focus is on like, encouraging new family formation, but even if literally every possible heterosexual pairing is formed and they all have 2 kids you're still going to end up below replacement by a small amount.

[loki-zen]

Yeah, agreed. What would actually need to happen is for the production of more children to be recognised as the necessary work for the long-term value of the economy that it is, and compensated appropriately. (At which point, there would be incentive to work out how to automate parts of it potentially. Obviously fully parentless children are a very thorny issue but at minimum cyberwombs could enable more people for whom natural childbirth is impossible or impractically risky to have (more) children.)

[loki-zen]

But really it's like.

So basically all employers/entities in the economy benefit from there being a world where there are more babies long-term bc no babies means Bad but all of them want everyone but them to actually help pay for that (via employee benefits and accommodating and promoting employees with family commitments and financially supporting children and childcare and education). That needs to get broken up somehow. Coordination problem kind of

[wiseguynephile]

flashback to when I got a little too gnc in my new profile pic, and my mom caught on that I had The Gender (which she was super supportive about, tbc), but didn't want to ask about it outright. so she started making up never-before-seen euphemisms

[wiseguynephile]

some hits from the tags

[simplysnaps]

Hannah Montana is fucked up because its entire POINT as a show is that children should be protected from fame and exploitation, but it stars a REAL little girl that's being exploited. Nearly every episode carries the looming threat of Miley being outed as Hannah and losing her peaceful teenage life to the ravages of fame. Her father in the show (played by her own father in real life) wisely protected her from the trauma of fame by making her wear a disguise and live a rather quiet, interview-free life. Meanwhile the REAL Billy Ray Cyrus sold his daughter to Disney Channel when she was 11 and forced her to read dialogue about how terrible it would be to face the public eye. Like... Jesus, dude. The fictional Robby Ray is 10x the father, and it's not even close. (It's also IMMENSELY funny that her dad doesn't use his real name in the show, while she does. Almost like he wanted a bit of a disconnect between his identity and his character. Something Miley didn't get.)

[bauliya]

so women are supposed to grin and bear the books, the comics, the movies, the plays, the tv shows, the stories, the sci-fi, the translated ancient poems, the fucking millennia of men writing about their self inserts torturing women and it being declared as High Art by other men, we’re supposed to read it in our free time, study it in classrooms, include their styles in our own writing, accept their cultural influence as natural, watch it in the cinema, write about it, talk about it, accept it, aspire it, but men can’t tolerate three seconds of female wish fulfilment of a woman snapping the wrist of a creep without feeling personally kicked in the balls.

[darkshrimpemotions]

This reminds me of something I observed in college while I was doing my honors thesis on women in modern horror films. I watched a LOT of horror during that time as part of my research, and sometimes that was done with my family around.

And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.

Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.

Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.

Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.

My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).

But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.

So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?

Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.

In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.

And they flinch every time.

[tzikeh]

Here have a newspaper comic from 1993

[lastoneout]

I really do think it comes down to desensitization and a lack of learned sympathy. Imo it’s why cishetperisex white abled majority men tend to react so badly when the protagonist of a game or movie or whatever is a woman. I think when society more or less caters to you via media and representation you never have to learn to sympathize with people who don’t look like you, or at least not in the way marginalized people do. Black men and boys have to learn to see themselves in white ones, women in men, queer folks in straight, disabled in abled, we do not get catered to, so we learn to find ourselves in places we don’t exist and we learn fast. It sucks, and it never feels 100% natural, but we learn.

And yes, we all are supposed to learn to see ourselves in others by default, that’s an important part of being a person and also engaging with stories, I should be able to understand why my lesbian neighbor is upset that her amazon package got dumped on someone else’s porch even though I’m not a lesbian, and I feel like Clark Kent and I could talk about growing up in the middle of nowhere and find common ground even if I’m not a white male alien superhero but like, it’s different when you HAVE to do it ALL the time JUST to engage in media and feel represented and seen. And that’s what we do and we get really good at it because if we didn’t we’d never enjoy anything.

Quick obligatory disclaimer that plenty of men are perfectly capable of learning to do this, as well as everyone else, and do it all the time, this is not a natural state of white manhood this is something chosen that can be discarded–but your average white dude who grew up with all the media around him being about him just straight up does not have years of hard training in “seeing myself in the other” because he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t have to try to find himself, he’s Luke Skywalker, John Wick, Superman, he’s always seeing a reflection of himself.

So what happens when suddenly he’s looking in a mirror and sees someone else? He gets uncomfortable, angry, confused. Which at it’s core is understandable, this is a skill that you have to learn and it’s normal for your brain to respond with discomfort or anger when you don’t know how to do something, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to let it fester into resentment and bigotry and hate….which is what these dudes do. He can’t relate to this person, he doesn’t know how to look for things that are similar like where they grew up or shared interests, things that we look to when connecting with a character to relate to them enough to be invested in their story. And some are so bad at dealing with that discomfort they lose it at the thought of having to think that hard about relating to a story, get pissed that they’re being asked to consider that humans exist who aren’t like them and who also deserve to be in the spotlight sometimes, but I think at the core it’s insecurity born of a lack of a skill our society necessitates everyone but these men learn. They don’t know how to do this and they have no idea how to handle that.

That’s similar to the logic of the horror stuff, women and minorities spend so long learning to like horror despite us being the fucking bad guys and victims in everything, but I remember I thought of this originally after people got mad at the Charlie’s Angels remake having the biggest male character turn out to be a villain. These guys weren’t just mad that there wasn’t more men, they were mad that they were specifically being painted as the bad guy, and I was like…confused? At first, because like yeah dude that doesn’t actually say much about you as a person, sometimes the bad guy looks like you….and then I was like oh. Oh. The bad guy never looks like you, does he? And you don’t know what to do now that you’re looking at a character you’re supposed to hate and seeing yourself.

Because the other thing we as minorities have to learn to do is love the bad guys because WE’RE the bad guys. The torn queer kid who wants to be Aladdin but sees so many of his mannerisms in Jafar and has to just…deal with that. It’s like horror for me, I love horror, but I’m disabled and mentally ill. I am almost always the bad guy in horror. The face in the mirror is my own, and I like horror, so I and everyone else in the same place learns a delicate act of like, sympathizing and seeing yourself in the characters but also not and trying to root for the good guys who aren’t like you or just not doing that and rooting for the bad guys the whole time, like I’m not describing it well, but it’s hard to articulate despite being something again, almost all of us have to go through at some point.

And god I remember Ghostbusters 2016 having the bimbo be a himbo instead, dudes were SO fucking uncomfortable and I was just laughing because yeah wow that….that sure is just how some men write women!! And they do it all the time, and it’s really fucking stupid and sexist and weird especially seeing it come from a male character, but like dude fr me @ these men do you seriously have absolutely 0 tolerance for a depiction of a person who looks like you in a story being negative??? You literally never learned how to deal with that???

But they didn’t. They never had to. Because even when the bad guy looks like them there is always a good guy who does too. Charlie’s Angels and Jenifer’s Body and Ghostbusters make them uncomfortable and angry because the bad guys look like them and the good guys don’t. They have no tolerance for that discomfort, they are not desensitized to their only representation being the villain or the victim or the idiot, and they also seemingly have no idea how to not internalize the idea that the bad guy looking like you doesn’t mean the story is saying you are the bad guy.

I mean they do to the rest of us but for majority white men it doesn’t because:

I mean fuck half the horror movies out there explicitly just say “all mentally ill people are crazy dangerous murderers you should never trust” and I learned to live with that somehow while Charlie’s Angels just says “this one particular dude sucks” and it’s the end of the goddamn world to every white dude who suddenly forgets other people aren’t them. Almost funny if it wasn’t so infuriatingly immature and deeply bigoted.

It plays out in smaller ways, white people failing to see themselves in folks of color, skinny people refusing to humanize fat ones, hell it even plays out in adults refusing to attempt to relate to children, every axis has a side that is not asked to see themselves in the other as often and it leads to this disconnect and discomfort and anger and lashing out when you actually do get asked to do it. To learn to like a story even if the bad guy is wearing your face, to relate to a hero you know has nothing in common with you, seeing yourself in the other is not something asked of everyone, and not being able to do it messes you up.

I think that’s why it’s so uncomfortable for men to see themselves as the victims of women or as the bad guys, they never have to learn to be okay with being treated like shit by a narrative, or at LEAST just not being the main character, and they hate that.

But they’re just experiencing what the rest of us have been for all of human fucking history and we’re perhaps a bit too exhausted by it to humor it for long and just gotta give a firm

[wuggen]

Everyone say thank you sanitation workers we owe you our lives sanitation workers

[retquits]

artistic rendition of how my cat fell asleep this morning

[lillyloon]

PANTZ