#relly rambles

[maygrantgf]

lord we are in TROUBLE 😭😭😭

[girderednerve]

so i've been watching the olympics!

i ideologically reject the olympics & they should not be held. however, it is fun to watch sports on television, especially if you, like me, are a fan of weird sports that aren't televised often (equestrian sports!).

there are a lot of problems with equestrian sports, mostly that they're capital-intensive, which is to say that they're inaccessible & elitist. the big controversy this olympics relates to animal welfare, though. there have been scandals in the past, but this year, right before the olympic games, charlotte dujardin, a very famous & celebrated dressage rider, withdrew from competition pending an investigation for animal welfare by the FEI & british dressage federation after the release of a video that is at least two years old (age contested) of her repeatedly striking at the legs of a client's horse with a long whip during a training session. i will note that she has previously had to withdraw from an international competition after blood was found on her horse (they check bits & spurs every round). charlotte dujardin is famous & celebrated because she has had incredibly good, record-breaking results in international competition, despite her relatively young age (gold medalist in her 20s, when people remain competitive in this sport into their 60s). she also competed in international dressage wearing a riding helmet, which was not at all conventional in the 2010s, although it is now in part because of her influence. when she won her gold medals at the 2012 olympics, she was riding at home & was met with a massive swelling of national pride by british viewers.

international dressage competition was dominated by german riders (isabell werth is like, the queen mother of dressage basically), and there had just been a huge controversy about animal welfare centering on the practice of rollkur, a training method in which the horse's head is pulled in very close to their chest, which is a very unnatural way for a horse to move & involves a lot of force exerted on the bit(s) in the horse's mouth. i strongly agree that rollkur is bad and should not be done, but the public discussion about it immediately became extremely messy, because a) some fans were looking for a reason to discount german records & decry german horsemanship and b) we couldn't agree what rollkur actually is! the FEI said that you can't do rollkur, but that it's fine to use a "deep & round" training frame, which is, um, different, because it's not mean? which is nonsense, or at least very difficult to enforce by eye, but sort of understandable; i myself have spent plenty of time on a horse (my beloved friend, strudel the pony) who habitually ducks behind the bit & carries his head low & behind the vertical. while it's straightforward to identify & sanction extreme cases (e.g., patrik kittel's blue-tongued horse), it can be much harder to agree on other instances, keeping in mind that you only see a very small piece of a rider's general practice in competition. judges are supposed to penalize movements in which the horse's head is behind the vertical, but in practice they spent years penalizing carriage in front of the vertical more sharply & consistently (this has begun to shift in the last couple years, but the rollkur stuff was happening in like, 2010). this sport is an old, strange, slow-moving patchwork of styles, full of people who are deeply particular, territorial, & aesthetically conservative. there's also a huge variation in how horses themselves behave; they have character, personality, & preferences. none of which lessens the burden of responsibility on riders & people who work with horses to make sure that they are cared for well, but does make adjudicating an individual case complicated. of course, it's also intensely emotionally charged, because we are, & ought to be, outraged by animal abuse.

anyway the thing i'm trying to get at is that we don't have a cultural consensus on what animal welfare in equestrian sports ought to look like. i realize that sounds like rank apologia, which i am not trying to do; i have not watched the video of charlotte dujardin in the training session, because i don't have the stomach for it & am not interested in trying to argue about this one case. the bigger & more interesting issue to me is that i think there's a general cultural shift, in the sport & beyond it, around what we think is appropriate to ask from a horse. like i said, people have long careers in this sport, & it's culturally conservative on its own; i rode a couple times with a celebrated british rider whose father was responsible for determining which horses to care for & which to put down during world war ii (!!!), which obviously accompanied an extremely different attitude towards horses & the labor we expect from them than anything you might find in a modern barn. many of these determinations about equine welfare are being conducted on the public stage, by people who have never spent significant time around horses; the video of dujardin hitting a horse aired on good morning britain. there's also a vibrant, very opinionated amateur community, who have spent time with horses but aren't professionals. i do think there's a meaningful difference between having a horse who is your buddy & spending all day working with horses, having sort of done both; i don't think it's particularly edgy to say that you treat an activity differently when it's your job than when it's a thing you're doing for fun & stress relief.

when i was taught to ride, i was told (& of course believed!) that it's fine & appropriate to punch a horse with my stupid seven-year-old fists if they knocked me around with their big horse faces, which made me feel weird when kim raisner was banned from the german pentathlon team for same, but then she obviously was not seven. i'm not quite sure what i think about it; the argument in favor of smacking a horse is that they're big & dangerous if they don't have manners, & in my experience they didn't really care. i feel some shame & conflict about this now that i am years away from working with horses, but i also recall trying to make sure that the horses i was around knew me & weren't afraid of me. we had solid working relationships from my perspective, but of course i can't go back & ask the horses. increasingly, i think excellent animal welfare is probably just not compatible with large-scale competitive sport, or, perhaps, with a capitalist environment. hot take, i guess!

one thing i think about a lot is that while there obviously is money in dressage, there's not nearly as much money in it as there is in horse racing, which is, from my perspective, a hugely destructive & cruel industry for horses & for people. horses die racing. people die caring for them, almost all of them undocumented barn workers. dressage defines itself in opposition to this approach—many amateurs pride themselves upon the differences—but i'm not convinced that the kinder ideas we have now of how to coexist with animals scale with revenue-generating industry, even outside of racing.

anyway, it makes people uncomfortable, and it makes me uncomfortable too. i think we'll see some comparatively rapid change in the next five years or so. the future of equestrian sports in the olympics is in question, as the olympics desperately try to stay relevant & interesting to younger generations (do kids like, uh, breakdancing? skateboarding? metal bands???). there's also an image crisis more broadly. the olympic ideal has shifted over the years, but a lot of the people involved in planning the games have self-aggrandizing ideas about what they're doing & the utopian potential of sports. equestrian sports have a martial history, which commentary generally elides, but is revealing in its way about the historical purpose of the olympiad. if the public conversation is focused on how this sport, which is expensive to put on & pulls low viewership numbers, is a harm to horses (&, in the popular mind, is not so much a sport as an exercise in expensive sitting, cf. the comedy around the romney-owned dressage horse), then the whole facade is crumbling. i guess it's better for the IOC for us all to worry about charlotte dujardin's heavy whip hand than it is for us to ask why israel is competing, or how well the unhoused people of paris are faring during these expensive spectacles, but surely they'd rather we set aside those conversations to talk about how inspiring the whole games are.

[honestlydarkprincess]

listening to @maygrantgf ramble on the phone is the best thing ever 🥰

[eebie]

btw if gamzee was real hed be my best friend. he wluldnt kill me we’d hang out and hahe so much chill fun he would forget that he is so full of rage

[secretary-ian]

Ughhh my friends asked me who a couple others in the DSAF AU would be yesterday and I BROKE

So. Yu is Jack, and Kadee is Dave, right.

I already had made Soul SazErenos as Henry.

But then, I considered, and...

Dee is Sam. From The Doom Wall.

Peter is the King of Draco.

It kinda makes me wonder who the rest of the Phone Guys could be, but... eh... I really don't know yet.

Yes this implies I'm headcanoning Sam and Yu as brothers. I am. They're bros for life now.

[candyn-gutz]

ITS CUTE

[icyhotheartwritings]

I need to scream my Wild Horse Rant at someone but I don’t want to annoy my friends but I will also not put my Wild Horse Rant on the free internet because if there’s a single idiot who’s disconnected from the reality of the situation that sees the post I will get a fucking death threat

[apricote]

love all the random npcs in bg3 who are gay. like the gnome husbands in grymforge and the brothel's chef with his husband.......... seeing background queer couples always makes me really happy because some people think that lgbt+ characters queerness has to be a plot point or a character arc for it to be realistic. it doesn't have to be a big deal all the time. we're more than our sexuality. you know?

[heckyeahrellie]

To be honest friends, I’m glad this story is reaching more people through the live action show. Even with this blog losing activity for a few years, I’ve never stopped loving Riley and Ellie. They’ve been dear to my heart this whole time, and now seeing my non gamer friends learn about them has warmed my heart. It throws me back to when I first got a ps4. TLOU was the first game I bought, along with the DLC which was already out at the time. Seeing an LGBTQ+ story in a AAA game blew me away back then and it still does now. I felt very lucky to get to experience it and it’s my greatest hope that we continue to get stories like this in video games and in mainstream media.

[maygrantgf]

has anyone done this yet

[theonlythingimfuckingisstupid]

maybe i shouldn’tve taken this shift ://

[honestlydarkprincess]

gonna post the stubble fic sooooonnnn<3

[autisticnightfury]

ive just had the weirdest day. awake for *checks time* thirty five hours, my dog at work went crazy on a RC car, saw someone buy so much potato salad at the grocery store. had a heavy, deeply needed conversation with an old friend ive not seen for four years, played the most ridiculous session of dnd, realised A Lot of things about my self and how i probably need therapy and now im sitting and drinking the most swedish brännvin ive encountered so i can finally unwind. ive written so much smutty fic in the last few days i can barely think about anything else and i might have ocd

good times

[arcandoria]

What if... I made both Rellihn and Andrali canon by having double KCMs. What if I was sexy like that.

[moomoorare]

Help me god get ready to go to the store.

[a-sleepy-ginger]

20/5/24

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Did well on practice run of the exam in that I managed to complete the essay in an hour

Baby potato

Ender toast

Got cuddles from my cat