the proletariat isn’t a culture it’s a class! we’re defined by our material position, not our hobbies. so if you begin “the proletariat enjoys” or even “the proletariat thinks” you’ll always end with a reductive statement (at best laughable and at worst insulting & alienating) and you’re missing the damn point of class analysis
i’m not saying an analysis of the superstructure isn’t important bc it is and you all know it’s what i spend 80% of my time on because frankly it’s all i’m good for. but the correct approach isn’t to make some wild overarching claims about what differentiates proletarian and bourgeois culture and then attach innate value to everything you’ve associated with the proletariat
Hearing people talk about economic/class issues in terms of culture always makes me think of conservatives and right-libertarians complaining about left-wing “elites” (i.e., working-class people who live in cities, recycle, occasionally drink a latte, etc.) and fawning over “blue-collar billionaires” (i.e., obscenely rich people who think they’re still good ol’ regular folks ‘cause they drive a pick-up truck and say racial slurs sometimes).
^^^^^
Space, materials, and expertise! It’s like the ‘means, motive, opportunity’ of vernacular architecture!
An actual excuse I gave to my mother for not coming up for lunch. (via shelomit)
When you see a really good post but there’s some form of guilt tripping to reblog it added on at the end
(ID: A screenshot of Marge from the Simpsons looking dismally at the camera with one arm raised. A caption underneath her reads “It’s true, but I’m not reblogging it.” End ID)
someone : Unfollow me if you don’t reblog this
The rebel in me: not rebloging and not unfollowing
No Federal civil rights law shall be interpreted to treat gender identity or transgender status as a protected class, unless such law expressly designates “gender identity” or “transgender status” as a protected class.
“
@yall I see ignoring this please dont. I get it its upseting, but this is IMPORTANT information that could SAVE our lives and our rights.
Also this boils down to stripping rights away from intersex and trans ppl from what I understand, meaning that we would no longer be protected under federal law. This is scary. Call your reps and get this shut down as soon as you can. We can beat this together. We need each other right now. Share this, spread this information.
how you can help:
call your local senator and representatives! websites like 5calls tell you your national representatives based on your location and if you use their mobile site, you can call those representatives through their site. they don’t yet have hb2796 on their site, but you can use their system regardless!
here is an example of something you can say: “My name is (your name) and I am a constituent in (your town/city/district). I strongly oppose house bill 2796, which aims to remove gender identity protections from civil rights legislation by forcibly clarifying “gender” or “sex” to indicate only a person’s assigned gender at birth. Transgender people require civil rights protections as a vulnerable part of our population, and it is extremely important to me that they receive those protections. Thank you for your time and attention.”
IF YOU LEAVE A VOICEMAIL: leave your street address to ensure your call is tallied!
when you call, they will not argue with you, and basically just tally how many people contact them on a certain issue. also, if you want to support other issues on the 5calls site, don’t be afraid to make multiple separate calls! call volume matters and if you call more separate times it will be better.
Dammit I hate to use this blog for this but- from one trans guy to yall- this is important!
It looks like this bill isn’t getting fast tracked and is actually going through the entire legislative process so keep at it!
This is important. Calling all witches! contact your representatives and then get out those spell ingredients!
Today is August 25th, 2018.
HB 2796 is still in this stage:
It has not passed the House. Keep it up, folks. Eliminate this monstrosity.
Above is still true as of 10 September 2018. Contact your representatives, and vote in November for people who will kill this resolution.
We all assume that Old Adam kidnaps Dame Hannah when Ruthven says to carry off “any lady” because Adam has a crush on Hannah, which is mentioned by the bridesmaids in Act 1.
But it was just pointed out to me that Adam is almost certainly the same age or older than Hannah. It’s likely he lived in the village of Reddering most of his life, possible he even worked for the Murgatroyds since he was a young man- if Ruthven had hired him after running away, Adam would probably not know that Robin was Ruthven in disguise. I assume Adam knew about young Ruthven’s plan to fake his own death to avoid the title, and followed him to keep an eye on him or something. And honestly, his suggestions for crimes in Act 2 suggest that maybe this isn’t his first time being Evil Henchman.
Which means Adam very probably KNOWS that Hannah and Roderick were engaged 40 years ago and broke up when the previous ancestor died and Roddy had to go away to be the Bad Baronet. So maybe Adam brought her there knowing she’d have to talk to Roderick and perhaps clear up some past misunderstandings.
(Any basses reading this who have played Old Adam and would like to weigh in on his motivations, please do. Or non-basses who just like Ruddygore :))
I really like the notion of Old Adam just…masterminding everything
There really needs to be Ruddigore fic, because the ending leaves the village with a population that suddenly includes quite a lot of former ghosts, and aside from the legal and practical issues — is the place going to end up overrun with eager historians? ( “I was to busy trying to think up my daily crime, sirrah, to pay any attention to the damn mealy-mouthed politics of the age!”)
Ooooooooooo! Historians! Talking to certain ghosts of certain Baronets…
If they’re legally alive again, do they resubstantiate, or
is it more of a polite legal fiction kind of thing? If they *are* alive
and solid again, is there an epidemic of bruises for the first few weeks because
out of habit they keep confidently walking into walls expecting to pass
through?
I’ve always assumed it was legal fiction. Besides, legally alive and physically dead is a nice opposite to Grand Duke.
Come in, come in. Tea? Cakes? We have excellent cakes here, now that the mill is running so smoothly. A terrible trial we had with it at first, but now there is more time for leisure. Such time! I’ve been able to build a little boat, even, and my sons and I sail on the lake you saw as you came up. Ah! Canada, not so bad. It reminds me of home.
I was not a pirate for long. Two years before the mast, maybe a little more. I left Amsterdam ahead of a press to force young men into the Navy; I wouldn’t have any of that, but the sea didn’t seem like a bad choice, so I joined a ship of ill-repute. Well, yes, it was a pirate ship. But it was a life of my choosing, not chosen for me, and that has always made the difference.
It suited me, suited me fine for a while. I can’t say I grew rich, but I put some aside – my spoils are the good strong mill on the river and the land surrounding. Of course it wouldn’t do to talk too much about how I bought them now, what with my standing here.
The seas were all right, and I tell you I didn’t anticipate leaving when I did – but we pulled alongside harbor one night, off the coast of America, and I saw the land, laid out before me, a new land at least to me. I was on the night watch, but it was bitter cold and no others were on the deck. So I took my chance; using a rope and with all my worldly goods clutched to me, I swung from the deck of the ship a deserting pirate, and landed on the shore an immigrant.
It wasn’t long before I found that many of my people – Dutch, not reformed pirates – were making their way to Canada, where the land was good and winters cold. So I came too, and bought this little plot of land. I have a sweet wife and many sons, and they say one day soon I will be chosen as the next minister.
Not a bad end for a pirate.
It’s talk like A pirate day, not talk like EVERY pirate day. This year I chose my venerable ancestor, an undocumented immigrant who built a boat, a mill, and a dynasty in eastern Canada before becoming minister of the Mennonite church.
here is a concept that I’m still trying to flesh out: medieval science fiction.
not, of course, aliens land during the middle ages, though I’ve read and enjoyed that, but something much more difficult to execute, if it’s possible at all: space opera (exempli gratia) as written by Bede or Gildas or Geoffrey of Monmouth.
The challenge is, of course, that you have to get into the medieval mind (ok, I know that talking about “the” medieval mind is fallacious) and figure out what they’d keep from their world and what they’d think to change – what is the analogue to ‘50s writers giving us faster than light travel & radioactive planets & psionics and still having gender and family politics that are identical to ‘50s middle class American politics? I have a feeling it’s the Church – it’s true that there are several books with Space Popes, but it tends to be a rebirth of the Papacy. I doubt a medieval science fiction writer would have the Church decline or even guess at the Reformation.
Also, sci-fi tech tends to be, both aesthetically and functionally, an extension of tech the society it’s from already has – does a medieval space ship look like a siege tower? How do they envision the instant communication I’m sure they’d have to have as working? Would it be through magic (which is often the case in modern sci-fi)?
And what would the spirit of it be? I would argue that, while you can’t really generalize over an entire field, and there is certainly some bleak sci-fi, the general tenor of American sci-fi is hopeful & enamored of the human spirit. Is the point of medieval space travel to find God*? Will leaving Earth leave behind Original Sin? Are we going to convert the Martians?
DO they need instant communication? I mean, even star wars still has people carrying thumb drives around. There could be a pigeon analogue – sleek little machines flitting between the stars carrying messages, or perhaps creatures already native to the higher spheres suited to the task. Venusian swallowtails, mercurial spirits.
I’d love to see the heavenly spheres as a setting for this all on its own, too. What’s the first moment a traveler hears the music like?
I could see a lot of it through the lens of knights on impossible quests – why not ascend the sky? Knights riding on bright steeds of golden fire known as comets. Knights finding allegorical realms on the various planets, like the Kingdom of Love from Capellanus’ Treatise on The Arts of Courtly Love, but set in the golden mountains of Venus, and you could have a Kingdom of War and a Kingdom of Wit and a Kingdom of Time on Mercury and Mars and Saturn. Prester John could be from Jupiter!
I’m not sure about the ways I would expect medieval scifi to be subversive, but I might look at Marie de France for ideas, she plays a lot with expectation and obligation and the implications of gender in her Lais, in very clever ways.
medievals didn’t have the concept of vacuum, let alone know that space doesn’t have air. everything is open ships and space sails. gravity isn’t oriented to the planet, there’s a universal ‘down’. engines are driven by people or animals or wind or water, not burning fuel; your space chariot is pulled by cloud horses or sun lions.
other planets are not other earths, they’re allegorical locations populated by allegorical creatures. angels, demons, dreamers, cannibals, a planet of all women and a planet of all men – but not for 1950′s bikini shenanigans, more as a parable about how the sexes can’t get along without each other because men’s work and women’s work are both necessary. no concept that men could do women’s work and vice-versa, or at least do it competently. the men on the men’s planet would like, grow children in their fields, but wean them on burnt bread soaked in beer because they’re terrible at milking cows and kneading dough, or something like that.
there’s a Renaissance thing, Orlando Furioso, in which the knight Astolfo gets to the moon in Elijah’s burning chariot. (He goes to the moon because everything that has been lost on Earth can be found there, including Orlando’s sanity, because of course.)
I think I’d argue that theological allegory, like the Divine Comedy or the Vision of Piers Plowman, pretty much is medieval science fiction: speculations and warnings and encouragement, based on what is known-or-believed-to-be-known. As I understand it, the general opinion of medieval European scholars was that theology was THE most important thing to know about; studying the Creator more fervently than the creation was considered pretty much the same degree of Obviously Sensible as, say, studying birds doing bird things and being birds instead of just looking at empty nests and eggshells would be to us, like, why study mere side-effects when you can study The Entire Truth And Cause Of Everything? So I would argue that theology is the medieval version of twentieth century rocket science and atomic physics as The Coolest Thing To Know About, and thus spec fic based on it is the equivalent of science fiction.
Mooncustafer 