Transgender people in my phone you’d better live you’d better love you’d better live long enough to become old and annoy your great grandnephews you’d better watch trashy movies you’d better meet new people you love and hate and forget and remember you’d better hang in there for better and worse you’d better smell the dust after the rain and remember that you’re alive and full of beautiful sturdy bones you’d better hold onto that friend and never let them go you’d better keep living and living and living and never stop
I saw a screenshot of some AI gen (or photoshop idk) of Doctor who supporting Nigel Farage, and it pissed me off so much I drew him punching that stupid fucker in the head.
in response to your tags, the 'hyperactivity' associated with adhd is a bit misleading; often, neurotypical observers will insist people with adhd are 'hyperactive' when they could easily mean something more like 'they have multiple interests which consume many hours of their time at a stretch' or 'they change what activity they are doing in a way i don't like/very often' or even 'they show too much enthusiasm about their hobbies'
now, about caffeine: stimulants work differently in adhd brains. Some doctors believe it is because people w/ adhd do not produce or retain high enough levels of dopamine. Thus, the theory is that stimulants bring an adhd brain closer to 'standard' arousal levels (arousal, here, meaning 'excitement' in general and not sexual arousal).
Important to note: for most people, caffeine literally makes them unable to be tired. Iirc, it blocks melatonin receptors.
If you drink caffeine and get more tired, or if it has literally 'no' effect, your brain is goofing up somewhere. It should literally actually make you more alert and awake. People aren't exaggerating or making up the symptoms commonly associated with caffeine- neurotypical people get caffeine jitters, become more alert, and literally cannot feel tired with large enough doses of caffeine.
(and before anyone asks: i type with the bolding because it is a friendlier way to type long posts for people with adhd- at the very least, people with my type of adhd)
why is everything. even slightly abnormal about me. a sign of adhd. like. i know. and i will probably never get diagnosed. tumblr. please. if you're going to offer advice. just. advise better or something.
you're an individual, so i'm not sure what advise will work for you but
1: if you relate to ADHD posts, you ain't gotta get a diagnosis to use the tips and tricks ppl have posted to help with ADHD
2: if you do have access to a health professional and feel comfortable asking for a new prescription, you don't need a diagnosis to be prescribed non-stimulant ADHD medicine, like strattera or other dopamine-reuptake-inhibitors. hell, if your doctor is cool enough they might get you stimulants without a diagnosis (though there is currently a shortage in the USA, so ymmv)
3. my biggest catch-all tip for ppl w/ ADHD is this: Do it the way you want/need to do it. whatever 'it' is.
If you need to take the cabinet/pantry doors off so you can see what's in there, do it. If you need to store your vegetables in the front of the fridge and not the vegetable drawer so you actually see them before they wilt, do it. If you need music playing to focus on homework, do it. If you need to keep snacks at your desk so you actually remember to eat, do it. If you need to set 16 reminders per day to get your work done, do it. Do it scared, do it wrong. You don't even have to do your best. 30% is better than 0%.
And if you can't do it, that's okay too. There's no wrong way to live your life. Just, you know, live it.
One hot and cool writing tip that I wish more people knew is... you don't have to write out people's accents phonetically. You just don't. You are not Dickens. You are (hopefully) not Rowling. There are so many other ways you can make someone's speech feel authentic to their background, or just make it clear that they're speaking in a certain accent, not limited to:
literally just saying 'he spoke with a Welsh accent'; sure, it's a bit blunt, but it gets the job done in a pinch. "He's completely drunk," he said, his southern drawl lingering on the final syllable as if to highlight the extent of the offence. Y'know, something of that ilk, but not as shit.
learning the specific vocabulary and syntax that someone with that accent might use. Sticking with the Welsh theme, because it's objectively the best accent*, there's a bunch of things that differentiate a colloquial South Walean accent, outside of our famed tendency to elongate a vowel to the point of death. The way we use prepositions (where to by is he?), the vocabulary borrowed from Welsh - saying that someone daft is twp, or something small is dwty - can easily signpost our speech as being from that specific area, without needing to type something like "'e's absolutely 'angin', man, pissed as a faaht 'e is!" Something less jarring, such as "He's absolutely hanging, he is." is just as clear. A character who says "Do you want a cuppa?" is coded or located very differently to one who says "You'll have a cup of tea, so you will."
ditto if there are specific ways that someone from a certain area might refer to a well-known concept. Regional words for mother and father, for example, or words that are class-specific; your character who calls his parents 'mater and pater' is likely inhabiting a different socioeconomic strata than your character who calls them 'mam and dad'. See if there's a colloquial way of saying 'yes' and 'no'; a lot can be signposted if your character says 'nah' rather than 'no', or 'aye' rather than 'yes'. A character saying 'couch' is inherently coded differently to one who says 'sofa'.
The reasons that writing accents phonetically is Generally Ill-Advised, In My Opinion are as follows:
quite simply, you're probably not being as clear in conveying the sounds of the accent as you think you are. Taking JK Rowling's work as the best possible example of this, her attempts at writing a Cockney accent phonetically come across like someone is chewing a mouthful of cheese curds and struggling to contain them. There's no consistency, no proper understanding of how to transcribe syllables into writing in a way that coherently conveys the accent she's trying to portray. I mean this so seriously, but what the flying fuck is: 'Well, 'e 'ad these 'ead pains and 'e was def'nitley nervous. Depressed maybe.' It's a crime, is what it is.
it's just plain hard to read. Trying to wade through sentences full of apostrophes and elision, parsing what's actually being said, gets tiresome. It asks the reader to do work that you're actively making harder for them. And that's not always a bad thing! Making readers Put Some Fucking Effort In can be very fruitful! But do you really want them to be struggling to understand every single thing that your Character B is saying for 350 pages?
which leads me onto the last point, and the most important in my mind: writing out accents like this always, always affects accents that are already in some way Othered. They're either racialised or working class, or associated with certain local regions that have negative stereotypes - think the deep South of the US, or the Welsh Valleys. They're never the 'default'. And this raises thorny questions about what the default is, what the standardised accent is, the accents that do and do not merit differentiation from the norm. You're relegating Character B to being hard to read because he's from, idk, Sunderland. You've decided that he isn't speaking 'properly', and therefore the reader needs to understand that other people think he's speaking weirdly. That, to me, is the principle issue. Because returning to JK Rowling (a sentence I hoped never to type), the only characters who speak like this in her work are working class, or they're from other countries. They're never from, you know, Surrey. Wonder why that is. And it's easy to be glib about it, but I do think it reifies class and regional boundaries in a way that's ultimately harmful.
This isn't to say that there's never a place for eye dialect in writing - Trainspotting, for example, wouldn't be what it is without it, and there's definitely a different conversation to be had when it's your own accent and you're making a deliberate point about identity by differentiating through eye dialect - but I think that the blanket assumption of 'oh shit, my character is from Ireland, I'd better type that out phonetically!' can actually be both damaging to your writing and to your character representation, and I think that instead doing the work to really understand the vocabulary, speech patterns and unique aspects of a language or dialect always makes a work feel more authentic and lived-in.
To wit, less of this shite:
There’s mony a slip, an’ I’m no losin’ sight o’ any o’ my suspectit pairsons, juist yet awhile. (Peter Wimsey, if you were wondering, and yes, that's supposed to be Scottish)
and more of this:
"Are we straight so?"
"Aye, we're straight," said Jim.
"Straight as a rush, so we are." (Jamie O'Neill, Irish, from At Swim, Two Boys)
*objective determination made via a sample size of one: me, in an elaborate hat.
People in the fandom who think Aerion is cosplaying Maegor when he named his son Maegor...? Idk bro there's another major historical targ known for their martial prowess, dabbling in black magic, and naming their son Maegor... Just whooo could it be?
I love Maegor-Aerion tether as much as the next person, but it's a egregious blind spot to not recognise Aerion's Visenya WIP Cosplay. I think some fans just don't think about female characters, so they latch onto the obvious male character (Aerion is controversial like Maegor, his son is named Maegor, duhhh) as point of comparison for their fave. But also, some people might be adversarial to explicitly paralleling Aerion to a controversial targ woman, because it may open up Aerion's role in the story/history to a more contentious interpretation where his actions are perhaps (even(?)) more(?)* sympathetic than first examination may allow.
*imo few people actually take Aerion's position as his father's most prized pony while still being a second son bound to inherit nothing as an abject position, even after hotd at length elucidated this point with Daemon & Aemond. There's also something very compelling in the double whammy of Dyanna's death & Daeron's insufficiency as a first son leading to Aerion taking prime position at his father's side, but never truly filling out the shoes of either, as he's no woman, nor first son. I guess for the latter there's coverts kinslaying to cheat at, but the former? Hopeless. (I do think that people's intuitive reading of this troubled gender aspect of Aerion's is sublimated into the omegaverse popularity... But it also seems to be also a way to ignore the coding idk. Jury's out on this one.)
With the possible brighfyre bastard line, there's also obvious Daena The Defiant sprinkled in, what with naming their sons after a controversial targ man, though in this case I'd argue that Daenora is the more obvious echoe of Daena due to the Daen-name. (Daenora is deliciously close to Daeron, name wise, but that's neither here nor there. Like she might as well be called Daerona lol.)
Even beyond awoiaf fandoms, there's always crickets when it comes to reading transfeminine narratives of ~male~ characters that don't fit a more explicitly "failing at manhood" narrative. The moment they know to swing a sword, or have violated someone, that lense of interpretation never is considered. Because women are ontologically averse to violence and good and peace loving doves.
And I haven't mentioned the monstrous gender it/its dragon-gender of it all or the Cersei parallels... Thanks if you've read my insane sensitive rant <3 bye.
I’ve been (controversially, even with the disclaimer that the characters and their respective situations clearly still differ quite a bit) comparing Aerion to Saera and Viserra for a while now, but somehow I’d never thought to extend this to Visenya as well! Really intriguing, I’m definitely going to be thinking about this from time to time going forward. Another quick disclaimer is that, for obvious reasons, an explicitly transfeminine reading is perilous in a way which I personally don’t feel qualified to navigate as a cis woman…but the series is of course very into subversion and reversals where gender is concerned, and Aerion’s brother Aemon famously applies Barth’s hypothesis about dragons to Targaryens themselves in a figurative sense after learning that Dany seems to be acting the part of the prince that was promised: “Dragons are neither male nor female, Barth saw the truth of that, but now one and now the other, as changeable as flame.”
Finally, highlighting the following in particular because besides being impeccably put it’s one of the very reasons why the THK Targs exert so much fascination on me:
There’s also something very compelling in the double whammy of Dyanna’s death & Daeron’s insufficiency as a first son leading to Aerion taking prime position at his father’s side, but never truly filling out the shoes of either, as he’s no woman, nor first son.
Visenya may have also been willing to put on a false smile the way Aerion does. You could read the following as a rare moment of “softness,” but her actions do serve a very particular purpose (conquering the Vale at light speed with zero human cost and other military expenditure on her side)
Sharra Arryn had strengthened the defenses of Gulltown, moved a strong host to the Bloody Gate, and tripled the size of the garrisons in Stone, Snow, and Sky, the waycastles that guarded the approach to the Eyrie. All these defenses proved useless against Visenya Targaryen, who rode Vhagar’s leathery wings above them all and landed in the Eyrie’s inner courtyard. When the regent of the Vale rushed out to confront her, with a dozen guards at her back, she found Visenya with Ronnel Arryn seated on her knee, staring at the dragon, wonder-struck. “Mother, can I go flying with the lady?” the boy king asked. No threats were spoken, no angry words exchanged. The two queens smiled at one another and exchanged courtesies instead. Then Lady Sharra sent for the three crowns (her own regent’s coronet, her son’s small crown, and the Falcon Crown of Mountain and Vale that the Arryn kings had worn for a thousand years), and surrendered them to Queen Visenya, along with the swords of her garrison. And it was said afterward that the little king flew thrice about the summit of the Giant’s Lance, and landed to find himself a little lord. Thus did Visenya Targaryen bring the Vale of Arryn into her brother’s realm.
“You truly believe he meant to kill the horse?”
“Is there any doubt of it? If Prince Maekar had been here, it would have gone differently, I promise you. Aerion is all smiles and chivalry so long as his father is watching, if the tales be true, but when he’s not …”
And you know who else bears certain similarities to Visenya…
Maekar was an energetic king and a warrior of note, but also a harsh man, quick to judge and to condemn. He had never possessed his brother Baelor’s gifts that made friends and allies come easily, and after his brother’s death at his hands—however inadvertent—he became even more stern and unforgiving.
Visenya, eldest of the three siblings, was as much a warrior as Aegon himself, as comfortable in ringmail as in silk. She carried the Valyrian longsword Dark Sister, and was skilled in its use, having trained beside her brother since childhood. Though possessed of the silver-gold hair and purple eyes of Valyria, hers was a harsh, austere beauty. Even those who loved her best found Visenya stern, serious, unforgiving, and some said that she played with poisons and dabbled in dark sorceries.
Finally, to bring it all together: a meaningful juxtaposition between Maekar’s literal reflection and Aerion (shoutout to @pissbataille for pointing this out)
Maekar motioned, and the guards vanished as suddenly as they had appeared. The prince studied him a long moment, then turned and paced away from him to stand beside the pool, gazing down at his reflection in the water. “I have sent Aerion to Lys,” he announced abruptly.
Do you think somebody abused Aerion? If so, who are the most likely perpetrators?
It may well have been the last thing GRRM had in mind, but it’s probably my preferred reading (and a contentious one, obviously! But as I mentioned a few posts down, it does no one any good to categorically dismiss it considering the uncomfortable truth that many perpetrators of COCSA have been abused themselves. At the same time, however, it should go without saying that this reading does not constitute a defense of Aerion’s actions).
First, to make sure we’re all on the same page in regard to the terminology I’ve used: AKOTSK generally does not state the characters’ ages and so this analysis concerns book canon, in which Aerion was indeed a child himself when he threatened Egg with castration (Daeron is eighteen in “The Hedge Knight” making Aerion seventeen at the oldest, and Egg is eight or nine and says it happened when he himself “was little,” meaning—from his young perspective—quite a few years prior). In such scenarios the question of where the child perpetrator got the idea in the first place inevitably arises, and in this case it’s quite possible that simply growing up in a violent feudal society in which castration is a legal punishment and child marriage is not uncommon was sufficient; however, some individuals have unsurprisingly learned from their own experiences of CSA.
Then there are other details to consider. Aerion’s privileged status as a prince certainly played a role in making him who he is, as did the Targaryen tradition of close kin marriage, Maekar’s parenting (more on this later) and Aerion’s “madness”…but the dangerously “mad” Targs have generally also experienced at least one specific adverse life event as an inciting incident. Viserys III (an obvious narrative parallel to Aerion) and his father Aerys seemingly had some difficult personality traits to begin with, but at about age thirteen Viserys became homeless and the sole guardian of his little sister after Willem Darry’s death (Dany also says that “When Viserys sold their mother’s crown, the last joy had gone from him, leaving only rage”) and Brienne’s maester probably correctly opines that the six months of captivity during the Defiance of Duskendale “had driven King Aerys mad” (Varys also did all he could to stoke Aerys’s paranoia). Another potential example is Maegor, in whose case quite a few environmental factors were at play—even in addition to the possibility that Visenya had used blood magic to conceive him in an attempt to produce an heir who would be strong and ruthless in response to Aenys’s “weak” disposition and regression after his own mother’s death—and it’s particularly of note to me that he was married off at only thirteen to a twenty-three-year-old and that this union was immediately consummated. GRRM has written a number of characters subjected to early sexual experiences—or sexual abuse in general—who go on to behave in ways quite evidently informed by this; Aegon IV was known as Aegon the Unworthy due in part to the broad consensus that his promiscuity was unacceptably excessive, and—while this pattern of behavior was once again the product of no single factor—I do not think it is a coincidence that when he was fourteen the twenty-four-year-old Falena Stokeworth “made him a man.”
In regard to your second question—“who are the most likely perpetrators”—personally I do not have anyone specific in mind, but if it were a man around Maekar’s age this might explain some of the strangeness inherent to his relationship with Aerion. By which I mean, given Maekar’s personality and drives (e.g., prideful, desires to escape “the shadow of his eldest brother”) it’s not at all surprising that he casts Aerion in the role of the golden child in contrast to Daeron, but Aerion’s matching investment in behaving as the perfect son around Maekar and absolutely no one else (in the novella, unlike the show, “all smiles and chivalry so long as his father is watching” proves an accurate description of Aerion’s behavior) is otherwise a bit harder to fathom. It’s not solely a means of staying out of trouble, as he doesn’t bother with the act in front of Baelor, the second-most powerful person in the realm: even before Aerion proceeds to kill Humfrey H.’s horse we see him take “a pause to dip his lance to Prince Baelor, a pause so brief that it was almost perfunctory.” Aerion reminds me a bit of Saera, whose “sisters all misliked her to various degrees,” who ended up in Lys after a scandal around the same age as he did, and whose relationship with her father bears a slight degree of similarity to Aerion’s with Maekar:
[L]ong before she was half-grown, Saera had learned the art of getting anything she wanted from her father: a kitten, a hound, a pony, a hawk, a horse (Jaehaerys did draw a firm line at the elephant).
As for the matter of these puppeteers, by the time Aerion is done twisting the tale it will be high treason. The dragon is the sigil of the royal House. To portray one being slain, sawdust blood spilling from its neck . . . well, it was doubtless innocent, but it was far from wise. Aerion calls it a veiled attack on House Targaryen, an incitement to revolt. Maekar will likely agree. My brother has a prickly nature, and he has placed all his best hopes on Aerion, since Daeron has been such a grave disappointment to him.
While I find the relationship between Saera and Jaehaerys much more suspect (the reading that she experienced CSA at his hands is supported by quite a volume of evidence, whereas I’m personally less inclined to think that GRRM intended the same when it comes to Aerion and Maekar), Aerion’s willingness to please Maekar and him alone still suggests a level of enmeshment to me. This could be a matter of poor parenting and nothing else, but—as I mentioned above—GRRM’s precedent of writing characters whose interpersonal relationships are patterned somewhat on their past experiences of sexual abuse forms an additional line of inquiry here.
Finally, I think this part was originally @aerionbrightflame’s idea, but the following is worth examining more closely:
He thinks he’s a dragon in human form, you know. That’s why he was so wroth at that puppet show.
Considering that Aerion ultimately dies in an attempt to become a literal dragon, this belief of his seemingly operates somewhere in the realm of wish fulfillment. A “madness” brought on by an experience of powerlessness, perhaps, in view of the relative physical vulnerability of dragons and humans*…which may shed some further light on his extreme reaction to the puppet show’s outcome. On that note, I want to reiterate that this reading is not an attempt to downplay his treatment of Tanselle and Egg; personally I just find it more rewarding to speculate further on causality as opposed to attributing his actions to privilege and Targaryen marriage tradition alone (plenty of other Targaryen men constitute counterpoints) or, worse, simply concluding that he’s “inherently a bad person” (not really GRRM’s style).
*As stated near the beginning of this post I’ve limited my analysis to book canon, but I have to say that his virtually around-the-clock chainmail on the show is intriguing in this context.
Evil wizard tasteful pin-up magazine but it's all photos of like, skinny old goths coyly fingering cursed amulets, long-bearded sorcerers doing the 'oopsie' pose as their corrosive destruction spell destroys enough of their own robes to show some skin, naked desiccated lich king positioning his staff of human skulls just so it leaves something to the imagination, dark knights in full armor just holding their soul-eating blades out in front of their codpieces, orc chieftain who did not understand the assignment and is posing with a monster he killed like one of those guys-with-fish photos. Or maybe he DID understand the assignment. Hmm.
So ok look. The point is not the flared leg by itself. These cannot be yoga pants. These are, and you have to understand this if you are too young to have worn them, BLUE JEANS. And this was the last years before all jeans were 70% spandex.
They were denim, and they weren't bell bottoms. They hung loose from the knee in a way that would make a wizard envious. We all walked around like we were wearing hakama. And they dragged on the ground. That was important. Ragged cuffs. If your jeans weren't so long that they had ratty cuffs, they were embarrassingly short.
And the thing about denim is that it's a twill weave and it's cotton. So not only does it hold a lot of water, it wicks. Walking around in these suckers on a wet day could get you wet to the knees even if you never stepped in a puddle.
Then you'd go inside and take off your shoes and try to avoid letting your freezing, wet, filthy pant legs touch your skin.
The visceral memory of that time is something that never leaves you. Everyone's jeans were many inches higher in the back than the front because you kept stepping on the hem and ripping it off. Your lower legs were so very cold. Every new pair of jeans literally enveloped your entire foot, they were so so long re: leg-to-waist ratio. Walking on a rainy day was a legitimate workout. You have no idea.
I'm a corset centrist. I think it's reasonable for historical fiction characters to not like corsets, but I reserve the right to roll my eyes in that scene in Bridgerton where they tightlace the girl before putting her in an empire waist dress.
#i dont like bras! some people just dont #the thing is authors overlook really thinking about what that says about their charicter because theyre thinking about corsets less #as a garment and more as a symbol #maybe theyre hypermobile or have slipping rib syndrome #maybe theyre lactose intolerant and spend their lives feeling ill all the time #maybe they have sensory issues or tight clothes make them feel clostrophobic #maybe theyre dysphoric! #maybe its a hand me down that doesnt quite fit #my charicter doesnt like corsets should be the begining of asking what your charicters sensory world is
This is a really good point/set of points. I've gone on and on before about why most women wouldn't have been that bothered by their corsets so I don't want to bother rehashing it, but this is the flipside of that aspect.
It really, really is not inherently a problem to have your character(s) not like the feeling of wearing a corset. But it is bad writing to repeatedly use the same cliché characterization. If you're determined to go with this, don't just be like "well she's too free-spirited and modern" and call it a day (and if you do see this cliché criticized, please stop accusing the critics of being dumb misogynists, it just makes you look like you don't know enough about the historical genre to be aware that it's a cliché).
you can use not liking corsets to say something about your character! You just have to get past the idea that not liking corsets is a default state of any woman with a brain!
Even if she dislikes them on principle or for proto-feminist reasons, there has to be something about the sensation of them that she finds impeding to her life (which not all women did). Is it about difficulty bending at the waist, and if so, what about her life means that she needs to bend at the waist so badly and hasn't adapted her wardrobe to do so? Is she making and selling a patented corset alternative and therefore has a financial as well as possibly a philosophical stake in the question? Does she wear one of the many alternatives that were on the market in real life? Does she not experience any particular discomfort from corsets, but has a purely principled objection to them? If so, why? What does she think women should do for breast support instead? Or is she very small breasted and doesn't understand the discomfort many women experience in going without support? 
you could do a lot with this if you weren't falling back on the tired old "well, obviously anyone worth listening to would dislike them because they're corsets and corsets are evil torture devices!" Shorthand 
i stopped giving a shit about "legit" purchases of digital products after i spent $80 on the entire Dark Horse collection of Trigun/Trigun Maximum ebook mangas, learning that I only got access to reading them through a proprietary website ereader function, couldn't download them, and couldn't get a refund, and then literally only a year later, getting an e-mail stating that Dark Horse was shutting down that part of their company and I wouldn't even be able to read them anymore. Fuck that
Pirate shit. Don't feel bad for it. It's not "your fault" that artists, independent or otherwise, can't make a living. You downloading an album or ebook for free isn't the cause of the problem. The cause is capitalism, plain and simple, and pirating is a lucky loophole that will companies are still trying to stomp out.
discord letting you have custom emoji has really ruined my ability to communicate effectively on other apps. what do you mean i cant send jalute. what about givehand. cryingpat. torment. sittinghere. tvek. cant even send my wonderful beloved frogheart. whats the bloody point
In June of 1902, Rachel's former roommate Peggy (one of the "two Margarets") wrote Will from Pasadena, California where her family had recently relocated. Mart (the other Margaret) was visiting and the two of them had taken up a new hobby.
"We have taken to playing Ping Pong lately. Have you tried it? We play every evening until after eleven o'clock. Sometimes it is too much of a good thing." - Peggy to Will, June 1, 1902.
Joining Peggy and Mart in their new hobby was - well, pretty much the entire world...
After the introduction of lawn tennis (now just called tennis) in the 1870s created a worldwide phenomenon, it was perhaps inevitable that someone would move the sport indoors.
A handful of mentions of various games called “table tennis” or “parlor tennis” appear throughout the 1880s, often with rules that bear no resemblance to outdoor tennis. Several related patents were filed in England in the 1880s and early 90s, but none that seem to have resulted in mass production.
The earliest modern table tennis set was marketed under the name “Gossima” by J. Jacques & Son Ltd of London, beginning in 1891.
(source: The Graphic, December 10, 1898.)
A Gossima set included two vellum rackets, a covered cork ball and a foot high net that could be secured to any standard dining table with a strap.
Though I’ve found records of Gossima being marketed as far away as Pakistan and New Zealand, it seems to have met with limited success until the Fall of 1900 when it suddenly exploded in popularity among London’s elite under a new name - ping pong. This (both the sudden success and the new name) were likely due in part to the introduction of the celluloid ping pong ball we know today, which far outperformed the previous cork design.
In September 1900, the Pall Mall Gazette published an article (actually a stealth ad for Hamleys toy store) discussing the new fad and giving tips for players. The article was also picked up by overseas press and printed in several newspapers in the US and Canada (minus the Hamleys plug), spreading the first whispers of the game abroad.
By January of 1901 the fad had become near ubiquitous in London. The Evening News wrote ““Ping Pong” is the only game that may be mentioned, let alone played, in London drawing rooms. Everybody Ping Pongs, or watches other people Ping Pong, from the Dutchess in Belgravia down to the clerk in Forest Gate.”
(An improvised ping pong table set up by servants as portrayed in Punch magazine, November 13, 1901.)
The (London) Morning Leader wrote in March - “Gentle reader “Do you Ping Pong”? If you don't you're not an up-to-date person. It is as fashionable as mourning or the Twopenny Tube, and far more the rage than bridge.”
By May, Hamleys was selling folding ping pong tables and special sets for tournaments.
Throughout 1901, ping pong continued to grow in popularity across the British Empire and beyond. By this point the name “Ping Pong” had been trademarked in both England (by Hamleys and J. Jacques & Son Ltd.) and the US (by the Parker Bros.), forcing competitors to sell under various names including: Whiff Waff, Pom-Pom, Pim-Pam and Netto. “Table Tennis” or “Parlor Tennis” would remain the most common generic terms.
One London firm claimed to have sold one million ping pong sets in the last three months of 1901.
The US would not fully fall to the ping pong craze until 1902, and newspapers reported the spread of the game as you would an encroaching pandemic.
“[It] is becoming more infectious than smallpox and as catching as golf.” The Boston Globe warned in December 1901.
“If it were a plague, ping-pong could not be sweeping more widely over the face of the earth. In Mexico, in India, in Japan - everywhere - the ping-pong of the little xylonite ball is heard throughout the land…” - Harper’s Weekly, May 3, 1902.
(source: The Macon Telegraph, May 18, 1902.)
By May 1902 the ping pong pandemic had fully engulfed the US.
“For one not to know how to play ping pong means practically social ostracism.” - The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 18, 1902
Ping pong parties and luncheons abounded. Pubs and poolrooms quickly converted into public ping pong parlors. Countless clubs and tournaments were soon arranged.
Even senators and congressmen were asked their opinion of the game and, in one case, whether they would support opening a ping pong parlor at the Capitol Building.
In late May, Alice Roosevelt hosted a “ping pong tea and dance” aboard the presidential yacht.
(source: The Bradford Weekly Telegraph, April 19, 1902.)
Enterprising businessmen attached the name ping pong to articles of all imaginable varieties. Soda fountains served ping pong punch and ping pong ice cream.
Photographers introduced the ping pong photo - which produced a strip of multiple pictures using a sliding frame which “ping ponged” back and forth.
(A ping pong photo of Mart and Rachel, taken circa 1902.)
Clothing stores carried ping pong hats, ping pong ties, ping pong shirtwaists, ping pong slippers and ping pong belts (made of mesh to resemble the net), while fashion columns suggested appropriate ping pong attire.
(A dress with pockets designed to hold ping pong balls, from the New Orleans State, May 25, 1902.)
(source: The Memphis Commercial Appeal, May 25, 1902.)
Flexible ping pong corsets were developed after some female players found it difficult to play the game in their tight-laced undergarments. One article mused whether ping pong might bring an end to tight-lacing altogether.
(source: The Indianapolis News, May 27, 1902.)
Articles extolled the healthy virtues of ping pong for exercise and weight loss, while others warned of its dangers to your health. “Ping pong shoulder”, “ping pong ankle”, “ping pong wrist” and severe eye strain were all touted as possible outcomes of overzealous play.
Worries that public ping pong parlors would encourage gambling resulted in Providence, Rhode Island implementing a ping pong license.
The ping pong craze would last through the summer of 1902, but begin to wane by the end of the year. Some areas extended the fad through 1903, but by 1904 it was well and truly dead.
“There isn’t half enough thankfulness for the griefs of yesteryear that haunt us no more. Ping-pong has gone.” The St. Louis Globe-Democrat proclaimed on January 25, 1903.
While a syndicated column in February 1904 printed “Weep copiously, dear ones, for the ping pong fad is dead. After the obsequies, you may trade your outfit for a phonograph and annoy the neighbors.”
Over the next two decades dedicated clubs continued to hold tournaments, but the general public more or less moved on.
Until another ping pong craze broke out in the late 1920s and persisted throughout much of the Great Depression.
After several more crazes and a stint in global politics, table tennis became an Olympic sport in 1988.
we're moving to an internet where children would be banned from reaching out for help and friendship online but abusive parents can post their children's every second online to humiliate and expose them for money with no pushback
appreciation for all the non descript trans. all the vagues and in-betweens and still-figuring-it-outs. all you unlabeled flavors of nonbinary or polygender or something else entirely. for some people it's as simple as male to female or vice versa! this is for everyone that, instead, went from Assigned Gender to ??? What Happened Where Am I. it's perfectly valid if your identity is "just whatever" for the rest of your life. you're still trans!! and i am right there with you. how lovely it is to mold yourself
the best fanfiction you've ever read was written by a woman in her 40s before she made dinner for her kids. it was written by a teenager after school when they should've been studying for a history test. and a barista came up with the idea while they cleaned the espresso machine and busser fact-checked it on their break and the post-doc edited between writing grant proposals and the nurse apologized for typos in the notes after a long shift and behind every drabble and one-shot and multi-chapter fic there is a person with a wonderful and interesting and chaotic life and it is such a privilege that we get to be a part of it because they decided to do this thing we all share, for fun.
forever thinking about that girl at my uni orientation who, after being told to pour out her water bottle before entering an event, looked at me and said "they tell us to stay hydrated and then make us pour out our water, this is like totally kafkaesque" and then poured out what was very obviously an entire water bottle full of whiskey. hope she's doing well.
There is a quality of books (or movies or shows) that I can best describe as “stickiness,” which is separate from being good or even enjoyable: a sticky book is one I just keep thinking about. Sometimes it’s because a book is very good (e.g. The Locked Tomb), and sometimes it’s because a book is very bad (e.g. ACOTAR), but there are also very good and very bad books that are slippery, such that when I’m done reading them they slip from my thoughts like water from a hydrophobic surface.
