Blogs are confusing

I am lurking and learning

[computer-voiced-by-majel-barrett]

Shoutout to my favorite genre of TOS episode:

[dduane]

…I can’t think how it took me so long to run across this. I feel privileged to have been found by it. 😄

[shiropoint]

This is mesmerizing to watch.

[fuu-dog-treats]

actually physically painful to watch because you know months were spent masking all those frames for each of the kajillions of transitions in this

[ask-ickle-mod]

[thatsthat24]

Holy………..shmokes…….

[mozzarella-shenanigans]

Oh?? My god??

[stahsm]

Overlock Stitch by @clothes_reetzy

[thatisuseful]

Damn, that's useful

[fluidstatick]

Finally a hand sewing tutorial on a hemline that isn't just the ladder stitch! the ladder stitch disappears when you tighten it, but it's not meant for hemlines because it breaks really easily! The overlock stitch is more stable, so it holds much longer, and it won't pucker or warp the fabric!

[memory-of-stargazing]

“It just means you have to work double as hard as most people!”

Well maybe I don’t WANT to work double as hard as abled people!! Maybe I deserve a BREAK!! Maybe I’ve been working MORE THAN double as hard for MY WHOLE LIFE and it’s led me to immense burnout & caused me to develop several MORE disabilities!! Maybe I should be ACCOMMODATED so I don’t have to KILL MY BODY AND BRAIN over trying to do what abled people can do!! Maybe I DON’T have to work double as hard!! Maybe if there’s the option to let me NOT work double as hard, I should have it, because I’m already working double as hard JUST TO SURVIVE!!

Why do you think disabled people deserve less rest than mentally & physically abled people?

[pinkelephantsonthebrain]

#in fact maybe they should be able to work half as hard #and have energy left for joy

[the-semicolonoscopy]

It’s Pride Month Eve, so leave out some milk for Freddie Mercury and his cats.

[the-semicolonoscopy]

Time for the annual Pride Month reblog of Freddie Mercury and his fabulous cats!

[hortensius-deactivated20240909]

the novelty of having pets really does never wear off i’ve had my cat for ten years and i still look at him strolling around like can you believe this. a cat. is everyone seeing this. he’s alive he has bones and all. unbelievable

[schizotisticstatic]

hey i know no one will probably see this other than people who already know it but. schizophrenic/schizospec people aren't all homeless people talking to themselves or people stuck in psych wards trying to kill everyone or whatever they tell you. for example, i just kinda sit in my room and don't bother anyone like maybe 80% of the time. i scroll on my phone. i watch movies and play games on my computer. i do chores when i (rarely) have the energy. i have a partner who i love and who tries their best to understand me and help me no matter what's going on with me.

yes, i also have a lot of crazy ideas that i believe and i see and hear things that aren't there and sometimes i start freaking out because i think someone close to me died when they're perfectly fine or that someone's coming to kill me or that my pets have been replaced with alien creatures, but i'm also a person with a life and a childhood and friends and i am not a threat to anyone.

and i'm here. on tumblr. on youtube. in real life. i can see and hear what everyone says about people like me. and i'm fucking tired of it.

treat people with psychotic disorders like people. please. it's not hard to do.

[pinkelephantsonthebrain]

people are people. We need to remember this.

[crocincrocsart]

unpopular opinion: Vimes is kind of drama queen

[mangaluva-deactivated20220930]

Sam “held a burning hot coal until it nearly took the skin off his hand while maintaining perfect calm and eye contact with the asshole in need of intimidation Just Because” Vimes? Sam “sitting on the stoop with a mug of cocoa and a cigar, cautiously aware of every inch of the scene he’s building” Vimes? Sam “could just tear his sleeve to show the mark of the Summoning Dark but instead tears off his whole goddamn shirt” Vimes? A drama queen? Reaching a bit don’t you think

[thestuffedalligator]

Yep, certainly doesn’t seem to describe Sam “pretends to eat poison as a power move” Vimes. Not Sam “buries an axe in the table in the Rats Chamber” Vimes.

[mangaluva-deactivated20220930]

I mean are we really talking about Sam “yes a whole room full of candles with wicks dipped in holy water is the best way to beat this vampire” Vimes, here? Sam “has fought bad guys on top of a speeding train AND a riverboat during a flood” Vimes, really? Definitely Sam “nearly gets shot in the head by a crossbow bolt that shatters his shaving mirror and then uses the bolt to prop up a shard of said mirror to finish shaving” Vimes we’re discussing here?

[davetheshady]

excuse me?????

vimes did not resign from his post in protest, observe the rest of the watch resign from their posts in protest, recruit them into a militia, sail to the country they were at war with, and attempt to arrest two different armies for disturbing the peace so you could sit here and call him a drama queen, as though drama was some myffic quality bestowed by an accident of birth and not the inherent right of every creatively petty and histrionic citizen of ankh-morpork 

vimes is a drama public employee

[discworld-heritage-posts]

Discworld Heritage Post

[ariaste]

Hey! Ive been loving the roman gender posts Ive been catching, and was wondering if you had. Like. Book/paper recs? Further reading someone could do if they want to know more?

A whole lot of this got launched by me reading Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity by Craig Williams. Written in 1994 and I'm reading it like "buddy you are RIGHT on the edge of realizing that you're describing Genders you're straight up describing Genders, this is all Genders, if you were nonbinary you would realize that what you are talking about is in fact just Genders, if you say 'this is genders' then the math becomes a lot easier, sort of like when you realize that we're in a heliocentric cosmic system, not a geocentric system with planets doing weird loop-de-loops" but he does a great job giving you QUITE A LOT of the Hot Goss Other things I read/referenced (most of these were recommended by my Vizier On Latin, Roman History, And The Academia Thereupon, @twobeesornottwobees)

"Had They No Shame? Martial, Statius, and Roman Sexual Attitudes Towards Slave Children" by Niall McKeown

"Sex and Power in Cassius Dio's Roman History: The Case of Elagabalus" Chrysanthos S Chrysanthou

Gender, Manumission, and the Roman Freedwoman by Matthew J Perry

"Speaking Out? Child Sexual Abuse and the Enslaved Voice in the Cena Trimalchionis" by Ulrike Roth

"Some Myths and Anomalies in the Study of Roman Sexuality" by James Butrica

LISTEN there is SO MUCH SCHOLARSHIP on Ancient Roman Sex Bullshit, classicists LOVE roman sex gossip, can't get enough of this shit. You can't swing a cat in JSTOR without hitting some good papers about weird shit, just get in there and start digging.

For ancient roman writers, I also got some genuine laughs out of Petronius' Satyricon.

Also, honestly..... Even if you don't have access to JSTOR, you can find some really juicy highlights just by reading Wikipedia articles about the Romans. Like this one about Emperor Vespasian's death.

God i love them. They're all like this. They're all That Bitch. Literally in the middle of shitting yourself to death and you're like "an emperor ought to die standing" and you immediately kick the bucket. the bucket which you were presumably just shitting into. unpleasant for everyone involved.

Stole it, tweaked it, put it in THE WISDOM OF EMPERORS:

Labecula, in Lives Of The Emperors, reports that Valerius [Emperor Cabian's grandfather], who had been quite busy languishing in his deathbed with a horrific case of dysentery that week, “had even uttered what were to have been his final words: ‘An emperor should die standing.’ While struggling to his feet with the help of his attendants, he was afflicted with an bout of diarrhea so powerful that he fainted and no doubt would have died in their arms on the spot, except that at that very moment, a slave ran in, screaming that Valerius’ grandson was born and that [Cabian's father] had thrown himself on his own sword in the same hour. Even as this shout’s echo was still ringing, the emperor quite suddenly and vigorously came out of his swoon, cried out, ‘Well, then! That’s quite enough dramatic plot twists* for the day. I will not have people saying that we are a house of tasteless, third-rate thespians,’ and jumped to his feet, apparently cured of all ills.” * ‘peripetīae’, a term from Ancient Lausan theater, usually referring to a sudden reversal of fortune (such as a wealthy man losing everything at a gambling table, or a street urchin being adopted by a wealthy widow). Ironically and despite his wishes, Valerius Agrippa in this moment was not contributing to a reduction in the ambient amount of thespian melodrama, as he too had his peripetīa (being on his deathbed and suddenly willing himself to health and vigor) in this moment of anagorisis, which is another theatrical trope, to wit: the moment of a shocking revelation or discovery (e.g. Mescinia’s tragic hero Subvespero discovering that not only is his favorite concubine actually his mother, but that his beautiful new catamite, whose charms he has already enjoyed, is also his illegitimate son).

[twobeesornottwobees]

Hello 👋

I am the Vizier On Latin, Roman History, And The Academia Thereupon in question.

Alex has charged me with providing a more thorough syllabus. You'll notice that a lot of these lean towards explaining the relationship between sex and slavery in the Roman world (especially relevant for the new Fantasy Romans book 👀). For context, I am currently writing my dissertation on the masculinity of enslaved men in Rome, in which I'm arguing that male slaves constituted a sort of third-gender.

If you're interested in this topic, check out.....

For basic introductions to What In the (Ancient) World is going on with ancient sexuality and were the Romans Okay? (Answer: no):

Controlling Desire: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome - Ormand, Kirk (2009): A very good place to start! This is a common textbook in the field but it's written with a popular audience in mind. Ormand is a well-respected scholar in the field and a genuinely good person by all accounts. He does a great job of hold the reader by the hand and being like "History is full of fucked up people but we're gonna keep studying them anyway. Okay, sweetie?"

Slavery and Sexuality in Classical Antiquity - ed. Kamen, Deborah and C.W. Marshall (2021): An edited volume with topics on the intersection of slavery and sexuality. Deb Kamen is one of my favorite scholars in the field, her work is impeccable, innovative, and approachable. CW Marshall is also a very well respected scholar but specializes in the Greek world so slightly less crossover. A good smattering of a wide range of topics. You will experiences the five stages of grief in every chapter.

Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome - Langlands, Rebecca (2006) : The most thorough explanation of the Roman concept of pudicitia, which translates to something like "sexual integrity". It's a difficult concept to explain because it's such a foreign concept to the modern Christian notion of chastity that's so embedded in our culture. Some of the scholarship has evolved quite a bit since Langlands wrote it but still, an excellent primer on "Come again, the Romans believed what now?"

The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor - Richlin, Amy (1983): Very technical but foundational to the field. A little dated but she got the spirit.

Pardon Me, But I'm Only Interested in the Weird Gay Shit:

Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity - Williams, Craig (1999). The definitive guide to Why the Romans Were Not Homophobic, Stop Saying They Were Homophobic. The text itself is quite approachable but the footnotes are denser and more plentiful than the Amazon Rain Forest, good lord. Wade in with caution and a Latin dictionary.

Not before Homosexuality: The Materiality of the Cinaedus and the Roman Law against Love between Men - Richlin, Amy (1993): This article technically pre-dates Williams' book but it does address the point that Williams somewhat ignores, i.e. Alex's beef that this man does not engage as thoroughly with the concept of genders.

Some Myths and Anomalies in the Study of Roman Sexuality - Butrica, James (2005): Have you ever wanted to read an article that was basically a subtweet to everyone in the field 20 years ago?

Why the Romans Were Both More and Less Weird About Sex Work Than You Think:

The Brothel of Pompeii: Sex, Class and Gender at the Margins of Roman Society - Levin-Richardson, Sarah (2019): An in-depth look at Pompeii's only purpose-built brothel. Very well written, might be slightly confusing for people who know next to nothing about architecture but SLR walks you through it. Even more impressive than the quality of the research, which is excellent, is the attention that Levin-Richardson pays to integrating new archaeological approaches to a field that is still deeply influenced by the Victorian era. (Speaking of...)

The Economy of Prostitution in the Roman World: A Study of Social History and the Brothel - McGinn, Thomas (2004): McGinn's terminology is quite outdated so, you know, proceed with caution. But his underlying argument--that Romans did not consider the sale of sex to be a matter separated from public/family-friendly life and, indeed, these categories are still super imposed onto antiquity because our early archaeological approaches were developed during the Victorian era and Those Guys Were Freaks--is quite fascinating. A little technical but nothing an enthusiastic amateur couldn't overcome.

Um, Hey Wait, This is Starting to Get Uncomfortable??

Repeating some of what Alex suggested but...One of the things new students of antiquity struggle the most with is dealing with the discomfort that comes along with learning that Romans did not consider "children" and "eroticism" to be wholly separate categories. These are some of the few articles that I've found that acknowledges how hard that can be. I highly recommend this to people who want to read Alex's new Fantasy Romans book but are worried that no one could possibly handle that topic well.

Had they no shame? Martial, Statius and Roman Sexual Attitudes Towards Slave Children - McKeown, Niall (2007): Very short, only 6 pages but well worth a read.

Speaking Out? Child Sexual Abuse and the Enslaved Voice in the Cena Trimalchionis - Roth, Ulrike (2021): All of Roth's work is great. Particularly good at handing comparative evidence across cultures. You will say "Wait, that's so fucked up," and she will say "Mhmm, yeah, yes, you are correct."

Child Slaves at Work in Roman Antiquity - Laes, Christian (2008): Laes is the leading expert on enslavement and Roman families, especially children. Most of his stuff is good.

Other great random topics:

Gender, Manumission, and the Roman Freedwoman - Perry, Matthew J (2014): Answers the question: Wait hold on, if Roman slaves were supposed to be sex objects but Roman women were supposed to be chaste then what the fuck did they do about freedwomen?

Looking at Lovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art, 100 B.C. - A.D. 250 - Clarke, John (2001). Wait, why are there so many penises in Pompeii? And why are all the pots so horny?

Candelabrus and Trimalchio: Embodied Histories of Roman Lampstands and their Slaves - Bielfeldt, Ruth (2018):

Take Me Straight to the Source, Show Me the Fucked Up Poetry and Weird Shit, Please:

Catullus, pretty much all of it (63 is very Gender and the most concise example I've ever seen of Reasons Reading Latin Makes It More Fun to Read Latin)

Petronius, Satyrica (don't just skip to the famous parts, Giton is the weirdest part)

Martial, pretty much all of it but Books 2, 6, and 11 are good places to start. (Craig Williams has a really good translation and commentary on Book 2 but it's geared toward people that want to know more about the Latin so be warned)

Juvenal, Satires (esp. 6 and 9)

Longus, Daphnis and Chloe

Plato, Phaedrus and the Symposium (do not read one without the other or so help me Jupiter....)

No, I Want the Really Weird Shit:

Apuleius, Metamorphoses (aka The Golden Ass)

Suetonius, On the Life of the Caesars (aka The Twelve Caesars) (especially Tiberius and Nero)

Achilles Tatius, Leucippe and Clitophon

I have PDFs of many of these and I love questions so please feel free to DM me or send me an ask!

[redstonedust]

pet peeve is when you look up fashion references from a specific era and you keep getting modern day '[era]-inspired' fashion like NO i want authenticity damn it. i can see your 2020 photo quality and your 2020 hair and your 2020 makeup. youre not fooling me.

[bincliff]

hello i'm a historical fashion researcher and i have a lot of experience looking up things! this is a very widely experienced irritation and you're definitely not alone in this, but i am here to share everything i know!

so, ways to get around this:

turn off AI results. they're literally nonsense to us

don't use pinterest because the sources/provenance is often hard to trace

a standard internet search can be okay, but museum collections are the top tier (list of collections below this list)

instead of broad terms like victorian, regency, tudor, renaissance etc. try using the decade you're looking for. if you're not sure of what decade it is but have a vague image in your head, look on the fashion history timeline and just jump around until you find it. but even changing to e.g. 19th century will give better results than victorian

including terms like womenswear/menswear, daywear, formal wear, evening wear, court dress should increase the value of your search too

including "fashion plates" in your search can give you a nice impression of the intended silhouettes of the era. some of these might be a little stylised but will show you what was considered in vogue

for pre-fashion plate eras or things like makeup and styling, you'll have to look at portraiture or manuscripts. these are harder to actually find what you're looking for, but searching museum collections and limiting results to specific date ranges will be your friend

when looking at art, do bear in mind sometimes artists would paint fabric extra flow-y to show off their skills. it might not have been exactly like that in terms of fabric weight or drape. so, a pinch of salt required!

if you find something on image search where the provenance is dubious, reverse image search and you might find a source! i've been able to trace random pinterest images to real sources, but this does take a lot of time and effort and is often not worth the headache

some online resources and museum collections:

fashion history timeline is an invaluable resource if you're trying to get a feel for everything and should be your first port of call. it'll also link to good examples

the met has a vast number of extant examples of clothing, as well as fashion plates

costume institute fashion plates is a subcollection of the met for fashion plates (1800s-1922)

v&a also has many extant garments, fashion plates, and incredible articles on clothing and aesthetics. read the details of the objects because they'll often reveal a lot about the piece

lacma is good for C19th-20th pieces

nypl digital collection for photographs

national portrait gallery or similar for portraiture, or literally any museum in your country that has historical art

national museums scotland can be useful situationally but might be oddly specific

stout style history is a great collection for finding image references for fat people wearing historical clothes. survival bias of a lot of museum pieces tends towards smaller clothing that couldn't be repurposed, but this aims to counter that. it's not sortable, but is still a really nice resource

wikimedia commons is surprisingly handy! and the images, if you should need to link/repost them, are public domain

auction websites sound like a funny one to recommend. some won't have mannequins and some will. just look up historical garment auctions and you'll find some!

anyway, i hope this has been a good place to start for anyone interested! there are probably some i've missed because there are so many museums across the world and i don't know about all of them or can't remember them. but these are the ones i've used the most! (my specialisation/jobs i've had to research for have only really been in western fashion, so my resources reflect that)

[haemey]

Wikipedia has a list of fashion museums. Unfortunately, the page itself is only available in German, but the introductory paragraph is very short and after that, it's organised by country, and then it's a simple list. If you click on a museum's article, the website is usually linked in the overview table.

[pinkelephantsonthebrain]

Useful Knowledge

[sleepymccoy]

[pinkelephantsonthebrain]

That is the exact same measuring cup they gave me at the shelter when I adopted my cat. This exact same thing has happened XD

[movementnudge]

Movement nudge, moar balance!

X

[anghraine]

My search for "The City on the Edge of Forever" gifs reminded me of how much NYC in 1930 is treated as this utterly foreign environment of a distant and frequently incomprehensible past to Kirk and Spock, which in a way works even better now than it did at the time, because I think we don't always fully realize just how old TOS is.

Like, we get it in a purely mathematical sense, with regard to anniversaries and fandom history and such. But not really, a lot of the time.

For instance, both of the actors considered for Kirk were much older than William Shatner, who was only 34 when he acted as Kirk for the first time—one of the actors considered was over ten years older than that, the other actor nearly 20 years older. Kirk's characterization being in some ways very much defined by his youth followed from casting such a young actor (and young looking actor, given how the heavy smoking and drinking of so many 60s actors prematurely aged them enough to pass for much older—but the idea of Shatner's Kirk in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" as 40-something or 50-something is absurd and all the more so then).

But despite Shatner and Nimoy being such young men at the time, the remote past of the NYC of "The City on the Edge of Forever" is a year prior to when both actors were actually born IRL. They were born less than a week apart in March of 1931, in Boston and Montréal (respectively). The world of NYC in 1930 was not nearly as remote to them at the time, but we experience it that way, nearly a century removed from the Depression.

[anghraine]

I was going to reblog this yesterday for the official birthday of my ST blorbo of ultimate destiny, original flavor-only James Kirk, b. March 22, 2233. I got caught up in other things and forgot, but belatedly, here he is, trapped in the remote horrorscape of New York City in 1930:

In real life, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were just short of their 36th birthdays when they played Kirk and Spock in "The City on the Edge of Forever" in February of 1967. That is, they were pretending to be men from the future, pretending to be homeless vets, stuck in the distant past of one(1) year before the actors' actual births, which were not quite 36 years earlier at the time (but 95 years ago this week). The setting of the episode was no more remote for them than the 80s and 90s are for millennials.

[pinkelephantsonthebrain]

The 90s feel like yesterday - so strange to consider this episode from that perspective.

Complementary feeling to when 2000 is the mysterious future in other shows.

What would the 60s have been nostalgic for when thinking about the 30s? What would they be glad to be rid of?

How do you then take those feelings and imagine them into the perspective of someone from 300 years in the future?

[prokopetz]

The real reason your sapient dragon character needs a "rider":

Dragons on the wing are vulnerable to being mobbed by smaller, more agile flyers, particularly in your large rear blind spot, like a bird of prey being mobbed by crows. Having a human armed with a long spear perched on your back helps to dissuade anyone from getting any funny ideas.

Breath weapons are impressive enough on the ground, but in flight they're really only good for strafing stationary targets; trying to use your breath weapon in an aerial dogfight is a good way to get fire up your nose. A real fight calls for sterner measures – and, concomitantly, a crew to aim and reload the cannons.

In today's competitive world, it's not enough to devour a flock of sheep and call it a day if you want to keep your edge. You're accompanied at all times by a qualified personal alchemist tasked with carefully regulating your internal furnace to ensure peak performance, and sometimes you even listen to them.

No dragon of any quality would be caught dead without their valet. It's not as though you can announce your numerous long-winded titles yourself when introductions are called for, can you? You suppose next you'll be expected to pick up the spoils of your conquests yourself, like a common brigand. Perish the thought!

[mikkeneko]

[thoughtportal]

5 simple exercises to awaken dormant muscles

{source}

[onemillionwordsofcrap]

I appreciate this video a lot--people don't realize how important it is to start slow if you're trying to come back from a completely sedentary lifestyle, and they get really hurt as a result. Straining your muscles too much, too suddenly can land you in the E.R. and the wrong joint injury can permanently affect your mobility, so please start with absolute basics and easy stretches!

[kaelio]

Recipes from Portland's famous but long-closed Rheinlander restaurant. This cookbook was produced in a limited window before Chef Mager's death. All of these fucking slap.

[ladyvean]

For my fellow vegan/vegetarians, these sound scrumptious and look pretty simple to make substitutions!

[kaelio]

just to be clear

[certifiedsoupposts]

certified soup post

[anghraine]

So, famously, there's a lot of "wtf" about AOS Kirk as a take on TOS Kirk—mostly because he isn't. He's a take on pop culture-ified The Wrath of Khan Kirk, whose characterization as written was IMO already sharply at odds with TOS Kirk's and owes a lot more of its perceived consistency to William Shatner's performance than I'd expected from reputation. In fact, I actually think that The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek (2009) had extremely similar goals in their own contexts, approached those goals through similar means for better and worse, and their most impressive accomplishments and deepest flaws tend to resemble each other's, but that's another post.

All of that aside, my best friend J has a silly, fun in-story crack theory about why AOS Kirk is so fundamentally dissimilar from TOS Kirk in ways that even Mirror Kirk isn't, and it made me giggle, so I'm sharing it!

The basic premise of the AOS movies is handled thoughtfully in some places and is incredibly creaky in others, depending on which aspects its creators care about at any given moment, but involves the whole invasion deal in which Kirk's father (unknown and insignificant in TOS, and conspicuously absent from mentions of his family) dies. The shock of all this leads to his mother giving birth to him while still off-planet.

He's essentially born in the stars, which could have been a cool concept for an iteration of TOS Kirk, someone who in many ways resists definition by any particular place or persona and who is only really at home in a starship, constantly moving, discovering and exploring the unknown, adapting to changing circumstances with a lot of fluid theatricality and glitter and ethical quandaries. It's his only natural environment! TVH was wrong about this, frankly; as far as TOS was concerned, Kirk doesn't just work in space, he belongs there, and I think it avoids giving him a particular origin or birthplace for that reason.

The earliest period of his life we ever hear about in TOS is when he was a 13-year-old living on Tarsus IV. We don't know how long he had already been there by then (the writer had envisioned five years but wasn't allowed to say so) or what happened to his parents, but he was already being shaped by a life far from Earth in the earliest part of his existence TOS ever tells us about. It never mentions him living anywhere else except the Academy and various spaceships. So I think if you're going to do anything with his literal birth, choosing "shuttle somewhere in space" as his birthplace is a great choice.

Unfortunately, I suspect this was an accident, in much the same way that AOS Kirk never getting linked to the events on Tarsus IV actually does fit more organically with what AOS is doing with his experiences IMO, but I don't think that's why they left it out any more than it's why The Wrath of Khan did; I think both films simply forgot that TOS Kirk is a genocide/starvation survivor.

(Note: what I mean by Tarsus IV not fitting thematically for AOS Kirk is that he's shaped by highly individualized, personally-targeted miseries that are all about him as a unique problem; in this, his experiences are more like TOS Spock's than TOS Kirk's, if anything. TOS Kirk's horrors are large-scale atrocities in which he's one of a mass of faceless, dehumanized victims whose individual characteristics and choices are treated as largely insignificant apart from classing him in with many other disposable people to begin with.)

If it didn't try to push the "iconic OG Kirk was able to grow into someone better and nobler because he had it easier" agenda, the absence of Tarsus IV and the other atrocities of TOS Kirk's life would make sense internally, and you could maybe buy that this is someone who's been shaped by fundamentally different kinds of experiences, for better and worse. But because it does try to push "TOS Kirk had it easier and that's the real reason he's so heroic" as an excuse for basically anything it does with its turbo-Kirk Drift version of him, the reality that TOS Kirk's life is incalculably worse than anything going on with AOS Kirk, and AOS just has to make up shit that isn't in TOS but insist it was totally there and really important the whole time, while ignoring almost everything that actually is in it, to pretend otherwise—well, that just makes AOS's evasiveness around atrocities like Tarsus IV frustrating, instead. So we've got something that isn't really a bad idea in an absolute sense, but approached and executed in some really careless, asinine ways that make it worse.

WRT AOS Kirk's birth, I've heard that some people (men) on the team thought that it was necessary to show a woman doing Woman Things onscreen (aka painfully giving birth) to attract female audiences—as if female fans hadn't eagerly shown up for Ethical Quandaries and Homoeroticism in Space: the Show from day 1 with or without female characters involved. (Fun fact: the only speaking female character in the absolutely beloved "The Devil in the Dark" is the Horta.) So... that's less cool, but the concept of the shuttle birth is not intrinsically bad or anything, especially since Kirk's mother survives.

And the creators did think hard enough about this to conclude, reasonably enough, that this means AOS Kirk is actually "older" than TOS Kirk in the sense of when his literal birth occurred. Therefore, his birthday should be earlier.

We know Kirk's age (33 in 2266) but not his birthday from TOS. For internal timeline reasons that are a bit too granular to get into here, his birthday is likelier earlier rather than later in the year, but it's really vague. "Officially" there's a long tradition of giving him William Shatner's birthday, March 22nd (though of course, 2233 instead of 1931), which fits conveniently with those timeline details, and was what the AOS team was considering as TOS Kirk's DOB. So naturally, AOS Kirk—being a little premature—should be born a bit before March 22nd.

That's all good, except the thing is ... the people running the show apparently knew little and cared less about pregnancy (or, I'm guessing, women in general) and couldn't be bothered to run a quick Google search about preterm births. This "couldn't be bothered to check" basic carelessness is in some ways the besetting fault that prevents AOS (esp the first two films) from becoming the better movies that seem buried inside the ones that exist, but while the birth date they settled on is a minor detail in one sense, it is comically egregious in another: they chose January 4th.

I emphasize the date because this makes AOS Kirk something like 11 weeks premature, on purpose. If TOS Kirk was the result of a normal 40-week pregnancy, AOS Kirk would be the result of a mere 29-week one. Even if we assume TOS Kirk was born, say, a week late, at 41 weeks, AOS Kirk would only be born at 30 weeks into the pregnancy (still "very preterm"). Either way, he should be no more than like... 2-3 lbs and would need immediate emergency care. This is obviously not the case in AOS—even Memory Alpha has a hilariously baffled note about how this should make AOS Kirk over two and a half months premature.

So, J's crack theory: AOS Kirk can't possibly be born earlier than the "late premie" stage, and therefore he must already have been conceived weeks earlier than TOS Kirk was. That means he's the result of a different, earlier pregnancy that precludes the pregnancy that resulted in TOS Kirk in his own universe; his parents would always end up naming a second son James Tiberius, but he's TOS Kirk's brother insofar as the relationship between people from different universes in which the other does not exist can be described at all.

The whole Kelvin thing is but one of several divergences between their universes; the AOS universe is extra wonky because of interference from the movie/TNG universe, but would be different from TOS anyway (and that's why it's so different in so many ways that don't seem to follow from the Kelvin thing at all). It's actually pretty remote from TOS as far as the ST multiverse goes. If AOS Kirk were to get vworped into 60s TOS, and Bones ran a sneaky scan of his DNA, the results would show a suspiciously close genetic relationship to TOS Kirk—but genetically close like a fraternal twin, not an identical one. TOS Kirk may well be more closely related to his in-universe older brother than to AOS Kirk—who, in a sense, is also his older brother.

[pinkelephantsonthebrain]

Delightful take and makes me feel very different about AOS Kirk.