Monterey Bay Aquarium
ojovivo
KIROKAZE
almost home
No title available
Misplaced Lens Cap
titsay
izzy's playlists!
Cosmic Funnies
No title available
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Mike Driver
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
★
sheepfilms
⁂
Kaledo Art
Janaina Medeiros
No title available
seen from Indonesia
seen from Chile
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from Brazil
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Chile
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Ireland
seen from Malaysia
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from Peru
seen from United States
@spin-measure-cut
How Mayan Weavers Are Keeping A 2,000-Year-Old Indigenous Craft Alive | …
1. This is incredible to watch
2. https://tramatextiles.org/collections you can go buy their stuff! These weavers are having a hard time during the pandemic, and you can help! I just bought some masks and pencil cases.
Fragments of Iron Age textiles from the Celtic saltmines at Hallstatt, Austria
“...A lone woman could, if she spun in almost every spare minute of her day, on her own keep a small family clothed in minimum comfort (and we know they did that). Adding a second spinner – even if they were less efficient (like a young girl just learning the craft or an older woman who has lost some dexterity in her hands) could push the household further into the ‘comfort’ margin, and we have to imagine that most of that added textile production would be consumed by the family (because people like having nice clothes!).
At the same time, that rate of production is high enough that a household which found itself bereft of (male) farmers (for instance due to a draft or military mortality) might well be able to patch the temporary hole in the family finances by dropping its textile consumption down to that minimum and selling or trading away the excess, for which there seems to have always been demand. ...Consequently, the line between women spinning for their own household and women spinning for the market often must have been merely a function of the financial situation of the family and the balance of clothing requirements to spinners in the household unit (much the same way agricultural surplus functioned).
Moreover, spinning absolutely dominates production time (again, around 85% of all of the labor-time, a ratio that the spinning wheel and the horizontal loom together don’t really change). This is actually quite handy, in a way, as we’ll see, because spinning (at least with a distaff) could be a mobile activity; a spinner could carry their spindle and distaff with them and set up almost anywhere, making use of small scraps of time here or there.
On the flip side, the labor demands here are high enough prior to the advent of better spinning and weaving technology in the Late Middle Ages (read: the spinning wheel, which is the truly revolutionary labor-saving device here) that most women would be spinning functionally all of the time, a constant background activity begun and carried out whenever they weren’t required to be actively moving around in order to fulfill a very real subsistence need for clothing in climates that humans are not particularly well adapted to naturally. The work of the spinner was every bit as important for maintaining the household as the work of the farmer and frankly students of history ought to see the two jobs as necessary and equal mirrors of each other.
At the same time, just as all farmers were not free, so all spinners were not free. It is abundantly clear that among the many tasks assigned to enslaved women within ancient households. Xenophon lists training the enslaved women of the household in wool-working as one of the duties of a good wife (Xen. Oik. 7.41). ...Columella also emphasizes that the vilica ought to be continually rotating between the spinners, weavers, cooks, cowsheds, pens and sickrooms, making use of the mobility that the distaff offered while her enslaved husband was out in the fields supervising the agricultural labor (of course, as with the bit of Xenophon above, the same sort of behavior would have been expected of the free wife as mistress of her own household).
...Consequently spinning and weaving were tasks that might be shared between both relatively elite women and far poorer and even enslaved women, though we should be sure not to take this too far. Doubtless it was a rather more pleasant experience to be the wealthy woman supervising enslaved or hired hands working wool in a large household than it was to be one of those enslaved women, or the wife of a very poor farmer desperately spinning to keep the farm afloat and the family fed. The poor woman spinner – who spins because she lacks a male wage-earner to support her – is a fixture of late medieval and early modern European society and (as J.S. Lee’s wage data makes clear; spinners were not paid well) must have also had quite a rough time of things.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of household textile production in the shaping of pre-modern gender roles. It infiltrates our language even today; a matrilineal line in a family is sometimes called a ‘distaff line,’ the female half of a male-female gendered pair is sometimes the ‘distaff counterpart’ for the same reason. Women who do not marry are sometimes still called ‘spinsters’ on the assumption that an unmarried woman would have to support herself by spinning and selling yarn (I’m not endorsing these usages, merely noting they exist).
E.W. Barber (Women’s Work, 29-41) suggests that this division of labor, which holds across a wide variety of societies was a product of the demands of the one necessarily gendered task in pre-modern societies: child-rearing. Barber notes that tasks compatible with the demands of keeping track of small children are those which do not require total attention (at least when full proficiency is reached; spinning is not exactly an easy task, but a skilled spinner can very easily spin while watching someone else and talking to a third person), can easily be interrupted, is not dangerous, can be easily moved, but do not require travel far from home; as Barber is quick to note, producing textiles (and spinning in particular) fill all of these requirements perfectly and that “the only other occupation that fits the criteria even half so well is that of preparing the daily food” which of course was also a female-gendered activity in most ancient societies. Barber thus essentially argues that it was the close coincidence of the demands of textile-production and child-rearing which led to the dominant paradigm where this work was ‘women’s work’ as per her title.
(There is some irony that while the men of patriarchal societies of antiquity – which is to say effectively all of the societies of antiquity – tended to see the gendered division of labor as a consequence of male superiority, it is in fact male incapability, particularly the male inability to nurse an infant, which structured the gendered division of labor in pre-modern societies, until the steady march of technology rendered the division itself obsolete. Also, and Barber points this out, citing Judith Brown, we should see this is a question about ability rather than reliance, just as some men did spin, weave and sew (again, often in a commercial capacity), so too did some women farm, gather or hunt. It is only the very rare and quite stupid person who will starve or freeze merely to adhere to gender roles and even then gender roles were often much more plastic in practice than stereotypes make them seem.)
Spinning became a central motif in many societies for ideal womanhood. Of course one foot of the fundament of Greek literature stands on the Odyssey, where Penelope’s defining act of arete is the clever weaving and unweaving of a burial shroud to deceive the suitors, but examples do not stop there. Lucretia, one of the key figures in the Roman legends concerning the foundation of the Republic, is marked out as outstanding among women because, when a group of aristocrats sneak home to try to settle a bet over who has the best wife, she is patiently spinning late into the night (with the enslaved women of her house working around her; often they get translated as ‘maids’ in a bit of bowdlerization. Any time you see ‘maids’ in the translation of a Greek or Roman text referring to household workers, it is usually quite safe to assume they are enslaved women) while the other women are out drinking (Liv. 1.57). This display of virtue causes the prince Sextus Tarquinius to form designs on Lucretia (which, being virtuous, she refuses), setting in motion the chain of crime and vengeance which will overthrow Rome’s monarchy. The purpose of Lucretia’s wool-working in the story is to establish her supreme virtue as the perfect aristocratic wife.
...For myself, I find that students can fairly readily understand the centrality of farming in everyday life in the pre-modern world, but are slower to grasp spinning and weaving (often tacitly assuming that women were effectively idle, or generically ‘homemaking’ in ways that precluded production). And students cannot be faulted for this – they generally aren’t confronted with this reality in classes or in popular culture. ...Even more than farming or blacksmithing, this is an economic and household activity that is rendered invisible in the popular imagination of the past, even as (as you can see from the artwork in this post) it was a dominant visual motif for representing the work of women for centuries.”
- Bret Devereaux, “Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part III: Spin Me Right Round…”
If I may tag onto this: it's really astonishing how much spinning you can get done when you do it in tiny increments. When I'm at a medieval market or music festival (back when that was... a thing), I carry my spindle everywhere and just spin a tiny little bit, constantly. Waiting in line for food. Sitting somewhere waiting for the next band to play, in the early morning when nobody's up yet. I can get through 100 gr of fibre in a day like this without consciously dedicating any extended time periods to it (and I'm not the best with a drop spindle). I would imagine that is roughly the way it worked in pre-modern cultures, too, which means that yes, it was possible to supply the fabric for an entire household this way, if the fabric was also taken care of properly (mended, re-used, recycled ...) and the spinner didn't suffer from illness or had any disabilities (!). It wouldn't be easy, but it also wouldn't be terrifying back-breaking labour.
This is an illustration circa 1325-1335 of a woman feeding chickens -- notice she’s got a distaff tucked under her arm with a handspindle dangling from it. Women spun *constantly* because making thread for weaving and sewing was a never ending task.
Someone I know not well enough to voice my opinion on the subject said something like why didn’t God make potatoes a low-calorie food so I am here to say: God made them like that because their nutrition density IS what makes them healthy. By God I mean Andean agricultural technicians. Potato is healthy BECAUSE potato holds calories and vitamins. Do not malign potato
For all evolutionary history, life has struggled against calorie deficit… So much energy goes into finding food that there is no time for anything else. Our ancestors selectively bred root vegetables to create the potato, so that we might be the first species whose daily existence doesn’t consist of trying to find the nutrients necessary for survival. One potato can rival the calorie count of many hours of foraging… Eat a potato, and you free up so much time to create and build and connect with your fellow man. Without potato where would you be?? Do not stand on the shoulders of giants and think thyself tall!!
I nearly teared up reading “Andean agricultural technicians” bc fuck yes! these were members of Pre-Inca cultures who lived 7 to 10 thousand years ago, and they were scientists! food scientists and researchers and farmers whose names and language we can never know, who lived an inconceivably long time ago (pre-dating ancient civilizations in Egypt, China, India, Greece, and even some parts of Mesopotamia) and we are separated by millennia of time and history, but still for thousands of years the fruits vegetables of their labor and research have continued to nourish countless human lives, how is that not the most earthly form of a true miracle??? anyway yes potatoes are beautiful, salute their creators.
There are approximately 4000 varieties of potato in Peru. I’ve seen an incredible variety of corn and tomatoes, and root vegetables I’ve never seen before, on the local farmer markets. Yet some expats insist on buying only imported, expensive American brands of canned veggies… 🤷🏼♀️ Peruvian potatoes 👇🏼
It is long since time for us to start viewing plant domestication as the bioscience that it is. Because while the Andeans were creating potatoes, the ancient Mesoamericans were turning teosinte into corn:
And then there’s bananas, from Papua New Guinea:
These were not small, random changes, this was real concerted effort over years to turn inedible things into highly edible ones. And I’m convinced the main reason we’re reluctant to call them scientific achievements is, well, a racist one.
“Consider the Vikings. Popular feminist retellings like the History Channel’s fictional saga “Vikings” emphasize the role of women as warriors and chieftains. But they barely hint at how crucial women’s work was to the ships that carried these warriors to distant shores.
One of the central characters in “Vikings” is an ingenious shipbuilder. But his ships apparently get their sails off the rack. The fabric is just there, like the textiles we take for granted in our 21st-century lives. The women who prepared the wool, spun it into thread, wove the fabric and sewed the sails have vanished.
In reality, from start to finish, it took longer to make a Viking sail than to build a Viking ship. So precious was a sail that one of the Icelandic sagas records how a hero wept when his was stolen. Simply spinning wool into enough thread to weave a single sail required more than a year’s work, the equivalent of about 385 eight-hour days.
King Canute, who ruled a North Sea empire in the 11th century, had a fleet comprising about a million square meters of sailcloth. For the spinning alone, those sails represented the equivalent of 10,000 work years.”
“...Picturing historical women as producers requires a change of attitude. Even today, after decades of feminist influence, we too often assume that making important things is a male domain. Women stereotypically decorate and consume. They engage with people. They don’t manufacture essential goods.
Yet from the Renaissance until the 19th century, European art represented the idea of “industry” not with smokestacks but with spinning women. Everyone understood that their never-ending labor was essential. It took at least 20 spinners to keep a single loom supplied.
“The spinners never stand still for want of work; they always have it if they please; but weavers are sometimes idle for want of yarn,” the agronomist and travel writer Arthur Young, who toured northern England in 1768, wrote.
Shortly thereafter, the spinning machines of the Industrial Revolution liberated women from their spindles and distaffs, beginning the centuries-long process that raised even the world’s poorest people to living standards our ancestors could not have imagined.
But that “great enrichment” had an unfortunate side effect. Textile abundance erased our memories of women’s historic contributions to one of humanity’s most important endeavors. It turned industry into entertainment.
“In the West,” Dr. Harlow wrote, “the production of textiles has moved from being a fundamental, indeed essential, part of the industrial economy to a predominantly female craft activity.””
- Virginia Postrel, “Women and Men Are Like the Threads of a Woven Fabric.” in The New York Times
Every time I think about the Age of Sail, my mind almost shorts out contemplating the sheer amount of work involved. From the mid-16th to mid-18th century, every single one of those enormous sails was made of handspun thread, and woven on looms with a person throwing the shuttle back and forth thousands upon thousands of times.
The post above mentions the shift from spinning wheels to spinning machines, and how that revolutionised textile production. The Age of Sail was reliant on an earlier technological advancement - the spinning wheel. Wheels were used in China, India and the Islamic world from around the 9th or 10th century, but they came to Europe in the 14th and fast treadle wheels were invented in the 16th.
Wheels increased thread production by up to 10 times, giving more to the hungry looms and allowing more cloth to be produced.
So think about that, and also that the Viking women who supplied all the thread for their fleets were using simple spindles. Their work was literally never done.
So according to recent wank started by prokopetz, Jareth from Labyrinth is a sexual predator of the pedophile variety. A lot of radfems in the replies are chest beating about problematic female fantasies and on god it's about to make me tear my hair out.
I mean I don’t know that I agree with him entirely on his analysis of Jareth’s villainy, but he is right that Jareth is - on the most basic level - most definitely preying on a teenage girl, and that he has very obvious sexual desire for her.
However, if we take up the very valid interpretation that the whole adventure is a dream or a fantasy (and moreover her way of working through her feelings about her mother’s death, her father’s remarriage, and her departure from childhood), it’s also clear that Jareth represents a lot of Sarah’s anxiety about sexuality. She has recently gone through puberty. We are also told that she doesn’t date, and where is she on a weekend evening? Playing dress-up/pretend in the park by herself.*
Then Jareth shows up with his seductive voice and his extremely tight pants and begins making overtures. Moreover, we need to remember the overall context that he was played by David Bowie in 1986, a time when David Bowie’s face was almost definitely plastered over many a teen girl’s bedroom wall. He was, at the time, an absolute beacon of male sexuality for many girls and women.
Moreover, despite his creepy actions, I would argue that Jareth is still very obviously presented within the female gaze. He is lithe and elegant, he’s royalty, he’s magical, his clothes are tailored to show off his body in an erotic-but-not-too-erotic way, he’s self-controlled up until the point that he throws aside his dignity to beg her for love (Mr Darcy vibes, anyone?), his idea of a hot date is a fairy-tale ball and he even magics her a dress that every young preteen/teen girl dreams of, and on top of that, he’s shown being cute with kids! That is 100% female gaze material right there.
So basically, you have a story of an isolated girl who is clinging to her own childhood in order to maintain a sense of normalcy as her life falls apart, but who is also being faced with the unavoidable changes that come with adolescence - including sexuality. At the start of the film, we are shown that she is threatened by her step-mother assuming the role of her father’s wife and sexual partner. She is saddled with the very proof of that sexuality - her baby step-brother - who she obviously resents, partially because he is the embodiment of her step-mother’s entrance into the family, and perhaps partially because he is a symbol of something that very frequently comes along with adult womanhood (fertility and babies).
So she fantasises/dreams of a world where everything is confusing, with no clear answers, and life is unfair. In other words, adulthood. She also fantasises/dreams of a man who absolutely drips with a teenage girl’s version of eroticism, but who is also threatening and frightening at the same time - because guess what? Those desires and feelings can be very frightening and confusing when they first show up! And they can feel extremely demanding, too - just like Jareth.
Anyway, all that said, I disagree with @prokopetz that Jareth symbolises predatory male sexuality, because it is very clear that he was written to simultaneously represent young girls’ desires and anxieties about the unfamiliar world of sex and adulthood. And for young teen girls like myself who watched that movie…yeah, it damn well worked. There’s a reason a lot of us remember that movie fondly, and why it continues to fuel a lot of fantasies today. I would also disagree that he is the villain. He’s an antagonist, surely, but the real villain is Sarah’s own uncertainty and fear.
Of course, obviously, if you want to take a literalist interpretation of the story, then yeah, Jareth is a predatory villain, but I would argue that a literalist interpretation is missing the point of the film entirely. And I’m not surprised that radfems are missing that point by a country mile.
–
* Personally, as a ND woman who can very distinctly remember the experience of being a ND teenage girl…yeah, this movie really resonated with me at the time for obvious reasons, and I’d say that it’s very safe to also read Sarah as a ND girl who has been traumatised by the death of her mother.
this is an absolute galaxy brain take, thank you for this.
Can’t believe Jane Austen wrote Pride and Prejudice in the 2000s
And in 2015 Emily Brontë released literary clsssic Wuthering Heights
Thank God someone paved the way for them…
if you think jk was the first woman author, you don’t actually care about women authors.
Mary Shelley didnt fuck on her parents graves for this level of disrespect
Murasaki Shikibu didn’t invent the novel for this.
Christine de Pizan did not sit down at her desk and write The Book of the City of Ladies, advocating for women’s education and finding value in women of all social classes and backgrounds, in 1405 for this.
🎶SHAHARIZADE HAD A THOUSAND TALES🎶
This……….isn’t even true in 20th century fantasy or childrens books? Pierce, Lackey, Applegate, McCaffrey, Bradley, Butler, whomst?
Excuse me wut? ENHEDUANNA
You’re a daycare worker, watching over toddlers, when the imminent end of the world is announced. It becomes increasingly clear none of the kids’ parents are going to show up as the end inches nearer.
[Audio starts]
“Mom has been texting me for the last twenty minutes. She wants me to come home. It’s a four hour drive, when the roads are clear, and from what I hear everybody is trying to get somewhere right now. There’s no telling if I’d even-”
“Everybody else has left. All the other kids were picked up, the other staff left. They gave me all the keys. I promised to stay and wait for as long as- well. Even if some of the parents show up, I guess some of them won’t, so I’m just waiting. Until.”
[Clears throat.]
“A couple of people came after everybody left. Peter, one of Aidan’s fathers, gave me three hundred dollars for staying. What am I going to do with money? It’s- anyway. I kind of get it. He wanted to give me something.”
[Audio ends]
[Audio starts]
“They’re all between 2 and 4.” Sniff. “They’re so little. Too little to really- maybe if they were older, I’d have to tell them something. But um. I’m just- trying to stay calm and keep them happy and occupied. I think that’s the best thing, right now.”
[Heaving breaths.]
“I normally use this recorder to help me remember stuff. It’s just, uh, habit to talk to it. I don’t know. They’re napping, right now. I’ve got the baby monitor, they know that if they talk into it, I’ll come, so-”
[Sobbing.]
[Audio ends]
[Audio starts]
“Mom keeps texting, so I blocked her. I sent her a text telling her goodbye, first, but. I do. But these kids need me.”
[Sniff.]
“I tried calling their parents again, but I can’t get anybody. It’s just busy signals. I called the firefighter station, 911. I can’t get through to anybody.”
[Shaky breath.]
“I went out into the yard. Um, I think they can play. It’s nice out, and you can’t really see it yet. Little bit of a glimmer, if they ask I’ll just tell them it’s a plane, but it’s nice out and we’ve got hours before-”
[Murmuring child’s voice, indistinguishable.]
[Audio ends]
Keep reading
Risu just sent me this and I am SO DELIGHTED
Archeologists say they have found the world's oldest piece of yarn or cord, making it the earliest known evidence of textile and cord making
Ahhhhhhh!!! Go read it! Go read it!! The cording was plied by Neanderthals!!! The article talks about how we can’t keep thinking about them as being stupid it’s so delightful! In these trying times, let’s read about some joyful anthropological and archaeological discoveries!!!
Read it! The fact that it’s plied is so exciting! For plied cord, you first spin your fibers in one direction (they did it clockwise) and then take that collection of singles and twist them in the opposite direction (in this case counterclockwise). So it’s a process that requires planning and experience. You spin your first bit, you set it aside, you spin your second and third, you ply them. You can’t do it all in one go. And unless this piece happens to be the work of the very first person to spin fibers, and that person was a super genius who not only invented the idea of spinning but the technique for plying, it shows that the Neanderthals were communicating technological skills amongst each other. Which I mean isn’t news in and of itself, but this is just one more piece of evidence.
FERAL FROTHING IN FIBER ARTS THIS SHIT IS SO COOL
Holy shit this is incredible! The puts textile technology at 40,000 - 50,000 years old; the earliest previous evidence we had was 20,000 - 25,000 years.
And also, like the poster above said, this is evidence of *planning*. I was going into the article thinking "hmmm, extremely cool but probably thigh-spun two ply which is a single stage process...?" but no! This is three ply cord! I guess it might be possible to do thigh-spun three ply (be bloody tricky though which would be evidence of skill in itself), but more likely this was a highly skilled multi-stage process.
Holy shit.
If your suit watch is correct, you should have ran out of air… three weeks ago? The stars drift past and you’re forgetting how you got out here, but your practiced cognitive self-tests tell you that you’re sane. Reality seems to be dissolving the further you drift into space. And now.. music?
(After the bittersweet tragedy of the Last Contact, I really had to write a First Contact to cheer myself up.)
She drifted. Cognitive dissonance had set in some time ago, she was aware of that. It passed the time.
However, she was still capable of lucidity. In one of her lucid spells, she ran through the exercises that she had been taught during training. (She wasn’t sure how long ago training had been, but she remembered it had happened) So far as she was able to tell, she was sane.
The suit was in low power mode now. It had shifted into low power mode after the air ran out. Which had been, according to the timer that was still running, three weeks ago. (It had been one week last time she looked. Odd.) The timer was attached to the tiny distress beacon which existed to identify the suit’s location for searchers, as well as telling them whether or not the drifting suit still held a live person, how long the person had been dead, and the last known location.
She should have died when the air ran out. If the suit had thought she was out of air before she really was, she should have frozen to death within a few minutes of entering low power mode.
Instead, she was still drifting, in empty space. She couldn’t even see her own ship, let alone any searchers. Not even debris. She had rotated on every axis multiple times, looking all around herself. Nothing. Only the stars, drifting past.
Which…. wasn’t right. None of this was right. None of this was possible.
And yet here she was, drifting.
She had mastered lucid dreaming years ago - most astronauts did, as a way of alleviating the boredom and sameness of space-travel. She closed her eyes, relaxing into that mindset. If this was a long, strange dream - and it could be - she could at least make it more interesting.
But she couldn’t so much as conjure a distant ship, or some soft music. This was not, then, a dream.
It was not reality.
It was not a dream.
What other options were there?
She closed her eyes, then opened them again. For the first time since she found herself adrift - and she did not, now, remember how that had happened - she spoke aloud.
“Is this a test?”
Keep reading
Science fiction is full of first contact stories, but is there a such thing as LAST contact? Decide exactly what that means, and write about it.
It was too late, when the humans came. They were a young species, still exploring outwards, vital and thriving.
We… were not.
War had ravaged us, and sickness, and war once again, until our population dwindled beyond the point of recovery. We struggled against that, of course… we used genetic manipulation, and cloning, and even more desperate measures. None succeeded. When the humans came, we were sinking into apathy, only a few tens of us left. We had begun to discuss whether we should commit a mass suicide, or simply wait to fade away.
And then the young species came, in their clumsy ships, and they asked us why we were so few.
“We are becoming extinct,” we told them. “We have passed the point of recovery.”
It is custom to avoid the races that are dying – once a species reaches the point of inevitable extinction, even war is suspended, and the fiercest enemy pulls back. The custom was born of plagues and poisons that could be carried forth from a dying world to afflict a healthy one, but it has the implacable weight of tradition now. After we are gone, after they have waited for the prescribed period of quarantine, there will be a fight for our world. Habitable worlds are few, and this is a good one, with plenty of free groundwater and thriving vegetation. It is a bitter thing to be grateful for the custom that allows us to die in peace, but we are grateful.
But the humans don’t know that custom, and they do not leave. They seem distraught, when we tell them we are dying, and try to offer their aid - but their technology is behind ours, and it is too late. When they realize that they can’t save us, though, they do something that bewilders us.
Keep reading
highkey when will someone write the lesbian emma adaptation we deserve ,,, just make knightley a woman and make emmas arc abt overcoming her comphet need to end up with a man its that easy
Emma:
thinks she’s smarter than everyone else (recall that Dykes to Look Out For panel like “I used to think I was just smarter than other girls but then I realised I was gay”)
says that she will never marry because she doesn’t need the ££ and she has her father and will have nieces and nephews so she can’t be tempted to leave the enviable position of respectable celibacy
EXCEPT FOR the crush that she’s assigned herself on a man she has NEVER MET.
all of this:
“Emma knew [Miss Smith] very well by sight, and had long felt an interest in [her], on account of her beauty. […] She was a very pretty girl, and her beauty happened to be of a sort which Emma particularly admired.”
“She was so busy in admiring those soft blue eyes…that the evening flew away at a very unusual rate.”
from Mr Knightley: “I cannot rate her beauty as you [Emma] do,” / “Emma, your infatuation about that girl blinds you.”
“at present she could not doubt his having a decidedly warm admiration, a conscious preference of herself; and this persuasion, joined to all the rest, made her think that she must be a little in love with him, in spite of every previous determination against it.
‘I certainly must,’ said she. ‘This sensation of listlessness, weariness, stupidity, this disinclination to sit down and employ myself, this feeling of every thing’s being dull and insipid about the house!— I must be in love; I should be the oddest creature in the world if I were not—for a few weeks at least.’”
after having met the assigned-crush man & deciding (tho’ it’s not clear exactly how this decision happens) that actually she won’t marry him either and wondering how to discourage him, he leaves and she tries to talk herself into being in love with him (primarily BECAUSE she thinks he likes her) and even sets a timeframe. hello?? ‘I should be the oddest creature in the world if I were not’ no Emma it’s called lesbianism!
to be fair the “falling in with someone because you’re grateful that they love you” thing is explicitly attested in Austen, but if anything that only makes it more notable that on this occasion this demonstrably-possible recipe for someone falling in love doesn’t work
exhibit whatever-we’re-on is: “I must see somebody very superior to any one I have seen yet, to be tempted” to marry, aka to be romantically / sexually tempted by someone. does “I’m not a lesbian, I just have VERY high standards for men” ring a bell……..?
Oh!!!!!!!!!
the thing about queer history is if you’re looking for yourself in the past as you see yourself now it’s not gonna work, or it will work but um badly and often sloppily
my FAVORITE thing about queer history is looking to the past and seeing it doesn’t have to be like it is in my current moment. “the closet”? Historical construction that appears in the 50s. a divide between gay and lesbian identity and trans identity (ie “trans” is a distinct category from “gay”)? so fucking recent there are ALMOST DEFINITELY communities where that hasn’t happened, and there are 1000% people living who struggle with that divide because it is actually *new* to them
we *have* to be flexible–to be QUEER–with our genealogies because queer genealogy doesn’t WORK the same way genealogies do for other marginalized identities. most of us (not all of us!) don’t have queer parents who taught us how to be queer. we don’t have literal queer ancestors; and honestly even if we do, we might not recognize them on their own terms.
is that unsatisfying? yeah it can be, if what you want is proof you had a past in this specific way. but you are a product of your present moment. things are possible now that weren’t, and things were possible then that are not now. looking to the past at its best for me is recognizing that there are different ways of being, which means we can imagine different ways for the future. they may not be modeled directly on the past, but IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE LIKE IT IS NOW, AND HAS NOT ALWAYS BEEN.
Extremely City white people are so fucking weird they see a pic of a deer and theyre like “its an Old God, tell me the wisdom of the trees Forest Lord … wow this is just like game of thrones” its a deer. Its a fucking stupid idiot animal it doesnt know shit
Yes deer are dumb panicky dinguses in real life, but sometimes a picture will capture one looking all majestic and we just… want to believe…
Case in point: this dude
Yes he got like that by being so hormonally addled that he tried to fight a tree. But try to tell me a forest god wouldn’t have big leafy antlers just like that if he were to take a physical form.
who says the old gods aren’t stupid animals who are so hormonally addled they’d try to fight a tree
@librariansheart for your enjoyment
Look, I’ve lived a good chunk of my childhood in a halfway abandoned mountain village in the middle of nowhere. Which meant wildlife galore whether you liked it or not.
And that meant sometimes we saw a deer in the middle of the road at midnight and the majestic motherfucker just stared us down until my mom shredded our tires to stop from hitting him. Once we stopped he did a little half-bow as if saying ‘You have not committed an act of godslayer this night. Your bloodline shall bear no curse of mine’, and walked away chill as you please.
The next day a neighbor told us a deer with fucking big antlers got tangled in his fence because it was trying to steal his grapes.
I went on a hike with another neighbor to collect yarrow for tea. A bear came out of the woods towards us, went on its hind legs and inquiringly roared. And he pushed me, tiny as I was back then, behind me out of sight and spread his jacket wide to make himself seem bigger than he already was. He let out a sound I had not known humans were capable of making. He and the bear looked at each other for a moment, and came to an understanding. The bear went down and walked away, respecting a powerful opponent protecting its young.
A week ago, there had been a bear that completely tore apart our trashcan and gorged itself on half-fermented apples we threw away. My cousin had to chase it away, drunk out of its tiny fucking mind, with an umbrella that made weird noises when opened. The bear ran for its life, crashed into our wall, fell on its ass, and scampered away.
I was playing on a swing once, all alone, and a fox came up to me, the most beautiful animal I had seen in my ten years of life. Thinking it wanted to pass, I stopped swinging and sat still not to spook it. But instead of passing, the fox circled the swing, found it wanting, and came to sit before me perfectly poised and looked me in the eye, and I could swear it wished to tell me something but I could not understand the language spoken before human time.
Then my mom came out of the nearby inn, shrieked at the fox and swung her purse to chase it away. The fox jumped, ran off and fell into a ditch, all notions of grace gone with the wind.
What I’m saying is: the old gods are absolutely idiot animals who embraced the life of constant sex and hedonism in return for losing their higher power. Whether or not they regret it, we’ll never know.
@thegreenchapel
Well the Old Gods are old. In the same way your grandparents are old. They’re a font of experience and wisdom, they’ve survived wars, famine, poverty–but they’re thwarted by a smartphone. The Great Stag understands “car” in the same way he understands “challenger.” He understands “fence” in the same way he understands “brambles” or “underbrush.” He can handle plant fiber in his way but metal might be a bit beyond him. The Old Gods understand their ways. The Great Stag can can give you the wisdom of being a stag, but humans aren’t stags, so not all of his wisdom applies to our experience. If you promise not to hunt in his forest for a year and a day, he’ll show the trails his herd uses so that you can get out of the woods faster. Maybe you’ll keep that memory, maybe you won’t. If you do remember, you are responsible for being a stewart.
Some believe the Old Gods are living gods. There’s no one single Mother Bear. It’s a title that gets passed on. The beings are inhabited by divine force much older and deeper than any human can imagine. Picture a pebble being thrown into a pond. Each new incarnation is like a new ripple expanding outward. If the Old Gods are living beings then they are limited and falliable. They make mistakes and are prone to embarrassment. Like we all are. Instead of merely venerating them, sympathize with them.
Behold, the rare sight of an Old God interacting with something new:
that is some next level knot magic.
it isn’t though!!! it’s because most relationships aren’t worth the effort. The “sweater curse” is actually most commonly called the “BOYFRIEND sweater curse.” Which=heteronormative, but the curse most often falls on a woman knitting a sweater for a boyfriend. Before she finishes the sweater, they break up - pop culture would have you believe it’s because the boyfriend freaks out do to the weirdness/clinginess of having a sweater made for you, but I think knitters are wiser than that.
It’s because after spending serious £££ on materials, and then HUNDREDS OF HOURS OF LABOR on the creation of the item, with every stitch a prayer of totally focused intent, creating a large display of technical skill - it is then gifted to a non-knitter who does NOT APPRECIATE the work/effort/skill/cost/TIME it took to make it, and in fact thinks you’re a bit weird and making a big deal out of a piece of clothing, and after they go “oh thanks” and shove your creation in the cupboard next to a sweater they got for £15 at an M&S sale, then they never wear your sweater because it’s too tight because when you asked them how their favorite sweaters usually fit they said “I ‘unno” and when you measured them for the fifth time and asked, rather tersely, if they had enough room in the chest, they said “I guess,” and then if pressed they say they don’t really like the sweater design, but then you point out that they were supposed to participate in helping you design it and they say they don’t really care about how things look, and when you say that you tried to match it to their other clothes so how can they hate it, then they say that honestly their mother still buys all their clothes because they hate going shopping, and that they hate all their other clothes too, well. That’s when a sensible knitter goes “Fuck this shit. And you know what? Fuck this man.”
This is what happens when someone posts in a knitting forum “Attack of the sweater curse!” - this is the usual story. It has a rigid plot. It is as old as myth.
That’s when you look at the time you spent and realize, “I could LITERALLY have written the first draft of a novel instead of doing this.” That’s when you go “I could have taken that £200 and bought myself a new wardrobe.” That’s when you go “I could have taken all that intent, all that willpower, all that creative force, and laid down some fucking witchcraft, all right?” That’s when you go “I basically spent 100 hours straight thinking about this bastard while making something amazing for him, and I have no evidence that he ever spent 10 hours of his life thinking about me.”
And “I could spend this time and energy and money in making myself an enormous, intricate heirloom silk shawl with just a touch of cashmere, in elvish twists and leafy lace in all the colors of the night, shot through with subtly glittering stars, warm in winter and cool and summer and light as a lover’s kiss on the shoulders, suitable for draping over my arms at weddings or wrapping myself in to watch the sea, a lace-knotted promise to myself that I will keep for my entire life and gift to my favorite granddaughter when I die, and she will wear it to keep alive my memory - but instead I have this sweater, and this fuckboy.”
The sweater curse is a lesson that the universe gives to a knitter at an important point in their life. It is a gift.
Knitting a sweater for a husband or wife generally doesn’t call down the curse, because the relationship is meant to be stronger than 4-ply.
(Although I say this, but I’ve taken over 5 years to finish a pair of mittens for my husband, because he casually asked me to do something customized with the cables, and I still can’t get the math to work on the right hand.)
this post is so much better with that commentary
Fuck yes.
Hey @elodieunderglass! How’re the mittens coming along?
It is 2020, we recently marked 9 years of marriage and no progress has been made
This is all 100% accurate, and also now I want to make that shawl.
i wonder what evolutionary niche clowns evolved to fill
Apex predator.
No im pretty sure they started as a prey animal, that’s why their pupils are rectangles
Short answer: They are physiological designed to be the perfect children’s entertainer.
Long Answer: They didn’t really evolve at all. They were selectively bred alongside mimes, which share a common ancestor, the Jester. Jesters are, of course, the domesticated descendant of Bards, from which the entire Entertainer genus evolved.
Clowns were bred to be appealing to small children who would (theoretically) be more interested in the clown’s bright colors, silly antics, and slapstick comedy.
Mimes were bred to be more appealing to older audiences, for whom color and simplicity are as likely to be disinteresting as fascinating.
This is a dangerous oversimplification. Party clowns were bred to entertain children, and many modern circus clowns are crossbreeds with high party clown content (the party clown’s bright coloration being a desirable trait) but the party clown’s gentle nature and poor reflexes makes purebreeds a poor fit for the circus. The ones you see in the circus are generally crossed with mimes or acrobats.
Generalizing clowns as children’s entertainment leads to tragedy when people think they can trust any clown with small children when many breeds are temperamentally unsuited for that kind of thing - rodeo clowns are notoriously high-strung, funhouse clowns can be mean-spirited, and while the evil clown’s name is something of a misnomer you should still never leave a child alone with one.
To that note. The ancestry doesn’t stop at bards. It goes back to poets! See a particular breed of poet back in the Gaels time were actually quite formidable. They were ruthless and unstoppable to the point of dethroning kings with their sick burns alone. In attempt to harness their power and strength they were cross bred with european writers who were already fully domesticated under the heel of the ruling church. This produced the well known bard with their shanty and songs while still maintaining a bit of their ruthless bite they were prised for. While never quite as effective as the Gaelic poet they maintained their popularity.
The poets however began to fall out of favor and were mostly wiped out. But threads of their heraldry can still be seen today with americanized poet cross breeds. While not retaining their classic power of the Gaelic poets they still maintained their respectable cunning and might of word we can still see today in clubs and spoken word events.
actually entertainer species of one kind or another have been present throughout pretty much all of recorded history. even paleolithic art documents the evolution of homo coulros alongside early humans
history didn’t begin with europe. humans and clowns have coexisted since the beginning
fun fact: while prevailing scientific attitudes tend to assume that clowns were predominantly a scavenger species, there is some evidence that early clowns & humans hunted together
This entire thread is a fever dream am I dead??
surely death would be more peaceful
Unironically, as a trained clown (no, really) I find this really funny because you are literally describing how these types of clowns historically came about IRL and doing so with surprising accuracy. I learned this in actual clown school y'all. Your shitposting is accidentally (?) real, factual Clowning History and I can’t get over that.
They’re still evolving
Why is this like the third clown breeding and maintenance post I’ve seen?
Because some fucking people still insist on keeping dangerous fucking animals as pets instead of letting them be in their natural environments.
We’ve decimated their habitats and killed off their natural predators, what else are we supposed to do?
