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The first time I ever rode a roller coaster was the old wooden coaster at the Pacific National Exhibition grounds in Vancouver. This was back in the mid 1980s, before the big renovation, so it still had shitty plywood cars where the only thing preventing you from being thrown bodily from the track was your own weight and a single metal cross-bar to hang onto. I just barely cleared the "you must be this tall to ride" sign, but I was abnormally tall for my age and the operators either didn't notice or didn't care how skinny I was, so I was well below the minimum safe weight; when my car hit the big drop I was lifted from my seat by the sudden acceleration, and hung suspended in mid air for the full duration of the drop, held in place by my grip on the safety bar. It was the most magical experience of my life, and one I look back on with fond nostalgia, which probably explains a thing or two.

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So I made notes when I read Pride and Prejudice because I had so many spoilers for this book thanks mostly to tumblr, and yet here are some things that took me quite off guard:

The narration just dips into anybody’s head whenever it feels like to give us a summary of who they are as a person and what they care about. Very straightforward. Very effective. Very much not the modern approach.

This extends to telling us straight out, like half a chapter after the iconic Darcy-snubbing-Elizabeth scene, that he had now developed a massive crush. This comes as a great shock to Elizabeth quite a bit later, but the audience spends much of the book enjoying the layers and/or dramatic irony. Who knew!

Elizabeth on the other hand had a crush on Wickham.

Wickham is genuinely good at being likeable not an obvious sleaze and the fact that he’s a bad guy was an actual plot twist, though I’m sure plenty of people saw it coming even when the book was new.

As much as the book attends to women’s concerns, being as it is a book very much about a woman, the greatest explicit thematic force of the novel is the question of class.

Specifically, that great and renowned engine of Anglophone egalitarianism, the conviction of the upper middle class that they are every bit as good as the true upper class, or that if they aren’t it’s only a question of opportunity.

Seriously, the fact that the ultimate symbol of emotional resolution the story closes out on is that the new Darcy family has over for Christmas Elizabeth’s aunt and uncle the Gardiners, who are in trade and don’t even live in the nice part of London but are nice and sensible and not at all people it is mortifying to be related to, even though Darcy assumed as much without having met them, while avoiding both her tawdry shallow mother and his awful smug aunt, who are very similar people for all one is a wretched social climber and the other a minor aristocrat obsessed with her own consequence…that’s it, that’s the book.

Additionally the fact that this novel is from the end of the 18th century , when in England the Industrial Revolution was gaining momentum but no one knew what it meant yet, including I’m pretty darn certain Jane Austen.

(Though since she waited 16 years to publish it she may have had a better sense by then, and even made amendments to that effect.)

So everyone’s sense of what is real wealth and security and thus valid social status is still vested in land ownership and income specifically from agricultural rent, and yet you can feel the change coming, because the desire to write this book in this way arises from the cultural forces that were at that time in play, particularly the question of upward mobility.

Elizabeth’s grandsons will have to get into trade in some sort of way, or their children in turn may not be able to keep Pemberly in adequate repair.

 By loosening the stubborn Darcy/Fitzwilliam pride in this particular regard Elizabeth may in fact have saved the house from dissolution.

Btw the thematic import of Mr. Darcy having his mother’s maiden name as his first name, in part because she actually ranked his father, as wealthy and respectable as the Darcys may be. His family legacy is literally his whole identity and part of what Elizabeth brings to the marriage is having helped him understand that it doesn’t have to be.

Seriously how did I not hear about any of this.

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plush

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Do you check for trackers and remove them before sharing links?

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The real question is how did he get the license and why did he get the license... Did he need it for a script? Was the end of the universe moved up a year if Blade didn't get a driver's license? These are important questions...

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Today's warm up: There are few left with their minds, and the ghost would hope that they are still welcome, after pruning the Mantis Lord's family of twisted branches.

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listen

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Rannoch selfie

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twitter trend! i wish he wasn't so addictive to draw lol

best viewed in light mode! here's the gridded version. i changed the order because it looked weird to see only a fourth of the image in the preview

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Oh my god

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2025 June 15

Two Worlds, One Sun Left Image Credit & Copyright: Damia Bouic; Right Image Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, MSSS; Digital processing: Damia Bouic

Explanation: How different does sunset appear from Mars than from Earth? For comparison, two images of our common star were taken at sunset, one from Earth and one from Mars. These images were scaled to have the same angular width and are featured here side-by-side. A quick inspection will reveal that the Sun appears slightly smaller from Mars than from Earth. This makes sense since Mars is 50% further from the Sun than Earth. More striking, perhaps, is that the Martian sunset is noticeably bluer near the Sun than the typically orange colors near the setting Sun from Earth. The reason for the blue hues from Mars is not fully understood, but thought to be related to forward scattering properties of Martian dust. The terrestrial sunset was taken in 2012 March from Marseille, France, while the Martian sunset was captured in 2015 by NASA’s robotic Curiosity rover from Gale crater on Mars.

∞ Source: apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250615.html

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"hoverboard" and it's just a motorized skateboard. "evil AI supercomputer" and it's just algorithmic plagiarism. "self-driving car" and it's a fucking tesla

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GOD’S GROVE | PART I by Liza Gomza

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each year congress people should be required to go on a field trip where they each get dumped in the middle of a random u.s. town & handed a phone with google maps & forced to find their way back to washington solely through the use of local public transportation systems.

to be clear i don't think this would improve our political reality in any way, but it would be fun to watch

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Druid of Durrag’s Tower by Lin Chang