Laughed At This Image For Five Minutes Straight Today

You really enjoy romanticizing women’s suffering

Use your face if you want to insult me, you coward.

But I'll reply anyway, because it honestly is kind of annoying how many people don't understand what I'm saying in my arranged marriage post. I assume you haven't really read anything else I've written because a whole lot of it is pointing out how women are oppressed and harmed in Jane Austen's works and begging people to stop hating on abused 16-18 year-old fictional girls.

My point in that post is that women would have different reactions to arranged marriage because a lot of people buy into oppression. That is how oppression is perpetuated. Right now, in our world, people are convincing women that the only natural form of childbirth is epidural-free and they aren't "real mothers" if they don't go through that. Mothers will tell you, sincerely, with a straight face, that you should have a "real natural birth" and that's it's a beautiful experience. That is complete and utter bullshit, and I know that because I've birthed a freaking baby. So if I write from the perspective of one of these women, am I "romanticizing women's suffering?" No. I'm showing how people can buy into things that persecute them. I'm telling a story about how someone can embrace something that harms them.

It's actually a better indictment of the arranged marriage system to show someone excited about it whose entire worldview crumbles after facing the reality. But it would also be interesting, and good fiction, and acknowledgement that people in the past had different ideas about love and marriage, to show women who want to climb socially, or be richer, or gain power, happy with their arranged partner because he's rich, powerful, or socially savvy.

"Stop writing women as Modern Girlboss Monoliths who all have the exact same worldview" ≠ "romanticizing women’s suffering"

odysseus absolutely does present a threat to penelope if he perceives her as at all unfaithful, and i feel the unfairness of this, and i think people tend to undersell how much tension at least potentially exists between odysseus and penelope. but i'm also like. his reaction, all speculation aside, his actual reaction in the odyssey to her flirting with the suitors is delight, because he immediately ascertains that she is running a con. sorry that they're so in-sync in spite of the forces that try to drive a wedge between them, including their own misgiving hearts. sorry that they invented homophrosyne ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Darcy in his letter being like, "I suppose if you say so, your sister might have actually loved Bingley. I'm not sure though, it seems unlikely. I did look very hard at her for like, whole minutes at the ball. But whatever, it's already done and I still think I was right. Because your family sucks."

I love how liberal criticisms of Marxism always boil down to a game of peekaboo where capital moves the worst forms of exploitation to different nonwhite countries and liberals can’t see it anymore and assume it disappeared. It’s falling for the most basic illusions that run throughout Marx’s entire body of work

“Nooooo the slavery in chocolate supply chains is just an exception to our totally fair and consensually free exchange of goods”

“Nooooo China is an evil socialist nation wdym our global capitalist economy depends on the exploitation of 300 million intraregional Chinese migrant workers who are barred from forming independent labor unions and arrested for demanding better living conditions”

“International trade is about nations exchanging goods based on comparative advantage. No I will not look into how that means one company shipping its products around the globe and different stages of the production process to countries where workers are more easily controlled and violently suppressed. It’s actually good because it means I can buy a temu haul every week”

Every page of the legendarium is dripping with love. Love for Christopher love for storytelling love for history and language and nature and the world just a kind of slow reveling in the best parts of living that makes Tolkien’s work so antithetical to modernity and feel so timeless

nothing, just tolkien originally writing down the hobbit because his son christopher kept complaining that he'd change the details from night to night and then christopher later being so crucial in taking tolkien's notes and turning them into fully written novels of worldbuilding. loving someone to the point of creation and then having them help you finish the job.

i feel like we as a digital society have forgotten the important rules of the internet

Don't feed the trolls

Never give out personal information

Anonymity is the best defense

Don't click suspicious links

Don't click popups and ads

Just because it's written doesn't mean it's true

You are responsible for your own experience

There is porn of everything, act accordingly

We had a storage warehouse on our realm already, but I really wanted a space for plant-specific storage for the ten million oak leaves I inevitably need to save for custom trees -- so I built us a greenhouse! I think this might be the largest build I've done yet!!

A couple of things have labels, but for the most part storage spaces are delineated by the plants themselves -- barrels for a particular type of leaf have the corresponding sapling sitting on top, flowerboxes show off what kinds of flowers go in the barrels next to them, etc. I really wanted the space to have practical room to store EVERY PLANT, but to also feel like the primary purposes is growing and enjoying them.

And bonus planning sketches:

it took a LOT of planning -- these are just a few of the sketches I did trying to figure out where everything should go. IT WAS HONESTLY QUITE INTIMIDATING TO SORT OUT, I can't believe it's done!!

Also, a couple shots of the little dirt storage room just b/c I think it turned out nice too:

If you wanna watch me walking through the space (these screenshots don't quite show it all), I streamed a little tour recently over here!

who up hating pop psychology