elegantqueenpirate-blog

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"Hello, Spud. How are you feeling?"

Laurie, dying. Ralph, touching his crush's chest.

Hey, what if I knew ANYTHING about naval uniforms, wouldn't that be amazing

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What happened on that occasion was this. One day at Antioch, while a comedian and his wife were on the stage performing some scenes from common life before a hushed and admiring audience, the woman said: ‘Unless I am dreaming, the Persians are here.’ The spectators all turned their heads and then fled in confusion to escape the missiles raining down upon them. The city was set on fire, and many people who were strolling at large, as one does in time of peace, were cut down.

I love this sort of Kaufmanesque anti-humor

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God damnit.

O Captain! My Captain!

by Walt Whitman

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won, The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring; But O heart! heart! heart! O the bleeding drops of red, Where on the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up — for you the flag is flung — for you the bugle trills, For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths — for you the shores a-crowding, For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning; Here Captain! dear father! This arm beneath your head! It is some dream that on the deck, You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still, My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will, The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done, From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won; Exult O shores, and ring O bells! But I with mournful tread, Walk the deck my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead.

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Thinking about how my job sort of ground to a halt due to lack of work, I had some time to really consider my sexuality. An then I got fired* and now I am only thinking about work, and where to find it. Again.

* which I consider unfair since my official position was basically terminated, but I still got unemployment so whatever

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I have to add that some historians now think the dark lady might have been literally not white. In some ways the speaker sees the same sex attraction and the attraction to the dark lady as equally unconventional and puzzling to his expectations. They are not equally against nature to the speaker, but they seem equally to cause passionate reflection.

On the sonnets of Shakespeare:

"A woman's face with nature's own hand painted" and "My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun" are both about being confused by attraction.

(This came to me in a dream, I think. One of my nicer mental qualities is the ability to do small amounts of literary criticism while asleep.)

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On the sonnets of Shakespeare:

"A woman's face with nature's own hand painted" and "My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun" are both about being confused by attraction.

(This came to me in a dream, I think. One of my nicer mental qualities is the ability to do small amounts of literary criticism while asleep.)

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“I feel very strongly that if historical romance can give women a happy ending, it can give queer people a happy ending. M/f historical romance doesn’t tie itself in knots over the likelihood of the rake having syphilis, the terrible dentistry, the lice, the prolapsed uterus after multiple pregnancies, the prospect of death in childbed, or the horrifying legal discrimination against married women. We don’t close the book on the wedding scene reflecting that the heroine can now be legally raped, has just lost all her property to her husband…and would be vanishingly unlikely to obtain a divorce. Historical romance readers aren’t stupid; we know this stuff, but we choose to believe our heroine will be one of the lucky ones. And I don’t see why we can’t extend that happy glow to other stories, too. If women’s lives don’t have to be blighted by social oppression in romance, neither do those of people of color or queer people. Moreover, human nature doesn’t change. A lot of what we read about LGBT people in history is appalling because the rec­ords we have are the legal documents, the newspaper reports, the accounts of people who were victimized. We don’t generally have the hidden stories of the people who lived under the radar…. But we know…people we’d now call gay, bi, trans have always existed and [that] as a matter of statistics plenty of them must have lived and died without ever coming to the law’s attention. Which is not to hand-wave the horrors of the past but only to say that horror isn’t the only story, and it’s not an acceptable reason to deny marginalized people their happy-ever-after.”

— KJ Charles (Library Journal interview) 

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One of the funniest people I have known, when asked about a phenomenon he found distasteful, would intone, with perfect sarcastic seriousness, "Nothing human is alien to me."

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I do think it's super fascinating that there are only two independent discoveries of zero and one was by the Mayans.

e was the last to be discovered and honestly I still find it baffling.

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Silly idea: Marxist materialist account of all the most fundamental mathematical constants, 0, 1, i. Pi, e, perhaps. Ideally as " vulgar " as possible.

I don't know why this tickles me, it would be wrong. But I feel like it would exhaust a certain explanatory space.

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Silicon valley tech dude: "tragically this advanced civilization chose to chill at home!!!"

Me sitting on my couch, aggressively: "you got a problem with that??"

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On the great filter approach to the Fermi paradox: I feel like adding "loses desire" to the list of great filters gives the game away. What is so disastrous about an intelligent civilization that prefers not to colonize space? Is the entire paradox so-called simply constructed around the experience of the West in the last 500 years? Or is there something truly universal in the propensity of life to fill every available niche?

Even you think there's some sort of utilitarian duty to spread intelligent existence... Okay I'm losing my train of thought ... That would be whack and a reason to reject that particular school of utilitarianism.

(Sorry if you're not deeply into thought experiment wankery this probably makes no sense. I think I would need to rewrite it with considerable more introduction.)

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They are really going after the entire intelligentia, and it's so fascist!! Maybe I should have guessed.

The Trump admin is sh*tting on some familial/social connections for being dot dot dot research scientists and it feels bad partly because I did not anticipate this particular vector of persecution.

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The Trump admin is sh*tting on some familial/social connections for being dot dot dot research scientists and it feels bad partly because I did not anticipate this particular vector of persecution.

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Read part of this tonight. Damn Anne Lindbergh was also a fascist, not surprising I guess.

Revisiting “The Plot Against America”

I read and reread Philip Roth’s book to try to understand the present, to make sense of what may happen.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

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Tim Snyder is the go-to person to read about this.

A: occupied Poland.

First Felon has over 3500 court cases.

Now that he is a convicted felon, fraud, and adjudicated rapist, he wants to skip judicial process and one-way ticket innocent people to concentration camps in El Salvador.