oozey mess
The Bowery Presents
Monterey Bay Aquarium
pixel skylines
Sweet Seals For You, Always
$LAYYYTER
trying on a metaphor
Sade Olutola
No title available
Cosimo Galluzzi
Love Begins
sheepfilms
KIROKAZE
almost home
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
ellievsbear
No title available
official daine visual archive
Misplaced Lens Cap
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Argentina
seen from Singapore
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from Bangladesh
seen from Venezuela
seen from Ukraine
seen from South Korea
seen from Ukraine
seen from Canada
seen from Türkiye
seen from France
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
@theredkite
ok tumblr is currently telling me my blog has no posts with the tags I use to track my posts, so I'm making a new one in the hope that the easy win will help the search function to believe that the power to search for my tags was inside it all along
one of the reasons why "what if people went on a road trip and it was weird" is one of the oldest story types is that a lot of sense of personhood has been, historically, tied to place. the weird road trip says "what if we went somewhere else, where no one knows us, and tried out being a different person".
Odysseus, the famous liar, goes on a weird road trip & over the course of it becomes several different people, and then comes home & is all those people as well as himself, wearing the echoes of those other people
What’s that quote? There are only two kinds of stories: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.
nosferatu? no. tuferatu. no es mi problema.
no mi circo no mis feratus
batmanestunedroguedepassage
nosferatu ? non. tesferatu. c'est pas mon problème.
quorprêtre
pas mon cirque pas mes feratus.
My favourite scene from The Frame-Up Job. Sophie and Nate are just watching their favourite pet nemesis throw a temper tantrum like an exhausted toddler <3
*turns my attention inwards* mmmmm. no *turns my attention back outwards* oh god
By the way it's like. Really fucked how society's thoughts on epilepsy is just "get over it." Seizures can cause permanent brain damage. Seizures can kill people. Seizures hurt like hell. Allow me to reiterate that seizures can kill people. And you're just gonna casually put flashing lights, a common trigger for seizures in your advertisement, in your animation meme, in your edit, on your billboards, without even thinking about putting a simple disclaimer? That's unbelievable. Your little anime edit could deadass cost a life and you're not gonna put a warning because it's "inconvenient" or "people like that shouldn't be on the internet" (ableist) (the problem exists outside the internet also). Or you'll give insufficient ones like putting it in the captions or only giving like one second before the flashing lights appear, meaning that the trigger's already in motion before anyone who needs the warning can read it and save themselves from literal physical danger.
We need to start commenting under other people's posts about how to properly warn for flashing lights and eyestrain. We need to be emailing and calling companies about their possibly triggering advertisements that could induce seizures. We need to stop tolerating ableism and start speaking up for the more vulnerable.
Also, stop putting epilepsy warnings. That's like saying "warning: schizophrenia" on a post including unreality or "warning: dyslexia" on a post with a typing quirk. First off, the disability mentioned isn't the only group of people that this could trigger. Second, it doesn't truly get the message across and instead makes it worse for those with the disability-- scrolling through the epilepsy tag on Tumblr should get you to view the content of other epileptic people, but no, you just get a bunch of flashing lights and eyestrain, even though you could instead tag for, oh I dunno, flashing lights and eyestrain.
Anyways this Disability Pride, and for every month that comes after, think about epileptic people and others who are triggered by flashing lights/eyestrain. Happy pride to those who experience seizures too frequently due to the unaccommodating and ableist societies we live in!
“...A lone woman could, if she spun in almost every spare minute of her day, on her own keep a small family clothed in minimum comfort (and we know they did that). Adding a second spinner – even if they were less efficient (like a young girl just learning the craft or an older woman who has lost some dexterity in her hands) could push the household further into the ‘comfort’ margin, and we have to imagine that most of that added textile production would be consumed by the family (because people like having nice clothes!).
At the same time, that rate of production is high enough that a household which found itself bereft of (male) farmers (for instance due to a draft or military mortality) might well be able to patch the temporary hole in the family finances by dropping its textile consumption down to that minimum and selling or trading away the excess, for which there seems to have always been demand. ...Consequently, the line between women spinning for their own household and women spinning for the market often must have been merely a function of the financial situation of the family and the balance of clothing requirements to spinners in the household unit (much the same way agricultural surplus functioned).
Moreover, spinning absolutely dominates production time (again, around 85% of all of the labor-time, a ratio that the spinning wheel and the horizontal loom together don’t really change). This is actually quite handy, in a way, as we’ll see, because spinning (at least with a distaff) could be a mobile activity; a spinner could carry their spindle and distaff with them and set up almost anywhere, making use of small scraps of time here or there.
On the flip side, the labor demands here are high enough prior to the advent of better spinning and weaving technology in the Late Middle Ages (read: the spinning wheel, which is the truly revolutionary labor-saving device here) that most women would be spinning functionally all of the time, a constant background activity begun and carried out whenever they weren’t required to be actively moving around in order to fulfill a very real subsistence need for clothing in climates that humans are not particularly well adapted to naturally. The work of the spinner was every bit as important for maintaining the household as the work of the farmer and frankly students of history ought to see the two jobs as necessary and equal mirrors of each other.
At the same time, just as all farmers were not free, so all spinners were not free. It is abundantly clear that among the many tasks assigned to enslaved women within ancient households. Xenophon lists training the enslaved women of the household in wool-working as one of the duties of a good wife (Xen. Oik. 7.41). ...Columella also emphasizes that the vilica ought to be continually rotating between the spinners, weavers, cooks, cowsheds, pens and sickrooms, making use of the mobility that the distaff offered while her enslaved husband was out in the fields supervising the agricultural labor (of course, as with the bit of Xenophon above, the same sort of behavior would have been expected of the free wife as mistress of her own household).
...Consequently spinning and weaving were tasks that might be shared between both relatively elite women and far poorer and even enslaved women, though we should be sure not to take this too far. Doubtless it was a rather more pleasant experience to be the wealthy woman supervising enslaved or hired hands working wool in a large household than it was to be one of those enslaved women, or the wife of a very poor farmer desperately spinning to keep the farm afloat and the family fed. The poor woman spinner – who spins because she lacks a male wage-earner to support her – is a fixture of late medieval and early modern European society and (as J.S. Lee’s wage data makes clear; spinners were not paid well) must have also had quite a rough time of things.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of household textile production in the shaping of pre-modern gender roles. It infiltrates our language even today; a matrilineal line in a family is sometimes called a ‘distaff line,’ the female half of a male-female gendered pair is sometimes the ‘distaff counterpart’ for the same reason. Women who do not marry are sometimes still called ‘spinsters’ on the assumption that an unmarried woman would have to support herself by spinning and selling yarn (I’m not endorsing these usages, merely noting they exist).
E.W. Barber (Women’s Work, 29-41) suggests that this division of labor, which holds across a wide variety of societies was a product of the demands of the one necessarily gendered task in pre-modern societies: child-rearing. Barber notes that tasks compatible with the demands of keeping track of small children are those which do not require total attention (at least when full proficiency is reached; spinning is not exactly an easy task, but a skilled spinner can very easily spin while watching someone else and talking to a third person), can easily be interrupted, is not dangerous, can be easily moved, but do not require travel far from home; as Barber is quick to note, producing textiles (and spinning in particular) fill all of these requirements perfectly and that “the only other occupation that fits the criteria even half so well is that of preparing the daily food” which of course was also a female-gendered activity in most ancient societies. Barber thus essentially argues that it was the close coincidence of the demands of textile-production and child-rearing which led to the dominant paradigm where this work was ‘women’s work’ as per her title.
(There is some irony that while the men of patriarchal societies of antiquity – which is to say effectively all of the societies of antiquity – tended to see the gendered division of labor as a consequence of male superiority, it is in fact male incapability, particularly the male inability to nurse an infant, which structured the gendered division of labor in pre-modern societies, until the steady march of technology rendered the division itself obsolete. Also, and Barber points this out, citing Judith Brown, we should see this is a question about ability rather than reliance, just as some men did spin, weave and sew (again, often in a commercial capacity), so too did some women farm, gather or hunt. It is only the very rare and quite stupid person who will starve or freeze merely to adhere to gender roles and even then gender roles were often much more plastic in practice than stereotypes make them seem.)
Spinning became a central motif in many societies for ideal womanhood. Of course one foot of the fundament of Greek literature stands on the Odyssey, where Penelope’s defining act of arete is the clever weaving and unweaving of a burial shroud to deceive the suitors, but examples do not stop there. Lucretia, one of the key figures in the Roman legends concerning the foundation of the Republic, is marked out as outstanding among women because, when a group of aristocrats sneak home to try to settle a bet over who has the best wife, she is patiently spinning late into the night (with the enslaved women of her house working around her; often they get translated as ‘maids’ in a bit of bowdlerization. Any time you see ‘maids’ in the translation of a Greek or Roman text referring to household workers, it is usually quite safe to assume they are enslaved women) while the other women are out drinking (Liv. 1.57). This display of virtue causes the prince Sextus Tarquinius to form designs on Lucretia (which, being virtuous, she refuses), setting in motion the chain of crime and vengeance which will overthrow Rome’s monarchy. The purpose of Lucretia’s wool-working in the story is to establish her supreme virtue as the perfect aristocratic wife.
...For myself, I find that students can fairly readily understand the centrality of farming in everyday life in the pre-modern world, but are slower to grasp spinning and weaving (often tacitly assuming that women were effectively idle, or generically ‘homemaking’ in ways that precluded production). And students cannot be faulted for this – they generally aren’t confronted with this reality in classes or in popular culture. ...Even more than farming or blacksmithing, this is an economic and household activity that is rendered invisible in the popular imagination of the past, even as (as you can see from the artwork in this post) it was a dominant visual motif for representing the work of women for centuries.”
- Bret Devereaux, “Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part III: Spin Me Right Round…”
If I may tag onto this: it's really astonishing how much spinning you can get done when you do it in tiny increments. When I'm at a medieval market or music festival (back when that was... a thing), I carry my spindle everywhere and just spin a tiny little bit, constantly. Waiting in line for food. Sitting somewhere waiting for the next band to play, in the early morning when nobody's up yet. I can get through 100 gr of fibre in a day like this without consciously dedicating any extended time periods to it (and I'm not the best with a drop spindle). I would imagine that is roughly the way it worked in pre-modern cultures, too, which means that yes, it was possible to supply the fabric for an entire household this way, if the fabric was also taken care of properly (mended, re-used, recycled ...) and the spinner didn't suffer from illness or had any disabilities (!). It wouldn't be easy, but it also wouldn't be terrifying back-breaking labour.
I would like to amend the above: spinning all day every day in order to keep your family afloat must absolutely have been terrifying back-breaking labour eventually. Or wrist-breaking.
In unrelated news, last year I got a repetitive strain injury from too much spinning, and had never been so grateful in my life that I can simply stop spinning and suffer no financial hardship from it.
I hate the term 'differently abled'. The only reason it exists is because the word disabled makes abled people uncomfortable.
when i was a little kid (age 8 and on) i had 3 veryyy intense special interests i constantly infodumped about to anyone who gave me the time of day. these were:
The Bubonic Plague
Vampire Folklore
Tree frogs.
So as you can imagine my mom spent many years prepping me for social outings by doing a call-and-response litany with me that went "let's focus on tree frogs tonight. let's tell people about tree frogs."
Every time I apply my oestrogen gel because of menopause I think "there is a trans woman somewhere who is also sitting in her underwear post shower waiting for the gel to dry before she finishes getting dressed" and I feel happy and a sense of kinship and camaraderie with her even though I am not a trans woman or even trans femme in anyway
But I know how to apply the gel because I saw posts from trans women how to apply it and I feel that even though are reasons for using it are different that we are not so different
So for any woman or non binary person out there who are sitting post oestrogen gel application and scrolling on their phone as they wait for it to dry...we are doing this together and this genderqueer person lovee you
3500 years ago a bunch of people decided to build a tower to the sky and now I have to worry about keeping up my Duolingo streak
why would you blame the people reaching for heaven instead of the god who cursed them
add that one to the list, boys
You're right and you should say it
some of you people are so annoying. i mean me too but good lord
bouncing off of @an-ruraiocht’s Iliad/Odyssey/Aeneid poll I’m curious about some other ancient Greek and Roman texts
Which of the following Greek or Roman texts would you say you are most familiar with?
The Iliad (Homer)
The Odyssey (Homer)
The Aeneid (Vergil)
Antigone (Sophocles)
Oedipus Rex (Sophocles)
Medea (Euripides)
The Bacchae (Euripides)
Another Greek tragedy (tell me in the tags!)
Metamorphoses (Ovid)
Pharsalia/Bellum Civile (Lucan)
Thebaid (Statius)
Another Greek or Roman epic poem (tell me in the tags!)
which of these classical texts have you read?
the iliad, the odyssey, and the aeneid
the iliad and the odyssey, not the aeneid
the iliad only
the odyssey only
the aeneid only
the aeneid and the iliad, not the odyssey
the aeneid and the odyssey, not the iliad
I have read none of these
"what if I've read part of it" if it's a large enough part that you would consider yourself to Have Read It in general contexts, then it counts. if it's not, then it doesn't. only you can be the judge of that, but I'm not giving you a nuance button.
any translations count, but abridged retellings don't
obviously, there are lots of other classical texts out there. you might have read none of these and be an expert on greek tragedy. I'm not judging your classical knowledge so you don't need to tell me all that. I'm just curious about combos of these specific texts and their popularity, bc a post i just saw got me thinking about it
My coworker had managed to catch 3 out of 4 kittens that a neighborhood semi-feral popped out 5 weeks ago. So now they are at work to be tamed and found new homes.
They are already tame. The boys like armpit scritchies. Girl kitten was too sleepy to really join in.
