[Transcript: I reject the oft-spouted idea from anti-trans voices that transmasculine bodies are mutilated. I dreamt of this body, and I celebrate it, even if it hasn’t turned out exactly to my specifications. Trans bodies are often portrayed as sites of horror, trauma and dysphoria, or as examples of medical and scientific overreach. I prefer to think of trans bodies as sources of love and desire. We have partners, we date, we are intimate. I still feel gender euphoria when I place my palm flat in the centre of my chest, or when I catch the angle of my jaw in the mirror. There remains a femininity to my physicality that I wouldn’t trade, and I have been called both slinky and sprite-like by other men. This body feels ethereal. I had to pass through another realm to get it.]
[ID: black text on a white background “But we can’t know if the caves were themselves particularly sacred spaces. It’s possible that Paleolitic rock art was concentrated entirely in caves, but it might also be true that caves, sheltered from the outside world, are simply where this images survived. It could be that the people of the Pleistocene, made their entire world into a gallery, that animals charged across every rockface, that whenever the tremendous herds of Ice Age beasts roamed, they were surrounded on all sides by echoes and images of themselves, in a world where image and object had not yet torn themselves apart.” End ID.]
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
[text id : “To be loved means to be consumed. To love means to radiate with inexhaustible light. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge]
For when people say they’re sick of seeing gay stuff everywhere. Suck it up. 4 years. 4 years. And that’s just on the books, it’s legal. It doesn’t stop shitty attitudes, actions, or straight up violence.
This is just the timeline for homosexuality. As of today (July 2019) you can still be fired for being transgender in 26 of the 50 states. You can be evicted for being transgender in 31 of the 50 states. The Stonewall Uprising was started to protect a transwoman being arrested, and more than 140 transwomen have been murdered since 2013.
Two men or two women being able to get married is not the only basis for LGBT+ rights.
“Never mind. I invented you. I invented you, as far as my purposes go. I invented loving you and I invented your death. I have my tricks and my trap doors, too.”
— Alice Munro, from Collected Stories; “Tell me Yes or No,”
(via violentwavesofemotion)
This is a fascinating article on the Industrial Revolution (by the same guy who does the articles on LOTR battles and their strategy/tactics/logistics):
This week we are taking a look at the latest winner of the ACOUP Senate poll, which posed the question “Why didn’t the Roman Empire have an
I’ve wondered why it happened when and where it did (1700s Britain) and not any previous time (thinking not just of Rome, but other prosperous areas of the world at various earlier times - the Mideast, India, China). There’s no shortage of ideologically-driven claims (various forms of ‘Europe was just better’ on the one side, ‘because imperialism’ on the other), but this article digs into the extremely specific local conditions that produced the exact chain of technological development that led to the Industrial Revolution.
Based on what I’m getting from the article, these conditions were:
Extremely high demand for coal for heating and cooking (requires: shortage of wood; readily available near-surface coal so people are familiar with it as a heating product; also more coal deeper down that, due to the high demand, people will want to mine as surface coal runs out)
The need to pump water out of these coal mines, and the coal (despite high demand) being cheap enough that even an inefficient coal-powered pump is cheaper than having humans do the pumping
As continously more efficient pumps are developed for that purpose, some other need for large amounts of rotational motion that the pump can provide. This came from Britain’s large textile industry (both domestic wool and imported cotton; the latter is where imperialism does very much come into it) and some concurrent advances in textile production.
So from the article, the Industrial Revolution was almost, well, a fluke: the consequence of very specific circumstances producing demand for a machine that did a very specific thing - which then allowed for continous improvements in that machine and new applications for it. There are prerequisites (you need a place that has a level of technological development capable of producing the original machine), but without that very specific demand, no amount of wealth, commercial activity, or inventiveness is going to lead to that specific innovation.
On a larger scale, it also ties in with some of the things I found most interesting in The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 (by Christopher Ehret; easily the best Africa history text I’ve found) describing how major changes - agriculture, cities, etc - were frequently in response to specific new challenges (for example: the climate’s changed and the plants we’re used to gathering aren’t growing as well any more, what if we tried cultivating them ourselves?; desertification of the Sahara causing migrations that produced huge concentrations of people in the Nile Valley, leading to the development of Ancient Egypt). Major changes come is response to lacking something, they don’t just show up once a society’s reached a certain level of prosperity.
People go on about good healthy queer rep but I cannot express how much I want unhealthily devoted queer rep. Raise your lover from the dead no matter the cost. Kill to get them to safety. Trade your soul for theirs. Die to reunite with them. I want gothic hyper-devotion codependent lovers
okay ive been thinking about american psycho all day . i think the business cards in american psycho are so important to the characters because they’re literally a representation of the self, in the most blatant and bold way possible. Literally, a name, a position, and an address: everything the doppelganger yuppie elite class explored in the novel and the movie strives to have. Both the book and the movie present them with such a comical and absurd tone — because really, how different are they — but to the characters, it is of the utmost importance that their business card is the best, because the men in this story have no way to relate to each other besides competition, posturing, and status. Bateman becomes so enraged when Luis changes his business card — adding gold lettering, not black — because Luis, the outlier of the group, attempts to change the mold.
Luis is not a “good” moral paragon of a character in either the book or the movie, engaging in the same yuppie culture as the rest of the characters, but the one thing that Luis has that the others don’t is a deviance in personality. Luis is either bisexual or gay with a fiancee (later wife) to posture as heterosexual in public, but even with his facade of heterosexuality, it is obvious to everyone in his social circle that he is attracted to men. His individuality sets him apart from everyone else in the circle — while it is possible that he may not be the only queer person in the group, he is the only visibly queer one, which sets him apart from the group. Bateman is so enraged by this individuality (which is further compounded by his homophobia and his disgust over Luis’s obvious crush on him) that he is driven to attempt to murder Luis right after the business card reveal. It wasn’t the business card, it was the deviance from the norm: instead of black lettering, Luis chose gold. Luis chose to be different, something that Bateman both detests and longs for, something that Bateman feels he cannot have, something he feels must be punished. And, when Luis reacts with passion, Bateman is left completely confused, emasculated, and helpless.
The business cards in American psycho are an absurd display of surface-level identity in 1980s American yuppie culture, and the way the book and the movie both weave them into the story is just so completely genius and fascinating to me.
o’ captain! my captain! @studyuwus - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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