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There are certain very specific, unsustainable periods of history.

The Golden Age of Piracy lasted from the 1650s to the 1730s, and was really three different waves of piracy that all had their own specific causes and characters. My personal favorite has always been the post-Spanish Succession period, when a bunch of sailors and privateers were left unemployed and turned en masse to piracy since those were the skills they'd picked up during the war. This supply of pirates was obviously non-renewable.

The Wild West lasted between 1865 and 1895, depending on who you ask, not even a full human lifetime. It's a very narrow band of time, and of course it wasn't sustainable, there was only so much land to colonize.

There are lots of these times of change, conquest, colonization, and war, particularly in the last three hundred years. I always think they're interesting, mostly in how quickly the course of history moves on to some other relatively more steady state.

There's a thing that speculative fiction does where it stretches specific periods out to extremes, most notably with Medieval Stasis, but I think it's far funnier when applied to these tiny slices of history that have ballooned in the public consciousness. Either it takes heroic feats of worldbuilding to make it make sense, or everyone is just sort of okay with the idea of a Golden Age of Piracy that's implied to have lasted for a millennia.

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Was just informed that "any sufficiently deep enthusiasm is indistinguishable from academic rigor" and hoo boy we are really in a crisis of anti-intellectualism.

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Someone was asking in a thread what kind of people could work for ICE right now.

I think it's a good time to remember that the image above are the people who put children into gas chambers.

When I was little, I asked what kind of person could work at a concentration camp.

The answer to both questions I think is "normal people who have accepted the dehumanization of another group of people."

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love shakespeare. did a hamlet run tonight, looked someone dead in the eye to say “am i a coward?” during a speech and the fucker shrugged and nodded

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Barnes and Nobles is gonna start serving food and alcohol.

Everybody’s cracking jokes about how it’s a desperate attempt to stay relevant in the age of Amazon.

But you know what? Props to them. This is exactly what Blockbuster didn’t do. At no point was Blockbuster like “Hey, movie rentals aren’t the lucrative enterprise they once were. Perhaps it’s time we become known for our cheesy garlic bread.”

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I'm reading a book named "A Guide to The Correction of Young Gentlemen Or, The Successful Administration Of Physical Discipline To Males, By Females" - essentially, a fantasy femdom BDSM book, written in 1924 by Alice Kerr-Sutherland but first published in 1991.

It has some genuinely fascinating stuff to say about gender, and I feel like it's worth looking at/thinking about in the context of Historical Gender Stuff. This 100 year old book has the following to say:

"The truth is that some young gentlemen would rather they had been born young ladies: they cannot admit this openly, because in the male world to confess as much would lead to instant ostracism if not worse; but they cannot conceal it either, and by preferring the company of girls, and soft, feminine clothing, and by flinching during the rough pursuits to which all boys, willing or no, are occasionally heirs, they attract opprobrium."

"Such boys weep too readily for their fellows' tastes - weeping is a great crime among boys unless it is generally admitted that circumstances left little choice - and are hounded for that reason."

"Just as there are girls who had rather been boys - we all know examples of the type - there are boys who, in a kinder world, would have been born into the gender more suited to their dispositions."

"Many young people of this sort are riven with a guilt they do not deserve but have been forced, by the conventions of society, to adopt; they are confused, ashamed and thoroughly unhappy."

"The ideal thing to do would be to treat these cases on their merits, send them to girls' schools, and so on. (The same thing should happen with those girls who would rather be young gentlemen.) Boys of this sort are girls in any case-in all respects save one."

"Most subjects of this sort have a secret name - a girl's name."

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those ads for ai integration on phones are so funny bc it seems like they cant. come up with that many use cases that arent already on a phone? "ask gemini to give you recipes when youre cooking!" "use our AI assistant to find the perfect gift for your girlfriend" yeah or i could just like. google it. you've spent millions on a slightly fancier version of an alexa. good job man.

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i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes

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Triple J's holding an Australian Music Hottest 100, lets gooooooo

https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/countdown/hottest100

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Really enjoying the scritches

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Does anyone else see different US regions as “coded” as specific seasons?

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Among the reasons why Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is the best Star Trek is that the outfits look like they were designed by a competent costume designer who had been given a pile of the world's most miscellaneous fabrics and told that if they didn't use it all up by sunrise, Rumpelstiltskin would take their firstborn child.