paradoxius

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words cannot express how obsessed I am with the Keira Knightley/Jack Davenport audio commentary on the first Pirates of the Caribbean film

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someone: this beauty standard was constructed with specific political purpose, and effectively dismantling the power structure that justifies itself through it requires us to give up using aspects of the body as a metaphor for morality or social worth

the notes:

it’s just a personal preference, it’s not that deep, go outside, touch grass, get married, work a hard job, have kids, stop thinking

so you’re saying I have to fuck people with [trait]? you’re going to show up at my apartment and force me to fuck strangers? your analysis of beauty standards is literally rape. OP wants to fuck me specifically, a random hostile stranger in their notes. they’re turned on because their body disgusts me! (no I have never seen them but I vividly imagine their body as disgusting because why else would they make a post like this)

did you know that another society/culture/time period had a different set of beauty standards? I bet OP didn’t even realize this

actually beauty standards are evolutionary instinct and you’re anti-science. you want us to ignore biology?

I actually WANT to fuck people with [currently devalued trait]

we should remind people that [currently devalued trait] was valued in a different society with another brutal hierarchy based on bodily ideals as proof that [currently devalued trait] is good actually. this definitely does not replicate the exact politics OP is challenging

once I met someone with a stigmatized bodily trait and they were a bad person. I’m sharing this anecdote absent any context so others can draw their own conclusions. if you go to my blog every single post is me sharing totally real stories of people with this trait doing mean things. I’m not saying certain bodily traits create inferior morals, I’m just compulsively curating an entire blog to imply it over and over and over

I used to think [stigmatized trait] was disgusting but I’m trying to unlearn it right now. I assume anyone with that trait would feel me saying this publicly is an act of kindness I’m bestowing upon them rather than a casual cruelty just like all the other comments about how disgusting the trait is

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A man was walking down the road on an inauspicious day, when he came upon a village whose fields and orchards hung heavy with overripe fruit yet unharvested. He asked the first person he came across, "why hang your fields and orchards so heavy with overripe fruit yet unharvested?"

"We can't begin the harvest, since it isn't an auspicious day," came the reply.

"What is an auspicious day?"

"An auspicious day is many things of course," the villager answered with a chuckle, "but one of them is a day when it is fit to begin the harvest."

"Then how do you know it isn't an auspicious day?"

"That's simple enough. It's rather prosaic, but an auspicious day is a day when the wind is from the west as the sun rises."

"But how do you know," asked the man, "that it's fit to begin the harvest on days when the wind is from the west at sunrise?"

"Because if the wind is from the west, then it's an auspicious day, so it's fit to begin the harvest."

The man considered this for a moment, trying to work out exactly why this didn't seem to make sense to him. "I guess I just don't see how the westerliness of the wind at sunrise is an indicator of whether a day is fit for the beginning of the harvest. Those two things don't seem to be connected. If the thing that defines an auspicious day is wind direction, then what makes an auspicious day fit for the first harvest? And if the thing that defines an auspicious day is first harvest fitness, then what makes the wind westerly at an auspicious day's sunrise?"

"Ah, I see the confusion," said the villager, who had been getting a little frustrated, "everybody knows all auspicious days and only auspicious days have a westerly wind at sunrise, and everybody knows all auspicious days and only auspicious days are fit days to begin the harvest."

The man still didn't understand, but it really seemed like he was supposed to so instead of asking any more questions he took out a little book and started writing.

"What have you got there?"

"Oh, I'm writing down this conversation for my sister. She's very curious about the world and would be interested in all this. Besides, I think she would understand it better than I."

"Why doesn't she just come here herself, as you have?"

"She can't travel alone, since she isn't a man."

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Alternately: The series is about someone trapped in some manner of labyrinth, trying to survive and escape, in contact with the outside world through audio-only communication. The focus is split between the protagonist overcoming various Minotaurs and Jigsaws in the labyrinth, and allies outside the labyrinth providing support. Over the course of the season, some of the allies begin to question the protagonists honesty.

The crux of this doubt falls upon the protagonist's explanation of the death of another person trapped with them, which happened before the start of the season. The protagonist claims to have torn up their pants to make a rope in the course of trying to save the other person. They had previously explained that they didn't have pants on, and this story darkens what previously seemed a humorous part of the premise. Doubts emerge about the truth of the story though, and with them, doubts about the protagonist's attested pantslessness. The protagonist makes a remark at one point late in the season that seems to imply they are wearing pants. Some of the allies become convinced that they were lying about everything, and the pants become a synecdoche for deception.

Carefully arranging my TV show's scene compositions and camera angles to see for how many consecutive episodes I can preserve textual ambiguity regarding whether or not the protagonist is wearing pants.

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#keep it going until the season one finale#the answer somehow ends up being critical to the plot

First scene is en media res in a moment of crisis. It will eventually become clear that the whole season is building up to that moment. Second scene flashes back to earlier that day. The protagonist is getting dressed, and it is established that they have a particular object in their pants pocket. They are interrupted in dressing by something like a phone ringing, and we cut to the dealing with the interruption without showing whether they put the pants on. As the series continues, the protagonist is contrived to have neither reason nor opportunity to put their pants on (if they haven't already), and it becomes clear to the audience that the crucial moment of crisis will come down to whether they have the object that we know is in their pocket.

Carefully arranging my TV show's scene compositions and camera angles to see for how many consecutive episodes I can preserve textual ambiguity regarding whether or not the protagonist is wearing pants.

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2018 tumblr post:

1: why do they call it a boner when theres no bone in it

2: there used to be

3: why does this sound so ominous

2025 tumblr post:

1: forward my shambling soldiers and slay without thinking. let blood flow into every crevice of this rotten land

2: yes my lady

3: yes my lady

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-1 All +2 Most +3 Many ±0 Some +1 No

Inadvisable tabletop RPG premise #137: Apocalypse World hack where each playbook's core stats are drawn from a different part of speech. The playbook with verbs for stats is straightforward, and the one with adjectives nearly so; advanced players can try on a playbook whose stats are prepositions.

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Don't worry: I would never feel bad for a car dealership owner.

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Pointing at Asimov's three laws of robotics as some kind of solution for machine ethics is like reading a bunch of Sherlock Holmes stories and deciding that we can stop all crime by putting potential murder victims alone in locked rooms with no apparent means of ingress or egress.

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Matt McCreary

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coffee shop by my house hired a new barista who is extraordinarily hot and flirts with me incessantly but she also makes the worst - and i truly mean the worst - coffee i’ve ever paid for. atrociously bad. just another of god’s little jokes

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"There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque. Of course, there exists a false wrestling, in which the participants unnecessarily go to great lengths to make a show of a fair fight; this is of no interest. True wrestling, wrongly called amateur wrestling, is performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest, like the audience at a suburban cinema. Then these same people wax indignant because wrestling is a stage-managed sport (which ought, by the way, to mitigate its ignominy). The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees."

Roland Barthes, "The World of Wrestling," in Mythologies (1957)

wrestling isnt fake actually its more real than actual sports

[paradoxius]

Something fascinating I read about in Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore by Seth Rockman was how sexed wage inequality impacted household formation in US cities in the early republic era. Working class households could look a lot of different ways: parent(s) and child(ren), married or unmarried couple, siblings or cousins, group of friends, many-generational, etc. Working class people could use household formation as a strategy to make survival easier, by pooling resources, labor, etc.

But, of course, women were paid lower wages than men. This meant that it was difficult to form a household without a man, as women brought in less income relative to the amount of work they did. This ended up reinforcing the expectation that women bear the burden of domestic labor in addition to wage labor, coerced by their dependency upon the higher wages of the men in their household.

Even excluding the power of cultural expectation or deliberate exploitation on the part of men, a household of rational economic actors would, under those conditions, choose to shift the burden of domestic labor onto the women so the men could prioritize wage labor to maximize household income.

(Of course, much of this is broadly true throughout various periods, societies, and social classes, but this book laid out the facts of the relationship between wage inequality and domestic labor inequality very clearly IMO.)

But I think the relevant takeaway here is that the role of breadwinner is a privilege rather than a burden, not just because you get to feel empowered by it or even because it might let you control your household's money, but because it gives you material power within your household (including the power to what household to be part of).

Women throughout (American and English) history worked. The idea that in the past the sole responsibility of women was domestic labor and childrearing is largely inaccurate for the majority of women in these societies. Women were expected to do domestic labor like cooking and cleaning and raising children AND work to bring income to their family, this was true for the average woman, excluding the upper middle class/wealthy. If a woman’s husband owned a tavern or restaurant, she also cooked and kept bar and did the duties associated with the business. If a woman’s husband was a (small scale/subsistence/tenant) farmer, the woman did farm labor. Often a woman was expected to do labor related to her husband’s job.

Women also had vocations and forms of income unrelated to their husband. The nature of these jobs changed over time but many women did things like weaving, embroidery, crafting, beer brewing, chicken tending and laundress work to bring income. Women with skills were seen as better marriage candidates because they’d make money for their husband.

My great-great-great-great grandmother told fortunes and did farm labor, my great-great-great grandmother was a midwife, my great-great grandmother worked in a textile factory for most of her adult life and my great grandmother was a school lunch lady.

This is why it makes me irate when women on the right say things like “feminism forced me to get a job instead of being allowed to stay home with my children” before feminism you would have had to tend house, raise your children and bring income to your husband. Now, at the very least, the money is hopefully your own. Women were always in the workforce, their work was not recognized.

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The real problem with the Hasbro monolith re-defining "indie RPG" to mean "literally any tabletop RPG that isn't Dungeons & Dragons" is that now when you ask somebody what their favourite obscure indie RPG is, that twelve page zine game about robot catgirls having sex with each other is competing for oxygen with, like, Vampire: The Masquerade, and that's just not good for the ecosystem.

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If someone, hypothetically, were to paint some miniatures based on the "Holy Dominion of Northwestern Iowa", what colors and kinds of symbology would they potentially use 👀

okay so can I just say that as a lorebrained vexillology dweeb you have given me such a beautiful gift. Ideas that immediately come to mind:

Overarching colors

Red, to represent military valor and The Passion, but never alongside white or blue. The Heptarchate is part of the "post-American" movement within the former United States, rather than one of the polities seeking legitimacy via translatio imperii.

Gold, representing prosperity and ambition; the state's (relatively) bountiful supply of wheat and maize; and the glory of God.

Pale pink or lavender, representing love, temperance, and the Prairie Rose, unofficial flower of the now-defunct United State of Iowa.

Orange, drawn from the founders' (questionable, New-Agey) understanding of Buddhist monasticism. Symbolically, it represents joy; brown, which is essentially a darker shade of orange, may be used to represent trees or fertile soil.

Specific symbols

BROKEN WHEELS. An end to cycles both mundane and metaphysical; a testament to the Palatinate's effectiveness in repelling and pacifying road-warriors.

SUNRISE AND SUNSET. Naturally unifies all the aforementioned colors. Seen as the "successor" to Noah's rainbow - a symbol of God's pledge that the strife of the 22nd century was over, and that humanity would endure.

CROWNS, in particular A CROWNED DOVE, representing the unchallenged authority of God and his earthly representatives, i.e., the Heptarchs themselves.

Additionally, families and social organizations - regardless of wealth or social standing - will often have their own crests or coats of arms that contain more unique, personal symbolism.

Such crests will almost invariably include a "Fursona" (untranslatable), an animal meant to represent that group's values and virtues; often, a family's name is derived from its crest rather than vice versa. For example, Lavender's family - the Spadeharts - were so rechristened in the 2130s, being gardeners and farmers who sought to embody the cervine virtues of Meekness, Temperance, Kindness, and Discretion.