Wren's Nest

I'm a middle-aged polyamorous suburban mom casually reading. Stories about my kids, husband, and metamour are here. Stories about my D/s relationship with my partner are found at @subbywren.

[queer-as-city-folk]

Anti-city people are just plain fascinating to me

[thingsisaidweredumb]

"yeah i mean you just have to have energy to go to the store every day even for a fast trip because you can't keep food at home"

people who think everyone should want this life are fascinating to me

[buttstothemoon]

Having a grocery store nearby doesn't eliminate any and all possibility of doing big shops. It just allows the option of fewer smaller shops.

[thingsisaidweredumb]

........ The post is literally about how not having a car elimiates the possibility of doing big shops. No one said having a grocery store nearby eliminated any and all possibilities of doing big shops. The screenshot shows someone asking those who are dogmatically dedicated to the idea that no one should have cars how they would go grocery shopping with 4-8 bags of groceries. The answer given is that you do a small shop every day instead of a big shop every week.

I said that you have to have energy for that, and thus the dogmatic assertion that everyone should do that is ableist.

Your response is that people can do a big shop if they want. So I ask you what the original tweet asked: How do people do this in a world without cars?

Also I'm fascinated by this idea that people in suburban areas cannot do quick small shops. Mixed use zoning isn't what "allows the option for fewer smaller shops" because energy is still what allows that. I do smaller quick trips frequently when I'm not working (like today I went to the store just to get antacids, tomorrow I will go just to get lactaid). When I am working, however, I don't have energy for that and do big shops on the weekends. Having a grocery store next to my house would not change the way that works. My energy reserves aren't going to magically work different because I have a grocer store next to me instead of a family of 4.

[queer-as-city-folk]

Hi, Op here. The post is making fun of the twitter op for moving the goal post.

And it does use less energy when you don't have to drive to get somewhere and can walk a block. If you want to do big shops, you still can, if you use a cart or cargo bike. I also never said cars should be banned in this post

Also, I am a disabled person, I cannot drive.

[gluecookie]

mc character calls itself murderbot but rarely if ever murders in cold blood Meanwhile this ship just. Fucking try me i will murder you

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

And we love it for that!

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#SMALL! PREDATOR!#LARGE! HERBIVORE!

[athanza]

From Veronica Tucker via Pinterest

[hungry-skeleton]

Asexuals were always part of pride and it really fucking shows when people think it's a recent term.

[hungry-skeleton]

Although not going by the term "asexual" yet, asexuality was spoken about alongside homosexuality as far back as the 1890s. Asexual history is just as vital to queer history as any other term and I'm so tired of watching us being treated like a new thing

[hungry-skeleton]

This image is so so fucking important to me

[hungry-skeleton]

Reblog this, cowards

[icantspellthings]

Top 3 things people love insisting they don't have despite it being impossible

Pronouns

An accent

Bias

[tj-crochets]

My grandma just called and, among other things, said “You have hips. That’s good! Men like hips!” and then she interrupted herself to say “Women like hips. People of your preferred gender like hips. I can never remember”  And I was like “Thanks grandma! My preferred gender is none of them, no thanks.” and she was like “Okay, no one will comment on your hips!” very self satisfied, like “aha, I have figured it out” I think like half her grandkids are some variety of not-straight and she can’t always remember which is which but she is the epitome of like “she’s a little confused, but she’s got the spirit!”

[tj-crochets]

Update: I gave it some thought and my estimate was wrong. Of the grandkids that are out, it’s 1/3, not ½

[tj-crochets]

I told my grandma that I’d told my friends about what she said and that some of y’all had said you wished she was your grandma, and she said “Well, you can never have too many grandkids!”  So like…consider her your honorary grandma* I guess? *if you want an honorary grandma, that is

[tj-crochets]

Update on my grandma: I told her my hair was standing up, but instead of straight line it was diagonal and she said “That’s okay, you’ve never been straight!” and then laughed so hard at her own joke I thought she was going to drop the phone

[tj-crochets]

Happy almost pride month! Have my confused-but-supportive grandma!

[tj-crochets]

An update: my grandma just called me to ask if I knew it was pride month

[tj-crochets]

Happy pride month!!

[annabelle--cane]

I think the core difference between the book and movie versions of ryland grace is that, while both are desperately afraid of taking action, book!grace's fear stems from the fact that he doesn't want to be hurt, whereas as for movie!grace it's that he genuinely thinks he's incapable of doing anything meaningful.

compare how they react to remembering they were forced onto the ship:

in the book, he stands around in numb ashamed shock at his cowardice for a minute before deciding, against rocky's better judgement, that they should voluntarily subject the hail mary to a six g force again to get the lab equipment up and running instead of just waiting eleven days to get back to the blip-A, and it hurts him a lot and he ends up passing out from it. he locates the problem in his memory as being that he was too caught up in concern for his own wellbeing, so he tries to counterbalance it by opting to do something bizarrely personally risky so they can get back to work more quickly. his refrain in his memories is "I don't want to die."

in the film, he remembers it all and then he's back to his old self when saying his farewells to rocky. his emotional vulnerability is gone, his walls are back up, he tries to leave without saying a real goodbye before rocky continues the conversation, and he rejects being called "brave." all his weeks of learning to do the scary thing so he can care for someone and be cared about are just gone. he locates the problem in his memory as being that he as a person is simply not brave; he lacks the gene for it and isn't capable of real accomplishment; he'd thought he could grow and change and he was wrong. his refrain in his memories is "I can't do it."

[gossamer-green]

i love this and i'd like to share some related thoughts on movie!grace specifically (mostly because i'm much more familiar with him than with book!grace)

it did seem to me like the movie!grace we see who's so so unsure of himself must be pretty different from the him further in the past, a guy we know called out prominent scientists in his field by name to insult them and even declared one a staggering waste of carbon—at a conference, so presumbaly face-to-face, and in front of a crowd. i've been of the belief that the fallout from all that, combined with his already being in a bad place mentally when it happened, ended up just totally shattering his self-esteem/self-confidence.

he says at the meeting after the explosion: "some people are failures," and he was surely thinking about how his stance on non-water-based life forms (and his actions in defense of it) led to his disgraced exit from academia AND seemed to be proven wrong by astrophage, which had seemed to have all the makings of a lifeform that would finally prove him right.

but what i think is extra interesting (especially in relation to this post) is his next line: "some people don't rise to the challenge." i do wonder if he's still thinking a bit about his life in academia there, sitting underneath the obvious and current challenge of giving up his life.

in the book, stratt berates grace for always fleeing from risk, like leaving academia when he was met with backlash and opting instead to be the "cool teacher" who's adored by his young students. if things in the past went that way for movie!grace, then i think it adds an interesting layer to him in that he's already aware and ashamed of his risk aversion, and that shameful aversion cyclically feeds into and is fed by his belief that he isn't a capable person.

[annabelle--cane]

aw yeah now you're speaking my language. I said a few things about book!grace's response to being ousted from academia in another addition I made to this post, but to expand, I think the subtly altered dialogue in the two versions of his first scene with stratt convey that the two iterations of the character took slightly different things away from the same experience. the in-person "staggering waste of carbon" incident is a movie-only inclusion, and you're right, that's not a very "unsure of himself" thing to do, and whatsmore it's a super mean thing to say (which doesn't seem all that like him) and also simply an innovatively stupid move. like, if he wanted to precisely calculate the best way to explode his career, that would be it. in the book, he says of that paper that he "had enough of the research world and that was sort of a ‘kiss-my-butt’ goodbye," meaning it was knowingly incendiary, but we don't get a similar line in the film.

movie!grace has a few moments were we see him express anger externally: something crosses a line and ticks him off and he screams and hits inanimate objects about it. important to note, I think, that he's never screaming at anyone, the objects he smacks around are mostly his own, and that the one time he does it in front of other people and in someone else's space that he keeps the physical stuff confined to a trash bin and cools down a little before taking to anyone and apologizes afterwards, broadly showing that he's not trying to be aggressive and genuinely does just have a short fuse. combined with the lack of any "I was on my way out of the field and wanted to leave with a bang" lines, it reads to me like he just lost his temper in a really bad way in a public professional setting. he wasn't looking for an opportunity to get out, he had a visible acute breakdown and lost his job. and he remembers that whole episode as "I was fired for standing by what I wrote" instead of something like "I was fired for making a scene at a conference and severing all my professional connections," locating the problem as being that he stood up for himself in the first place.

what I think is particularly interesting is that his conclusion of "I'm a failure, I can't rise to the challenge" looks completely rational from his pov. he cussed out the leading scholar in his field in front of an audience and got fired about it (yeah that'll happen if you do that) and then his big bold idea got roundly disproven (so maybe they were all right to treat him like he didn't matter regardless of how much he believed in the work). "I can't handle the pressure, I'm not skilled enough, I'm wrong about my strongest convictions and I'll suffer pointlessly if I actually try to give it my all" is a reasonable takeaway to have from that sequence of events. he conducted himself poorly and was legitimately wrong, the narrative doesn't validate that he was secretly right to do any of that, it just says that he shouldn't have let it ruin his self-image.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

Martina McBride didn't win Country Music Association Song of the Year for a song about how burning your house down with your abusive husband still inside it is good, noble, and an allegory for the American Revolution for people to act like the genre belongs to bootlicking fucks

[dragon-in-a-fez]

other things people didn't do for you to act like country music belongs to bootlicking fucks:

Garth Brooks winning video of the year at the ACMs for a song about how none of us are free as long as there's racism and homophobia

Reba McEntire charting with a gothic horror song about an innocent man being executed by an incompetent judge and a corrupt sheriff

Willie Nelson being, well, his entire self tbh

Dolly Parton recording the hating capitalism banger of all time

Kacey Musgraves telling everyone to ignore the haters, smoke weed, and be a bisexual slut

[dragon-in-a-fez]

how the hell did I leave Morgan Wade off this list. wrote a song about being depressed, alcoholic, and suicidal and how mental illness stigma sucks, saw how much people connected with it, wrote a Part II of that song about how she's doing better now but you're never totally free of the risk of relapse. fucking icon.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

I specifically curated this list so people couldn't be like "ah yes but you see here is my simple binary of good and bad country music which always works", I made sure to add different genders, eras, subgenres, etc and y'all are still pulling that shit in the tags!

listen. Alan Jackson, the archetypal mister big hat man sitting on a tractor singing about a pickup truck, wrote a shockingly normal song about 9/11 that was like "yeah I don't know jack shit about politics but my copy of the bible says we're supposed to love everyone" and then went on the radio and explained how he specifically wanted to write a song about that day that "wasn't vengeful". Miranda Lambert took the southern leftist slogan "y'all means all" and made it the title of a corny ass pop-country song for the Queer Eye soundtrack. Kenny Chesney stole a horse from a cop and Tim McGraw put the cop in a chokehold defending him, and I know that's not about their music but it is, and this is very important, fucking sick as hell

it's fine if you only listen to female country artists or pre-1990 country artists or whatever the fuck you want but stop acting like you've cracked the secret code to dividing a whole genre of art into good pure anti-establishment folk songs vs bad corrupted right-wing sellout pulp

[dragon-in-a-fez]

updating this post for 2025:

Luke Combs covering Fast Car and keeping the line "I work in the market as a checkout girl" and doing an interview about how he couldn't change a single word because it's not his story. king shit

Morgan Wallen doing I Had Some Help, literally the first song that spoke to me as a male survivor of domestic abuse. also shoutout to the guy for getting caught saying a racial slur and responding by specifically telling his fans not to defend him and raising a bunch of money for the Black Music Action Coalition. bro had an engraved invitation to the culture war and said "nah I'd rather be normal"

Shaboozey just absolutely obliterating the drunk roadhouse anthem glass ceiling

Maren Morris and Brothers Osborne with a song that okay, released in 2019 but I didn't hear until recently, about how good friends mind their own business and let you love whoever you want and also get high with you when you're broke

Kimberley Perry! If I Die Young Part 2!! "actually I'm glad I lived, bitch" ass song that I bet is gonna mean a LOT to kids fighting depression

Kelsea Ballerini and Noah Kahan with Cowboys Cry Too. okay it's shallow and corny but genuinely a shallow and corny song about how men shouldn't be afraid to have feelings is what a lot of men need

[dragon-in-a-fez]

bringing the full version of this post back around because people are pissing me off today

[probablyasocialecologist]

“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”

What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us

[wire-smith]

I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.

I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.

And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.

[bob-artist]

Can I interest you in a

.

…

a…

…

crabonated beverage?

[bob-artist]

How to tell when your pun has reached both of its intended demographics

[blumineck]

How Orissa Kelly gave me rope burn!

(AKA there’s a reason circus performers usually prefer silks)

ALSO

If you like this sort of nerdy content and you’d like to see me test a bunch of fantasy tropes in a suit of armour, please consider supporting The Bluminarmour Project!

The Bluminarmour Project

Blumineck is trying to fun a video series doing fun and serious historical and fantasy testing in fitted plate armour.

[carys-the-ninth]

"The magic system is never fully explained" yeah that's how life works. Imagine having a story set in modern day America and the characters have several pages of exposition on combustion engines and telecommunication networks before we get to the plot

[et-in-arkadia]

i think this is absolutely correct and good writing advice but also victor hugo would like to have a word with you about the parisian sewer system circa 1832

[bendingsignpost]

victor hugo would like to have many words with you about the parisian sewer system circa 1831

[prismatoxic]

if you've ever found yourself wishing you could watch more media where a leading lady protagonist gets treated the way a messy emotionally constipated man typically gets treated, i do have to aggressively recommend you watch star trek: lower decks

i was rambling about it last night and it occurred to me that beckett mariner is in fact a flavor of fuckboy, and i love that about her

[needsmoreexplosions]

Since Google is useless now I propose the new phrase "Wikipedia is free" when someone tries to derail a post they know jack shit about

[victusinveritas]

He's prostrating himself before the Eucharist, in case you're wondering. Or possibly planking.

[vvatchword]

@apocrypals

[apocrypals]

Hi, pope expert here. This isn’t funny — popes only do this when they’re in extreme distress

[rainathrownaway]

We're all in extreme distress, he's not special.

[thedoctorknits]

Starting an embroidery project at 10pm on a saturday is definitely going to end well lol

[thedoctorknits]

Okay maybe I'm not 100% starting it because tracing from a tablet screen is impossible and we're out of printer ink

[thedoctorknits]

Printer ink acquired

Also the fact my phone can extract zip files is wild to my 90's brain

[thedoctorknits]

Now that took a hot minute

I'm going to just have to freehand place/town names I think because the pencil transfer on linen just can't get the details fine enough to be legible

[thedoctorknits]

@ink-and-stars yessssss let me know what she thinks

[thedoctorknits]

Okay so matching the typography freehand isn't too bad, but the sizing on this thread count linen is a bit of a nightmare. Its a 30(ish) count I had in stash but I probably should have at least a 40.

[leggywormy]

It's end of May, yall know what that means

[zeestarfishalien]

Come on guys, if we're gonna do this, it needs to be in true tumblr style