Sophia, the Boston woman from 1875 who haunts a lamp I got at Brimfield: what is a stay at home girlfriend, if you please?

me: well, it's a woman who's financially supported by the man she's dating, and she lives with him and usually keeps house and cooks for him

her: and they're not married?

me: well, no; hence "girlfriend" rather than "wife." I know that may alarm y-

her: oh calm down I know about Kept Women. he has no legal tie to her, though? she has no sort of standing with him in the eyes of the law? only his word that he'll follow through?

me: yes

her: and remind me again- you don't have to be financially dependent on a man anymore, right? there are more than like three careers open to women that will let you support yourself at a decent level now? and society isn't pressuring you 24/7 to get married and stop working outside the home?

me: yes

her: so these women. CHOOSE to be dependent on a man. who could leave them at any moment without legal consequence. because they don't like their jobs. the jobs, while imperfect, that let them live on their own, answerable to no-one

me: yes

her: that had better be some absolutely amazing jewelry they can pawn off if he leaves them, then

me: it's usually not

her: THERE'S NOT EVEN SECURITY JEWELRY?!

me: oh by the way they blame feminism for "having to work"

her:

her: I became fully dependent on my in-laws who hated me, after my husband died two years into our marriage, because I was a 23-year-old orphan with no marketable skills in any avenue besides Running A Household and the only men left unmarried in my social circle were widowers thirty years my senior. I also couldn't establish lines of credit as a widow because the merchants said my husband dying so soon meant that I didn't have stable enough income. and that was entirely legal

me: yeah

her: I'm going to go slam some doors please do not bother me

Stop giving men the ability to ruin your life 2k25

Not the point of this post but I'm endlessly amused that Tumblr has rediscovered ghosts as a cultural metaphor for confronting the horrors of the present through the lens of the past in meme format. The essays I could write-

everything u need to know about me can actually be explained by the fact that i read that poem about the serving girl wearing the pearls so they're warm for her mistress when i was like 11 and it rewrote my brain chemistry forever

like this Changed Me

Sometimes you just gotta let an email sit in your inbox until you’re confident your reply won’t start with “listen bitch”

— beau taplin

"This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We've got extra pronouns here."

GNU Terry Pratchett

The full quote is fascinating though, and adds an interesting context as it's Angua (a werewolf) and Carrot (human, but raised by dwarves) discussing a dwarf colleague, Cheery.

"Female? He told you he was female?" "She," Angua corrected. "This is Ankh-Morpork, you know. We've got extra pronouns here." She could smell his bewilderment... "Well, I would have though she'd have the decency to keep it to herself," Carrot said finally. "I don't think it's very clever, you know, to go around drawing attention to the fact." "Carrot, I think you might have something wrong with your head," said Angua. "What?" "I think you might have it stuck up your bum."

Sir Terry Pratchett - "Feet of Clay"

This is CARROT being the asshole. Carrot who has, throughout all the prior books, been depicted as basically the best of all possible people. He is noble, brave, considerate, kind. He is the good guy in the entire City...

... and yet, he grew up dwarf, and has picked up their more conservative views on gender identity.

Discworld dwarves start out in the books as basically a people without visible gender differences (thanks to the woman growing beards just like the men) and using "he/him" pronouns as their default. Anything else is seen as breaking the most basic of social conventions. (Dwarf dating is described early on as being two dwarves who like each other spending an inordinately long time trying to find out, as tactfully as possible, what gender the other dwarf is)

Carrot does immediately adopt the "she" pronoun for Cheery, which is but wishes she didn't make such a fuss about it. He's prepared to tolerate her choices, but he doesn't APPROVE of them, and thinks that that is enough.

Carrot, because he IS Carrot, does learn to open his mind on this subject, perhaps his final frontier of bias, but I do love that it's addressed as something he has to work on, and succeed.

And to Terry Pratchett's credit what started out as a throwaway joke about dwarf sex, gradually becomes a multi-volume subplot which is a fascinating exploration of gender and social identity as more dwarves start to "come out" as being female, and not just identifying as female, but changing their form of dress to something which matches who they are (they keep their beards though, because to a dwarf, that has nothing to do with gender, and everything to do with being a dwarf) and how their society has to adjust, with differing levels of comfort, to this new reality.

Carrot was also prejudiced against the undead early on as well. And the fact that he unlearns these views is a good example of a common theme in Pratchett's work

The overwhelming theme of Pratchett's work is change. Not good vs evil but progress vs stasis/going backwards. The protagonists of Pratchett's stories are people who can take on board new ideas and change and grow and adapt. Some of them start out as very stupid people with very stupid views in fact until they learn and grow and improve. The villains on the other hand are people who desperately want things to either stay the same or regress back to some imagined "Good old days" that they prefer.

While we're talking about Terry Pratchett gender, there's also golems, who are basically lumps of clay that have been brought to life but don't actually have any gender or secondary sexual characteristics so everyone defaults to male and he/him. As the books story goes on some of them decide to try being women just because.

Feet of Clay came out in 1996. I cannot overstate how pronoun discourse wasn't anywhere on the radar then. I'm fairly terminally online, active in fandom, and the first I can remember is some timid discussion of neopronouns in the mid-2000s, where "how could you tell other people to use them for you" was a major puzzle. (I still love neopronouns - zie/hir appeals to me in a way they distinctly doesn't, genderfluid though I am.)

ALSO also also

1) I don't have the book to hand, but when Cheery comes out she changes her name to Cheri, because "sometimes, when you shout who you are to the whole world, you need to do it quietly." It's such a beautiful expression of coming out being a process, and one that needn't be undertaken all at once.

2) Pterry had the best goyische take I've ever seen on golems, and I will die on that hill. It's not perfect, but it is really well-done, and it was done with respect, and to me that might be even more important than perfection.

I had the book to hand because I reread it recently. The quote goes:

THERE we go.

Discovery

The Atlantic, which I grew up with thinking of as a literary magazine but which is now better known as the magainze whose editor in chief was somehow invited to the Houthi PC Small Group chat on Signal, has a new story which reveals some of the vile details of the administration's illegal deportation machine.

I hope you will be able to read the whole thing; I'm a subscriber now so I get to gift articles. But here is the summary:

We use the phrase "due process" to talk about why all this is wrong; and I partially blame the lack of traction that this argument gets on the cultural effect of several decades of crime shows in which things like "due process" are treated as "technicalities" that allow Bad People to elude legal punishment. Due process is not a technicality. It is what protects our rights to life and liberty from a government that even before this point has shown quite an appetite for incarcerating its citizens.

Under the rule of law, if the government wants to lock you up, they have to prove that they have a reason for doing it. They have to show a judge some evidence that you might have broken the law. That's due process. The administration has decided that ICE can skip this step. That's what made this "administrative error" possible. Had ICE even once been required to show some evidence in court as to why they were deporting Abrego Garcia, the judge would have blocked them from doing it based on his protected status.

Instead, they flew him to the country he fled from at 16--trying to AVOID being targeted by the MS-13 gang--and put him in what is basically a dungeon--for, evidently forever, since they are now claiming that once we send someone to El Salvador we have no means of retrieving them.

Tim Miller over at the Bulwark always refers to this 'megaprison' as a gulag. I say forget Stalin, forget Putin. This is old school. This is Don Pisarro-style authoritarianism. This is fucking Count of Monte Cristo-style authoritarianism. We are not deporting these people; we're disappearing them.

Back to the constitutional crisis thing: you might ask, "Well, if the administration isn't going to abide by the judge's decision, what's the point of lawsuits?" This is the point. Discovery. As long as they're still playing this "unitary executive theory" game according to which anything can be construed as legal if Donald Trump Says So--and that is exactly what they're arguing in this filing-- then they have to follow basic legal procedure, and that means they have to provide information about what they're doing and why. And that's how you find out about things like this.

So keep suing these assholes. Make them do their discovery. Make them cough up the dirty details. Make them discover their vileness for as long as they can be forced to do it.

US citizens: contact your Congresspeople. No matter what party, they need to know we care about our people.

Imagine your rich dumbass parents got scammed out of a ridiculous amount of money because they believed that determining how a bunch of cells would likely score on an "intelligence" test or which hobbies it would be good at once it's grown into a human child was real and possible, and then they'd hate you for not being be a genius. I think these kids should be legally allowed to kill their parents.

@leaving-earth requested the least seen movies. So here we have a list of the top 100 films that tumblr users reported as having heard of but not having seen per results on @haveyouseenthismovie-poll.

TW: A couple of films famous for racism are on this list so please enter at your own risk.

Given the number of titles on this list that belong to relatively obscure films which later received much more popular remakes, I have to wonder how many respondents are unwittingly inflating their tally because they didn't notice it says Little Shop of Horrors (1960) and not Little Shop of Horrors (1986).

It’s been crazy to me that people haven’t figured out that ceasefire and the return of the hostages are very connected events. It’s why Israelis are protesting Bibi, they want the ceasefire to stay to get the hostages back. It’s been pretty clear from most of the polling in Israel that the majority of the people want to stop fighting if they can get all their people back. So seeing all these people yelling ceasefire now while demonizing those who are advocating for the hostages, ripping down posters and genuinely making disgusting remarks on them really makes me question if they want a ceasefire.

They don't. I'm seeing some of them mocking Gazans who are protesting Hamas. Talk about blood boiling. Those Gazans have more courage in their little toes than these leftists will have in their entire bodies in their whole lives.

the thing that's been so frustrating to see is how the families and loves ones of the hostages have been the ones advocating HARDCORE for a ceasefire, for peace, standing outside Bibi's house.

and no one either notices or cares

or acknowledges that even months before Oct. 7 Israelis were marching in the streets against Netanyahu's tyranny

people would rather demonize a nation of 15 million people, babies and children included, as inherently evil, and that's just bigotry 101 it's so stupid

the "pick a side" mentality of the internet is so tiresome. The real world is not fandom wars. Every nation has good and bad people. LOTS of people live in nations with terrible leadership. I'm from the United States and live in fucking Florida, I understand this very clearly that the people who represent me share absolutely none of my values and I would be mortified at the entire world thinking Byron Donalds or Rick Scott or Ron Desantis or Donald Trump and that other new senator who hopped in for Rubio whose name I can't remember but I'm sure she's terrible too, represent how I feel or any of my values.

Like take a long hard look at yourself. If you live somewhere where A) you have fair representation and B) your representative has good values, consider yourself lucky and have some compassion for people who happened to be born somewhere with worse leadership than you. If you live in a place with shitty leadership, have some fucking empathy for people who have to deal with the same

nuance is dead, but it doesn't have to be. You don't have to reduce complex world affairs to a catchphrase, you don't need everything to be easily explained in 280 characters. You just gotta read and do some critical thinking and have more empathy for EVERY single victim of conflict who wanted no part of it but had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It's not hard to do. In fact, I think if you really want to claim decency, you have a moral imperative to have empathy for ALL victims of conflict.

nothing will ever live up to the moment when after devouring over 250 pages deeply immersed in the characters and story and after the emotions of the proposal I reached the very end of the letter that turns everything on its head only to find out that Mr Darcy's name is Fitzwilliam

how could i forget to mention that this also comes shortly after meeting his cousin whose surname is also fitzwilliam

thank you so much for telling me this precious piece of information which i have now permanently integrated into my p&p belief system

@hazel-athena this feels like a very targeted reblog.

In case this is useful to anyone, I once spent the better part of a day in a chat announcing my findings as I worked this through. I assure you, nobody else cared, but fortunately they're the kind of friends who humor me when I'm on one of my investigations.

the tboy mullet and everything.. who else would be this bold

Happy Spring to the truest thing that’s ever been said about Spring

Happy Spring to

the truest thing that’s ever

been said about Spring

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

told my girlfriend that if she proposes i want a secondhand wedding ring. i explained i don't want to contribute to a vanity-based industry like diamond mining, and that it would be important to me to continue marriage traditions in a way that causes minimal environmental and personal harm. she asked me if i was just trying to roll the dice on obtaining a haunted object, and i told her i can want two things.