ThatAndyDavisFellow

59 years (old?), UK, Journeyman Fool & Persistent Bright-Sider

[thatandydavisfellow]

If you’ve come for Brideshead content, check out my sideblog at https://www.tumblr.com/bridesheadrewatched

Brideshead Rewatched

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[regicidal-defenestration]

This Be The Verse - Philip Larkin

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

"Babe are you okay?

You reblogged You Broken Brain Daddy Issues As Personfied By Seven And Ace again"

My Girlfriend, worrying about me, probably

[avelera]

I’m a big fan of reenactment archaeology. I think there’s a lot to be said for recreating a scenario to better understand decisions made in generations past. Usually there’s an inherent logic to them.

Which is to say, that now that I have a baby of my own, I understand so much better the common cultural practice in which unmarried women wear their hair loose and uncovered, while married women have their hair covered and/or bound back.

I doubt it was just for modesty, oh no. No, my friends, I see now that the reason for this common practice of mothers binding back their hair is because there is nothing, I mean nothing, a baby love more than YANKING EVERY STRAND OF HAIR THAT COMES WITHIN GRABBING DISTANCE OF THEIR STICKY, SWEATY, AND IMPOSSIBLY STRONG LITTLE HANDS.

[bethanydelleman]

It is necessary for my postpartum depression study for the moms to have their hair down (due to our science hats) and the second they put their hair down YANK

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[midnightssea]

it’s amazing how women are able to navigate crowded rooms without ever touching a palm to a man’s lower back

[prokopetz]

If you want to write in the classic high fantasy mould, you don't have to be hung up on food specifically, but there must be some very mundane thing you're prepared to cultivate a sincere interest in and describe in excruciating detail every single time it comes up. Clothing. Furniture. Architecture. It doesn't work without it.

[prokopetz]

(The trick is, it needs to be something you can touch or hold. If you're infodumping about trade routes, you've crossed the line into the venerable "worldbuilding bible with a fantasy story stapled to the side of it" genre, which often overlaps with classic high fantasy but is not identical with it!)

[dragon-in-a-fez]

the real problem with the acceleration of technological change is that society no longer has time to get normal about things. we used to be able to do that! "TV rots your brain" had mostly died down by the time "video games make you kill people" came along. "video games make you kill people" was fading by the time "social media is full of depression and perverts" started. but the social media thing had barely started when we got smartphones and both of those were still going when we got AI. so now we have a generation of adults who are not one but three Scary Technologies away from their children.

[pjotwitter]

[queenlua]

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one that added 35k extra words to the projected length of this fucking story ahgeilahgleiag

[kactusnz]

@derinthescarletpescatarian

[luna-azzurra]

The thing about a good character flaw is that it has to be the same thing as their greatest strength just turned up too high. the person who loves deeply and therefore controls. the person who sees everything and therefore trusts nothing. the person who is so loyal they lose themselves. there are no clean villains and no clean heroes and once you understand that in fiction you can't unsee it in people. everyone is just their best quality at the wrong volume.

[iteration-dave]

[dorothygale]

pop health science is so annoying bc it'll be like "did you know? eating strawberries will give you mega cancer" and you're like pfft whatever begone influencer. but sometimes then you'll see a reasonably credible article like "Study Shows Possible Link Between Strawberries and Mega Cancer" and you're not usually the type to follow that kind of thing religiously but idk maybe you should consider not eating strawberries? but then there's another article saying "Strawberry/Mega Cancer Study Debunked" and it turns out the original study had a sample size of 3 and was funded by Big Blueberry, and strawberries may have a small connection to mega cancer but only if you are genetically predisposed to mega cancer and eat 50 strawberries every day. so you return to your strawberry eating life. but whenever you eat strawberries in public someone tells you about the mega cancer.

[quasi-normalcy]

Nobody uses telepathy as a plot device anymore. It was so ubiquitous in 20th century science fiction and now just no one does it.

[frothlad]

The answer is that John W. Campbell, Jr., was a lodestar for everyone who sold science fiction for three decades in the middle of the 20C. If you sold SF at any point during his tenure as editor of the one of the primary SF magazines, you knew what he liked to buy. And SF writers like to write things that sell.

And Campbell was a nut for "psi". You put telepathy and other psi powers in your stories, you could sell to Campbell.

That's how we got telepathic superteen Telzey Amberdon. That's how we got telepathic dragons on Pern.

Read any one-year stretch of Campbell's magazine and you'll likely get at least a couple of installments of continuing series about psi or psi-adjacent protagonists, like Randall Garrett and Lawrence Janifer's FBI agent.

Even if you weren't selling directly to Campbell, you were still likely inculcated; regular Campbell author Robert A. Heinlein built "Time for the Stars", one of his original juvie SF novels, around twin telepathy.

It's Campbell's fault.

[quasi-normalcy]

I'm reading three stories from the 1950s, selected because they have parallel universes as a major plot point; all of them also include telepathy. It's barely even relevant to the plot, it's just there.

[quasi-normalcy]

Of course, it's probably worth noting that one of the roles that telepathy frequently played in these stories was just allowing characters to stay in contact while they weren't in the same place, which admittedly is just kind of redundant now that cellphones exist.

[ellakas]

[ellakas]

[knight--error]

CANNOT take credit for these, my sister in law made them. Behold.

[magicratfingers]

i need this completed or ill die who is kitty?? WHO IS LYDIA

[fishing4stars]

@scyllas-revenge this has your name written all over it. twice.

[scyllas-revenge]

Ahh my two favorite things smushed together!!

[ellakas]

as op of this post this had me laughing truly out loud @scyllas-revenge

my bro in law: I hope they fold their gowns properly

[scyllas-revenge]

Hell yes I'm getting a good grade in reblogging

something that is normal to want and possible to achieve

[spacemomnephmoreau]

I gotta throw in a tag for @bethanydelleman because I hope you can hear this as clearly as I can!

[lytefoot]

@hillnerd

[elodieunderglass]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a group on an adventure must be in want of a hobbit.

[quasi-normalcy]

The fact that anti-abortion laws and anti-transgender laws are both being implemented en masse, at the *same* time, by the *same* people (who, it hardly needs to be remarked, are overwhelmingly neither women nor transgender) should be enough to convince any reasonable person that the narrative of conflict between and women's and transgender is, first and foremost, a divide-and-conquer strategy by the far right.

Your survival is our survival. Our survival is your survival. Anyone who says different is a fed.

[cornedbeef101]

I think there’s quite a big difference between a woman getting an abortion and a teenage girl being sterilised and having a double mastectomy.

Women’s rights and trans issues are not comparable and are often in opposition.

[quasi-normalcy]

Fuck off, Collaborator.

[kaidadragonfly]

It's interesting that there are people that understand that the right lies constantly about abortion but think they tell the truth about trans people.

[penrosesun]

Also, hey, let's walk with this totally bad faith argument for a second. What IS different about a teen girl choosing to get an abortion, and a teen girl choosing to get a tubal ligation and a mastectomy? Are you saying that teenage girls who know that they will never want children should be forced to preserve their fertility anyway? Are you saying that teenage girls with severe back pain or the BRCA gene need to preserve their feminine breasts and be aesthetically pleasing to others, even at the expense of their own health? I mean, they're just too young to be making medical decisions which might make them less fertile or sexual desirable, right? What if they regret it???

And hey, you know, the same worry that teen girls might regret these things is true for adult women, too. Maybe we should make them wait until they're married, in case their future husband disapproves. Maybe we should make them wait until they've had kids - what if she regrets it and wants children? what if she regrets it and wants to breast feed? what if her stupid little woman brain hasn't thought this through and correctly pinned her entire self-worth and value as a person on her ability to act as a sex object and baby incubator? what then???

Trans men aren't women, and infantilizing them as poor helpless girls is obviously transphobic. But in addition to that, even if we were to buy into the central transphobic premise here, the conclusions would still be sexist as hell. Let's say that there are no trans men. Let's pretend for the sake of argument that trans men simply don't exist. Infantilizing teen girls out of being able to make their own medical decisions isn't feminist either.

If you're categorically against teen girls being able to choose to get a tubal ligation and a mastectomy, I have an awful lot of trouble believing that you're actually pro-choice. Pro-choice doesn't mean "women should have bodily autonomy just as long as they do the things I want". Pro-choice means pro-fucking-choice. You can't sing female empowerment and bodily autonomy out of one side of your mouth, while sticking your tongue out to lick the boot of the patriarchy on the other.

[megpie71]

Let’s also note here that by “teen girl” they mean “eighteen or nineteen years old”.  Or in other words: legally adult, and therefore (supposedly) allowed to make their own choices about their own bodies. 

[trammelsb]

Trans people are people and deserve human rights. But also this is the same fight! I am a cis woman who never intends to use my uterus. They want to define everyone by their body parts. I am not a breeding mare and I want other people to have the same choice about their bodies (and who they are) that I should have!

[ipostradicalfeminismisntrad]

[tsarina-anadyomene]

There's really this strong temptation that everyone has which basically says "to have interiority is to be like me; ordinary people are surface everywhere." And this manifests in different ways in different spaces, and becomes really pronounced when you cluster together with similar people. So tumblr users often act like straight people don't have any interiority because it helps you feel the deepening of social bonds with other gay people. This happens professionally too. I think it was Summer or Sharks who was saying that programming people think that intelligence is just being really good at writing code. Not surprising but very strange to me! I am (equally ridiculously) used to thinking that intelligence is being really good at philosophy, having command of a lot of sources that you can use creatively, etc. This reflects a kind of dynamic on tumblr and reddit. On reddit to have interiority is to be a science guy and on tumblr to have interiority is to be a humanities girl (and the dynamic is gendered in exactly this way). And I think there is something dangerous about habitually regarding other people as automatons. It's good to have people outside of your niche to remind you that other people from different walks of life are quite deep and complicated. They are full of love and fine grained attention to things you never thought to care about. And I think a lot of people go through life thinking of themselves as perpetually victimized by basically empty people rather than having genuine confrontations with full, genuine people who are committed to subtle, complex and real values, who have detailed and intricate histories, and who have a bond to you that you might never quite fully understand. But we rarely even try at understanding these things. We just decide that they're stupid and ridiculous and unreasonable.

[partywithponies]

Fascinating how what's considered feminine and what's considered masculine can change over time. The rebranding of being a horse girl into being a stereotypical feminine girly trait needs to be studied.

[partywithponies]

Look at classic children's novels. As recently as the 50s and early 60s, being obsessed with horses as a girl was depicted as strange and tomboyish, and the very concept of being obsessed with horses from early childhood and loving toy horses and desperately wanting your own horse being a "little girl thing" and not a "little boy thing" would send someone from the 1800s and earlier into a coma.

[partywithponies]

There's maybe a point to be made here somewhere about how when keeping and riding horses stopped being necessary to the functioning of society and became a more "frivolous" thing, it was rapidly rebranded as silly and girly and for women, but what do I know.

[thatandydavisfellow]

I just heard a disembodied voice grumpily agreeing with this post, and it turns out it was the late Count Piotr Vorkosigan.

[thatandydavisfellow]

But then, the early Miles books are very much about navigating masculinity, and the pitfalls thereof.