#》J.S. || THREADS

[judassamara]

night out / judas & chris

@chris-elkar​ 

It took a few days for them to organise all their shit but once it was done, he didn’t hesitate to take up Chris’s offer to hang out together. Besides his day leave, it would be the first time they actually got to hang out and do what they wanted. It had 120 years since Judas had been free to move about the city as they pleased and a lot had changed in that time. He’d seen parts of the city when they were out doing contracted labor but those times had always been very restricted. That was no longer the case.

“You ready to show me around?” They asked, though it wasn’t really a question. Someone had to show him around and it was going to be Chris. “Everything’s different since I last had any fun. Okay, maybe not everything, some of the clubs are the same but there are new ones, too.”

[judassamara]

daphnemontagu​:

“I miss seeing those paintings in your cell.” Daphne confessed in return. Somehow, she would have rather been there, locked in Judas’ cell with him, refreshing his art supplies and practising her speeches. That felt like safety. “Cal is fine,” Daphne nodded. The woman remained to be the thing she loved the most in the world, but became her downfall, because whenever she left the house Daphne felt this crushing sensation that she’d never see her again. “She’s just gone to feed.” She added, biting the sides of her fingers. After a moment, Daphne lifted her eyes again. “I’ve missed you. I feel like I haven’t seen you lately, with all the missions. How are they going?” Daphne cleared her throat, “How is Matthew?”

-

“If they didn’t all go down with the Hereafter, I would bring you one,” they replied, thinking about all the canvases and paintings that had been in his apartment. They did miss them but there wasn’t much time to paint these days. Judas had a great amount of respect for Calista, the woman going above and beyond to protect Daphne. They did what they could to bring what they needed on occasion, his small way of thanking her. “I’ve missed you, too. Seeing you is always relaxing, feels like the world hasn’t gone to shit,” they replied, giving her a soft smile. “He’s - uh... he’s good.” Not that he saw much of him lately. 

For: @judassamara

Location: Daphne & Calista’s Home

Daphne knew Calista didn’t enjoy numerous people knowing where they lived, the woman was protective beyond measure—something that Daphne found she appreciated more than ever these days— but after some initial teething problems, she had come around to the idea that Judas was a staple that Daphne needed in her life. He was someone that Daphne considered as her brother and he had proven that he wasn’t a danger from the fifteen years that Daphne had been held captive.

“How are you?” Daphne asked him as they stood in the kitchen of Daphne and Calista’s Shipyard apartment. She twirled a spoon around a cup of tea that she had no intention of drinking, to give her something to keep her hands busy.

[mikrokosmos]

J.S. Bach - Contrapunctus XIV from The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080

On this day 274 years ago, J.S. Bach passed away and his death was treated as the official end of an entire era. It is cliche to crown him the Best Composer of All Time, but it's hard not to be intimidated in his shadow for how influential he would become in the grand narrative of European music. And maybe it's Fate which brought me back into listening to a lot of Bach lately. At least my ears had been itching to revisit his great organ fugues, and different performances of the Well Tempered Clavier. So I thought I would commemorate his death day anniversary with the "last piece he ever wrote" (citation needed). The Art of Fugue is a collection of fugal exercises based on one theme, each fugue showing different potentials inherent in the theme. Like the WTC, this piece is more of a pedagogical work, originally not scored for any specific instruments so possibly written to be studied more than performed. But there's no reason why even a music theory exercise by Bach shouldn't be played for an audience, or by a musician for their own personal enjoyment.

The beautiful moment here is the last fugue in the set, Contrapunctus 14, which starts as a fugue on a completely different subject than the main theme that ties the rest of the pieces together. Instead, a solemn and contemplative fugue develops from this first theme, and in the middle a new subject emerges with shorter note values and moves forward quickly, bringing back the first subject and then develops as a double fugue. Then, another new subject comes in... so in German notation, they refer to the pitch B as H, and the pitch Bb is called B instead. I don't know why this is, but conveniently it allows Bach to sign his name in notes. But the motif Bb-A-C-B is chromatic and so close together, it doesn't sound like something that would work well for a baroque style fugue (at least, the later B-A-C-H pieces [i'm thinking by Liszt and Reger for example] are much more fitting for Romantic angst and drama). But Bach surprises us with his genius in writing a coherent and harmonically "correct"/"functioning" fugue around this complicated subject. And after the BACH fugue develops, the other two subjects join in and the piece re-introduces itself as a triple fugue.

Or at least, it promises to, but Bach stopped writing at this very moment. It is assumed that had he finished the work, he would have finally brought back the main fugue theme from the other contrupunctus pieces in the set and end with a developed quadruple fugue. And as someone who has tried and constantly failed at writing a decent sounding basic fugue for one subject, the dream of what could have been boggles my mind. Why did Bach stop? The score notes at the very end "While working on this fugue, which introduces the name BACH in the countersubject, the composer died." in CPE Bach's handwriting (one of Bach's many musically gifted sons, nicknamed "the Berlin Bach") but historians believe the manuscript is from a year or two earlier, before his deteriorating vision kept him from finishing. It's also a Romantic notion to imagine that Bach intentionally stopped there, letting the BACH fugue be his personal farewell to life, to composition, to music...a way to wrap up his lifelong work of trying to use difficult and contrapuntally dense music to reflect the glory of God and the intangible heavenly kingdom.

Whether he meant to or not, it's impossible not to feel this profound sense of farewell listening to this work trail off with the last threads hanging loose, as if such anticipated perfection of the quadruple fugue can only be heard in the life beyond our lives on earth. I first heard this piece in high school, and despite being young and naive and stupid in a lot of ways, the final unfinished fugue immediately hit my soul in a way nothing else had at that point, and I listened to it over and over, on piano, on organ, on guitar, as it was written along with different completions by other musicians or musicologists...

and I remember some question on some old web forum asking users "if the world was ending, what's the last song you'd want to hear". Of course I choose this one, and because of the question, any time I listen to Contrapunctus 14, I imagine myself as an astronaut, the last human alive, somehow detached from the ship and floating off into the cold and infinite abyss of the universe, listening to this piece as my oxygen runs out and I lose consciousness looking at the glittering stars, following the remains of the music into oblivion.

[bands-and-books]

"Yet I have asked myself this also: what is the point of life when it has but one texture, when the scarlet thread of transgression is removed? What is peace and security if it is brought about solely by the sword?"

- Dracula's Child by J.S. Barnes

[spacenutspod]

Science experienced many first-of-a-kind feats this year. These are the groundbreaking achievements that grabbed our attention. Cosmic web shake-up Glowing threads of gas, galaxies and dark matter provided the first tangible evidence that shock waves permeate the cosmic web, the large-scale structure of the universe (SN: 3/25/23, p. 14). Simulations had predicted that colliding threads generate shock waves, which catapult charged particles into the web’s magnetic fields and create a faint glow. That aura appeared in data from radio telescopes, confirming the shock waves exist. The glow also provides the first (if indirect) peek at the cosmic web’s magnetic fields. Hats off After more than 50 years of searching, mathematicians finally found an einstein tile (ein Stein is German for “one stone”). The shape, dubbed “the hat,” fits with its mirror image to create an infinite pattern that never repeats (SN: 4/22/23, p. 7). Soon after, researchers discovered a “vampire” einstein, a shape that doesn’t require its mirror image to create an infinite nonrepeating pattern (SN: 7/1/23, p. 9). Einstein tiles and their unique balance between order and disorder could spur new discoveries in materials science. In March, a group of mathematicians reported the first true “einstein,” a shape that can cover an infinite surface in a pattern that never repeats. The 13-sided shape was nicknamed “the hat” (left). Another milestone came in May: the first “vampire einstein,” a shape that makes a never-repeating pattern without using its mirror image (right).BOTH: D. SMITH, J.S. MYERS, C.S. KAPLAN AND C. GOODMAN-STRAUSS (CC BY 4.0) Fleeting debut The first appearance of oxygen-28, a superheavy form of the element that physicists created in a particle accelerator, was much briefer than researchers had expected (SN: 10/7/23 & 10/21/23, p. 4). The isotope decayed almost immediately after forming, despite its atomic nucleus having full outer shells of protons and neutrons — a property that is typically linked with extra stability. Oxygen-28’s instability hints that something may be wrong with our understanding of the strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons. Scientists had predicted that oxygen-28 would hang around for a while before decaying. But when they finally managed to create the elusive isotope in a particle accelerator, it fell apart almost immediately — shedding four neutrons (illustrated blue) and turning into oxygen-24.Andy Sproles/Oak Ridge National Laboratory RNA retrieval Scientists isolated and decoded RNA from an extinct creature for the first time. The fragile molecules, which help ensure that cells follow their DNA instruction manuals, were extracted from a preserved Tasmanian tiger held in a museum (SN: 11/4/23, p. 10). Researchers hope that the feat will aid efforts to bring back the wolflike marsupial, which is named after its homeland and died out in 1936. The Tasmanian tiger (one shown in captivity in 1930) went extinct after the last one died in a zoo in 1936. Researchers have now extracted RNA from one museum specimen.Topical Press Agency/Stringer/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Surviving a deep freeze Adult corals can be safely flash-frozen and revived, researchers demonstrated, raising hopes that cryopreservation could be useful in coral conservation (SN: 9/23/23, p. 11). The key to preventing ice crystals from forming and damaging tissues is to bathe corals in a rigid metal container filled with a dehydrating solution before plunging them in liquid nitrogen. Whatever water remains in the tissues solidifies so quickly that it cannot crystallize and expand. Porites compressa, a finger coral, gets its name for its blunt branches. Mature chunks of it collected off the coast of Hawaii have successfully been frozen and revived, offering hope that the world’s corals could be preserved as the oceans warm and acidify.Claire Lager, Smithsonian Neutrino cartography A new map of the Milky Way is the first made without using light. Instead, cosmic cartographers used data from a detector in Antarctica and AI to chart nearly massless particles called neutrinos onto the galaxy’s plane. The resulting image (third image below; optical and gamma-ray versions shown for comparison) offered a rough idea of where the first known high-energy neutrinos to originate in the Milky Way were born (SN: 8/12/23, p. 13). With some refinement, the approach could pinpoint their birthplace and those of other amped-up ghostly particles. IceCube Collaboration/Science 2023IceCube Collaboration/Science 2023 Every letter counts This year marked the completion of the pangenome, an effort to catalog every single letter, or building block, in humankind’s genetic instruction manual (SN: 6/3/23, p. 6). The undertaking involved compiling and comparing nearly all the DNA of 47 people to get the most comprehensive snapshot yet of human genetic diversity. A few months later, researchers added the final piece: the Y chromosome (SN: 10/7/23 & 10/21/23, p. 7). The pangenome could shed light on the molecular foundations of fertility, heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease and more. New efforts to sequence the human Y chromosome (illustrated right; X chromosome shown left) may shed light on its role in fertility and the risk of developing cancer and Alzheimer’s disease.NATHAN DEVERY/ISTOCK/GETTY IMAGES PLUS Star eats planet Astronomers have long suspected that stars swallow up planets, but no one had ever caught a star in the act until this year (SN: 6/3/23, p. 8). About 10,000 light-years from Earth, the sunlike star engulfed an orbiting planet that was about 10 times as massive as Jupiter. Over several days, the star grew noticeably brighter and burped a bunch of gas, suggesting it engulfed a companion star. But the relatively small amount of energy released tipped off researchers that the star had actually eaten a planet. Dust blasts into space as a star (illustrated) swallows a planet about 10 times the mass of Jupiter.K. Miller and R. Hurt/IPAC/Caltech

[judassamara]

gwen-lycaon​:

Where: A dive bar in Hedon When: Recent Who: @judassamara

Gwen had been helping some of her bandmates load up their cars after the show as. They’d played a two-hour set and although there weren’t a whole lot of people there, she was still happy with the turn out. If anything it gave them a chance to practice, and Gwen enjoyed spending her time on the stage drumming away. “Oi! Watch it, Lola. You bend my snares and i’ll bend your ass,” the alpha barked teasingly at her bandmate helping her load up her suv. The all-girl group erupted in a fit of tipsy laughter before finishing up their task. Gwen waved them off before lighting up a cigarette and turning back towards the bar’s back entrance, wanting to kill a few more drinks before heading him. Then, she saw someone in the alley that was looking in her direction, taking a long drag from her cigarette before addressing them. “Fan or foe?”

It had been a spur of the moment idea to go out and enjoy the evening, ending up in some bar watching a band perform. They’d learned to play guitar in their years in Zamok but they’d always wanted to play the drums more. Watching the woman playing them now, that desire surged back up. He could play them a little bit, but he wanted to play them like she did. After the show was over, he loitered around, waiting to see if there was a good moment to talk to her and, eventually, there was when she called him out for watching them awkwardly. “Fan, promise,” he reassured quickly. “I wanted to ask you about your drumming. How long have you been playing?”

Where: A dive bar in Hedon When: Recent Who: @judassamara

Gwen had been helping some of her bandmates load up their cars after the show as. They'd played a two-hour set and although there weren't a whole lot of people there, she was still happy with the turn out. If anything it gave them a chance to practice, and Gwen enjoyed spending her time on the stage drumming away. "Oi! Watch it, Lola. You bend my snares and i'll bend your ass," the alpha barked teasingly at her bandmate helping her load up her suv. The all-girl group erupted in a fit of tipsy laughter before finishing up their task. Gwen waved them off before lighting up a cigarette and turning back towards the bar's back entrance, wanting to kill a few more drinks before heading him. Then, she saw someone in the alley that was looking in her direction, taking a long drag from her cigarette before addressing them. "Fan or foe?"

[jsfasteners]

[moonset-music]

A Mid-Year Update On Moonset Music

Good day, everyone! Since it’s just about the middle of the year, I wanted to share a couple of small updates about my channel’s stats and my personal goals. Click below if you’re interested!

New Content

In total, I have created 2 hours, 47 minutes and 16 seconds of new content this year. Just under 2 hours and 41 minutes are publicly available, with the remaining six minutes or so part of forthcoming projects. These are spread over 28 publicly released videos, plus an extra four forthcoming videos. I have been busy this year!

Sources of Inspiration:

I have made chip tunes based on the following properties. New properties are in bold, and linked ones have their own playlists:

Animal Crossing: New Leaf

Animal Crossing (General)

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

The music of J.S. Bach

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask

Japanese folk music

Heaven Official’s Blessing: Tian Guan Ci Fu

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

As you can see, I’ve had a chance to really expand my horizons this year!

Most Popular Videos

Thus far, my top 10 videos by views are as follows. Videos published in bold are new this year:

10. Red Thread Tied Around a Finger 9. Resetti’s Theme 8. Ocarina of Time Minigame 7. Hogwarts Grounds 6. Master Kohga’s Theme 5. Kakariko Village 4. Stone Tower Temple Upside Down 3. Happy Hogwarts 2. Stone Tower Temple 1. Deku Pałace

Yearly Goal Updates

I had hoped that in 2023, I would end the year with 1000 watch hours from this year alone and 200 total subscribers. I started the year with 80 subscribers, so I need to gain 120 this year.

I’m at about 482 watch hours, or 18 hours off being halfway to my goal, and at 135 subscribers. I’ve gained 55 of those subscribers this year, so am 5 off where I should be at the halfway mark. In short, it could be better.

(Obligatory: please listen to something if you’d be willing! Every minute counts)

Expansion Onto Other Platforms:

I recently made a Carrd website. Check it out here!!

This year, I have also begun distributing some of my music to other platforms through DistroKid. Thus far, I’ve only distributed one song like that (hyperfollow available here), but am hoping to have another finished project on there by the end of the year. It’s a little tricky, because Distrokid charges a hefty $12 per cover of music that’s not in the public domain, which means for my full catalogue of chip tunes to make it onto there I’d need to be shelling out a yearly $468, which I simply do not have. So to truly expand my non-YouTube profile, I will need to do more stuff in the public domain - classical music, very old popular music, or folk songs, basically. That is some of my least popular stuff on YouTube, however - all three of my least popular chiptunes are the three that I created to share on other platforms. You can see the dilemma here!

I’ve also started to a Ko-Fi and Patreon this year. I’m hoping to get 2 supporters by the end of the year at any tier. If you want to join, I’ve got a $1 tier on patreon and $3 and $5 tiers on both platforms. It would mean a lot to me!!

[judassamara]

location: chri’s place with: @chris-elkar​

“Can you meet me? At my place? I gotta take a shower or something… Yeah, I’m- I’m physically ok. Some crazy elf just attacked me… No I didn’t do anything… Can we just talk in person?”

It wasn’t what he expected to hear when he picked up Chris’s call. He’d been attacked?! Judas was filled with a wave of fear, worry and anger. How did Chris manage to get himself into these problems? They didn’t waste any time, not even bothering to put on a clean shirt, the one he was wearing splattered with paint. It wasn’t long before he was pushing his way through the door, not bothering to wait for him to answer the door. 

“Chris?” they called into the apartment, looking around for him a little frantically.

[imperialinquisition]

Aldrete et al., (Reconstructing Ancient Linen Body Armor (2013) do a complete labor study of the time it took to make a linothorax, a Greek style of linen armor, including fiber preparation, spinning, weaving and sewing. For the roughly 65,000cm2 amount of (admittedly quite rough) linen required (which in turn required 12,600m of thread), they figure it took 25 hours to break, scutch and hackle the flax, 575 hours to spin it into thread, 75 hours to weave the thread into fabric (including loom setup time), and 8 hours to measure and cut the fabric (alas, the linothorax is laminated, not sewn, so they have no data for the sewing portion).  Eve Fischer has done a similar calculation (but with back-of-the-envelope estimates rather than a detailed study) estimating that 41,804cm2 (5×1 yards) of fabric would require c. 8,230m of thread which would in turn demand something like 7 hours of sewing, 72 for weaving, 500 or so for spinning. J.S. Lee (op. cit., 51) figures a 14th century weaver (with those fancier looms and spinning wheels) could weave around 2 yards of fabric per day from roughly 6lbs of spun yarn while a given spinner might spin about 1lbs of yarn per day; assuming a 12-hour work-day that comes out to about 6 hours per yard weaving (a little more than twice as fast as Fischer of Aldrete’s vertical loom weavers) and 36 hours per yard spinning (three times faster than the hand-spinners). Using the average of Aldrete and Fischer’s figures (erring a little high to account for Fischer’s lack of preparation time) we might figure something like 2,683 hours to produce our 220,000cm2 minimum requirements. Our upper ‘comfort’ level might be three times this or 8,049 hours. Put into working terms, the basic clothing of our six person farming family requires 7.35 labor hours per day, every day of the year. Our ‘comfort’ level requires 22.05 hours (obviously not done by one person). These figures come way down once we get the spinning wheel and horizontal loom, but what seems fairly readily apparently is that women did not necessarily work less so much as produce more, selling the excess via the ‘putting out’ system we mentioned last time and using that to support their families.

I've had a hard time articulating to people just how fundamental spinning used to be in people's lives, and how eerie it is that it's vanished so entirely. It occurred to me today that it's a bit like if in the future all food was made by machine, and people forgot what farming and cooking were. Not just that they forgot how to do it; they had never heard of it.

When they use phrases like "spinning yarns" for telling stories or "heckling a performer" without understanding where they come from, I imagine a scene in the future where someone uses the phrase "stir the pot" to mean "cause a disagreement" and I say, did you know a pot used to be a container for heating food, and stirring was a way of combining different components of food together? "Wow, you're full of weird facts! How do you even know that?"

When I say I spin and people say "What, like you do exercise bikes? Is that a kind of dancing? What's drafting? What's a hackle?" it's like if I started talking about my cooking hobby and my friend asked "What's salt? Also, what's cooking?" Well, you see, there are a lot of stages to food preparation, starting with planting crops, and cooking is one of the later stages. Salt is a chemical used in cooking which mostly alters the flavor of the food but can also be used for other things, like drawing out moisture...

"Wow, that sounds so complicated. You must have done a lot of research. You're so good at cooking!" I'm really not. In the past, children started learning about cooking as early as age five ("Isn't that child labor?"), and many people cooked every day their whole lives ("Man, people worked so hard back then."). And that's just an average person, not to mention people called "chefs" who did it professionally. I go to the historic preservation center to use their stove once or twice a week, and I started learning a couple years ago. So what I know is less sophisticated than what some children could do back in the day.

"Can you make me a snickers bar?" No, that would be pretty hard. I just make sandwiches mostly. Sometimes I do scrambled eggs. "Oh, I would've thought a snickers bar would be way more basic than eggs. They seem so simple!"

Haven't you ever wondered where food comes from? I ask them. When you were a kid, did you ever pick apart the different colored bits in your food and wonder what it was made of? "No, I never really thought about it." Did you know rice balls are called that because they're made from part of a plant called rice? "Oh haha, that's so weird. I thought 'rice' was just an adjective for anything that was soft and white."

People always ask me why I took up spinning. Isn't it weird that there are things we take so much for granted that we don't even notice when they're gone? Isn't it strange that something which has been part of humanity all across the planet since the Neanderthals is being forgotten in our generation? Isn't it funny that when knowledge dies, it leaves behind a ghost, just like a person? Don't you want to commune with it?

[deathrazed-moved]

[  @northsworn :  jon s.  ]

     YGRITTE LONG TOLD HIM HE KNEW NOTHING, and from the looks of his blank, nonplussed stare in the king’s tower, such a statement could only be believed.  in love? he hadn’t heard those words from anyone, not even the fiery wildling girl he promised to take with him.  

     “ adelyn, “  he begins, then stops.  in love with him?  it somehow seems an impossibility, and yet�� some part of him knew.  a part he hadn’t dared to believe for fear, for rejection, for her own safety.  how could they love here? how could they…? chest rises with deep, slow breaths, face flushes hot despite the cold.

     where thoughts fail, actions seem to answer.  snow crunches under heavy boots when he steps forward to close the space between. gaze rakes that pretty face, and then lips meet lips in one sure, strong movement. there isn’t any real softness in the gesture, no gingerness or hesitation. just an arm wrapped firmly around the small of her back while the other hand braces her head.  they continue like this, kissing in the falling snows until at last he breaks away and grasps her shoulders. head is still pounding. “ i do not wish that on you, adelyn. not with what it means.”

          she’s   unsure   where   the   courage   to   reveal   her   heart   to   Jon   came   from    &    the   words   slipping   off   her   tongue   with   such   ease   surprised   her.    there   they   stand,    both   seemingly   frozen    &    hesitant    on   what   to   do   next    &    then   he   says   her   name    &    nearly   breaks   her   heart   when   he   stops   himself.

          eyes   drop   to   the   ground,    heart   pounding   in   her   ears   as   she   tries   to   take   back   her   confession.    ❝  Jon   i        ❞    his   lips   cut   her   off    &    the   shock   remains   for   all   of   a   moment   before   she’s   returning   the   kiss,    palms   cupping   his   neck   only   to   have   one   arm   wrap   around   his   shoulders   as   she   presses   closer   to   him.

          she   gasps   when   he   breaks   away,    catching   her   breath    &    watching   his   face   intently.    head   shakes   at   his   words,    hands   moving   to   his   jaw   in   order   to   bring   his   gaze   to   meet   her’s.    ❝  it   means   i   get   to   love   you   for   however   long   the   gods   allow.  ❞    fingers   gently   brush  a   few  strands   of   hair   from   his   face,    tucking   it   behind   his   ear.    ❝    &    i   wouldn’t   trade   that   for   all   the   gold   in   Westeros.  ❞    this   time   she   kisses   him,    fingers   tangling   in   the   hair   at   the   nape   of   his   neck    &    brings   him   closer.    this   time   it’s   slower,    with   a   tenderness   that   the   harsh   cold   of   the   north   has   been   missing.    when   she   pulls   away,    eyes   remained   closed   for   a   second   then   dark   hues   find   his    &    a   soft   smile   curls   the   corner   of   kiss   stained   lips.    ❝  not   a   single   coin.  ❞

[deathrazed-aa]

          when   Stiles   announced   a   short   road - trip   with   Scott,    Ravenna   offered   her   penthouse   before   he   even   attempted   to   ask   if   she   could   watch   him.   jumping   at   the   chance   to   spend   some   one - on - one   time   with   his   son,    she’s   eager   to   make   this   a   weekend   he’ll   never   forget        not   just   because   of   his   importance   to   her   boyfriend,    but   she   truly   wants   to   give   him   a   life   he   deserves.    in   order   to   do   that,    Ravenna   needs   to   build   a   relationship   with   him    &    earn   his   trust.

          after   saying   their   goodbyes,    Ravenna   closes   her   door   behind   Stiles    &    turns   to   face   Jason.    a   bright   smile   on   fair   features,    she   steps   forward    &    idly   begins   to   scratch   Theo’s   head   as   he   sits   beside   her   patiently.    ❝  how   about   a   quick   tour,    maybe   you   can   figure   out   which   guest   room   you   want   to   claim   as   yours   for   the   weekend ?   then   we   can   figure   out   lunch,    sound   good ?  ❞

starter  for :  @goodpersn​  /  jason  →  liked  for  ravenna

[corinnejmorris]

↷ little black dress | j.starke

It’s a Friday night in DC and rather than brooding over statistics with a glass of red alone in her kitchen she’s in a dress she borrowed from her gym buddy Mckenzie who at the least was half a size smaller than she was. Calico in the downtown DC district Shaw, the trendy spot, home of the young professionals, outdoor patios and fun boozy cocktails. She slides out of an uber using her carefully placed clutch to avoid a serious wardrobe malfunction. She sees the girls standing around a table and is immediately hyper aware of how she’s supposed to look and how much she doesn’t. But she pushes those thoughts away as she’s greeted by a chorus of squeals, “oh my god!”s, and “you look fucking amazing!”s. That’s all she needs to hear, the acceptance, the love, the acknowledgement whether it be factious or truthful, she relishes in it.

 She does her greetings and a drink is immediately thrusts into her hands. Always having been a lightweight, she catches up to their level of tipsy with relative ease. As the hours pass, their table overflows with empty glasses and pitchers it’s with a quick glance at her cellphone that she realizes what time it is and how low her battery percentage was, she excuses herself to the washroom, bambi legs send her stumbling down the hall. As she finishes in her stall the borrowed dress is caught in the door. Her immediate drunken reaction is to tug with all her might and she does and there’s a loud ripping sound and as she squints at the fabric in her hands, it takes her a second to realize what she’s done. 

What was once a suggestive slit up the left thigh, had become a rip that exposed the suggestive lace bottoms she decided to pair with the dress. “fuck fuck fuck,” she muttered to herself as she attempted to scrunch the fabric back together and make a mad dash back to her table. Once there she discovered it had been abandoned ( fuck! ) but the bill had been covered ( nice! ) she grabs her phone and immediately dials her assistant nick. “Nicky, oh my god nicky I need you right now— what do you mean you’re busy? No fuck whatever it is, I need you at Calico right now— no I can’t walk I ripped my fuckin’ dress and my house is on the other end of town. Nicky please, I’ll pay you any money— Nicholas fuckin’ please my phone is dead!” she pleads with her assistant as her back is pressed against the bar’s front.

@hans-starke

[tanadrin]

It’s worth noting there are other kinds of labor besides just food production that are vital to survival. The labor necessary to keep people clothed alone in ancient and medieval Europe was tremendous. Cf. Bret Devereaux:

A complete set of Roman clothing (I’m using the Romans because I’m more familiar with their dress), excluding formal wear (read: the toga, though I am also not counting the woman’s palla either) for this family of six might require something like 220,000cm2 (26.3 square yards) of fabric at a minimum pear year – a single complete change of clothing.  Comfort might look two or three times this much.  How much labor is that?

We can look at a few different estimates (skip one paragraph ahead if you hate lots of numbers).  Aldrete et al., (Reconstructing Ancient Linen Body Armor (2013) do a complete labor study of the time it took to make a linothorax, a Greek style of linen armor, including fiber preparation, spinning, weaving and sewing. For the roughly 65,000cm2 amount of (admittedly quite rough) linen required (which in turn required 12,600m of thread), they figure it took 25 hours to break, scutch and hackle the flax, 575 hours to spin it into thread, 75 hours to weave the thread into fabric (including loom setup time), and 8 hours to measure and cut the fabric (alas, the linothorax is laminated, not sewn, so they have no data for the sewing portion).  Eve Fischer has done a similar calculation (but with back-of-the-envelope estimates rather than a detailed study) estimating that 41,804cm2 (5×1 yards) of fabric would require c. 8,230m of thread which would in turn demand something like 7 hours of sewing, 72 for weaving, 500 or so for spinning.  J.S. Lee (op. cit., 51) figures a 14th century weaver (with those fancier looms and spinning wheels) could weave around 2 yards of fabric per day from roughly 6lbs of spun yarn while a given spinner might spin about 1lbs of yarn per day; assuming a 12-hour work-day that comes out to about 6 hours per yard weaving (a little more than twice as fast as Fischer of Aldrete’s vertical loom weavers) and 36 hours per yard spinning (three times faster than the hand-spinners).

...

Put into working terms, the basic clothing of our six person farming family requires 7.35 labor hours per day, every day of the year.  Our ‘comfort’ level requires 22.05 hours (obviously not done by one person).  These figures come way down once we get the spinning wheel and horizontal loom, but what seems fairly readily apparently is that women did not necessarily work less so much as produce more, selling the excess via the ‘putting out’ system we mentioned last time and using that to support their families.

...

A lone woman could, if she spun in almost every spare minute of her day, on her own keep a small family clothed in minimum comfort (and we know they did that).  Adding a second spinner – even if they were less efficient (like a young girl just learning the craft or an older woman who has lost some dexterity in her hands) could push the household further into the ‘comfort’ margin, and we have to imagine that most of that added textile production would be consumed by the family (because people like having nice clothes!).

So until the spinning wheel was invented and spread to Europe in ca. the 13th century, near the end of the Middle Ages, clothing alone (not food, not shelter, not harvesting fuel for a fire) consumed a massive amount of labor, and the nature of this labor substantially shaped gender relations. Because, as Devereaux points out elsewhere, spinning thread is one of the few kinds of labor you can do while also caring for and nursing children--thus, the needs of keeping a family clothed and children cared for also contributed to keeping women at home and isolated from public life. They had to be spinning thread constantly, and when not spinning thread, weaving, sewing, mending, and doing other kinds of labor. This would keep their families in one or two sets of clothing each.

By comparison, being able to walk into a store, fork over a small amount of cash, and leave with a complete outfit--or even multiple outfits--is a phenomenal degree of luxury that makes it extremely difficult to appreciate just how much damn work used to have to go into making clothes. The transition between the two was gradual--the spinning wheel spreading to Europe helped a lot, but it’s not a coincidence that the Industrial Revolution kicked off with the mechanization of textile production in Britain. Premodern textile production took a huge quantity of human labor! Women specifically being freed from that labor was a huge contributor to subsequent developments like women’s suffrage and the growth of feminism.

suppressing unbecoming fantasies of making everyone who blithely talks like this spend a couple seasons spinning/weaving all their family's clothing and chopping their own firewood

[bimboficationblues]

How would you define liberalism?

it's a few different things, because we're talking about both an ideology and a system of governance, but here's the big picture. the key category of liberalism is not freedom, nor is it equality. liberalism has formal versions of both but they're mostly to secure the existence of private property (equality in exchange, freedom to contract).

liberalism's key category is security. that is the common denominator running from Hobbes and Locke to Keynes and Hayek, a fundamental anxiety about the inherent insecurity of class society (or civilization, if you're nasty).

here are some of the things liberalism is.

charitably, it's a worldview and political system based on an idea of endless progress. Adam Smith and J.S. Mill conceptualized it as an eternal twin spire of accumulation - of truth and wealth. its purported values are using the self-interested pursuit of one's personal "Good" as a stabilizing social force; universal equality of moral personhood; consensual governance and the guarantee of certain rights; and efficient allocation of resources through a market system.

uncharitably, it's the organizational principles of global capitalism, the developed descendant of Smith and Ricardo's "science" of political economy. its actual values are security, property, aristocracy, and imperial chauvinism.

structurally, it's a legalistic form of aristocracy ("rule of the best"). instead of informal or arbitrary systems like honor and heredity, liberalism combines positive law (statutes, constitutions, judges) with markets, money, and state authority. this combination creates formalized, predictable results that guarantee the security of property, rather than relying on the arbitrary whims of a handful of egomaniacs who think God appointed them. the possibility for reform is built in to defuse instability. it is the tar pit in which we all reside, because we lack sufficient tools to avoid being ensnared; its dedication to procedural values (like formal equality), and its void of substantive content, means liberalism can consistently absorb parts of other political practices and patterns that would otherwise pose a threat, or force competing worldviews to fight them on liberal terrain.

economically, it's the political order that a nascent capitalism birthed to protect itself, the guarantor of private property. universal naked force for accumulating and hoarding wealth and power is ultimately inefficient because it paradoxically gives the repressed something to unify around hating. impersonal domination - more subtle forms of coercion by market forces, "invisible threads" rather than chains - and personal domination deployed primarily against internal or external enemies (of the nation, of the faith, of the social contract), is a lot more stable in the long term. meanwhile, constant expansion means there will always be new frontiers to exploit. the neutralization of class conflict is the ultimate goal here.

psychologically, it's a deep discomfort with the conflictual character of politics, and with the nature of power. fascists and other reactionaries resent liberalism because they think that wringing the blood out of the weak for the amusement and luxury of a ruling class can be achieved without the need for an impersonal bureaucratic machine [see the conservative-cum-Nazi Carl Schmitt's critique that liberals treat politics like it's a debate parlor]. ironically, this brutish desire to dominate is a lesson that fascists learned within capitalism's absorption and reproduction of preexisting hierarchies and values along the lines of gender, ethnicity, ability, and religion.

in the language of Tumblr, it's an enemies-to-lovers fic between the working class and the owning class.

personally, it's a whole heap of shit.

[kaepop-trash]

greetings. from where i’m from it’s only as late as the sun rises high. heyo. i am sorry for the gibberish i’m about to say but youu, your blog is a bleeding wound that caused me to wail every full moon. i might’ve been under the influence of legal substances BUT, HOWEVER,.. ect. i would love to request a small drabble for my dear knight who rides the black stallion since the dawn of time Lord Johnny Suh wooooeeeee- “I’m not as think as you drunk I am” + J.S.

love,

drunk anon (if the spot is still available please consider this as my application)

Now, this was so cute I'm literally uwuwuwuwu. I haven't started writing this yes but I have a feeling that this is going to get long. I just love drunk antics as a plot device. You've won my heart drunk anon. You ended up getting a full drabble.

__

Friends to Lovers Trope, Drunk Confession

Summary: Johnny tried not to be obvious, but he had a soft spot for you. Maybe it was the way you used every chance you got to make jokes at his expense. Or maybe it was how you laughed every time he made a joke at your expense. Either way, he tried his best to keep it to himself. So it was really detrimental to his cause that you were currently drunk and telling him that he had beautiful eyes.

__

"You're drunk." Johnny stated, trying and failing to purse his smile at the compliment.

"Never." She shook her head, stopping to hold her head. "Opps dizzy." She winced, quickly recovering just enough to look back up at him.

Her lips split into a dazzling smile and Johnny's heart pounded so fast that he'd give a cocaine addict a run for their money.

"Tolerance of a champ." She pointed at herself.

Johnny hummed skeptically, "You have a whole bar inside you. A horse would be drunk."

"Not me, no." She shook her head again, wincing like she learned nothing from the past attempt. "Not a horse. Just person." She nodded. "Are you drunk?" She questioned, head tilting to the side.

"A little, yeah." He nodded.

"Excellent." She clapped, excited giggles leaving her that made Johnny's brows raise a little. "You're drunk and I'm not." She pointed at him.

"Good job. Should we get you a trophy?" He questioned.

"Should we get you a bucket?" She shot back, bringing up the last time he was extremely drunk.

His lips twitched, "You're impossible." He shook his head with a light laugh.

"And you're intolerable." She mumbled, pouting down at the couch they sat on.

"You tolerate me just fine."

She looked up, brows knitting in focus. Johnny wondered if she was trying to figure out why she did tolerate him. He hoped that the conclusion she came to wasn't to stop.

"It's the eyes." She nodded, confirming whatever internal question she asked herself. "Actually, maybe it's the smile. Your smile does make people go all." She looked down, bringing her hand up to her chest to mimic an explosion.

Johnny sat up, eagerly reaching for a thread that he found thrown at him. "Who people?" He asked, his own chest lighting up in an explosion when she bit her lip.

"You know," She shrugged. "Just persons."

"No, I don't." He shook his head, pausing with a groan when he felt dizzy. "Do you happen to know anyone?"

She looked up at him, eyes wide and lips parted like a fish out of water. Johnny couldn't help the smile spreading on his face, elation filling into every crevice. Then he reminded himself that he needed confirmation. Then he realised that she was drunk.

She huffed, crossing her arms and sitting back. "Don't tease me. You're always teasing me."

"You tease me right back, (Y/N)." He reminded her, an endearing smile growing on his lips.

"Yeah, but. You know." She mumbled.

"No, I don't."

"Then you're an idiot! You're so lucky you have everything else going for you. Because you'd be a little screwed otherwise."

Johnny slid closer towards her, closing the distance she put between them. "Can I tell you a secret?" He whispered, hands reaching for hers. She took in a fragile breath and Johnny told himself that it was the final confirmation he really needed. Now he just wanted her to say it first.

"I think I'm feeling a little," He paused, biting down his embarrassment. Then he reached his free hand up to his chest, to mimic an explosion. "Right now." He squeezed her hand.

Her eyes shifted to something more focused and for a moment Johnny thought this was it. Then she scoffed.

"Are you going to talk about that girl you flirted with today again? I swear to go-"

"No." Johnny cut her off, huffing out his irritation of her ruining what he thought was the perfect moment. "It's you, dumbass. I'm so obvious about it too, always trying to talk to you. I used to think you're not interested. But you're just slow." He shook his head.

"Hey!" She sat up, "How was I supposed to know that your seduction tactics are calling someone the biggest disappointment since microwave meals."

Johnny grinned, "That was funny, you have to admit it."

"I hate you." She groaned, "I can't believe I can never stop thinking about you."

"Well, it's too bad. Because I'm in love with you."

__

Requests Closed