#this is a primary source

[shipsandtea]

[hoarding-stories]

Vox Machina: Grand figures that grew into amassed power

The Might Nein: Folk heroes that have a finger in every pot

Bells Hells: People with near-cosmic knowledge at the crux of things thrust upon them

[justafewberries]

Suzanne Collins herself has never actually said she only “writes when she has something to say”. It’s a line from tbosas fans have applied to her & people have since pointed to it as a false truth. she has never said this. she has never gone on record to say this anywhere. But just like Gale and Katniss being cousins, we’ve done the same thing and retroactively misquoted her so much it’s become truth.

[i-have-no-soul]

where the fuck are all these misogynistic trans men some of y’all keep talking about cause i don’t think they actually exist. and if they do they are a statistically insignificant minority in our community

[copepods]

being an artist who only does fanart is all fun and games until you lose interest in your current hyperfixation and don't immediately find a new one and so you are completely lost and unmotivated and unable to do the one activity you love most in the world for several months just hoping something new will come along and spark your interest so you can feel like a living person again

[ranticore]

thinking of the unique experience of being a scholar studying a historical figure and being the first person ever to get their hands on primary sources, not just retold myths and legends. the weird one-sided relationship where you know more about someone long-dead than anyone else alive, more than anyone in their own life knew of them too. feeling that you understand them. you'd even be friends if you met - you've stayed up countless nights compiling memories of them and you've thought of the exact right words you could have said to maybe ease their burden just a little. you could have saved them, they would have liked you, and no relationship is easier than when one of you has no say in the matter

[jstor]

Under apartheid, publishing radical books was an act of resistance. Ravan Press, (founded in 1972 by Peter Randall and others) amplified banned voices, Black Consciousness writers, and critical texts that commercial publishers wouldn’t touch.

Ravan published the first novels by authors like J.M. Coetzee and Miriam Tlali, often risking raids and censorship to do so. Its work was one part of a broader liberation struggle across Southern Africa, building political awareness from the grassroots up.

See more primary sources in the Struggles for Freedom: Southern Africa collection on JSTOR, with an emphasis on materials from Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.

Image: Books for Workers from Ravan Press. January 1, 1984. Digital Innovation South Africa.

[ot3]

Lava photography by Bruce Omori

[elodieunderglass]

Your jockeyposting has enthralled me (certified non-horse girl) and made me curious—how much familiarity do jockeys have with the horses they’re riding? Is it normal for a given horse to have a Long Term Jockey or are the jockeys like. Called up a week before and asked to race a horse they’ve never met? (& interested to hear any Killy lore related to this)

Thank you so much! (In reference to Killie the jockey OC and random posting about horse racing more generally.)

In general, racehorses never have a long-term or even a repeat jockey, and vice-versa! Jockeys usually aren’t familiar with the horses at all.

There are three main situations where they might be, though; if they’re retained, if they’re nepo babies generational and have a trainer in the family, or if they’re amateurs having fun. So with apologies for making a really long post, I’ve structured this as a writing reference.

Retained Jockeys

Killie’s a retained jockey for a stable (very unusual - not many jockeys are good enough, and not many stables have the resource to employ one) and he and Thunder share an especially eccentric owner who likes to watch them paired up.

And hey, if we were unbelievably ultra-rich people with no moral compass, “putting Killie and Thunder in a jar and shaking them together, briskly, to see what happens” would be a fairly legitimate hobby.

I’m not an expert or personally involved in the industry, so if you were thinking of doing some writing in the setting yourself, a starting point for a retained jockey’s life is this “day in the life” video, of champion flat jockey William Buick, TW for discussion of weight.

Generational

Jockeys may handle horses as family businesses. In real life, “racing dynasties” are influential. A very lucky jockey, retiring in middle age with piles of winnings, often wishes to become a trainer; especially prosperous ones buy a stable operation, move in their family, use their reputation and connections to get owners to send them horses, and start chucking their own children on the horses as a source of labour. The children grow up, stick around home, and naturally keep getting chucked on horses for their day job. Next thing you know, you have a lot of grandkids and horses around the place, so you might as well keep going with it. Everyone pretty much lives at Grandad’s stable together, and then you get cousins scuffling on the day job like this:

That’s how Killie grew up, as the result of several generations of jockeys becoming trainers producing jockeys. but moving to a retained post was both a) the only logical move if it’s offered, and b) an escape from his parents, who are astonishingly awful. and if you are that kind of nepo baby, like Killie, it makes so much sense to flee the country (move to the uk and constantly pretend you’ve just dropped your phone in a horse’s water bucket, glubglubglub, BYE MA.)

Press “keep reading” for the amateurs and then what everyone else is doing.

Generational steeplechase jockey Jonjo O’Neill Jr does a day in his life here. he knows the horses and is doing admin, management and stable work … at his family’s massive operation.

Amateurs

Finally, in the UK, you can ride as an amateur jockey - usually in types of lowkey local steeplechases, like “point to point” - and basically anyone can do this. horse racing is fun, but you need a license to do it with other people, and the license remains incompatible with owning a registered racehorse. So technically your best friend could share a horse with you, in all but paperwork, and they could be the trainer and you could be the amateur jockey, and you could wrangle your way into actual races with a horse that you knew. It wouldn’t work very well as a day job (the horse would only race like 2x a month, netting you like £300 a month out of your friend’s pocket, plus the absurd costs of transporting/entering everyone) but if you were writing a crazy story in which some good friends and their pet racehorse decide to make it rich, that’s how you could do it.

Everyone else

Everyone else (including generational jockeys whose grandfathers didn’t have the foresight to establish a proper dynasty) just scrabbles around.

Most races aren’t high-stakes! There are a lot of basic boring races every day. (though, if you ask jockeys, there is apparently never quite enough work.)

horses might live at the stable of their owner but more commonly their trainer (some owners are both).

Jockeys cannot own racehorses themselves.

In the UK racecourses are randomly scattered around the country, usually hours away from each other. They all usually have several races every day.

Jockeys in the UK are paid £157.90 for Flat jockeys and £214.63 for jumps riders per race. They get this flat rate for everyone, whether they’re experienced or not! Their expenses are fairly high, and as freelancers they have to cover them all. The real attraction pay-wise is that they get a “cut of the purse” (percentage of prize money) if they win first, second or third place in a race. It’s a small percentage that they have to share with their agent, but there are sometimes some super-big stakes, where you can earn your year’s wages all at once.

Of course, you need to be piloting a pretty good horse in a high-stakes race to have a shot at that.

jockeys are a rare professional athlete that work every day, and they want (but are never guaranteed to get) a few rides every day. This usually means travelling across the UK constantly every day.

Racehorses usually only race once a week or less. They definitely don’t “work” as often! Their schedules rarely match up to jockeys. Driving them around the place is also a huge pain.

Jockeys live all over, and most of them are known to spend several times more hours driving between jobs than they ever spend sitting on horses. They get up very early each day, often “riding out” (doing early morning horse exercise) for trainers before hitting the road, often driving for several hours between races. This has been flagged in many sports medicine papers as one of their many wellbeing risks.

At any rate, with hundreds of jockeys travelling randomly around the country, getting injured and suspended and with stats fluctuating constantly, trainers work through agents to book jockeys - often not getting the one they want.

There are also considerations like trainer suddenly deciding they want to get a different (better) rider instead, leading to the one they booked getting “jocked off”.

All of everyone’s stats, from horses to jockeys, are publicly available, and everyone can study them obsessively. Trainers will request jockeys who have attractive stats - that’s not just “winning” stats, but weight/strategy/experience that might match the horse (+ terrain + conditions, etc). In their turn, jockeys with better options may turn down an offer of a horse with terrible form (I.e. a big loser, or a dangerous animal, or one that looks incredibly dodgy in race videos.)

Often trainers try to get the same jockey for their horse, but in all this chaos it’s not always possible, and everyone has to constantly pursue their own best interests.

Particularly winning jockeys and particularly influential trainers may gradually come together in working relationships, and as a horse gradually emerges as a favourite and the stakes rise, you’ll start to see it working more often with the same people. For example, in the Grand National, the jockeys will probably know the horses.

In conclusion, it’s common for the first time the jockey touches the horse to be when they’re thrown on top of it, prior to the race.

They get around this by studying form (race statistics), watching videos of the horse, and of course speaking to the trainer about their desires/instructions/strategy.

OKAY that is the MOST information that I could possibly have given!! I don’t know why I know all this!!! Thanks!!

[amndmirk]

cream, cheese & gemerl shenanigans

[cutiepieautistic]

Source

[cheesenchalk]

thinking about that time somewhere in the early 70's George found an old letter of his from like '61 or something and pattie told him he should save it so he 'recreated' it and just for funsies threw in a line or two that wasn't in the original about how paul sucked at bass and john wanted to kick him out of the band. unparalleled haterism. you have to respect it

[maverick-werewolf]

Sabine Baring-Gould - A must-read source for werewolf folklore

Ever wanted to read just one fantastic source on werewolf legends? Read Sabine Baring-Gould's The Book of Werewolves from 1865! If you love werewolf folklore, you really need to read this sooner rather than later.

My edition is the best, of course (no, really, it is, I tried all the other ones I could ever find and ended up just making my own instead; I made this edition because this really needs to be preserved better than it is currently being preserved).

The text on the image reads as follows:

Only surviving source of multiple werewolf legends

Modernized formatting for ebook, paperback, & hardcover

Annotated bibliography with other sources to explore

Editor has lifelong background in studying werewolf folklore

Not just copy-pasted from Gutenberg! Actually formatted!

Fully annotated with relevant commentary and further citations & discussion

Translations for nearly all excerpts in Latin, Old Norse, and more

Unabridged, uncensored, author's work untouched

A must-read for werewolf enjoyers & anyone in werewolf studies

Find it here!

Also available on my website (ebook fulfilled by BookFunnel, I promise it's safe, since I've been asked about my ebook fulfillment)!

[taradactyls]

Found something interesting for Pride and Prejudice fans relating to Elizabeth's takedown of Mr Darcy's perception of himself a gentleman.

I'm reading Thomas Fuller's 'The Holy State, and the Profane State' (published 1642 but this version republished in 1841 so the views were clearly still applicable) for a research essay, and in the chapter labelled 'The True Gentleman' he states:

He is courteous and affable to his neighbours … the truly generous are most pliant and courteous in their behaviour to their inferiors.

And of course, during the Hunsford proposal, Darcy has just objected to Elizabeth's family, she's called him out, and we get the iconic lines:

"Nor am I ashamed of the feelings I related. They were natural and just. Could you expect me to rejoice in the inferiority of your connections?—to congratulate myself on the hope of relations, whose condition in life is so decidedly beneath my own?" "You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner."

So Elizabeth drops that bomb just after he's been ungenerous and discourteous about her inferior relations... in direct contradiction of one of the rules of true gentlemanly behaviour. No wonder he can't rebut her words at all in the moment, even though Darcy later says "it was some time, I confess, before I was reasonable enough to allow their justice." He might not believe he's got a real problem yet, but there's been examples Elizabeth could call on from even during the course of their conversation too blatant for him to disagree with entirely!

And then later, obviously, he reflects and finds it's true he also hasn't been gentlemanlike in this and other ways in too many aspects of his life.

[m3dieval]

Cennino D' Andrea Cennini's Il Libro dell' Arte (The Craftsman's Handbook, translated by Daniel V. Thompson) is available for free online in what appears to be the full text. The Il Libro dell' Arte was written in the 15th century and is basically a late Medieval art how-to book.

I'm hoarding it for the helm crest making part, but it also has:

Making Glue out of Lime and Cheese

How to Paint a Dead Man

Actually quite a lot on making coloured pigments

[clove-pinks]

I have finally found it: the milhist equivalent to claiming that Victorian women fainted constantly from tight-lacing.

Archer et al. on 18th century military uniforms: "The gaiters were tight and the rows of buttons sometimes took hours to do up with a special iron hook." (emphasis added) Hours!! HOURS!! Countless battles lost, lives sacrificed, because the men couldn't handle their Fancy Leggings.

...Needless to say, it does NOT take hours to put these on, even if you don't have a buttonhook.

Really annoying to read this drivel from four actual professors of history, not Internet randos making up wacky facts.