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This goes back even further: a lot of early modern friendships modeled themselves on the relationship as described in Cicero's De Amicitia (On Friendship) (which was of course doing its own Roman thing that the Renaissance really liked glomming onto) where friendship is both affective (emotional) and political (shared goals). So a friend could be someone in your inner circle because they were actually close to you or because you were, functionally, allies.

Now, scholars of Roman friendship and its Renaissance reinterpretation have gotten beyond the mid-20th-century assumption that ALL Roman/Renaissance use of friendship was political rather than affective. But it was and is definitely a part of the meaning of the word historically.

So...friend can mean almost anything.

And a lot of those Roman friends (and probably Renaissance ones too) fucked.

The corollary to "you shouldn't call historical people gay because it's a modern term" is "the word friend didn't always mean what you think it means".

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i wish i could text my cat to check on him when I'm out but his whole illiterate thing really gets in the way

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the thing is you're like obviously Austen was spectacularly talented at lampooning the worst kinds of people in a universal way that is still deeply relevant today and then you actually read some Austen again and you think wow she really was spectacularly talented at lampooning the worst kinds of people in a universal way that is still deeply relevant today

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i see posts here about how people are so mortified when they are acknowledged as being a regular customer somewhere that they never return. cowards. the employees at taco bell treat me like a celebrity. like royalty. i am their strange little pet customer who gets traded along as staff comes and goes. they know my car before i even speak in the drive-thru speaker. today i was 2 hours late and she ran over and squealed that she "thought i'd left them!" and that she "made my order with extra love!" and you what, she did

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It drives me insane how many people dont realise how often they break the law and that if the full force of it was ever applied life would basically be unliveable. Like between traffic violations, petty workplace theft, account sharing and piracy alongside how common it is to have been in posession of some illegal drug at some point in your life. People still manage to get away with thinking "criminals" are people who commit crimes not just populations that are surveilled enough to be routinely prosecuted

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just precisely how bad was 1500s jerusalem at making maps, you ask? well,

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i wonder what my basil plant thinks when i remove half its leaves for pesto. does it think theres a big and intermittent okapi on the loose

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There is a species of butterfly that lives in the mountains.

When it hatches as a caterpillar, it lowers itself to the ground on a strand of silk, and then produces a chemical that smells like the larvae of ants. An ant eventually discovers it, lured by the scent, and brings it back to the anthill, where it is cared for by the colony until it pupates. After a few weeks, the adult butterfly crawls back up through the anthill, through the dirt and the winding tunnels, and out into the sunlight before it can finally open its wings.

Some say that the caterpillar “tricks” the ants into doing this. I don’t know if I agree – I think it’s too small a thing to accuse of guile, don’t you?

With this in mind: Once upon a time, there were seven dwarves.

They lived and worked in the mountains, mining for gold and jewels and precious things. And one night, after a long day’s labour, they heard a knocking at the great stone doors of their mountain.

Outside, shivering and small, they found a human child.

I’m sure you can guess most of what she told them. Stepmothers were involved – it’s not important. What’s important was that each of the dwarves felt a dire and pressing need to care for the child, and they took her into their home, fed her, clothed her, and gave her a warm bed to sleep in. And many seasons passed around that mountain, with the dwarves raising the child as one of their own, until one autumn’s day.

The girl laid, slender and still, in a coffin of spun glass. And some weeks later, one of the dwarves had the idea to call for a prince. This was of course the sensible thing to do, and the prince of a nearby kingdom who listened to the story thought an ensorcelled girl would be a grand thing to rescue.

Poor devils. It feels cruel to judge them. But there were so many questions they could’ve asked – what was this stepmother’s name? Was she real? Did she exist? Who had made the glass coffin? Surely one of them must’ve thought of the question. And why did it grow more opaque with every passing day?

Were they wrong to trust?

I guess it doesn’t matter now.

The moment the prince stepped into the subterranean chamber with the glass coffin, it shivered with a twinkling, plinking noise. Threads of glass exploded into glittering, razor-edged confetti.

A claw split the great glass cocoon.

The thing that spilled out of it, hulking and huge, knew in the fog of its mind, in a base animal sense that screamed, that it was in a room too small for it to fit. It wanted up. It wanted out.

In front of it was some twiggy little thing holding a sword.

It took its first breath.

The flames were the colour of cornflowers.

The dwarves fled. The thing followed close behind, up, up, up through the stone and the winding tunnels, not to chase, not to hunt, but to get up, to get out, out, out–

It struck the great stone doors at a run. They crumbled like gingerbread. And then there was sunlight, and the open sky…

And it could finally open its wings.

Convergent evolution is a hell of a thing.

The dragon, of course, lived happily ever after with its loot of gold and jewels from a hastily abandoned dwarf mine. Being much bigger than a caterpillar, we could accuse it of tricking the dwarves who were kind to it, had taken it in, had fed and clothed and warmed it.

It probably wouldn't mind.

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I’m watching The Sword in the Stone for the first time in decades and I’ve gotten to the part where Merlin is trying to get Arthur to lose his virginity to a squirrel.

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taskmaster the game show where they read actual dictionary definitions on the show because what a contestant has done is so outside the box it challenges what a word means

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Boyfriend: wait but I thought you could change from alpha to omega? Like you get hit with a pheromone and bam become that and you fuck, but the rest of the time you’re androgynous

Me: … I think you have confused omegaverse with the seminal piece of science fiction literature The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin

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Being a committed pedestrian in a major city will make you hyperaware of the ways urban areas will attempt to make themselves hostile to homeless people and the ways that these efforts also make life worse for everyone else. The needlessly narrow sidewalks, the uncomfortable and inconvenient seats at bus and train stops, the noise pollution from convenience stores piping loud music outside. It all sucks, it all has a negative impact on everyone simply trying to exist within a community, and it’s all in service of cruelly trying to drive a class of people from public view.

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the whole "lipstick on a pig" thing makes no sense because the second we gave a pig access to makeup she became god's cuntiest soldier