Yo I feel like the idea that the only historical women who counted are the ones who defied society and took on the traditionally male roles is… not actually that feminist. It IS important that women throughout history were warriors and strategists and politicians and businesswomen, but so many of us were “lowly” weavers and bakers and wives and mothers and I feel like dismissing THOSE roles dismisses so many of our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers and the shit they did to support our civilization with so little thanks or recognition.
YES. This is such an important point. Those ‘girly’ girls doing their embroidery and quilting bees and grass braiding were vital parts of every domestic economy that has ever existed.
This is precisely what chaps my hide so badly about the misuse of the quote “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” because this is precisely what the author was actually trying to say.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a domestic historian who developed new methodologies to study well-behaved women because they were
1) so vital, and
2) their lives were rarely recorded in the usual old sources.
“Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all. Most historians, considering the domestic by definition irrelevant, have simply assumed the pervasiveness of similar attitudes in the seventeenth century.”
If you didn’t know: Abagail Adams (John Adams’ wife) led a very successful effort to fund the American Revolution. How did she and her tiny army of women do it?
They made lace, and sold it to the aristocrats. Real lace (the stuff you see on old outfits in museums, not the machine-made stuff you might be familiar with from today) is stupidly difficult to make, takes a lot of time and skill, and, well:
If you watch this through, you’ll hear her say this is DOMESTIC lace. This is not fancy, this is for household objects. You can imagine what it would take to make some of the elaborate pieces you see on old aristocratic clothing, and see why it was so expensive and valuable. (Incidentally, if you’ve ever heard the music from the musical 1776, in the song where Abagail and John are trading letters and he’s like “ma’am we need saltpeter” and she’s like “dude we need pins,” THIS IS WHAT THEY NEEDED THE PINS FOR. That song was based on real letters between the two.)
And this is all those revolutionary Revolutionary women did, every free moment of every day. They pulled out their pins and their bobbins and they made lace until they couldn’t see straight, and they sold it to revolutionaries and royalists alike, anyone who would pay. Yard upon yard upon yard of lace to earn cash to translate into rations and bullets.
The war was won by a women’s craft. Not even a “vital” women’s craft like cooking or cleaning. It was won by making a luxury item whose entire purpose was to say “look how wealthy I am, I can afford all this lace.”
Lace was not the only source of income for the Revolution. But it was a major one, and it is extremely fair to say it turned the tide.
American diners on interstate highways in the middle nowhere are metaphysically significant places
Not in the way that mid horror authors think though. Desert diners are groves of calm and sacredness. Getting food poisoning means the urban spirits have rejected you for being weak.
another bit of art for @tolkiengenweek - for the prompts “family” & “group dynamic” :D
Has this been done yet? I had so much fun with it :D and it’s the first time I’ve drawn Curufin & Amrod & Amras, so it was a blast to figure out designs for them! I’m pretty sure Celegorm is crouching for the photo. There’s no way Maglor’s taller than him.
Just saw a Barbie ad here for the first time. It is starting, folks. They must already be desperate if they’re buying ad space on TUMBLR.
Do not reblog official marketing or ads from struck works
including (but not remotely limited to) Barbie. They are advertising here because their actors are on strike and will not promote their products.
Barbie is not a struck work. It is okay to reblog barbie content. It’s done and finished. Going to premiers for it is crossing the line. But going to the regular ass movie is not.
Read me and read me good: not seeing Barbie is a great way to show execs that we don’t care about writers and actors.
Let me say that again: going to see Barbie is GOOD for the strike. Many people who WORKED on barbie are striking. They probably have not been paid yet.
The unions HAVE NOT asked us to picket the movie. Just the premier.
The original post is disinformation.
I believe it to be coming from a good place but avoiding works that are NOT being struck is genuinely harmful to the cause.
I feel like we’re dealing with a bit of a catch-22 here.
On the one hand, I don’t want to be buying tumblr merch and premium options to REWARD the garbage decisions they’re making right now, and I know enough about how upper management at tech companies operates to know that they WILL see an influx of money right now as basically saying either “ohhhh, so they LIKE these changes” - or, if they actually listen to the staff members fielding feedback, “ohhhh, so THREATENING to make the user experience worse gets us money!”
On top of which, I don’t want to encourage an OVERLY friendly relationship between the company and its userbase. Tumblr may be…by FAR the best we’ve got at its scale, despite the fact that they literally seem to be trying to hide that fact where they’re not threatening to change it outright, but they are still a company. They’re still inclined to make shitty decisions and lose touch with the userbase in the interest of Company Bullshit.
On the other hand…if we DON’T try to get them to at least break even, we’re going to lose the site eventually, and possibly have some REALLY heinous shit go down in its death throes. Definitely not today or tomorrow. Maybe not for many years; it’s hobbled along on life support via changing hands for many years already. But it will happen. They can fake it for a significant time if there’s enough demand, enough hope - tumblr’s not the only one pulling it off - but a company CAN’T go on forever when it’s hemorrhaging money. Money doesn’t become a nonissue when it’s not YOUR paycheck.
I’m sick of the illusion that the internet is an immaterial, intangible thing…except when we’re criticizing mining and energy usage and basically implying it shouldn’t EXIST. It’s not just a fake thing that exists in our phones and computers and the LITERAL ATMOSPHERIC clouds. Servers cost money to buy or rent, even when the software running on them is a buggy mess. Staff and contractors cost money to pay, even when the skeleton crew your company has is laughably insufficient for the scope of its services - we want them to expand staff to respond to tickets and improve their moderation system faster, well, with what money?? You want these improvements made with whose man-hours?? I wholeheartedly agree with most of the userbase that this Twitter-knockoff layout and some of their other stupid ideas lately are a huge waste of the ones they’re paying for, but that doesn’t mean they can redirect 1,000 man-hours from an ill-advised project and magically get a 10,000 man-hour project done!
Consider the moderation system. It’s bad! It’s biased! We’ve proven this! It’s also mostly automated. What are our potential solutions here?
Go back to fully manual: Puts real human people through a PTSD meat grinder. For this to be done even REMOTELY ethically demands hazard pay, short hours, and the best mental health care coverage money can buy. Where are these human moderators getting paid from, let alone if they’re going to be paid fairly?
Modify the software: …they’re already trying; retraining a whole system is easier said than done, especially in the very likely event that posts that are taken down by report-brigading innocuous content are feeding BACK into the system as “This Is What A Bad Post Looks Like.” I’d love it if they could do it better and faster - but again, with what money?
Train their OWN software from the ground up: Requires EXPERT software engineers to build the framework AND a large human moderation crew in the short term to hit that “good post”/“bad post” button all day; refer to the problems with fully manual moderation. No one is quite sure how to bulletproof a moderation system against report-brigading in a way that won’t ALSO deprioritize reports against content so heinous that everyone who sees it reports it. Once again - where is the money for all this labor coming from?
Every option is human labor that must be paid for. Every single possibility.
Anything else that needs doing? Fixing search? Human labor - money. Improving the bot filters to ban more bots and fewer real people? Humans have to do that - needs money!
So the money-seeking WILL continue until they’re breaking even or better, or the site shuts down completely. Those are the two options. You cannot anti-capitalist Theory your way out of them. You can have your grand ideas for how things will work in a healthier, restructured economy, but that’s not the point we’re at. For now? Operating at a deficit = enshittification or shutdown. Those are the options. There is no third one. The level of hostility I see from some users against the very concept of tumblr BREAKING EVEN is absolutely absurd and completely detached from reality.
But what’s the conclusion? Where do we go from here? Fuck, man, I have no fucking idea.
I never want to hear conservatives go on about repressive censorship in China, North Korea, and Iran ever again
To be clear to those unfamiliar: these are the companies that libraries use to lend ebooks.
They are literally cutting off library access to minors.
If you are affected by this or other bans and restrictions in the United States, be aware that the Brooklyn Public Library is offering free digital library cards to anyone age 13-21 nationwide as part of their Books UnBanned initiative:
a quick step by step guide on what to do if you come back to your apartment and find yourself locked out because your front door is frozen shut
kick the bottom of the door for 10 minutes
text your landlord
remember your landlord is on vacation and also in her mid 50′s so it takes about 36 hours to receive a response
briefly wonder why the fuck you moved the canada
remember that college tuition is significantly cheaper here than in the united states
look up and notice your cat is at the window, staring at you. he paws at the window lightly and meows. it’s devastating. his eyes are so big and imploring. decide that you have to get inside your apartment at all costs. not even god himself can stop you from feeding your cat his chicken wet food dinner. frida kahlo herself could descend from the heavens and ask “hey you wanna bang?” and you’d say “hell yeah but first let me open this door so i can feed my cat his dinner”
remember there is a starbucks 3 blocks down the street from you
enter. the barista gives you a weird look for entering a starbucks at 7pm on a tuesday
order a venti cup of hot water. you order in french because the barista just said “bonjour” instead of “bonjour, hi.” you have a strong american accent. you hit the r in merci a little too hard to compensate. you embarrass yourself.
exit the starbucks clutching the massive cup of hot water in your hands. it’s burning your fingers.
return. methodically pour the starbucks cup of water all over the the door frame. it begins moving a little but still wont open
back up
ensure your doc martens are properly gripping the sheet of ice covering the ground. many people have told you to stop wearing doc martens in the winter, despite your protests that theyre actually the ideal winter boot. also, you’re a lesbian and punk’s not dead
release a pterodactyl screech and sprint towards the door, slamming the full force of your pathetically tiny 5′2″ 110lb body into it
you dont know any of your neighbors so you dont care about maintaining your pride anyways
the door swings open
run up the stairs
open the actual door to your apartment and yell MOMMY’S HOME MY LITTLE BITCHASS BABY BOY DONT WORRY at your cat
cat flings his body to the ground and starts purring like he does every time you come home
