having a normal one!

emily. 27. ace. she/her. consistently losing my mind about various interests. hockey sideblog: @em-ptynet

[stardustsea]

[intrigd-voyagr]

one curiousity search on ebay to see if people are still going nuts over beanie babies has led to getting a strong contender for the funniest email ever

[petulantworm]

When your doctor prescribes you the generic

[catgirlforeskin]

trying to make a creative project without men and uproot any masculine words will drive one insane. There's the obvious stuff, right, swordsman becomes swordsmaid, count becomes countess, gladiator to gladiatrix and so on.

But did you know that "-er" is a masculine suffix, for which "-ster" as in "sister" is the feminine equivalent? Baker means a man that bakes, the historical feminine equivalent is a bakster, a webster is a female weaver. Some words already have the feminine as default, youngster, teamster, mobster, but most? Trying to be a principled feminist has you saying shit like goonster

[gwenadier]

Wait for real? Fascinating.

[catgirlforeskin]

for real! Lots of other examples too, anything "patr" comes from father, "patriarch" is the obvious one, but patriot, patron, patronym all would need "matr" for mother is instead. Pope and Papacy derive from "Papa" and would be Mome/Mamacy if you want yuri catholicism (hellworld!!) it's EVERYWHERE

[catgirlforeskin]

My favorite example, beyond the obvious ones like lord/lady, waiter/waitress, steward/stewardess, is housekeeper, which is now the more acceptable term for a maid, when maid, of course, just means "woman" and keeper is masculine, would be keepster or keepess but (to my knowledge) neither were used historically because, well, keeping wasn't something women got to do!

Likewise, waitress has fallen out of favor for host or server, which are also both gendered terms. (hostess or serving girl, respectively. Servant is also gendered, maidservant and servantess were used)

There's been a concerted push with a lot of these to phase out the feminine variants of these words and just treat the masculine variants as neutral, or find neutral alternatives like fireman -> firefighter (even though fighter is also gendered) because the feminine variants are seen as inherently lesser, which, yeah that's how women are seen.

There is a line you have to draw somewhere of "okay let's just treat this and below as gender neutral because, frankly, most words that just mean "person" mean "man" historically because women weren't (and still largely aren't) considered people, and otherwise we're going to shred the whole English language" and I get that.

BUT. I think a lot of folks draw that line at the start and insist that man/guy/dude/bro can be gender-neutral which is obvious stupid. And I think it's always worth having this investigation and questioning how we speak, it shapes how we think about worlds and people real and fictional.

Okay one last silly aside about barista, which is supposed to be gender-neutral from Italian but men got weird about it and then invented baristo so now -ista is kinda feminine? Typically it's just borrowed into English to sound Foreign (Sandinistas leading to the exonym Corbynistas)

[catgirlforeskin]

Bucket, Captain Lieutenant are gendered masculine btw, it'd be buckette captaine and lieutenante. It's not just an issue of suffixes being "ignored"(masculinized) when borrowed from french because we write Debutante with the e. Multiple times a month I stumble into new examples, the battle never ends

[gooned-out-tgirl]

hey i'd just like you to know ever since i saw this post it's been the only thing i think about when at work. Because of it i've tried imagining a version of english that is more feminine or even 100% fem. 1. it's been such a wild ride just going "my god how we speak is weird." 2. I has been a pure joy coming up with an idea for a world for a bee species and a lesbian lizard species to speak in this language.

[catgirlforeskin]

we are now sisters in arms in an eternal war 🤝

[minovskyy]

becoming homophobic because when two characters in a scene have the same pronouns you have to say their names one william times

[minovskyy]

finally some good advice on this post

[evilwizard]

getting my little goblin minions to punch and stab me in the middle of the grocery store to try and whittle me down to half health so i can assume my final boss form and reach the top shelf

[wifegideonnav]

“bits to use in everyday conversations”

[larkandkatydid]

One thing I’ve become a real extremist about is little girl’s clothing and hair styles because if your kid can’t get her hair wet, hang upside down, climb over a fence or run full out in the outfit/hair she is currently wearing then why not? And the answer better be both extremely fucking good and describe something temporary.

[poodletrain]

Hope you don't mind a story that also made me extremist about this issue.

Took my friends daughter (2.5yrs) to the park. Dressed her in practical clothing that's ok to get stained, brought an extra change of clothing. She sat in the mud at the water bank and played with rocks and mud. A little girl came over, couldn't be more than 3yrs. She was looking longingly at my friend's daughter. She has her hair in a perfect style and she's wearing a pretty dress with white socks and dressy shoes. The parents say "Sweetie don't go into the mud, you'll get your dress dirty" and pull her away, while giving me a judgmental look as they see the kid in my charge covered in mud and throwing rocks into the water. It felt really weird, like we saw eachother as aliens with completely different ideas on how to raise children. When my friends daughter was done playing, changed her into clean clothing and went back home. She had a lot of fun at the park and a day full of nature and play. The other little girl kept her dress clean.

[maybeasunflower]

There's a Tumblr post about someone finding out that "girls" toddler clothes are more restrictive than "boys" toddler clothes to the point that it made it harder for them to crawl, at a stage where they were learning to crawl.

[impulsivelycontentious]

I made one about how my toddler child couldn't climb in girl's TODDLER PANTS.

We are not a house who cares much about gendering a baby's clothes. It's a BABY. It doesn't care. So we'd take the kid to yard sales and let them pick out whatever baby clothes caught their fancy and would fit. Some were 'boy' and some were 'girl'. Kiddo loved floral prints because they're a baby (yeah my kid has always picked their own clothes).

Anyway, my kid LOVED TO CLIMB. Sometimes.

It was weird. Sometimes they were all over the sofa and the playground equipment and MY LEGS and sometimes they just. Weren't. Couldn't figure out what was going on.

Until I caught them trying to climb on rhe sofa in one of their pretty flowered pants.

They COULDN'T LIFT THEIR LEGS PROPERLY. And gave up, and did something else.

So I tested this out and... Yeah. The kid COULDN'T climb in ANY of their girl pants. Any. Put them in boy clothes and suddenly the kid is on everything again.

We stopped buying girl pants completely until they were old enough to test them and my kid is a TEENAGER now and i still make them lift their legs individually and jump if it's a girl fit.

YOU DON'T EVEN HAVE TO MEAN TO DO IT.

Whoever designed these clothes literally did not care if the baby could MOVE. But only if girl.

[lliveonthesunn]

i get why people don't believe in marriage as a social construct but legally it is the best and easiest way to say "this is who i trust to take care of me when i can't take care of myself" and i'm so glad gay people fought for that right bc when shit gets scary at least i know im in good hands

[thatdisasterauthor]

I don’t think we talk enough about how, despite the presence of multiple globes, PotC takes place on a flat earth, ice wall included.

[patrickdiomedes]

I'm gonna need some elaboration here

[thatdisasterauthor]

They literally sail over the edge of it after passing through a hole in a wall of ice. They fall off. They get back to the other side by passing through the whole ocean.

But also there’s a globe on, like, everyone’s desk.

[andthentheywilleatthestars]

#it's like lord of the rings#it's only flat for pirates

[thatdisasterauthor]

You get it.

[finalvortex]

No, but this is actually (sort of) canon.

See, part of the conceit of the PotC trilogy is that all myths are true. Nearly every supernatural element in the franchise has a root in some real world mythology or pirate lore, although some of them are mashed together.

Another thing is that they take place at the end of the Golden Age of Piracy, and the more the map gets filled in, and the more the Royal Navy takes power, there less room there is for the mystical and supernatural in the world. This is explicitly called out in At World's End with the death of the kraken:

Barbossa: The world used to be a bigger place. Jack: The world's still the same. There's just... less in it.

The only way to access the world of the supernatural is through the supernatural itself. You can only get to the Isla de Muerta with Jack's compass that points to whatever you desire, or if you already know where its is. You need Tia Dalma's map to find the edge of the world. To access the supernatural, you need to already be immersed in it.

The pirates world isn't flat, it's round - but because the edge of the world exists in myth, it therefore exists in reality. The pirates are able to find it through supernatural means, but if, say, someone like Norrington just sailed in the same general direction, he wouldn't end up in the same place.

[nitewrighter]

“Pirate” is a mage subclass fueled by word of mouth, rule of cool, The Power of Belief/Love/Friendship, and rum.

[dailyadventureprompts]

If you look at it in a particular way, the Pirates specifically function by FAIRY RULES: obscure codes of law and formality that they are irrevocably bound to abide by...except when you get the wording wrong.

When we go to Tortuga (or any pirate controlled space) we leave behind the sensibilities of the real world and enter this bizarre perpetual revel of debauchery and violence that could never sustain itself in a world bound by sense.

That makes Jack our Puck character, a trickster of tricksters who can invert your fortunes just by letting him talk to you.

It also makes Will into a changeling, born of the fairyworld, adopted by mortals, and fated to return to it in what makes for a doomed love story. Hell, one might say that the reason Will's swords are SO GOOD is because they contain an element of myth about them: they're the IDEA of swords, true to how they would be in myth.

[chirpingfromthebox]

[boitterfly]

[sua-sponte-deactivated20200331]

I’m watching that documentary “Before Stonewall” about gay history pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting.

The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.

So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”

1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.

Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.

Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman. Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! He wrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.

It appears that no one has made the connection between Dale Olson the publicity agent instrumental in the AIDS debate and Dale Olson the 22-year-old first openly gay man on TV. So I thought I’d make it. For Pride month, an unsung gay hero.

[is-the-post-reliable]

RATING: RELIABLE

you can listen to the clip of the 1954 interview here and find him on wikipedia here

[konoko]

[thundergrace]

WOW I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS MY FAVORITE TELEVISION SERIES OF ALL TIME (it's not out yet)

[byjove]

I think it would be so funny if there was a show about King Arthur and the knight of the Round Table where a different knight(s) joins the Round Table every episode and it gets to the point where the cast is like 500 people and absolutely no one is acknowledging that there are like 400 people in this court. Like a gratuitous amount of knights. The plot randomly pivots to knight or knights of the week and then back but it’s not an anthology exactly. Some of them die the same day they join, some randomly disappear from the story and others are technically there for the rest of the series but doing fuckall. Occasionally Arthur will be like “Where has Sir Whatever gone?” and everyone will shrug. Very important quest surrounding the major knights you’re expecting and a minor knight no one has seen for 5 seasons randomly joins in. You need a knightly spreadsheet to join in.

[byjove]

This is all handled very dryly by all the other characters, except for Arthur who occasionally breaks the 3rd wall, addresses the camera and says something like “This is all very confusing.” when the plot hits maximum ridiculousness.

[byjove]

There are several knights who do not speak Welsh and this is depicted by them speaking various dialects of old French and Gaulish and Brittonic splinter languages with a bar at the bottom that just says ‘I do not know what he is saying.’

Sometimes Arthur will be like “Where has Sir Whatever gone?” and someone is like “He has become a saint.” or “I believe he has become king of Dumnonia.” and there’s a random quick montage of this random knight getting up from the Round Table, riding out of Camelot and having religious visions or conquering an entire kingdom or drunkenly wandering all the way to Constantinople for no particular reason with the implication that this was all occurring while the other knights were debating a riddle or something asinine.

[byjove]

I think it would be so funny if the first shot of the series was Arthur sitting alone at a comedically large actually round table. Court utterly empty except for him and Sir Kay and like 2 guys from his father’s reign. And in the closing scene of the series he’s sitting in the same spot but there are hundreds of knights crammed into the room around him, sitting on each other’s laps, on the table, pressed flat against the walls to fit. They outgrew and surpassed this ridiculously large table several seasons ago and have been lowkey sitting on top of each other without addressing it.

[krakenartificer]

Everywhere in between the opening shot and the closing shot, the overhead shots show a normal number of people sitting at a normal sized table (say, 8 people around a round conference table), but when you pan around the table, you pan past 25 knights before you come back to Arthur.

Also, fundamental worldbuilding concepts vary from episode to episode and it's never addressed. Arthur got his sword from a rock and from the Lady of the Lake. Merlin ages both backwards and forwards. No one sees anything unusual about this.

[krakenartificer]

#this is actually how arthurian lit works tho#like please someone make this it would probably be the best adaptation of we have

Right? Like I cannot emphasize enough how much you would NOT have to make anything up or change anything from "canon" to make this happen.

You just go through Arthurian legend (I'm thinking chronologically by publication date, but I'm open to arguments for other methods) and transform prose/poetry into script and film it. That's all there is to it.

Oh, and every time there's another version of a story, you just tell that story again with the slightly different details. Pellinore's gonna be discovering a dragon on his property at least twice a season. Guinivere and Lancelot start a brand new love affair every other week.

[beardedmrbean]

I love the midwest so much

[woodwool]

severely deficient in whatever vitamin makes u a person