#madman of amargosa reblog | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

penig · 2 years

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I posted 4,522 times in 2022

That's 2,470 more posts than 2021!

210 posts created (5%)

4,312 posts reblogged (95%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@penig

@widespot

@asimplevampire

@natteryaktoad

@madman-of-amargosa

I tagged 4,516 of my posts in 2022

#the conquering nose - 1,395 posts

#widespot at large - 1,213 posts

#heartocalypse - 697 posts

#self-reblog - 439 posts

#asimplevampire reblog - 276 posts

#land grant university - 208 posts

#non-sims - 199 posts

#natteryaktoad reblog - 192 posts

#madman of amargosa reblog - 165 posts

#land grant university graduates - 152 posts

Longest Tag: 136 characters

#i think one problem people have with victorian literature is that we lack the visceral sense of constriction women took for granted then

My Top Posts in 2022:

I’m impressed that the Cratchitts can pay rent on a house, however small. Four rooms, yard, and wash house is an impressive property in a city where larger families are living in single rooms and sharing one pump and one outhouse with the entire building, or even multiple buildings.

Of course the Cratchitts are a bit idealized here. Dickens was a journalist and a social reformer as well as a novelist, and moreover had some personal experience of poverty. He knew a lot about the struggles of people living and raising children on 15 shillings a week. But he also knows his audience and his craft. The Cratchitts must be the antithesis of Scrooge and they must be attractive and squeaky clean, physically and morally, and the forces threatening them must not even hint at vice. A sickly and disabled child is a threat to their happiness not the most rigid middle class moralist can hold against them.If Martha is ever desperate enough to be tempted by sex work, or subject to the sexual predation of her employer’s husband; if Peter’s friends are pressuring him to shoplift; if Bob or his wife ever drink gin out of the context of a family holiday party - we’ll, now is not the time to explore that.

No, what is necessary now is a demonstration of the very important fact that Bob and his family, despite everything Scrooge has done to make them miserable, are happier than he is. They get much better value for the money they spend than he ever gets for the money he hoards. They don’t have enough money for new clothes, but they can make a good show for sixpence by adding ribbons to a twice-turned gown, and Bob can keep warm with exercise instead of a greatcoat to keep the kids clad, and even loan clothes to his offspring to make them feel dressed up. And they can eat their fill and have a proper holiday dinner, even the dessert, and pretend that the feast is more lavish than it is, to maximize their pleasure.

A twice-turned gown, by the way, is a labor-intensive bit of frugality. Victorian women’s clothing took acres of fabric, all of which had to be sewn by hand by the household or someone paid by them. A good dress had to be made to last! But everything fades with time and exposure, no matter how carefully laundered and protected. So once the original color faded, you took the dress apart, turned the unfaded side out, and put it back together again, probably with variations to accommodate changes in fashion or figure, or even, in a house with growing girls, of wearer. And if the fabric was good enough, when that side faded, too, you could turn it inside out again and re-remake it, if you were clever enough.

157 notes - Posted December 15, 2022

I have just finished reading Jane Eyre for the umpty-umpth time since I imprinted on it at 14.

Certain books I have read too often for too big a chunk of my life for me to ever alter my visual image of the locations and characters while reading, and Jane Eyre is one of them. However, this one out of all of them is gradually accumulating an Ideal but Impossible Cast List of actors who have never, and now never can, play certain characters, but should. Chief of these, of course, are Jane and Rochester. Rochester should be played by Jeremy Brett at slightly older than he played Sherlock Holmes, and Jane should be played by Gillian Anderson at 19, who could totally do the “drab little governess till she suddenly flares up” bit, with a few subtle shifts of eyebrow and half a lip. Today, a new one got added: John Hamm as St. John Rivers.

Because this is the first time since I saw the video adaptation of Good Omens that I’ve read the sequence in which St. John tries his damnedest to gaslight, browbeat, coerce, and lure Jane into marrying him in order to go to India with him as a missionary.

If you have seen John Hamm as Archangel Gabriel in Good Omens, and have read my Good Omens fanfic (which contains, I am told by a reader, the nastiest version of Gabriel in the entire fandom; no small feat for a character whom people have written as a rapist and serial killer), you will understand exactly how much I loathe St. John Rivers. He matches Gabriel’s presentation point-by-point, the self-righteous egotist who tramples all before him and thinks that being Great and Good excuses every bit of cruelty he indulges himself in; thinks, even, that because he never stoops to violence he isn’t cruel at all. When I was 14 it bothered me that he gets the last paragraphs of the book; now that I’m 61 it makes me almost physically ill. I want to shake Jane for all the excuses she makes for him. I hope he dies alone and is in Hell for half an hour before he realizes that’s where he wound up. I wish he’d met Rochester once, because even blind Rochester would’ve seen straight through him and stood a chance, if he could keep his temper, of cutting him off at the knees and shocking Jane into losing the scales on her eyes.

My opinion of Rochester has mutated a bit down the years - the implications of the age difference is much more real and meaningful to me now than it was at the time, for instance; probably more meaningful to me than it ever had a chance of being to Brontë, since she died so young herself. And the mad wife in the attic business is - really complicated and impossible to discuss without discussing historical methods of handling mental illness. But Jane made the right choices about him, right down the line. Of course she had to leave him after he’d lied to her and tried to trick her; of course she took him back after that tremendous ego of his finally broke down enough to let him change. Rochester and Jane have compatible faults, which are much more important, in marriage, than virtues, He in fact has many of the same faults as Rivers does, which explains how close Rivers came to winning. But he can love Jane the way she needs to be love, and no one will ever know if Rivers could, because he scorns to.

166 notes - Posted August 29, 2022

Scrooge’s nephew Fred is crucial to the story, one of the two people (the other being Bob Cratchitt) whose relationship with Scrooge is used to mark Scrooge’s relationship with the world, but he tends to fade out of adaptations. This is probably because he’s hard for most people to relate to.

Who among us has not had to be even tempered and docile while overworked and underpaid by a powerful asshole? We all feel you, Bob!

But who among us has gone out of our way to invite That Relative to our holiday party, knowing he would do his best to ruin it? Who has bearded That Relative in his lair, called down his ire upon our heads, deliberately opened ourselves to his nastiness, and returned a merry answer to each sneer? Why make nice to this awful man? It’s not to get into the will. Fred says here that he wants nothing and asks nothing, and we will see later that he’s not talking through his hat; Fred leads a perfectly comfortable life, with either a good job or a secure passive income from a source other than Scrooge. So why does he bother?

Does he just enjoy poking the bear, secure in the knowledge that his uncle’s rants can’t hurt him? Does he pity the old sour lonely man? Did he make a promise to his mother? Or is he an example of the flaw many critics of Dickens have charged him with, a character too good to be believable?

We’ll have more evidence later in the month and new readers may postpone judgment till then.

One thing that stands out here: we have now met the three most important characters in the book, and two of them have been neither introduced nor described. Scrooge has been described at length, physically and morally, before any action occurs; then Fred walks onstage, action begins, and all but incidental description stops. Bob is just hanging out doing clerky things in the background and shivering while Fred bursts in, flushed with exercise and breath smoking in the cold, and leaps into his verbal sparring match with Scrooge. And suddenly the cold grasping figure of Scrooge moves and speaks.

Dickens had to spend all those words describing Scrooge; because, left to himself, Scrooge does nothing. Nothing but convert the people around him into cash. Fred does’t need describing, because he moves and speaks and acts in the world. We are what we do, and Scrooge is a negative presence.

463 notes - Posted December 2, 2022

@todaysbird

478 notes - Posted November 18, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Let’s hear it for Sims.

Let’s hear it for meticulously crafted, efficient lots built with love and perfectly designed and decorated for the family that lives there.

Let’s hear it for huge barns with with three pinball machines, two arcade games, a billiard table, and four bowling alleys, but no stove.

Let’s hear it for gorgeous, gigantic, replicas of real palaces that crash 90% of games when loaded.

Let’s hear it for neighborhoods played in strict rotation; for neighborhoods where one family is played for three generations before another household is ever loaded; for neighborhoods still being used after 15 years of doing every Very Bad Thing under the sun; for neighborhoods that vanish inexplicably after being played once.

Let’s hear it for Maxis Match, for vanilla only, for palettes that are used exclusively for six months and then scrubbed in favor of a new one, for players who don’t know what any Maxis items, hairs, or clothing actually look like anymore.

Let’s hear it for unmodded games and for games modded into unrecognizability.

Let’s hear it for games in which each neighborhood has its own separate folder so it can have its own specific set of downloads and the player has to sit down and think about whether they want to play medieval, regency, fantasy, the 70s game, the BACC, the Test of Time,or the zombie apocalypse; and games in which the technology and fashion of all eras cohabit unselfconsiously in the same household.

Let’s hear it for non-supernatural heteronormative nuclear sim families; for werewolf/vampire/plantsim polycules; for queer utopias; for dictatorships that Big Brother would think too restrictive; for rigidly “realistic” games; for unabashed nonsense.

Let’s hear it for perfect worlds with no injury or sickness or fire or death and for hellholes of unending drama and danger.

Let’s hear it for defaults that make even aliens, plantsims, and robots conform to the range of current real-world skintones; and for those in which all colors of the rainbow are available except for those seen in the real world.

Let’s hear it for players who create neighborhood after neighborhood, setting them up perfectly, and never ever have a household open and unpaused long enough to see a welcome wagon.

Let’s hear it for players who build and build and build and never take the game out of build/buy except to playtest their build.

Let’s hear it for players who create CC for games they never play anymore.

Let’s hear it for players who have never made a thing, but toss in families, houses, clothes, objects, and businesses made by Maxis or other players, and play the stuffing out of them.

Let’s hear it for storytellers who never turn on free will and set everything up with poseboxes.

Let’s hear it for storytellers who never turn free will off and are continually surprised.

Let’s hear it for those who document their games and share them, and those who keep their games to themselves.

Let’s hear it for players who rush on to the next new thing.

Let’s hear it for players who doggedly maintain the tech to play their favorite iteration in the face of all difficulties.

Let’s hear it for no-cheat games, and all-cheat games, and every game in between.

Let’s hear it for the sandbox, and all the players therein, playing exactly the way they like to play.

Let’s hear it for sims.

557 notes - Posted September 2, 2022

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