Beware: I don't really use tags (I forget they exist 99% of the time). I rarely check usernames. What's a Tumblr filter. She/her, in case you need to grammar me.
I can't remember my actual age, but it was in the range of 10 to 13 I think. my parents had dragged me to a Pride festival, and walked across the street from the main event, across where the lines were drawn, to where a sea of people in red shirts that read "god has a better way" tried to drown out the celebration with speakers blasting christian music, and shouting and loud praying.
the leaders pulled all us kids to the side and gave us the spiel. they told us how the rainbow had been stolen from us, and that these people were tricked by the devil and just needed prayer, but that if we didn't save them, they were going to hell.
I rolled my eyes because I already didn't believe in god, and although I barely knew what being gay was, I knew my parents were usually on the Wrong side of things, and I shouldn't be siding with them.
"We aren't allowed over there if we're wearing the red shirts," the leaders told us, "so we're sending people over in secret without them so you can pass out tracts and pray for people. they won't talk to us, but they'll talk to the kids. does anyone want to volunteer?"
the people in red shirts disgusted me. the people on the other side of the line were cheering and having fun. I raised my hand.
we were supposed to go in groups with young adults, to make sure we were doing what we were supposed to be. I wandered off the minute I could and stood nervously at the edge of a crowd, watching on as people went by, happy and unbothered by the protests across the street. I felt a little pride myself in tricking the protestors into giving up a witness spot to me, when I was going to smile on and think profanities at god instead.
there was an older woman standing outside the crowd too. she asked if I was here with anyone, a girlfriend maybe? I said no, my parents were across the street. she nodded, and said she was here with her kid. a daughter, that she came to support, but couldn't keep up with in the crowd.
I almost cried. I told her how amazing that was, because I couldn't imagine my mother showing support like that to me over anything, much less something as serious as Being Gay. I imagined if I was gay, and at a pride event just like now, but this time because I Belong.
I knew automatically that my mother, without a doubt, would still be in the same place, across the street.
I got hungry after a bit, and tried to find a good food truck. I had a little money and I was unused to being on my own like this, but I didn't want to go back to the Other Side. I knew now without a shadow of a doubt, this was the Good side and that was the Bad side.
as I was eating the gyro I got, there was a stream of red shirted protestors trickling through; I had reached the end of the boundaries, and the protestors were allowed in here. I backed up a little, spotting my dad among them. I didn't want him to tell me to go back.
there was a line of women closing ranks around the Pride attendees, separating them from the protesters as they walked through. they spread their arms out and told every person the protesters spoke to that they were not obligated to respond, they could walk away and not engage.
my dad spotted me back, and made a beeline over. he couldn't cross over because a butch lesbian stood between us. I didn't know what those words meant, but I never forgot the buttons she was wearing.
he tried to tell me that it was time to go. "you're not obligated to speak to him," the butch said, cutting him off and edging further between us. I smiled at her, a little in wonderment. no one had ever told me that I didn't have to speak to my parents, or do anything other than blindly obey them. I watched my dad get held behind a line by a woman half his height, with no intention on letting him get to me, and I smiled and walked away.
I didn't have a clue who I was then, and I wouldn't for a good few years to come. but I never forgot the supportive mother, who symbolized to me everything a mother should be, that mine, for all her religious self righteousness, would never hold a candle to. I never forgot that she was the person I wanted to be, and my mother was the person I did not want to be.
I never forgot the butch who stood between me and my dad, and for the first time ever, put the idea in my head that I was ALLOWED to make my own choices in my beliefs, and made me feel protected in a way I hadn't known I needed.
the image of her standing between me and my dad, being a physical barrier to protect me against any potential threat, that inspired the image of who I admired and wanted to become. it inspired the version of me who could stand up to my dad - to the point that I could hold my ground and educate him enough that over a decade later, he walked side by side with me at a pride festival, with no intent of witnessing to or condemning anybody.
pride month may be over, but the impact this month and these events can have is so damn important. I became who I am because of two people I met at a pride festival. I'll never forget.
maomao is my favorite "not like other girls" style protagonist bc for one shes a girls girl through and through. to the bone. and two she's just a weird little freak. absolute lunatic. they have the whole "omg she's actually beautiful and everyone falls for her when she's all made up" trope but the punchline is that she does not fucking want to look like that. she actively puts dirt on her face every day bc she does not want to be perceived as attractive (mostly out of fear of being used for sex work though at the same time she has the utmost respect for women who do sex work like she grew up in a brothel those are her sisters). she's Sherlock level smart and solves every mystery so fast but goes "well thats none of my business. anyway back to testing poisons on myself" she has the 2nd most powerful guy in the nation head over heels in love with her and is like "man this guy is weird around me what's his deal. I guess he's fine though because he gives me rare medicines and has no dick" fucking ICON i love her. also she once slapped someone so hard they fell on the floor. 10/10
As others have pointed out before, if you visited a web page 20 years ago and it acted like that, you would rightly assume your computer had gotten a virus.
the mexican football team has a 17 yrs old player and one of the funniest outcomes of this is that he cannot appear in any ad for gambling or drinking so he only appears in candy and milk advertisements. his first world cup and he's not even legally allowed to drive. his nickname is "morita" (little berry). he's three apples tall.
From the media that brought you "Millennials are killing [insert industry here]" articles for years and years and years, now we have....
"Hey, Gen Z, we're gonna relabel vacations into something else now and tell you how you really should be wary of taking vacation because it might impact your financial future."
sorry I can’t hang out today I have to plan a graveyard orgy ritual for my mystery cult. soon my dark purposes will be fulfilled. you know how it is with sinister puppetmasters… ah ha ha ha.
“Scorpios are just popularly misunderstood! They’re not evil, they’re not sex maniacs, they’re not secretive manipulators with vindictive—”
GUARDS! consign this idiot to my scorpion pit. he’s trying to ruin my reputation. no not the regular scorpion pit the scorpion pit in which all the scorpions have boners. what?! well give them the arachnid viagra then. jesus christ. impossible to get good help around here.
this has happened to me too (as an adult) and I’m always like??? do you have no survival instincts??? what kind of idiot just goes around announcing their enmity towards a class of person that 1.) cannot be identified on sight 2.) comprises roughly 10% of the population and 3.) they believe to be uniquely conniving, vindictive, secretive, manipulative, and prone to petty vengeance and intense grudges???
if you genuinely believe in astrology and think that Scorpios are Evil™️, I don’t think you want to get on their bad sides if you can help it. right? right??? I don’t get it! why make unnecessary enemies with people who haven’t even wronged you yet? why make unnecessary enemies with people who haven’t even wronged you yet and also have pits of boner scorpions? and why do they before you know who they are, thus allowing them to begin secretly plotting against you?!?!
anyway I did begin secretly plotting against him but that had little to do with our respective star signs
#that is a man who A: has tripped over his sword before and been laughed at by EVERY ELF IN RIVENDELL and is NOT going to do it again#and B: knows that he has more leg than anyone else in the room and is GOING TO USE IT BY GODS#he is COVERING GROUND with every step#he got that moniker of strider through HARD HONEST WORK (and very very big steps)#aragorn#lotr movies#viggo mortensen
#So basically. He runs like an actual real person would over uneven ground 😂#The Hollywood Run is pretty to watch sure but also takes place on a paved surface usually#There is no way to look dignified whilst running across lumpy bumpy ground down across a hill. Unless one is an actual gazelle#thankyou Mr. Viggo for that Real Human rep (saving @jonairadreaming's excellent tags because everyone who has ever tried running down an incline over uneven, possibly shifting, ground knows you try to get down there as fast as possible with the least amount of time of foot actually touching the ground and constantly being prepared to shift your weight to keep your balance. By the time the stones actually shift from your weight you already want to be two steps away)
I've been seeing a lot of posts about piracy lately and in light of this i do need to say something because I've been seeing a lot of misinformation.
anti-viruses, vpns, ad-blockers- none of these are going to help you here.
the first thing you're going to need is a good solid boat (preferably oak wood). you will also want some cannons and a plank depending on the sort of shenanigans you plan on getting into.
Also! Not once have i seen any of you talking about the importance of citrus fruits and vitamin C. antivirus doesn't prevent scurvy. come on you should know this by now.
this sort of misinformation is wildly dangerous and irresponsible.
In elementary school, my best friend and I had this game we would play where we were school supplies living inside a child's desk and going on slice-of-life adventures inside it. And I remember that a key component of our school supply society was a sort of religious schism that existed around the purpose and nature of the giant hand that occasionally reached in to grab different citizens, use them, and then return them, because most school supplies considered this an auspicious and enviable moment of being selected for a greater purpose and allowed a glimpse of a vast truth, but pencils considered it a horrible portent of doom because they always got sharpened during it and came back smaller and closer to death. We were third graders btw.
Source: The Condendings of Horus and Seth, recorded in the Chester Beatty Papyrus I (held in Oxford) c.1147 BC (Ramesses V - New Kingdom). There is an older Middle Kingdom version from Lahun, but it is extremely fragmentary. The one I'm listing is our first complete version dating to the Pharaonic period, and there are other much later versions too.
Thoughts: Girl help, they'd Hatshepsut'd the Contendings by introducing additional homophobia.
It's hard to know where to begin here because...wow...mhmm...that sure is...a version of reality. This is the unfortunate thing of what happens when people think they know and can analyse an ancient text based on simply reading it with no cultural context and often not actually having read the text at all, which this person very clearly hasn't.
You can read a 1931 translation by A.H.Gardiner here (starts on page 8), but please be aware that it's quite an old one. It's still good, just terms and language (particularly describing Seth, Horus, and the Lettuce) may be old fashioned/offensive. The version I'm using is much newer (W.K.Simpson 2003 - The Literature of Ancient Egypt, Yale University Press, 91-103) but I cannot reasonably copy out the whole translation from the book (that's copyright infringement). I will be quoting it, though, so you can compare the two.
So, let's bulletpoint this under a cut before I cry, and a reminder that when I as an English person say 'Let's look at this...' I culturally mean 'join me in analysing this' and not the US cultural meaning of 'fuck you I think you're an idiot' that I get tripped up by and called a bitch about so often.
Seth is Horus' uncle. That's correct.
'And also much older than him' Why this addition was relevant I don't know. I suppose it adds to the 'problematic taboo' of what they're about to relate to their audience. Salaciousness sells. But 'much older' uhh...they're gods. What year were any of them born? What are their ages? Time doesn't really have a meaning when it comes to the Egyptian gods, nor do ages. They've both existed for millennia by this point because wibbly wobbly timey wimey. The main thing is that they're both adults as Horus does not start fighting his uncle until he is of age.
'Horus always asks his mum for advice, it tells (sic) a lot lol' If you think 'asking a parent for help' is a sign you are very young, you're about 20 yourself and older adults ask their parents about things all the time. It doesn't prove shit.
I mean Horus asks his mother for advice several times in this story, but it takes place over multiple years because this fight lasts for 70 years. Oh no! He asks him goddess mother, and sister of the guy he's fighting for help. Wow. Much mummy's boy.
There's a whole load of latent homophobia in the way queer aspects of this tale are presented in the two screenshots, which uhh...so progressive of them. It should not take my cishet ass to point that out.
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Anyway, Horus beheads his mother after a fight because she accidentally stabbed him while he's a hippo. He then carries her head up a mountain and chucks it off the top of it before going to sleep up there (Thoth fetches the head and fixes Isis). It's a typical relationship between gods (they always do this) but it's not the relationship that's presented in the screenshots.
Translation (Simpson, 2003: 97-98):
Thereupon Seth became terribly enraged. And so the Ennead said to Seth, "Why have you become so enraged? Isn't it in accordance with what Atum, Lord of the Two Lands, the Heliopolitan, and Pre-Harakhti have said that action should be taken?" Then the White Crown was placed upon the head of Horus, son of Isis. Seth, being angry, let out a loud cry before the face of this Ennead, saying, "Is the office being awarded to my young brother even while I, who am his elder brother, am still about?" Then he took an oath as follows, "The White Crown shall be removed from the head of Horus, son of Isis, and he shall be thrown into the water so that I can contend with him for the office of Ruler." Pre-Harakhti acquiesced.
Thereupon Seth said to Horus, "Come, let's both transform ourselves into hippopotamuses and submerge in / the deep waters in the midst of the sea. Now as for the one who shall emerge within the span of three whole months, the office shall not be awarded him." Then they both submerged. And so Isis sat down and wept, saying, "Seth has killed Horus, my son!" Then she fetched a skein of yarn. She fashioned a line, took a deben-weight's (worth) of copper, cast it into a harpoon, tied the line to it, and
hurled it into the water at the spot where Horus and Seth had submerged, Then the barb bit into the body of her son Horus. So Horus let out a loud cry, "Help me, mother Isis, my mother! Appeal to your barb to let go of me! I am Horus, son of Isis!" Thereupon Isis let out a loud cry and told (her) barb, "Let go of him! See; that's my son Horus, my child." So her
barb let go of him. Then she hurled it back again into the water, and it bit into the body of Seth. So Seth let out a loud cry, saying,
"What have I done against you, my sister Isis? Appeal to your barb to let go of me! I am your maternal brother, Isis." Then she felt very compassionate toward him. Thereupon Seth called to her, saying, "Do you love the stranger even more than (your) maternal brother Seth?" So Isis appealed to her barb, saying, "Let go of him! See, it's Isis's maternal brother whom you have bitten into." Then the barb let go of him.
Horus, son of Isis, became furious at his mother Isis and came out with his face as fierce as an Upper Egyptian panther's, holding his cleaver of sixteen deben-weight in his hand. He removed the head of his mother Isis, put it in his arms, and ascended the mountain. Then Isis ?transformed herself into a statue of flint which had no head. Pre-Harakhti said to Thoth, "What is she who has come having no head?" So Thoth told Pre-Harakhi, "My good lord, that's Isis the Great, the God's Mother, whose head Horus, her son, has removed." Thereupon / Pre-Harakhti let out a loud cry and said to the Ennead, "Let's go and inflict severe punishment upon him." Then the Ennead ascended those mountains in order to search for Horus, son of Isis.'
Such affection between the pair. Relationship is just fine...I swear
Just before this they're mad at Horus and tell him his breath smells bad: 'Then the Universal Lord became furious at Horus and told him, "You are despicable in your person, and this office is too much for you, you lad, the odour of whose mouth is bad."' (Simpson, 2003: 94) Tbh I'm including this for no other reason than that it's funny.
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'In the well known story...' This is where it starts to go off the rails really hard. It is not a story about Seth wanting to 'possess Horus carnally'. This is how I know this person has never even looked at the Contendings. They don't know what they're talking about. The infamous 'lettuce' incident is but a tiny fraction of the overall story in which Horus and Seth fight for the right to the throne of Egypt. They are constantly doing different challenges to try to prove that they are worthy of the throne. Seth wins some, Horus wins others, it's generally a tie.
This is then when the 'picnic' shows up and what the above screenshot is talking about.
As Horus is asleep on the mountain top, Seth shows up and gouges his eyes out. He then goes back to the Ennead and says 'Don't know where Horus is' Of course this is a lie. Hathor finds Horus and restores his sight.
Relevant translation (Simpson, 2003: 98-99):
'Now as for Horus, he was lying under a shenusha-tree in the oasis land.
Seth found him, seized hold of him, threw him down upon his back on the mountain, removed his two eyes from their sockets, and buried them on the mountain so as to illumine the earth. His two eyeballs became two bulbs / which grew into lotuses. Seth came away and told Pre-Harakhti falsely, I didn't find Horus," although he had found him.
Then Hathor, Mistress of the Southern Sycamore, set out, and she found Horus lying weeping in the desert. She captured a gazelle and milked it. She said to Horus, "Open your eyes that I may put this milk in." So he opened his eyes and she put the milk in, putting (some) in the right one and putting (some) in the left one. She told him, "Open your eyes!" He opened his eyes, and she looked at them; she found that they were healed.'
You'll note that it's both eyes taken rather than one, and Hathor who heals him rather than Thoth, as he does in a previous version. Gardiner (1931: 21) in his notes on this passage cannot tell whether this is a change from the earlier myth, as happens with a lot of Egyptian stories depending on which gods are in favour in any given century) or whether this is entirely made up for this particular myth. Myths in Ancient Egypt are both complimentary and contradictory. You get used to it pretty quick, which is why saying 'this is the one true version' is a crock of shit when it comes to translation and interpretation.
The Ennead, sick of both Horus and Seth's incessant fighting by this point, summon them both and tell them to make up and put the matter to rest. So Seth invites Horus to his home to eat, drink, and make peace.
This is where we get to the point where the user is referring to 'reaping masculinity' and 'being the loved on in a gay relationship was "feminine" in Ancient Egypt' and uhhh...cite your sources babe.
The 'femininity' part comes from much later sources and is a Greek and Roman cultural way of looking at same sex relations. It should not be applied to the Egyptians because they do not conceive of sexuality this way, nor view it as a defining trait of a person. This is why you find it's not really recorded in Egyptian sources. (Parkinson, 1995)
However, Parkinson (1995, 2008) does note that those who 'receive' are portrayed as 'back turners' and this is derogatory. It is an aspect of masculinity, but it's not about 'being feminine' it's about 'being a coward.' So it's 'unmanning' but more in the sense of 'I have made you a cringefail loser' and not 'lmao you're a girl now'. It's important when dealing with historical homophobic attitudes towards same-sex relationships that we get the flavour of homophobia correct. Otherwise you're just perpetuating more homophobia a little to the left.
Let's look at Simpson's (2003: 99) translation:
'Now afterward at evening time, bed was prepared for them, and together they lay down. During the night Seth caused his phallus to become stiff and inserted it between Horus's thighs. Horus then placed his hands between his thighs and caught Seth's semen.'
That's it, that's the whole section that the person described as 'Seth wanting to carnally possess Horus and make him into a woman'. There's no Horus 'escaping by making Seth drunk', it doesn't happen and it's not the night before Horus' coronation. Anyone else think that the person may have Very Much Overstated The Whole Situation? You too? Oh good. We're on the same page then. Moving on.
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Horus does return to Isis for help afterwards, and I don't see why this is an issue because 'help my uncle, your brother, and murderer of Osiris, just used intercrural sex to leave his semen on me to position me as a coward and thus unworthy of the throne of Egypt' is a pretty big problem that you'd want advice with.
Isis...freaks out. To make sure no semen is on Horus, she does in fact cut his hands off and throws them in the Nile before making Horus new ones. (This is possible because there's a creation myth where Khnum the potter makes all things out of clay, so just fashioning new hands is a piece of cake, especially for a goddess.
Here's the relevant translation (Simpson, 2003: 99):
'Then Horus / went to tell his mother Isis, "Help me, Isis, my mother, come and see what Seth has done to me." And he opened his hands and let her see Seth's semen. She let out a loud cry, took up her knife, cut off his hands, threw them into the water, and restored for him hands that were equivalent.'
Again, a very small part of the story.
The OP then contradicts themselves by saying Isis is a wise woman to go to after implying Horus was a mummy's boy for going to his mum for help after his uncle raped him. I would fight this person with my bare hands. A fish doesn't eat it, but a fish does eat Osiris' penis when Seth dismembers him (if you read the Ptolemaic version of the myth. Earlier versions just have it get lost.)
Now we get to the lettuce incident, which goes a little differently to how the OP writes about it. Here's Simpson's (2003: 99) translation:
'Then she got some fragrant ointment and applied it to Horus's phallus. She caused it to become stiff and inserted it into a pot, and he caused his semen to flow down into it. Isis at morning time went carrying Horus's semen to the garden of Seth, and she said to Seth's gardener, "What sort of vegetable / does Seth eat here in your company?" And the gardener answered her, "He doesn't eat any vegetable here in my company except lettuce." And Isis put Horus's semen on it. Seth returned according to his daily habit and ate the lettuce, which he regularly ate. Thereupon he became pregnant with Horus's semen.'
idk about you but 'mum jacking son off into a pot and then using it as salad dressing' isn't my idea of fun. The reason it's lettuce and not any other vegetable is because the lettuce found in Egypt at this time is a type of Romaine which has a thick sap that is extremely reminiscent of semen. That's why that lettuce is associated with the fertility god Min, and why Seth likes to eat it; i.e. to project his virility and strength. In the Ptolemaic version, this is presented to him at a picnic that Horus throws in turn for the meal at Seth's house.
I should also note at this point that 'thereupon he became pregnant with Horus's semen' is not literal. I've seen far too many people take it as a literal statement, which is what you get when you fuck about and find out with texts that you don't also look into the cultural background of. jwr 'to become pregnant' is the literal word they use but the Egyptians also used wrD 'to be weary' as an alternate way of saying 'death' so we should always be on the lookout for 'words being used to mean something else.' In this case, it's more 'it is inside his belly' but with not a full understanding of how pregnancy happens, 'baby grows in stomach' knowledge, and 'semen must go in a hole for semen to be in body because baby comes from semen going in hole to grow in belly' you can understand where 'it's in his stomach' becomes 'he got pregnant'. It's literally just telling you it's in his system.
So we get to 'the next day' where Seth thinks his semen is on Horus's thighs, thus making him a coward and not fit to be king, and Horus knows his semen is in Seth's stomach. The Ennead assembles and Seth proclaims (Simpson, 2003: 99):
'So Seth went to tell / Horus, "Come, let's go that I may contend with you in court." Horus said to him, "I'll do so; yes, I'll do so, I'll do so."
Then they both went to court and stood in the presence of the Great Ennead. They were told, "Speak for yourselves!" Then Seth said, "Let me be awarded the office of Ruler, I.p.h., for as to Horus, the one who is standing (at law), I have performed a man's work against him." The Ennead then let out a loud cry, and they spewed and spat at Horus's face.'
This is that homophobia but culturally Egyptian this time. Horus is seen as a coward and emasculated by that cravenness. Still, he is not 'a woman' but he has removed his masculinity. He is 'other'. The Egyptian concept of masculinity has many layers, and for a god it's even worse. That's an important distinction to make, and I'll refer people to Parkinson (1995, 2008) for more information. I just want to point out that the OP has misunderstood and extrapolated based on outdated ideas. It's similar to the Greek idea of intercrural sex, and how not putting it in doesn't 'unman' a person, but also slightly to the left. Complicated is a good word for it.
Horus laughs at this. Genuinely, the text says Horus laughs. He then says 'that's bullshit, lets call Seth's semen and see where it is, and then you can try calling mine. The answer might surprise you.' and so they do, and Seth's semen calls from where it was cast into the Nile. They call Horus's semen and it calls from inside Seth.
'"Let Seth's semen be summoned that we may see from where it answers, and my own be summoned so that we may see it from where it answers." Then Thoth, lord of script and scribe of truth for the Ennead, laid his hand on Horus's shoulder and said, "Come out, you semen of Seth!" And it answered him from the water in the interior of the 'marsh'!? Then Thoth laid his hand on Seth's shoulder and said, "Come out, you semen of Horus!" It said to him, "Where shall I come from?" Thoth said to it, "Come / out from his ear." Thereupon it said to him, "Am I, who am divine fluid, to come out merely from his ear?" Then Thoth said to it, "Come out from the top of his head." And it emerged as a golden solar disk upon Seth's head.' (Simpson, 2003: 100)
Yes, Horus's semen has such an inflated sense of importance that it refused to come out of an ear, and instead out of a symbol of divinity. I hate that op refers to it as 'juice' because bestie you said 'semen' on the part, just say it again. 'Juice,' my ass.
Seth does become enraged, but he isn't made fun of, nor does he 'escape' and Horus is immediately crowned. As I said before, this is a long running dispute and it's why it's called 'the Contendings' (plural) of Horus and Seth.
What actually happens is Seth becomes upset and tries to grab the semen, but Thoth snatches it and puts it as a crown on his own head. Why he does this I don't know, but it's not mentioned again. The actual lines are:
'Seth became exceedingly furious and extended his hand to seize the golden solar disk, but Thoth took it away / from him and placed It as a crown upon his (own) head. Then the Ennead said, "Horus is right; Seth is wrong." Seth became exceedingly furious and let out a loud cry when they said, "Horus is right; Seth is wrong." And so Seth took a great oath by god as follows, "He shall not be awarded the office until he has been dismissed outside with me and we build for ourselves some ships of stone and race each other. Now as for the one who prevails over his rival, / he shall be awarded the office of Ruler, l.p.h."' (Simpson, 2003: 100).
The semen incident, overall, isn't that big of a deal in the long run. It's over very quickly and neither Horus nor Seth suffer any long term consequences.
So the finale is 'okay Horus: 5, Seth: 5, we need something to break the tie between them' and Seth demands a boat race. But he says that both boats must be made of stone. On the day of the race, Seth's boat sinks immediately, but Horus's sails, thus winning the race. Seth is angered, turns into a hippo and bashes Horus's boat showing that it was actually made of barley fibre and disguised to look like stone. Horus cheated just as Seth did with the semen.
So they write to Osiris in the underworld because this has gone on for 70 years and everyone is sick of it. Osiris writes back 'umm, well since I'm dead, my son should inherit rather than my brother' and thus Horus is crowned king and Seth is given a position as his advisor.
Now I know that a lot of you will be like 'but Seth evil???1111!!!???' and I'm here to tell you that no he's not. Cut that shit out. Seth is a chaos god and Horus is calm/steady. In Egyptian mythology, you need chaos to balance out the calm. There must be both. Seth isn't considered evil within Egyptian mythology, just a little unpredictable, which is why the other gods don't punish or humiliate him for the Contendings but recognise his wisdom and cunning just as they did with Horus. They effectively equally matched, it's just Horus gets the job by birthright. That's it, that's the story.
So the OP's comments are something that have been waved over the truth to get a flavour of it, the La Croix of truth as it were, and are horseshit. As soon as the internet found out that Horus and Seth had sex they became blinded by 'lmaooo it's GAY™ #weknew #cunty' and rational thought fled the building. Genuinely, it's frustrating how often that happens. You can do a proper historical, cultural, and even queer reading of this text, but the above OP wasn't it.
Sources:
Gardiner, A.H. 1931. The Library of A. Chester Beatty: Description of a Hieratic Papyrus, with a Mythological Story, Love Songs, and Other Miscellaneous texts. Oxford; OUP. (linked above)
Parkinson, R.
1995. "Homosexual" desire and Middle Kingdom literature. Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 81, pp. 57 - 76.
2008. Boasting about hardness: Constructions of Middle Kingdom masculinity. In Sex and gender in ancient Egypt: 'Don your wig for a joyful hour', ed. Carolyn Graves-Brown, pp. 115 - 142. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales.
Wilkinson, W.K. 2003. The Literature of Ancient Egypt: An Anthology of Stories, Instructions, Stelae, Autobiographies, and Poetry. New Haven and London. Yale University Press.
oh and uhh
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I'm Lottie. This has taken me four hours and hasn't been Milo Rossi. Fucking googledebunk that shit. Bye.
Tumblr being the "piss on the poor" reading comprehension site makes sense when you realize that 79% of adults in the US are functionally illiterate. Same goes for Twitter and TikTok.
that's a real high number, sport. where'd you get it?
TODAY (Jul 11), I’ll be at the Idler Festival in LONDON.
Here's an irony: the "gig economy" is a statistical black hole. Workers, customers and regulators know very little about the most basic aspects of it: how much workers get paid, for example, or much unpaid time on the clock a worker puts in before they get a job from the app.
The reason this is ironic is that the "gig economy" is dominated by a handful of massive, data-driven firms that know the precise, up-to-the-second answer to these questions. The problem is that they won't share the data. Of course, workers and customers have the data, too, but our data is widely diffused, with each worker and each customer only representing a single, infinitesimal pixel in this massive picture.
Most of our industry-wide figures about the sector come from painstaking, expensive survey work. The expense and effort involved in conducting this analysis means that the public's understanding of the gig companies' business is fragmentary and thin.
But every now and again, we get a flashbulb glimpse of the full picture. One of those glimpses was captured by David Weil, the former labor standards boss at the US Department of Labor. In 2024, the Massachusetts Attorney General sued Uber over worker misclassification, with Weil serving as an expert witness, who was able to access the raw data on Uber's business operations.
In a new American Prospect longread called "The Dangerous Myth of Flexibility," Weil builds on the public record developed in the case to demolish the central myth of the gigwork companies: that they enter into a mutually beneficial arrangement with their workers by offering "flexibility" that lets workers "choose work that fits the rhythms of their lives, not the other way around":
This quote comes from Tony West, the Uber executive who has led the company's efforts to formalize its worker misclassification program, notably California's Prop 22, a $225m statewide campaign that overturned the state's landmark gig work standards. West is also Kamala Harris's brother-in-law, and he served as her campaign's corporate liaison, senior strategist and economic policy advisor.
On its face, West's statement sounds reasonable, and most of us have heard a version of it, possibly even from an Uber driver. But what Uber calls "flexibility" is really a way for the company to offload its operational risks onto its drivers.
Anyone who runs a business has to manage a key operational risk: staffing levels. A restaurateur who doesn't schedule enough cooks, bussers and servers might have to turn away business at the door if there's a rush. But if the restaurateur schedules too many people for a shift, they'll end up paying for those workers to stand around scrolling Tiktok.
In America, Congress and state legislatures have created a system that allows restaurateurs to transfer this risk onto their employees: the "tipped minimum wage." Federally, the minimum wage for tipped employees is only $2.13/hour, with the caveat that employees are obliged to "top up" their workers' pay if the tips from their shift don't add up to $7.25/hour. So if you work five hours and don't wait on a single table, your boss has to pay you $36.25 ($7.25/hour * 5 hours). But if you have a busy shift and you make $40 in tips, your boss only has to pay you $10.65 ($2.13 * 5 – the tipped minimum).
This is a transfer of risk from bosses to workers. The boss can schedule extra servers and offload most of their wages to diners who come through the doors. If your boss overestimates the amount of business, much of the cost of that miscalculation comes out of your paycheck.
This is quite a sweet deal for bosses. After all, servers have virtually no control over the amount of business a restaurant attracts. It's the boss, not the server, who decides where the restaurant will be, which hours it will keep, which food it will serve, how much the food costs, what advertisements to run, and where and when to run them. The boss controls the decor, staff attire and the music. They make the decisions, and workers pay the price if they decide poorly.
For most businesses, workers are less exposed to risks from their boss's strategic errors. If your boss screws up, you might see a lower annual bonus, or take a career hit thanks to the bad company's presence on your CV. Of course, if your boss really messes up they might lay you off or go out of business altogether, but it's a rare business that gets to externalize its risks onto its workers on a shift-by-shift basis the way restaurants get to.
But as sweet as restaurateurs have it, that's nothing compared to the incredible deal that gig platforms get. Companies like Uber and Lyft get to shift nearly all their risk to their workers, and then insist that they're doing workers a favor by offering them "flexibility." Like a restaurateur, Uber and Lyft control all the mechanisms by which the number of riders is set. They decide how to advertise and how to price their rides. When a driver signs on and makes themselves available – at no charge – to Uber, it is the company's actions, not the driver's, that determine whether that driver gets a job, and how much they'll get paid.
Uber and Lyft claim that drivers have control, too – when (if) they're offered a job, they get to decide whether to take it. This is true, but it's more complicated than that. Drivers get about 15 seconds (!) to decide whether to accept a job, which means they have 15 seconds to calculate the mileage and time-based rate on offer, all while operating a vehicle in traffic. Drivers who accept lowball offers risk having their base pay permanently eroded through "algorithmic wage discrimination," which is when the gig platforms infer that workers who accept very low wages are economically desperate and can be offered even lower wages in the future:
But workers can't simply refuse offers and wait for the wage on offer to increase. That increase may happen, but if a driver is too picky, the platform will punish them for turning down too many offers by excluding them from future opportunities. If this happens often enough, the driver may end up broke enough to start accepting those lowballs, triggering the inexorable downward trajectory of their expected earnings.
This is "flexibility," but mostly it's flexibility for Uber, not for drivers. Uber controls when a driver gets paid, and they control the data about that payment. This allows Uber to claim to be paying well north of minimum wage, while drivers average less than $2.50/hour. Uber exploits its information asymmetry to publish only the numerator (the amount a driver makes when a passenger is in the car) while hiding the denominator (how many hours it takes for Uber to put a passenger in that car):
Uber has perfected a system of algorithmic pricing that allows it to dangle just enough money in front of drivers to maximize their number on the road, irrespective of how many riders are looking for cars. The fact that they have all the information (while drivers have none) allows them to extract vast amounts of totally unpaid labor from those drivers. And then, once a passenger gets in the car, Uber's informational systems let it pay that driver the absolute minimum they will accept for the ride.
Of course, it works the same way for passengers, each of whom is offered a different price for the same rides, based on the company's surveillance data and its realtime calculations about how much the rider is willing to pay. When Uber launched, driver pay and passenger fares were linked (the same way a server's tips and the cost of a meal are linked). Today, these are fully decoupled. Uber runs a kind of cod-Marxist operation where workers are paid according to their desperation, and passengers are gouged according to their ability to pay:
This works so well (for Uber) that Uber has launched a side hustle selling algorithmic pricing and algorithmic wage discrimination systems to companies in other sectors, so expect this arrangement to infect ever-wider swathes of the economy:
(And this is neither here nor there, but holy shit, is Uber's investor relations site seriously serving ASPX pages in 2026?! Hey Khosrowshahi, the DOJ called and it wants its Clinton-era antitrust evidence back!)
Back to algorithmic pricing: this opaque, take-it-or-leave-it algorithmic pricing arrangement sets Uber apart from other platforms where sellers offer temporary use of their property to buyers. As Weil writes, at least Airbnb hosts get to override the nightly rate suggested by the platform (though I'd add that the platforms will downrank and bury people who resist their suggestions).
As Weil points out, even if Uber had to pay the minimum wage and assume other operational risks associated with running a business, they'd still have access to these algorithmic tools, albeit with different parameters. Rather than setting the wage floor for drivers at $0/hour, they'd have to pay $7.25/hour (the federal minimum wage, or more, depending on the state). This would force the company to refuse shifts to drivers when there were enough workers on the road to handle demand, but drivers would benefit from this arrangement – rather than driving around for a shift, burning gas and putting wear on your car without getting paid, Uber would just tell you to stay home.
Uber could try to offload those risks onto passengers, but remember, Uber is already charging riders a personalized price based on massive troves of surveillance data that is continuously re-analyzed to guess the largest sum you're willing to pay for any given ride. You're already paying the highest price Uber can set for you, in other words.
Weil has been in many forums – including that Massachusetts courtroom – where Uber touted its "flexibility" as a benefit to drivers. But as he shows, Uber could offer all the same flexibility to drivers without the downside risk of driving around for hours without earning a dime. Sure, forcing Uber and Lyft to extend rights and protections that every employee gets would raise their costs – but "the same is true for any company having to comply with employment law and work protections."
Outside of the US, these companies are being forced to shift the risk from their workers' backs to their own balance sheets. As Weil writes, the UN's International Labor Organization has set binding labor standards for gig companies, called Convention 193, "Decent Work in the Platform Economy":
The US government is pulling out all the stops to prevent these standards from being applied to US gig companies, even abroad. Trump's labor boss Keith Sonderling told the world that the US government "will not sit on the sidelines while some foreign governments push to hamper American innovation in the gig economy worldwide":
But, as Weil says, this isn't about innovation, flexibility or AI. It's about gig companies changing the distributional outcome of whole sectors, to shift money from workers to investors.
The rest of the world has its own ideas. In Switzerland, the Supreme Court found that gig companies' businesses were illegal and ordered them to extend normal labor protections to gig workers. Naturally, the gig companies just ignored the law and continued to screw those workers. Gig workers, as noted, are diffused. They don't work in the same place. They have no way to find out who else works for the same boss as they do. The same factors that keep us from gathering stats on gig work also keeps gig workers from comparing notes on how they're getting shafted.
What's a labor organizer to do? The Swiss labor union Syndicom came up with an ingenious solution. They partnered with a popular, pro-union pizza restaurant, listed it on the delivery platforms, and then placed orders for tons of pizzas through the scofflaw food-delivery platforms. They transformed the pizzeria into a pop-up union labor hub, and had an organizing conversation with every rider the company dispatched to the restaurant:
https://vimeo.com/1203473793
This is deliciously ingenious, and the labor organizing need not stop there. Companies like Para have shown how, by jailbreaking the apps used by gig workers, they can allow those workers to comparison shop for the best wage. Rather than getting 15 seconds while navigating traffic to decide whether a job is worth taking, drivers and riders could use a "counter-app" that evaluates all the offers on all the platforms and coordinates with other workers to mass-reject lowball offers:
The only problem is the "anticircumvention" laws that criminalize this kind of reverse-engineering and modifications of apps. These laws make it a literal crime to change how an app running on your own phone works. These laws were invented in America, with 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but in the ensuing years, the US Trade Rep has used the threat of tariffs to force every country in the world to adopt their own anticircumvention laws. By caving into US bullying, all of America's trading partners have left their workers and consumers vulnerable to technological surveillance, manipulation and price-gouging, to the great benefit of the US tech companies that have fused with the Trump regime.
This is the hidden silver lining to Trump's lunatic tariffs: they take away the threat that kept all those US-protecting foreign IP laws in force. When someone threatens to burn your house down unless you do as you're told, and then they burn your house down anyway, you really don't have to keep complying:
The possibilities for counterapps in gig work are endless. In Indonesia, gig rider co-ops commission "Tuyul" apps that mod their dispatch apps in ways small (upsizing the font) and large (spoofing the GPS):
In his article, Weil cites a study showing that customers for gig apps tend not to comparison shop – once you choose your default taxi-hailing app, that becomes your go-to. But with counter-apps, your default could be a price-comparison app that bids out your job to all the platforms and chooses the cheapest one, forcing the gig companies to compete with each other:
The platforms like to pitch themselves as "frictionless," but the reality is that they don't reduce friction so much as reallocate it. Because they control the technology, because the law makes it a literal crime to wrestle that control away, they can shift all the friction from their side of the ledger to yours, whether you're a worker or a customer:
Tony West isn't lying when he says Uber values flexibility – they value their flexibility, which arises out of the constraints (technical, legal) they impose on us: the drivers and passengers.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
