Womenās Union is a feminist discord server for natal women, whether they're radical feminist, rad leaning, or even liberal leaning feminist (with an open mind)! We welcome het-, bi-, and homo- sexual women regardless of gender identity. The server is firmly based on second wave feminsim.
We are an effort to encourage sisterhood, communication, and a more diverse collection of views and experiences. We also aim to promote female empowerment by hosting interest groups and encouraging learning and conversation about hobbies and various life skills! We promote activism and empowerment on both personal and class-based axes by fostering community.
As in labor unions, we are stronger together. If this sounds like something you're interested in, drop @thelaughingbird a DM and ask about joining the community! We look forward to seeing you there. :)
This side-by-side was built by the Rockford Desk and Furniture Co., which only existed from 1891-1895. I've found one singular other example of this cabinet, which was auctioned over a decade ago, and was stained a dark cherry color. I personally like the color of the quartersawn oak as it is, so I'm not planning a full restoration.
Wait I just realized this puts her in line of sight with my favorite chifforobe and I love how they look together. Very different periods and styles but I feel like there's a dialogue there.
We are not judging the mess in my drawing room, that's a later problem. Work table all covered in nonsense...
a lot of time in f&f is spent hammering home how frightening the servants should be. readers are taught to fear their ability to read the futures ā their "all-knowing" nature, their ability to predict, expect, and counter the protagonists' actions. and i love prophecies and dreams. my favorite fantasy tools. so i was very excited for these prophetic antagonists! the question is posed over and over: how do you beat an enemy that can predict your every move?
it was a question i was excited for hobb to answer. but then.... they never predict any move. they don't predict bee being the destroyer. they don't predict beloved infiltrating clerres. they don't predict any of fitz and the fitzgang's actions. and some might say, "well, credit to the protagonists! they chose the unlikely path! they evaded the servants' eye!" but i just don't find that to be a satisfying answer, personally. i guess it could be a matter of personal preference.
there wasn't a single instance where i was scared of the servants for their knowledge ā which is what i think we're intended to feel! i wanted to feel frightened at how much they knew! but no. the servants and the four are on their backfoot the entire time. they don't know who the unexpected son is. they laugh at dwalia and vindeliar and refuse to heed their warnings. vindeliar actually says "there is a farseer and dragons in the bay" and they don't look into it at all. these are the prophetic enemies we're supposed to be fearing? after we've spent three books hearing about how smart and knowledgeable they are?
and the way they die is soooo... i've already joked about it, but symphe thinking bee is stupid enough to believe her candy kidnapper trick? i don't even remember how fellowdy and coultrie died and i finished the book, like, three days ago. it was that insignificant. capra dies without much gusto or effort. after spending chapter after chapter after chapter with fitz and amber, listening to how fitz has to subject amber to memories of her torture just to know the layout + how to kill them? only for none of that to matter at all, because apparently it was really easy all along? why emphasize the planning phase that much? (good for beloved backstory exposition, but i hope you know what i'm getting at.) i was terrified for fitz to go head to head with the four, and i find their resulting deaths so anticlimactic. i liked that bee got to off symphe, but i wish it would've been harder.
again. caveat caveat caveat. "maybe the point was their hubris." i get it. i think that's a good and probably true reading of it. but i can't help feeling so cheated as a reader. if you're going to set up a cool, all-knowing, powerful set of villains, they better be cool, all-knowing, and powerful, or i will feel cheated! they should have been hard to kill! i never once felt scared of them or their prescience āĀ and their prescience is the part that was propped up as being "most scary" by the narrative.
which leads me to bee and her destroyer scene. (yay bee! yay destroyer! i love her so much.) so she burned the libraries. again, i felt let down by this scene. cool! she burned them! well, we never really got a scene with the libraries. we heard how important the libraries are from an abundance of sources. sure, we know the servants will allow famines or shipwrecks based on the contents of the libraries. but it's mostly tell, not show.
the libraries act as this "heart of the servants" that bee is felling, but again, i never once felt scared of their prophecies or prescience or libraries. they're not doing so great with it. in every scene with the four, they're fumbling around in the dark, bickering like children, unsure what to do. they don't know what the dreams mean. their library does not scare me.
what does scare me is the torture chamber. that's where we see the servants in action. that's the part that is shown to us, not just told ā through beloved's memories and crippled form, through dwalia's treatment of bee, we come to understand firsthand that the servants have a willingness and eagerness to commit sadistic brutality. that was what made them scary. not their fuddling of the prophecies.
it makes me sad because it feels like hobb cheated herself out of a destroyer scene. if you want bee to burn the libraries, make the scary part the libraries. the scary part is the torture chamber. none of the characters touch or harm that chamber ā the cave-in does the dirty work. it feels like such a missed opportunity.
all of this is personal preference. i found myself disappointed in the destroyer scene ā what visceral, hateful connection do i as a reader have, really, to the library? āĀ as well as to the servants as antagonists on the whole. this is such a long rant. so sorry. it's just so personally frustrating to see a cool concept get set up and then fall so flat. we should have had library scenes! we should have had a more difficult infiltration! the four should have been smart! THE FOUR SHOULD HAVE BEEN SMART! you can have a smart character that still falls victim to hubris. just because they're prideful and have blindspots doesn't mean they need to be fumbling. they should have been hard to kill. okay whatever i'm done. im not proofreading all this so if i said something stupid whoops please don't come for me
no okay but persephone. when you listen to the soundtrack it's like she's a party girl she drinks and has fun but you guys dont understand because every single time she took a drink she grimaced. every single time. not once did she enjoy herself, because it wasn't her indulging in her wants it was her coping. and even!! even during livin it up on top when everyone takes a drink there's a moment of silence where they all look almost disgusted by it. none of them enjoy it it doesn't taste good to any of them yet still they drink it??
and then UGH okay because lady of the underground i was under the impression that she was interacting with the workers and whatnot like making the cracks in the wall that orpheus was about to break down but there's no one on stage. the only people on stage are the musicians, hermes, and persephone. none of the workers are there. she's singing to herself. do you understand do you get it?? especially with why do we build the wall right before that because I didn't realize persephone was in that song?? and the whole time she looks terrified. she Doesn't want to be here she Doesn't want to engage with this (my mom compared the song to being at a maga rally and she was 100% correct) but she does anyway, perhaps because she's forced to. and the look of heartbreak when eurydice appears; the way eurydice is confused and put off at first, but it doesn't take long for her to learn the words and join in????
eurydice and persephone is a whole other thing because I never realized how much of a relationship they had. like persephone is quick to be friendly with her, and eurydice is enthralled by that attention. but then during chant when persephone is singing about like the earth dying and people starving she's looking at eurydice walking by. she's looking at her and she looks heartbroken, she's reaching out to her but she can't reach her because she's not there. she watches as the fates strip eurydice of everything she has, and then that look of despair changes of one to fear as hades' eyes land on eurydice as he declares he'll find someone else who will be grateful. and I know that like flowers can be like an analogy for sa but I really felt it during that part. not so much in songbird vs rattlesnake? but definitely during the end of chant like AJHVSGDJAS.
and then like I said when eurydice enters the underworld persephone looks shaken. because she knows eurydice, and she knows orpheus, and- idk man. imagine being in hell and someone you know shows up, but you know they can't leave and you know they're soon to become a shell of who they once were. like. yeah
EDIT IF YOURE READING THIS CHECK THE REBLOGS THE ONE WITH BLUE'S TAGS IS THE BEST YOU SHOULD REBLOG THAT ONE NOT THIS ONE!!!!
In earlier times, when giants needed to go on a journey they grabbed onto something sticking up from the earth and let the earth's rotation take them to their destination.
Grande mythologie tintamarresque. 1881. Illustrated by G. Lafosse.
In the dream, my partner and I were following the narrow paths in a dirty hallway with deep pools of water. In the deep water were the bodies of horses, bones and remaining flesh bleached white. We could hear a distant scream behind us that was slowly growing closer.
I'm watching The X-Files for the first time and holy shit. Holy shit, guys. I was of course aware that Scully/Mulder are one of THE ships of all time, but nothing could have prepared me for the insane levels of shippable tension between these two. Scully is out here barging into Mulder's hotel room - which is a LOADED location - to drop her robe so he can reassure her that she hasn't been abducted by aliens, she's just a mosquito magnet. Then she's defending him from bureaucratic bullies one moment and saving his life at gunpoint the next. Meanwhile, Mulder has the most wet, pathetic puppy-dog eyes for her at ALL times, truly whipped, casually fixing her necklace while talking about how she appreciates the "journey" they go on, immediately after she calls him out for being territorial around another guy. He's losing his mind when she's in danger. He's casually dropping the most insane compliments I've ever heard. He's known her, like, a month.
I thought I was prepared for them. I'm on episode three. I'm being fucking humbled for my shipping hubris.
people always talk about the doomed love timeloop when they talk about hadestown. look i love that shit as much as the next homosexual but can we please talk about the revolutionary politics. genuinely one of the best anticapitalist pieces of art of the 21st century. can we watch act 2 with our brains please
