the woman in the river shows me an axe of silver and asks if it is the one I lost. I respond that it is. she produces an axe of gold and asks the same question again. I shamefully look away, not sure whether I’m comfortable admitting that I was dual wielding
she stares at me in abject confusion as I take stock of my tools. a look of dissatisfaction brews on her face. “but why is one golden?” the woman asks.
I tug nervously at my coat, feeling the slightest bit insulted. “well, it’s not cheap to have a matching pair,” I tell her. “not everyone can afford two golden axes.”
“why not two silver axes?”
“I had the money for one golden axe.”
the woman crosses her arms. “but the gold is worse for everything you’d want an axe to do.”
“it’s not. it was more expensive and also really hard to find.”
“gold” she says, “is softer than silver.”
“it’s literally not, though,” I say. “that’s a really common misconception, but pure silver is softer than gold.”
“most metal sold as silver is actually an alloy. that axe is probably sterling silver. I don’t believe for a second someone made you a pure silver axe.”
I look at my axe, then back to the woman, then back to my axe.
“it was pure silver when it went into the river.”
an unreadable expression. with a great splash, the woman disappears into the current.
for three days and three nights, I wander along the river’s edge, hoping to find the woman again. I throw rocks, twigs, and once or twice a weird looking animal into the water. it’s all to no avail.
on the final evening, I see a glint at the river’s mouth. I run as quickly as I can, knowing I’ve finally found… oh for fuck’s sake, it’s just silver-plated. I lob the awful thing into the river with a huff.
“how can you tell?” asks the woman, peeking out of the water. “that could be the one you’ve lost.”
“it’s not.”
“but you won’t cut your losses and move on,” she gestures wide, “one axe the richer?”
“that’s too wide of a gesture for a cheap knick knack,” I say, gesturing modestly in some approximation of how much I think the silver-plated axe is worth. the woman seems annoyed.
“I’ve been telling you, you have your real axe. the gold axe is the one that sucks.”
“so what?” I spit. “are you suggesting I just use two cheap silver axes instead of my cool pure silver and gold axes?”
hey when you make posts, i just want you to know, thou/thee/thy/thine/ye are like he/you(object)/your/yours/you(subject) okay? “thou art wearing shoes,” “i will wear shoes for thee,” okay?
you say thine if the next word starts with a vowel and thy if the next word starts with a consonant and they both mean “your” so “thine own shoes,” “thy shoes,” okay?
and ye means you and refers to the subject of a sentence, “ye members of the brotherhood of shoes,” okay? you need this information to create better knight yaoi. i’m personally more interested in nun yuri but we are a community
hey when you make posts, i just want you to know, thou/thee/thy/thine/ye are like he/you(object)/your/yours/you(subject) okay? “thou art wearing shoes,” “i will wear shoes for thee,” okay?
you say thine if the next word starts with a vowel and thy if the next word starts with a consonant and they both mean “your” so “thine own shoes,” “thy shoes,” okay?
and ye means you and refers to the subject of a sentence, “ye members of the brotherhood of shoes,” okay? you need this information to create better knight yaoi. i’m personally more interested in nun yuri but we are a community
Prepare in advance, stockpile what you legally (or in minecraft) can, find diy that you trust.
They are going to take your medically required medication from you. This study is expected to start in about six months, and will likely be bullshit that only takes a couple months after that. There is still time.
However, I would predict an almost guarantee of a major federal legal restriction on adult HRT access in the 6mo-1yr from now range. I don’t want any of the bullshit I got at the time of the election about “fearmongering”. I stand by everything I said then.
i love when fic writers who have clearly never tried any kind of alcohol in their lives try to write someone drinking bc they’re always like
“he ordered a tall glass of hard liquor. after three large glasses he was feeling tipsy” like babygirl i can’t be sure but i think u just sent this man to the hospital
“the amber liquid tasted sweet” bestie i can assure you it did not
I love stuff like this. Didn’t a tribe in Africa send America some cows after 9/11? Like this is holy and the most valuable thing we have. We hear your suffering and want to do anything in our power to help
It was not a potato famine. The famine didn’t happen because of the potato yeald failing. Ireland was actually producing more than enough food. However it was almost all land owned by Brittish landowners, who took all of the food out of the country to sell in UK. Potato was what the Irish farmers ate, because it was cheep and could be produced in worst parts of the land, where more profitable food couldn’t be grown. When there were no longer potatos, the decision for the farmers was to either starve and sent the food as rent to the landlords or loose their homes and then starve.
The Brittish goverment was unwilling to do anything for two reasons. First was the laissez-faire capitalistic ideology, that put the rights of property owners to make profits above human lives. Rent freeze was unthinkable and they even were unwilling to do proper relief efforts as free food would lower the cost of food. The second reason was distain for the Irish, and the thought that they were “breeding too much” and the famine was a natural way to trim down the population, aka genocidal reasoning.
This is why it’s important to stress it was not a potato famine. The potato blinght was all over Europe but only in Ireland there was a famine. The reasons behind it had nothing to do with potatos and everything to do with the Brittish.
Apparently what made Choctaw want to offer relief to Irish was the news about the Doolough Tragedy. Hundreds of starving people were gathered for inspection to verify they were entitled to recieve relief. The officials would for *some reason* not do that and instead left to a hunting lodge 19 kilometers away to spend the night and said to the starvqing people they would have to walk there by morning to be inspected. The weather conditions were terrible and many of them died completely needlessly during the walk thoroung day and night.
This apparently reminded the Choctaw of their own very recent (and much more explicit and bigger scale) experiences of ethnic clensing, where they were forcibly relocated. It was basically a death march and thousands of Choctaw died from the terrible conditions also completely needlessly.
In 2015 a memorial named Kindred Spirits was installed in Southern Ireland to commemorate the Chactow donation.
Customer started yelling at me because I was 1 minute late to open the shop so I banned him from shopping with us and locked the door on him. Play stupid games.
This man had the audacity to come back at the end of the day as I was closing up by the fucking way. Ranting and raving about how he had been mistreated and that no one had even bothered to reply to his complaint email all day
Well I had the UNBRIDLED joy of informing him that not only had I seen his email, which was insanely abusive towards me for the crime of being 1 minute late and not putting up with his shit first thing in the morning, but that I was also the manager who he demanded to speak to, and I’d now also had our IT team block his IP address from being able to contact us or order with us ever again.
I should’ve been allowed to castrate the man but this will have to do
Okay this got way more notes than I was expecting so I feel like I should add some important context here. I’m not management. I’m not even middle management I’m just some guy that works here. I don’t have the authority to do any of this I just like lying to customers
THIS, writers. Unless your characters are very wealthy (can pay people to be very industrious in growing, spinning, weaving, sewing on their behalf) or live in a post-textile-industrial-revolution world (aka modern/futuristic), they’re not going to have that many clothes.
What they will have is protective outerwear. Aprons are a very real necessity for a lot of jobs, from cooking to blacksmithing and beyond.
Women wore aprons and housecoats into the 1940s and 1950s when doing cooking & cleaning because it was still a bit expensive to own a lot of clothes…so this is within 100 years. Within living memory for many folks.
Coveralls were created to protect clothing, and were handed out as uniforms by factories because the workers complained that their own clothes were getting damaged by their workplace. (Unions helped with this, strongly encouraging the companies doing the damage to their regular clothes to step up with replacement garments that could get damaged and then replaced by the company whose work was damaging them.)
Businesses started having their employees wear uniforms to make them look good and as a signature of their company (UPS brown, for example), but unless the design teams are idiots, those outfits are going to be stitched in ways that you can move easily & comfortably while doing your assigned tasks.
In corporate culture in Japan, the salarywomen are often given a uniform dress to wear, and I know of one business that held a work-slowdown because the way the sleeves of those dresses were cut and stitched, they literally couldn’t bring their arms forward to type on their computers in a comfortable way. The company balked at replacing the uniforms, until a section manager agreed to let his female workers wear their own “office-dressy” clothes for a day…and productivity leaped forward by over 200%, literally because they could move their arms and position them comfortably.
Another example of those who effed it up are the officers’ uniforms for the Germans during WWII, which were focused on looking fashionable–and they were!–but were horrible to don quickly, awkward wear in actual combat, etc, and it took them far too long to “drop trousers” to use the bushes in a swift, efficient, and safe manner. (Not saying they didn’t deserve to be shot for supporting such an evil regime, but you should be able to go to the bathroom without worrying that it’ll take you over a minute to put your clothes back together enough to run for cover in summer.)
Prior to the 1700s, servants in manor houses & noble estates often did not wear a uniform; they just wore whatever they had, and depended on aprons and watchcoats and whatever to protect their clothes. Then it became a status symbol to put one’s servants into uniforms, also known as livery. If you could afford to do that then, by gum-golly, you were wealthy, and people could literally see that you were wealthy!
As for those famous black maid’s dresses with white aprons that every manga loves to draw? Black dye was still a bit expensive, but black hid most stains. White aprons were protective, and were to be changed out frequently…and it was far easier to bleach cloth than it was to dye it black, plus the stark contrast was very eye-catching, and since the aprons could be swapped out frequently (very small amount of cloth compared to a whole dress), the fact that your maidstaff were wearing clean aprons was another sign of how wealthy you were, rather than just making the maid wear the apron all day long, progressively getting dirtier and dirtier.
With all this said, how valuable clothing was also affected how armies moved. Throughout most of recorded history, armies were composed primarily of men…but there were almost always 2 categories of women who followed them on the campaign trail. One, of course, was sex workers (for obvious reasons), but the other was Laundresses…and the laundresses would be ransomed first, ahead of the sex workers, if captured by enemy forces. (Not all were women by any means, btw, but the majority were, so I stuck with that gender.)
They worked hard to get the clothing clean, helped with getting leather armor clean, and provided other grooming services such as lice-combing. “But Jean, why would getting the soldiers’ clothing clean be that important?” Dudes, dudes, my dudes…if you need to take a piss or a shit, combat will not stop for you. Peristalsis will happen mid-sword-swing. This was one of the sources of “deadly infections killed many of the fighters who went to war,” and laundresses literally cleaned that shit up.
When you’re a warrior in an army, marching off through the forests of Gaul, you can only carry so many spare sets of clothes because you’re also carrying your armor, your weapons, and your rations, etc, etc. You will want to take care of your clothes, because you don’t have many replacements, and you won’t get many replacements.
So, writers, when you’re writing about pre-industrialized cultures…go easy on how many clothes people own. Also realize that accessorizing can make an old outfit look new, which includes small parts of the clothing that can be swapped out for other pieces in a mix-and-match style.
…One last note:
The most expensive, time-consuming part of building a Norse ship to go a-viking on wasn’t the actual ship, which took many men 2+ years to craft. It was the sails, which took many people, males and females, 3+ years to spin and weave and stitch together. There are literal stories of brash sailors robbing other norsemen of their sails because thieving it was faster & easier. (It also explains a lot of the fury of certain blood feuds between clans & holdings, if you think about it.)
Bringing this back to writers again, your period fantasy or historic characters are also going to know how to do upkeep and basic repairs on their own clothing. Laundries and tailors might be a thing in their world, but spot-cleaning and being able to mend small tears before they become big ones is crucial when off doing quests or campaigns or world-saving missions or what have you. Garments are expensive to replace. It may be sexy to have your hero discard their bloody, torn, and ruined shirt after a fight, but even if the garment is ruined beyond repair or wearability, woven cloth is still so valuable that it’s worth keeping and cleaning to be turned into something else (legwraps, bandages, resewn into a hat, or used as patches to repair other garments, etc.).
We live in an unprecedented era of wastefulness, where our clothing is often so cheap (and cheaply made) that it’s barely worth the efgort of repairing once it begins to wear out, and so easy to replace that we end up amassing more than we need of it. Even less than a hundred years ago, this kind of frivolity was reserved for the EXCEPTIONALLY wealthy. Even fairly well off people would continually recycle their old garments again and again. (Think of Cinderella’s mice making that old pink dress into something new with just bits and pieces of the sisters’ discarded accessories…. taking ribbons or lace or whole sections of an old dress to use in a new one was very common until quite recently!)
And never underestimate the usefulness of rags. If the clothing is beyond all repair or salvage, it has a new life as rags. You can wrap food in them, stuff them in your shoes for warmth and fit, pad your pillow with them, use them for cleaning, for bandages, for tying and belting your drawers, for patches…. rags are invaluable in a world where paper towels and disposable hygiene products do not exist.
I genuinely can’t stand pop psychology I’m not an expert on this stuff but the damage it has done to the general public’s understanding of mental health and psychology must be notable. People with low empathy are evil. NPD is The Abuser Disorder. here’s how your partner is subconsciously manipulating you. OCD is when you like cleaning. If you ask him a question and he looks away for one second he’s lying to you and abusing you. Follow for more dark psychology tips. Letting my intrusive thoughts win and dyeing my hair. I thought this guy was into me I’m so delulu. Anyone who comes to you with their problems is traumadumping and abusive. Anyone who gives you gifts is lovebombing and abusive. Being neurodivergent means Liking Things. Neurotypicals don’t like things. They are empty shells without feelings. Neurodivergent means ADHD or ASD. What, BPD? Schizophrenia?? That’s not very quirky or fun. And that’s what neurodivergent means. That’s just weird. Being mentally ill isn’t an excuse to be weird. Only Evil People manipulate and abuse. There are certain people who Are Evil by nature (people with NPD) and they Will abuse you. Loving someone means it’s impossible to abuse them only Evil People Who Hate You are abusive. Have I mentioned that people with NPD are evil. I really want to drive that home
Don’t mind me just shooting green aura into your eyes as you read this auaaauhuaaaaaaaaaaauauauuauaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaauaaaauaauuuuuuuuuuuuuauuuuuuuauauauaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
don’t fucking heal me
Oh god you wish this green shit healed
You just projectile vomited on me and called it green aura. Freak
don’t you vomit on honeycombs and call it honey?
Yeah but when i do it its actually cool and awesome and not noticeably green!
I believe that attitudes towards art will always come to impact other academic areas
“the curtains are just blue” okay and this study proving known carcinogens are “good for you, actually” paid for and published by scientists funded by a major producer of those materials is probably totally objective too
literary analysis is a good and fun and helpful exercise for what I like to call Real Life Analysis, in which you will form hypotheses and gather supporting evidence to confirm or deny those theories
The misuse of the “insult to life itself” quote from Miyazaki on AI burns my yams so bad bc the original context is being disgusted with how a characters movements are dehumanizing to disabled people specifically bc of his empathy for a disabled friend and it’s such a sadly rare sentiment, this cognizance of how we casually inflict indignity upon disabled people and how he finds it disgusting, I hate seeing it obfuscated
In the video he sees character animation where the presenter comments on how the AI can be used to model “grotesque movements humans can’t even imagine.” And Miyazaki immediately mentions that he thought of his physically disabled friend, who struggles with movement, with the implication being that what’s “insulting to life itself” is the degradation of people like him to grotesque monsters. Regardless of my feelings about AI art I don’t think it’s worth obscuring this humane thought process to have a rhetorical weapon
