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that time of year again

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i feel like a lot of the time fatphobia tends to manifest as a similar phenomenon to the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" thing especially among older people. sooo many people who have gained weight with age see themselves as temporarily embarrassed thin people. like 60+ y/o people who have not been thin since their 30s but they still keep going on diets. it sucks to see cause it reads like such a clear expression of self-hatred to me, like they're punishing themselves for their bodies developing in ways that they probably in reality had very little control over. fatphobia is such brain poison dude

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Republicans not wanting to fund libraries is part of their plan to make the next generation illiterate. That is why they are banning books too.

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from S.E.X. — the all-you-need-to-know sexuality guide to get you through your late teens and twenties by heather corina

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Salmonella is "a part of life" too, but y'all don't go around forcing others to lick raw chicken. Why have you given up all caution around covid and other airborne diseases?

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wym i don’t know how to flirt? i literally tell you random and unimportant fun facts

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Anyone else stuck in a freeze response for years and years and years and years

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Human: Deal.

Fey: Very well. When you return home tonight, your mother will be in pristine health again. It will be like she never fell ill at all. Even the memory of her suffering will fade…

Human: Thank you so much. She means everything to me.

Fey: I know, I know. Let’s hope the price wasn’t too much for you after all… Only time will tell.

Human: So, when do we start?

Fey: …If I may ask you to elaborate?

Human: You said you wanted my firstborn.

Fey: Yes? And you agreed?

Human: Yeah, so, when do we start?

Fey:

Fey, blushing: Ah.

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How many of these sound familiar?

Congratulations, you're utilizing AAVE!

How often do you find yourself recognizing when you are? Do you actually know what these words mean? Do you know when they're being used improperly? Are you interested in learning to respect the history behind the dialect?

This thought process, and others, are discussed in my lesson, "It's Giving" AAVE, and the Denied Yet Undeniable Impact of Black Culture.

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I think more games with romance should include polyamory as an option. Not just because of inclusion purposes but also because a lot of these games are super long RPGs and I sure as hell don't have time to replay the game 5 times to romance everyone I wanted to.

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Pissed off right now.

My partner has an appointment with a gender clinic today (it went well) and his clinician said something along the lines of;

"Please ignore the deadname on my email, I'm intersex and I've legally changed my name but I'm not 'technically trans' so higher ups say they won't change it on my professional email."

Hello???? He works at a gender clinic????

A name change is a name change regardless???

Fuck

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Work acquaintance, ostensibly as a joke about me and my interests, asked if I had any educational reading recommendations about "Santa's sleigh"

So, to pass the time, I thought we'd have a dialogue about the history of urban vehicularization and pedestrian encounters with vehicles, through the "vehicle" (pun intended) of a case study of carriages and sleighs in eighteenth-century Amsterdam.

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And none of this is to be taken seriously, I'm just saying words recreationally. But Amsterdam was the site of early speed limit regulations for vehicles. By the 1770s, the sleigh-man's guild had 285 sleigh-men active year-round, not counting unregistered sleighs, or those who used sleighs over snow in winter. The (colonialism-fueled) expansion of the city's infrastructure (in the context of maritime trade and East India Company profits) allowed sudden, dramatic architectural expansion, though there was uneven adoption of new transportation methods of wheeled vehicles in newly-built edges of the urban area (where textile factories were situated) while maintaining the architecture of the dense streets of the medieval city core, so that sleighs and carriages existed side-by-side in a way that was distinct from the streets of Paris and London. In 1790, visiting German scientist Georg Forster described Amsterdam as such: "The whole day long, a continuous thunderous roaring dominates. The manifold carriages of mayors, councilors, state officials, directors of the East India Company, physicians and the lavishly rich, the unremitting transport of goods [...] obstruct the way of passage and cause a constant yelling and rumbling [...]."

But history scholar Bob Pierik (in an article that opens with Forster's lamentation) describes how Amsterdam was an early site of "vehicularization" and related street regulations, and he finds this notable and worth considering because it anticipated and predated the more famous and more widely discussed urban regulations and policing of properly-industrialized nineteenth-century London, which allows us to perhaps rethink the historiographical narrative of modernity. Since vehicles, pedestrians, and their attendant regulations were experimented with in the Dutch metropole decades before the mechanized transportation and "politics of paving" in Victorian Britain, there were what Pierik calls "multiple modernities" existing simultaneously in the streets of early modern Amsterdam.

Evidently, "sleighs had been an important part of street life in Amsterdam long before coaches and chaises." Indeed, Pierik invokes the observation of English author Samuel Ireland from 1789, describing a visit to Amsterdam: "[C]arriages with wheels, except for the use of the nobility and gentry, were not suffered here for many years […]. A sleigh, as the Dutch term it (the French a traineau or pot de chambre) is now in use: it is the body of a coach, without wheels […]."

And guess what? They dragged those sleighs over pavement. No wheels, but only "an oily cloth (a smeerlap) was used to smoothen the passage."

A piece of rhyming graffiti, written on a wagon, and collected by Hieronymus Sweerts between 1683 and 1690, reads:

Who drives fast make a quick start

But easily loses their horse and cart

Careful and sen-

Sible is a good carriage man.

For all excerpts and arguments here, by the way, see: Bob Pierik. "Coaches, Sleighs, and Speed in the Street: "Vehicularization" in Early Modern Amsterdam." Journal of Urban History, Volume 50, Issue 4. First published online 2 September 2022.

Though, of course, in Pierik's telling, class and gendered hierarchies controlled access to vehicular transportation. A 1762 revision of the sleigh-men's guild regulations named "manspersonen" as the only people permitted to drive a sleigh with goods. As Pierik notes: [Quote] In the original Dutch text "controlling horses" [...] can also be translated as "governing," which resonates with the [...] logic casting adult men as the authorities who controlled those underneath them [...]. [End quote.] (Manhood/masculinity associated with ability to control horses and, by extension, vehicles. Potential future multispecies analysis research discussion of relationship between enforcement of human-animal hierarchy and class/gender hierarchies?)

And what of the pedestrian? Early on, at least in the Netherlands, vehicles were perceived as dangerous to pedestrians, and it could apparently be seen as arrogant to flaunt aristocratic wealth by gallavanting around in an expensive personal carriage in the city center, and so regulations and public opinion seem to indicate that pedestrian right-of-way was prioritized. An Amsterdam bylaw from 1528 indicated that drivers of sleighs could not sit upon their vehicle but had to walk beside it, because:

"[D]riving caused great disorder, often mixed with malice, as people, specifically women and children, are at great danger of being driven over."

An important city bylaw in 1634 banned the use of coaches within city walls. But the prohibition was gradually loosened, such that conflict between coach-drivers and pedestrians was frequently mentioned in depositions. but by the 1730s, something had changed. In Pierik's words:

[Quote.] Pedestrians now shared space with vehicles and had a new responsibility to protect themselves […]. [T]he language used in Bicker’s chronicle is very telling: In 1734, exactly a century after the vehicle ban, he wrote of a coachman who “had the misfortune of driving over a poor woman who died shortly thereafter.” Here, rather than the “women and children first” rhetoric that we have seen in the sixteenth-century regulations on the sleigh-men in the previous section, the coachman was also presented as a victim, and the right of the coach’s presence on the streets remained undisputed. Similarly, in 1746, Bicker Raije wrote of a nine- or ten-year-old boy who was “negligently watching around him” moments before he was killed by a sleigh horse. [End quote.]

In fact, Pierik sees this vehicularization of the early modern city as "at once a civilizing and a colonizing project" in the same vein as what Koslofsky described as "nocturnalization," or the way in which, in London and Paris, "the elites of the court and the city colonized the urban night."

We are, of course, reminded of another aristocratic figure who, traveling through the night, engaged in this civilizing mission of nocturnalization and colonized public space with their vehicle. Someone who, like the early modern vehicle regulations of Amsterdam, is associated with Dutch tradition. Someone whose persona is closely connected to mobility, even hyper-mobility, drawn forth by their sleigh.

Santa Claus.

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"you dont have it that bad, youre just making things up"

transandrophobia 🤝 ableism

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Ok so I'm taking a genetics class right now and in lab we've been given fruit flies with different mutations that we need to breed over the course of the semester.

Now, first thing I learned: fruit flies don't eat fruit. They eat yeast. They eat the yeast on fermenting fruit. They can not actually eat fruit. Their name is a lie.

Secondly, one of the two mutant lines I was given to cross are flies with the apterous mutation, aka they're wingless. I feel so bad for them, they can't do the one thing they're named for, they cant fly.

And then I realized. My fruit flies are in truth insects that eat yeast and can't fly.

Anyways, I've been calling them my yeast crawls and I am their god now.

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DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES 2023, dir. Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Dale

Bonus: