taylortut:

you know what’s wild is that all these crazy standards we hold ourselves to are things that we don’t even value in another person? like i’ve never been like “wow I love that this friend of mine is too proud to ask for help and never complains about their feelings” or “my favorite quality about this friend is that they get straight A’s and never get overwhelmed and has never told me about a problem” or “i love that this friend has never been wrong about anything or slipped up and said something embarrassing once in their life” and yet here we are, pushing ourselves past our limits for and beating ourselves up over slipups of things that our friends probably wouldn’t even rank in the top 50 reasons they like us

anarchistfrogposting:

mxxnlightsxnata:

Autism and masking are so funny because like internally I despise when plans change or food feels funny in my mouth or there’s a tag in my shirt or I talk to too many people in one day or I have to make a phone call, etc so I always feel like a nervous wreck at any point in the day, but on the outside I’m just 😎😊😃 just vibing and I seem so chill and adaptable and emotionally put together, so it’s hard to differentiate like am I GENUINELY okay with this or am I masking

I think a lot of being an autistic kid unaware that you are autistic is saying “I’m really stressed right now” and getting the response “you don’t SEEM stressed”. Like u have no idea how good I am at pretending not to feel like this

nuttysaladtree:

kaiserin-erzsebet:

There is something I absolutely loathe about fashion content on the whole.

“What is your color season? Buy a whole new wardrobe.” - I assure you that I am not throwing out perfectly good things I already have.

“Find your aesthetic and build a whole wardrobe around it” - again, this involves getting rid of things and buying new ones.

“Instead of buying this sweater, buy one that is pure wool.” - I have news for you about how affordable pure wool is.

“Just go thrifting!” - Thrifting is not the gold mine that people seem to think it is. A lot of influencers are getting lucky because they live in cities where there is a relatively high turnover of stock at the thrift store. My average thrift store visit ends with me buying one or two things that 1. I like. 2. Are reasonably priced for the condition they’re in. 3. Are actually my size.

If I had to sum up my irritation with this, it’s that a lot of fashion content (and interior design from what I’ve seen) is that it is built on the idea that your life should have a unified aesthetic. But I would wager that most people have pieces and parts of different aesthetics cobbled together across different periods of their life. And there’s nothing wrong with that. You don’t have to start over every time your “aesthetic” shifts a bit.

I wonder if this is (somewhat, partially) influenced by how people view history (and relatedly, how we learn history or how it is taught).

If you’ll bear with the tangent, the last sentence (and paragraph in general) reminded me of this bit of Bee Wilson’s Consider the Fork about models of historic kitchens:

Sometimes, you see mock-ups of historic kitchens…These mock-ups almost always have the same subtle mistake…A mock-up 1940s kitchen, for example, will include no item that wasn’t made in the 1940s: there will be a 1940s toaster, 1940s pots and pans, a 1940s gas oven, a 1940s radio and 1940s chairs. Real kitchens aren’t like that. In the kitchens we actually inhabit, old and new technologies overlap and coexist. A thirty-year-old housewife of 1940 would have had parents born in the nineteenth century; her grandparents would have been high Victorians, toasting bread by a grate with a fork; are we really to suppose that these earlier lives left no trace on her kitchen? No salamander? None of grandmother’s cast-iron pans?

Before reading this, I hadn’t seriously questioned any similar kitchen reconstructions or compared them to the real kitchens of my personal experience. I wonder if other people have had similar blind spots with fashion, and if those blind spots smooth the way for capitalism and commercialism to lie and tell people they need a new outfit every season. If your history describes outfits as being current to that time period’s fashion, if you’ve never imagined a thirty-year-old housewife of 1940 wearing a pair of slippers she’s been wearing since the mid-1920s or 1930s, why would you ever wear something that’s not In?

Wilson, Bee. 2012. Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat. La Vergne, TN: Basic Books. pp. 395-396. For editions with different pagination, is the leadup to the “With Coffee” end of Chapter Eight: Kitchen.

blood-head:

drownedinlight:

swimthroughthefires:

catherine-the-great-tv:

Anna Karenina & Alexei Vronsky in Anna Karenina. Vronsky story (tv mini-series, Russia, 2017)

#men undressing women: [drakeNO.jpg]#men assisting in dressing women: [drakeYES.jpg]#he’s really concentrating in getting those laces sitting right#what a good boy#anna karenina: vronsky’s story#gif harrietvane

On of the things that I learned in high school, which was just one of those facts that was just kind of like, “Yeah?” but is also one of those facts that you rarely see represented, that it does sort of startle into this idea of “wait, is that right.” Men absolutely helped their wives and lovers dress, especially in times when dress had become complicated enough that women could not get dressed alone (ties and buttons that had to fasten in the back for one reason or another, for example). If a woman didn’t have a servant to help her dress, and most women did not, it was the job of her husband once she was married.

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This leads to the interesting trope of a husband discovering his wife’s lover’s handiwork, for example in this 1840 illustration from Paris le Soir. The caption reads: “That’s funny! This morning I made a knot in this lace, and tonight there’s a bow!“

kyraneko:

questbedhead:

I love me a pseudo-historical arranged marriage au but it always nudges my suspension of disbelief when the author has to dance around the implicit expectation that an arranged marriage should lead to children, which a cis gay couple can’t provide.

I know for a lot of people that’s irrelevant to what they want from an Arranged Marriage plot, but personally I like playing in the weird and uncomfortable implications.

So, I’ve been thinking about how you would justify an obviously barren marriage in That Kind of fantasy world, and I thought it’d be interesting if gay marriage in Ye Old Fantasy Land was a form of soft disinheritance/abdication.

Like, “Oh, God, I don’t want to be in this position of power please just find me a boy to marry”, or, “I know you should inherit after you father passes but as your stepmother/legal guardian I think it’d make more sense if my kids got everything, so maybe consider lesbianism?”, or “Look, we both know neither of our families has enough money to support that many grandkids, so let’s just pair some spares and save both our treasuries the trouble”.

Obviously this brings in some very different dynamics that I know not everyone would be pinged by, but I just think it’d be neat.

This is actually a really cool variant solution to a real historical problem, wherein either primogeniture or other profoundly shitty customs led to wealthy parents having insufficient resources to provide for all of their children in a manner consistent with their station.

Historically, the Church and its widespread monastic structure functioned as a dumping ground for second/third/etc sons and all the daughters one can’t afford to marry off adequately, with the military eventually picking up the slack for the former post-Reformation to the point where it’s been argued that the need for something to occupy these dispossessed sons played a role in Europe’s ongoing conflicts between its nations and the eventual push of imperialism and colonization over the rest of the world.

In a world where homosexuality were more accepted, it would offer a new option: spare a comparatively-small outlay of resources from the main family fortune to equip a house and accoutrements, which would be reabsorbed into the family as a return inheritance in a few decades, and contract a marriage which would be deliberately unable to produce legitimate offspring.

You get the advantages of creating marital ties with another wealthy family, the people married therein have a spouse and the status achievements that go with marriage, and the risk that your child goes off and marries someone unsuitable or inconvenient is removed entirely, as is the risk that they could marry someone and have legitimate, inheritance-claiming children with them. Sure, they can have affairs and thus get children if they’re married to a same-sex spouse, but those children cannot be passed off as legitimate issue of the marriage, and so they pose less of a threat to the the main body of the family’s wealth.

And, thus: perfectly reasonable reason why your pseudohistorical fictional characters can find themselves in a same-sex arranged marriage!

podencos:

“In a 1994 Harvard study that examined people who had radically changed their lives, for instance, researchers found that some people had remade their habits after a personal tragedy, such as a divorce or a life-threatening illness. Others changed after they saw a friend go through something awful, the same way that Dungy’s players watched him struggle.

Just as frequently, however, there was no tragedy that preceded people’s transformations. Rather, they changed because they were embedded in social groups that made change easier. One woman said her entire life shifted when she signed up for a psychology class and met a wonderful group. “It opened a Pandora’s box,” the woman told researchers. “I could not tolerate the status quo any longer. I had changed in my core.” Another man said that he found new friends among whom he could practice being gregarious. “When I do make the effort to overcome my shyness, I feel that it is not really me acting, that it’s someone else,” he said. But by practicing with his new group, it stopped feeling like acting. He started to believe he wasn’t shy, and then, eventually, he wasn’t anymore. When people join groups where change seems possible, the potential for that change to occur becomes more real. For most people who overhaul their lives, there are no seminal moments or life-altering disasters. There are simply communities⏤sometimes of just one other person⏤who make change believable.

One woman told researchers her life transformed after a day spent cleaning toilets⏤and after weeks of discussing with the rest of the cleaning crew whether she should leave her husband.

“Change occurs among other people,” one of the psychologists involved in the study, Todd Heatherton, told me. “It seems real when we can see it in other people’s eyes.”

The precise mechanisms of belief are little understood. No one is certain why a group encountered in a psychology class can convince a woman that everything is different, or why Dungy’s team came together after their coach’s son passed away. Plenty of people talk to friends about unhappy marriages and never leave their spouse; lots of teams watch their coaches experience adversity and never gel. 

But we do know that for habits to permanently change, people must believe that change is feasible. The same process that makes AA so effective⏤the power of a group to teach individuals how to believe⏤happens whenever people come together to help one another change. Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.”

⏤ The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg

yarnandink:

dangerphd:

knottybliss:

nunchler:

every time i see trad gender roles people being weird about fibercraft i wanna tell them

-medieval and early modern knitting guilds were full of men learning and perfecting fancy knitting techniques to impress rich clients

-in cold, wet climates like the scottish highlands knitting was done by the whole family, in fact it was the perfect activity to do while a man was out on a fishing boat or in the pasture with his sheep and cattle

-men who were away from women for a long time had to know how to knit and sew at least well enough to mend their own clothes. soldiers knitted. sailors knitted. cowboys and frontiersmen knitted. vikings probably knitted (actually they would have been doing a kind of proto knitting called nalbinding, but that’s beside the point). all those guys the far right love to treat as ultra masculine heroes were sitting around their barracks and campfires at night darning their socks and knitting themselves little hats

Roman soldiers literally spun as they walked using kickspindles

every merchant marine I know can knit a rope hammock on broomsticks in a couple hours tops.

We have literal photo evidence of shepherd men knitting on stilt stools while watching their grazing flocks. Because knitting or spinning yarn was relatively easy and portable, kept them occupied enough to avoid boredom but also left them enough attention to make sure their flocks remained safe, and resulted in something they could sell to supplement their income from the fleeces, milk, cheeses and meat of their flock.

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Once the knitting guilds dissolved as economic powers (partially due to the advent of semi-mechanised knitting machines, which outsourced knitting to “unskilled” croft and cottage-dwelling families rather than restricting the industry to select trained guildsmen), knitting throughout Europe was more likely to be an activity relegated to socio-economic classes than to gender roles, especially prior to the mid-19th century when it was slowly embraced as a leisure activity by wealthy women (in much the same way that embroidery had been embraced in earlier centuries).

And sure, there’s an entire conversation to be had about how patriarchal structures have forced women to be more economically vulnerable than men throughout Western history, which therefore meant that once knitting was spread beyond the guilds’ tight regulation, a lot of women began knitting because they were poor and it was a relatively portable form of work to earn an income.

Just as there’s a conversation to be had about why various occupations and activities are devalued once enough women begin practising them - and especially once the activities are practised by “ladies of leisure”, who were seen as being especially frivolous - and why we then collectively develop amnesia about the respect our society held for that occupation or activity just a few generations earlier (think also about teaching, nursing, secretarial and administrative occupations - all previously male-dominated careers that were paid well and seen as respectable, but have been steadily devalued as more women entered the field).

But if that conversation ignores the fact that men are punished and constrained by patriarchal and socio-economic demands, that men have just as much place in the history of fibrecrafts as women, but have been erased from that history by people whose ideology demands that they never have taken part in “feminine” duties… then that conversation will be disingenuous and only half of the true conversation.

scribblinaway:

this site needs more middlemarch content. honestly, how have we not all gone feral for middlemarch yet?

correct. my dash made me read a heck of a lot of Gaskill and Austen back in the day, not to mention Blue Castle (which I’d already read and adored but has been experiencing a new wave recently), where is the middlemarch fandom and why isn’t it right here.

it’s a grown up novel! if you tried it and bounced as an idealistic young person who was into Love Stories you probably weren’t ready for it yet! but when you’ve seen various people’s relationships end up in all sorts of different configurations, THAT’S when you read and love Middlemarch.

flutish:

scribblinaway:

flutish:

In which I rant at length (and at times angrily) about the 1994 BBC adaptation of Middlemarch. With literally all of the spoilers. Friends, I am not kidding, this post literally has quotes from the last pages of the book, do not read this if you don’t want to know how Middlemarch ends. Seriously.


Okay. This miniseries pissed. me. off.

I mean. Okay, part of it was hype. I hyped this thing up so much because Middlemarch is legit one of my favorite books (and probably the best book I’ve ever read), and I was so hungry for an adaptation to do it justice. And I knew it’d be hard, I knew it forever ago, because Middlemarch is one of those Big novels with all sorts of threads that interlock according to a very particular mechanism. I had a gut feeling that it would just be hard to adapt.

I was right.

As I was watching “Middlemarch”, a thought kept coming back to me. Middlemarch works as a single novel, because novels enable you to see into the character’s heart and mind in a unique way. Any straight adaptation would instantly lose a lot by attempting to recreate the multiple threads, because they would thin out the story. They’d interfere with the natural progression of each plot point, by instantly forcing the filmed version to cut to an unrelated story. I started thinking that there’s simply no way to properly adapt Middlemarch to the screen with all three stories told alongside each other, and instead began to imagine a series of three films that have overlaps in very specific points (but always from different angles).

Part of this, of course, is a personal preference within the narrative. Middlemarch focuses more-or-less on three main stories: Dorothea Brooke, Tertius Lydgate, and Fred Vincy/the Garths (with Fred’s story moderately less centered). The overall plot is one of a changing culture, a changing Middlemarch, a changing England, but this is reflected also in the internal affairs of each character. And so I’m going to set aside the wonderful politics for a moment, and focus on the personal relationships. Mostly the shipping, to be honest.

Because seriously does the BBC’s “Middlemarch” get it wrong

And now I rant extensively with lots of long and amazing quotes from Middlemarch under the cut. You have been warned.

Keep reading

YES YES YES

You have articulated so clearly the problems with the miniseries. Extremely frustrating. Also: why do dudes hate Will Ladislaw so much???

WHY DO DUDES HATE WILL LADISLAW SO MUCH is such an important question to me, though. Why??? And my current theory is that he’s just… the epitome of a woman’s man and men critics/writers/whatever are uncomfortable with acknowledging what that means? Will lets Dorothea be his equal and he will do anything for her and he sees her so truly and I think this is extremely, extremely attractive of him and also makes him a fascinating and engaging character and also I just love Dorothea so much that I kind of have to love whoever she loves. Which makes certain men uncomfortable or something? (I also think many men critics don’t understand or appreciate Dorothea! Like they only ever see her as Dorothea-of-the-beginning rather than Dorothea-who-grows-and-feels-so-strongly.)

I wanna see someone in the Northanger fandom write up a detailed point by point comparison of Henry Tilney and Will Ladislaw because imo they have some interesting points in common especially with regard to being like Soft and not dismissive of women and feminine-coded interests.

But also do not let this take away from the extensive meta I want to read about Dorothea my beloved and how she fits into the pantheon historical nerdgirls and is specifically very autistic imo.

(And also while I’m posting requests Mrs Cadawaller who is very funny and criminally undervalued in the miniseries.)