Untitled

[2productive]

[sirenofthegreenbanks]

this is from "research as a leisure activity" by celine nguyen, publs. on stubstack in 2024. it's a very good read

[copperbadge]

I met someone when I was pretty young who had received a generous inheritance -- not enough to live a life of luxury, but enough to live on comfortably without working. He had chosen to simply keep going to school his whole life. He did get degrees, but he didn't use them for anything other than pleasure -- he had a Ph.D but also two Master's degrees, three BAs, and was currently serving an apprenticeship in blacksmithing while considering trying out some trade schools next. I thought, if I had the money I'd do that too, and then thought about how I still could learn all the time, it would just have to be a hobby instead of the career he'd made of it. It definitely changed the way I saw both education and leisure.

[allpiesforourown]

svsss characters and what fics they'd hate the most

shen yuan - binghe hate fics

luo binghe - liushen

luo bingge - any au that doesnt involve the washerwoman raising him

shen jiu - anything bingjiu

yue qingyuan - shen jiu doesnt get a happy ending

liu qingge - demon liu qingge aus

shang qinghua, liu mingyan, tianlang jun - nothing, they can stand any trash

ning yingying - groomer shen yuan

mu qingfang - medical inaccuracy

mobei jun - literally any perspective of his relationship with qinghua other than his own

feel free to add on

[crabussy]

really fond of humans just from an appearance standpoint. the long legs. the manes of hair that can come in practically any colour and texture. those crazy high-contrast eyes with the white scleras and colourful irises. the fingers being so much longer than the toes. there's a lot to love. solid 10/10 animal species

[devotedgossamerreader]

hey there just out of curiosity are you not human, too?

[crabussy]

hilariously enough, I am probably the most human out of anyone on this entire site. earlier today I was posting about getting "species euphoria" from doing human activities like ecosystem management. I'm the worlds first therian to have a kintype that aligns with his biological species. shirt that says "I ❤️ being a sapient omnivorous primate & bipedal persistence predator" on the front and booty shorts that say "largest gluteal muscles to body size ratio on the planet"

[ndnbutch]

something I do find mildly funny about project hail mary is that like. okay I think Ryan Gosling was excellent casting, right? like I think he does a really phenomenal acting job and I enjoyed him in this movie immensely, he gives a very endearing and believable performance as this meek nerdy scientist. and sure, actors can and do radically change their body types for films pretty often, but I don’t think this particular work really called for that. so like it’s fine. but there just really is no particular narrative reason for Ryland Grace to be beefy and muscular the way Ryan Gosling is. like that’s not something that just happens to you, it’s something you have to build and maintain. idk a lot about astronaut training, I’m sure it’s probably good for them to be physically fit. but notably Grace was not intended to go into space until the last second. so it’s not like he was working out for that. And like I guess there’s really no reason why he can’t be a nerd and also a gym guy. but it just is kind of amusing how jacked he is for no good reason. like imagine you’re rocky and for some reason or another you do get to go to earth and meet other humans and learn more about human biology in general. like I know Rocky wouldn’t REALLY have a metric for human attractiveness or maybe even buffness. but I have to imagine at some point it would hit you like. grace hunky dreamboat question. grace cut sexy GQ underwear model question. why grace get put in spaceship question. grace should have been at club statement. shaking ass in jockstrap statement.

[janedrewfinally]

One of the hilarious things in the book is that they lampshade this by having a) a whole discussion about "well, while the astronauts are in comas their muscles will be getting lots of electrical stimulation so that they will be In Shape for their mission and not losing muscle mass in the comas" and b) Grace notice that he's a lot buffer than he feels he should be.

[vintagewildlife]

"I can't believe humans would hunt the thylacine to extinction, humans are fundamentally evil" Hey, did you know that extinction was long thought to be impossible, and within 50 years of humans realizing that extinction via overhunting was a possibility it practically stopped happening? Did you know that humans are so desperate to prevent more losses that they're funneling millions of collective hours and billions of euros into helping other species? Hours and euros that could be spent on humans, and species on whom humanity's own survival does not depend? Did you know that due to an accidental introduction of rats, the Lord Howe Island stick insect population was brought down to 24 individuals and now there are tens of thousands of them?

This bug. This bug that, to most humans, is utterly useless, relatively gross, and completely foreign. Humans saved it because humans do not want to cause another extinction ever again if they can avoid it.

[ganondilf]

I don’t watch Once Upon A Time but every clip I’ve seen is like

Quasimodo: “And where is the amulet?” Edgar from Aristocats: “Safe and sound I assure you. Isn’t that right, Lightning McQueen?” *the sounds of revving comes out of the shadows*

Commercial break

[worldheritagepostorganization]

World Heritage Post

[garaks-padded-cell]

americans be like dude learning to drive isnt that bad but they dont know youre in ireland sharing a lane with a horse who is a bad person. And the horse and the instructor are friends and he keeps dapping the horse up through the window. And the horse called you a bitch under his breath so quiet the driving instructor is trying to convince you that you must have misheard him but you didnt. and theres a roundabout coming up and the horse didnt indicate

[theabyssofhappy]

I can no longer remember the title of the book it’s from, but here’s a quote that has remained trapped in my head for the last 8 years: “Driving in Ireland is dangerous because the roads are full of old farmers who’ve led good lives and are fairly sure they’ll get into heaven.”

[queenklu]

[stealingpotatoes]

pinterest reposters i no longer have extensive beef with you for i have been informed of a much worse threat to the court of lady normalgirl: people who put my art through AI filters and THEN repost it to pinterest

[stealingpotatoes]

actually screw it idgaf, everyone go report this guy and or beat them with a stick (ABOMINATION! here is the original comic if u like looking at real art)

[effinbirds]

[kedreeva]

The leftovers from making Cherry Bounce last night.

4c Brandy (can use Whiskey/Bourbon or Vodka if preferred)

16 oz pitted cherries (fresh or frozen)

2 cups honey (or sugar)

2 whole cloves (optional)

1/2 stick cinnamon (optional)

2 whole allspice (optional)

Put cherries and spices into a cleaned and sanitized 2qt mason jar (or split them between quarts or pints). I've seen vanilla pods used, or cardamom pods. I sanitized with OneStep.

In a large pot or saucepan, combine brandy and honey and heat on low until the honey is dissolved. Pour into jars over cherries and close. Shake lightly to mix.

Shake well to distribute the ingredients. Place in a sunny location for 1 week, and then store in a cool, dark place for 2-6 months before straining. The cherries can be used within a week of straining for baking or cooking. The liquid is a delicious cherry liqueur that can be sipped or added to mixed drinks for a sweet cherry flavor.

The recipe made a smidge extra liquid, hard to say if it was because I measured more than I was supposed to (I was not very exacting) or if my cherries were bigger or something, idk. But, I did not waste any of it, the leftovers are REALLY tasty. I ate a few of the cherries, and put a little into a Dr Pepper.

[voyaging-too]

People often say LOTR is a story about hope. (I'm reminded of it because someone said it in the notes of my Faramir post.) And that's true, but it's not the whole picture: LOTR is in large part a story about having to go on in the absence of hope.

Frodo has lost hope, as well as the ability to access any positive emotion, by Return. He is already losing it in Towers: he keeps going through duty and determination and of course Sam's constant help.

For most of the story, Sam is fueled by hope, which is why it's such a huge moment when he finally lets go of the hope of surviving and returning home, and focuses on making it to the Mountain. To speed their way and lighten the load, he throws his beloved pots and pans into a pit, accepting that he will never cook, or eat, again.

When Eowyn kills the Witch King, she's beyond hope and seeking for a glorious death in battle. It's possible that in addition to her love and loyalty for Théoden, she's strengthened by her hopelessness, the fear of the Nazgúl cannot touch someone who's already past despair.

Faramir is his father's son, he doesn't have any more hope of Gondor's victory or survival than Denethor does, he says as much to Frodo. What hope have we? It is long since we had any hope. ... We are a failing people, a springless autumn. He knows he's fighting a losing war and it's killing him. When he rejects the ring, he doesn't do it in the hope that his people can survive without it, he has good reason to believe they cannot. He acts correctly in the absence of hope.

Of course LOTR has a (mostly) happy ending, all the unlikely hopes come true, the characters who have lost hope gain what they didn't even hope for, and everyone is rewarded for their bravery and goodness, so on some level the message is that hope was justified. But the book never chastises characters who lost hope, it was completely reasonable of them to do so. Despair pushed Théoden and Denethor into inaction, pushed Saruman into collaboration, but the characters who despaired and held up under the weight of despair are Tolkien's real heroes.

(In an early draft of Return, Frodo and Sam receive honorary titles in Noldorin: Endurance beyond Hope and Hope Unquenchable, respectively. Then he cut it, probably because it was stating the themes of the entire book way too obviously, because this is what Tolkien cared about, really: enduring beyond hope. Without hope.)

Also, people who know more than me about the concept of estel, feel free to @ me.

[rinokami]

I get what you're saying, and I mostly agree with it, but I don't think "hopeless" is quite the word for it, and is probably at least partially why Tolkien axed the Noldorian titles. As you mentioned, Tolkien had two different concepts of "hope": estel and amdir.

Amdir is practical hope. It's saying, "ok, we do this, that, and the other thing and we'll probably be ok." It's the strategizing, action-oriented, mindset that most modern folk would think of when they hear "hope". Boromir was very much a man of amdir. Amdir is why he was a good general, why he jumped to plow snow with nothing but his arms on Caradhras with Aragorn so they could all make it back down the mountain. Amdir is good, but it is also fallible.

Estel is... not that. Estel is what Tolkien called "high hope", the enduring hope that the world will turn out right in the end, regardless of what that means for you personally. Estel is saying "I will do what should be done, what must be done, even if it kills me." I guess the closest word would be "faith", but I hesitate to call it that, given the extremely religious connotations that word can have, and, as devout as Tolkien was, he didn't really use estel quite like that. Estel was not a thing that required belief in, or even knowledge of, Ilúvatar or anything like that.

Frodo and Sam are running on pure estel by the end of RotK. Well, everyone left of the broken Fellowship is by that point, tbh. So you could say that their hope for their own personal selves was gone out the window by that point but that's not quite the same thing as being hopeless.

Sam even has a moment after ditching his pots of his own estel and fallen amdir arguing with each other:

He could not sleep and he held a debate with himself. ‘Well, come now, we’ve done better than you hoped,’ he said sturdily. ‘Began well anyway. I reckon we crossed half the distance before we stopped. One more day will do it.’ And then he paused.

‘Don’t be a fool, Sam Gamgee,’ came an answer in his own voice. ‘He won’t go another day like that, if he moves at all. And you can’t go on much longer giving him all the water and most of the food.’

‘I can go on a good way though, and I will.’

‘Where to?’

‘To the Mountain, of course.’

‘But what then, Sam Gamgee, what then? When you get there, what are you going to do? He won’t be able to do anything for himself.’

To his dismay Sam realized that he had not got an answer to this. He had no clear idea at all. Frodo had not spoken much to him of his errand, and Sam only knew vaguely that the Ring had somehow to be put into the fire. ‘The Cracks of Doom,’ he muttered, the old name rising to his mind. ‘Well, if Master knows how to find them, I don’t.’

‘There you are!’ came the answer. ‘It’s all quite useless. He said so himself. You are the fool, going on hoping and toiling. You could have lain down and gone to sleep together days ago, if you hadn’t been so dogged. But you’ll die just the same, or worse. You might just as well lie down now and give it up. You’ll never get to the top anyway.’

‘I’ll get there, if I leave everything but my bones behind,’ said Sam. ‘And I’ll carry Mr. Frodo up myself, if it breaks my back and heart. So stop arguing!’

[wowbright]

Friendly reminder that you're not required to publicly take sides in any geopolitical conflict you don't understand.

[minyardlumberyard]

tags too good to leave in tags @hyperrbolic-orange

[anxiette]

also way too valuable to leave in tags! from @carolinanadeau

[rotzaprachim]

I’m not entirely sure you can write a “feminist retelling” of the odyssey from the perspective of a single female character because where the position of women becomes so interesting in the context of the epic is as a collective and how simply inescapable the presence of women is as the major scaffolding of the entire story. it is not imho the physical journey home that is the major backbone of the odyssey nor Odysseus on his boat with his men, but the consistent metaphor of weaving which reflects womanhood as an identity that is actively constructed and physically tangible in the cloth and clothes he is constantly having to receive from the xenia of other people, and this forms the connecting sinews between a lot of parts of that are slightly smaller but that ultimately do end up forming the physical bulk of the narrative - Athene, penelope, eurycleia, melantho, Helen, calypso, ino, nausicaa, arete, Circe, Persephone. The story starts with Athena’s actions and it ends with her too. Odysseus is undoubtedly gendered as male but he moves through a world in which the individual actions of diverse women stitch into an inescapable web. Even when Odysseus goes to the land of the dead its Persephone’s land. He meets the blind seer but he also meets his mother

[rotzaprachim]

I guess I’m not against the specific point of view limitation and I have fiddled with it myself and find it interesting, so much as the current publishing need to do this at the same time I don’t think I’ve seen a single modern adaptation/retelling that really includes what a major presence women as a whole are in the odyssey. I think I’m haunted now I’m actually reading it by how the retelling tends to restructure the story specifically in a way that limits their centrality in the narrative (to focus on Odysseus’s quests before Ithaka! Which is fine! Not a bad thing! But has lead to a social construction of the odyssey in which women collectively hold less space in the text than in the original odyssey, and it’s from this perspective of semi-erasure the new retellings are working from. You can’t put a voice back into the story in the space of the erasure of the voices already there

[rotzaprachim]

the reason I put feminist retelling in quotation marks is that I am not against the feminist retelling per se as a thing that exists!!! Just the execution

but I think the actual under discussed elephant in the room here is not the issue of the “feminist retelling” but the inverse, the normalized “masculinist retelling” that forms the majority of adaptations and popular consciousness about Homer’s odyssey specifically, where the version that the general public is aware of and that’s formed the bedrock of general retellings for a while one is not a slight deviation but a significant reworking of the entire structure of the text that centers a (more) linear retelling of odysseys and an all-male crew having present-tense adventures among islands instead of the past-tense recalled narrative amidst a complex array of mixed-gendered domestic environs in which women are far more actively present in every way. I’m generally kind of wary of people talking about the Correct Text versus the wrong text or Rewritten versions because it can leave out the operative fact that everything is retelling and interpretation but in the case of Homer’s odyssey it is really undeniable that the base structure of the whole text has been rewritten to fit a more pleasingly male-centric narrative about men doing adventures in a way that has really worked to recenter Odysseus as only and sole lead of the work and sideline the collective voices of women and their social world from being active and central members of the text! The entire thing has to be gutted and resewn to make Odysseus into that! Ironically this series of versions does just as much as say Madeline miller to restrict the entire text but while EVERYTHING is obviously a perspective it’s a very very certain perspective on how to adapt Homer that’s become very mainstream and idk, even stuff like epic the musical or Nolan’s odyssey doing this at least as intensely as any feminist retelling

(also like hmmmm i think this isn’t a men versus women thing so much as a way we tell this narrative but I think also!!!! These tellings really do Odysseus a disservice from what a complex character he really is in the odyssey and one we largely learn about from how he interacts with other people, particularly women! So much of who he is and what he does is about being this survivor who is no longer really a cool sexy war soldier because there is no war and yet he has the trauma, it’s just that as per Homer’s original text much of that trauma is due to the combined effects of years of rape and imprisonment and isolation and this has definite effects on the ways he contextualises the world and the people around him! So I’d really love to see and odyssey that digs into Odysseus himself in this wider and largely female context and that like, focuses on the fact he’s a male survivor of rape and a refugee who washes up naked on other people’s shores and that this has a massive impact on his narrative and how he views people)

[rotzaprachim]

the thing about the omg why are the women in the odyssey just sitting and weavinggg thing is that like I am absolutely not here to argue they are NOT living patriarchally confined lives! But the social situation in the odyssey is not a divide between getting to go on a cool YA anime magic quest with a sword or sit home and do nothing. The social setting in the odyssey is that the war is over and the war was a real war, which means it fucking sucked and people died. Odysseus’s men have died. “Why doesn’t she get to pick up the cool swordy thing?” Because the men who picked the cool swordy thing up are literally dead and often for reasons far beyond their personal sphere of control and they aren’t here any more and who is are women with their looms

[cerusee]

Okay. For my money, the entire thesis of Chris Nolan’s 2026 film The Odyssey is that society chokes and sputters and dies when we abuse, ignore, or violate social norms like the laws of hospitality. That is not really what The Odyssey (the book/poem) is about, but I can clearly see why in the horror that is the 2020s, someone could read The Odyssey and go oh my god that’s a lot of bad dropping in. That’s a lot of bad visits. That’s a clear vision of how the loss of social norms and cohesion fucks you up and how war, literal, brutal war, is a terrible wound that destroys your humanity and your understanding of what civilization and society is. I don’t know that the iteration of Greek society that ultimately birthed the poem would agree with Nolan’s take, but I think this movie is quite ideologically coherent, that Nolan knew exactly what he was trying to say with each and every adaptational change, and I think he wasn’t nuts for using one of the most famous classical western civilization works as a way to make that argument.

[thenordroom]

A Grounding Color Palette and Reinstated Period Features in an Edwardian Apartment | subscribe to the newsletter

[hylianane]

functionally suicidal character saying “I would die for you” to their significant other and its like. I get the sentiment, honey, but if a hot dog vendor told me he’d sell hot dogs for me, I wouldn’t feel very moved now would I

[maseratus]

Now a functionally suicidal character saying “I will live for you”. Now that’s a dynamic I can sink my teeth into.

[mousidy]

now how about a functionally suicidal character saying "I will sell hot dogs for you"

[mousidy]

[bisthefairy]

Hotdog vender lays down their life to protect their suicidal partner, who then takes over the hotdog stand to carry on their memory...

[theslowesthnery]

when someone is completely fucking wrong about your blorbo but you don't want to argue about what basically boils down to opinions about shit that doesn't matter so you just sit there like

"that guy's wrong tho"

[theslowesthnery]

you get it