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The thing about gay sailors in the Victorian era is that England and America had totally different takes on it. In the british navy they could, and did, literally kill men for having consensual relationships with other men. But in the US navy, even tho John Adams literally copied England's naval regulations when making America's version, he chose to leave out every proscription against sodomy. And no one knows why!!! England was like hmm yes the death penalty and America was like i dont really see how thats my business. And like gay American sailors could still be charged with things like "uncleanliness" or "indecency" (charges that were vague enough to cover a lot of different things) but bc it wasnt specifically forbidden in the regulations "the commanding officers [were given] wide discretion to prosecute, punish, or ignore."*

And by and large US officers seem to have ignored it. We literally have the records of every flogging (the most extreme form of punishment allowed during these specific years) onboard a naval vessel for the years of 1846-1848 and almost all of the cases that involved homosexual activity "unambiguously refer to male/male homosexual activity involving attempted assaults on children, not consensual couplings between adults."* There are also multiple recorded instances throughout the Victorian Era of an American sailor coming forward with a charge of sexual assault and pulling in other sailors or even officers as witnesses who tell their captain yeah i totally saw them and didn't say anything until this sailor told me it was nonconsensual. There are even records recorded by naval recruitment officers of men with extremely explicit gay tattoos being allowed to join the navy. Why did the US navy not care enough to even include it in the regulations while the British navy literally hanged men for it??? Were we so hard up for sailors that John Adams was like bitch we need every gay sailor we can get????

And weirdly enough this was true on American Whaling ships too! In the recorded cases where homosexual activity led to sailors being disciplined (in some cases punishment so mild as just being dropped off their ship at the next port) it was usually in situations where rape was involved and/or there was a high degree of ship disruption related to it (guys getting into a public knife fight for example). Idk I just think thats so interesting especially when America and England were so similar to be so different in this particular area is fascinating

*quotes from Unruly Desires: American Sailors and Homosexualities in the Age of Sail by William Benemann

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God what i wouldn't give to have the sheer stamina and work ethic of my next door neighbor. Every morning, 8am, the hammers and drills come out. he's putting up shelves. he's feeding cables through walls 6 inches from my pillow. He's putting together furniture. He's making smoothies. He's 74 years old. Does it piss me off? of course. But i have to admit that he is clearly also the superior being. I need The Substance but to turn me (anemic 20-something with the constitution of a consumptive Victorian child) into this absolute beast of a man

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on watching a parent age

i saw somebody say “what if you’re gone and i haven’t become anything yet” and basically that broke me on a random thursday evening

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I have some news for members of the united states armed forces who feel like they are pawns in a political game and their assignments being unnecessary.

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one critical piece of advice is that opportunities are fractal doorways

you can take an opportunity that seems small, a group meeting for an hour once a week let's say, and if you really commit and put a lot of effort into even a small opportunity, if you work to prop open that passageway, then you will find that it can surprisingly quickly multiply into many future possibilities, many future paths.

one of the members of your small book club desperately needs a babysitter for the weekend. that's a gig. another one hits it off with you on some obscure topic. the bulletin board at the place you meet has a flyer for a class on writing. you go, and now you're in an environment full of other people who are there for the same reasons. talk to them. over drinks one night an older member encourages you to apply for uni with one of your short stories you wrote for the class. et cetera.

I spent a lot of time paralyzed with indecision, trying to find just the right opportunity to get me where i wanted to go. that's the entirely wrong way to go about it. practice pursuing possibilities is more important than optimizing your choice of path, waiting for just the perfect opportunity to magically drop into your lap. It likely won't happen like that, it's not necessary, and you don't need to live your whole life at once. Frodo didn't arrive at Mt Doom by making the optimal choice on the first crossroads out of the shire.

Instead cultivate an attitude of engagement with whatever imperfect seemingly insignificant opportunities that are already in front of you, and keep an open mind & eyes, and trust in the fractal nature of reality. look for threads to pull, opportunities to pursue, and engage with people as if every one of them has something new to teach you, and somewhere new to take you that you've never been. they probably do. the more you engage the more you'll find out that this is true; trust that paths will lead to more paths even if you can't see them yet. trust that the big scary void question mark of a future contains not only unseen dangers but also an unseen unfurling infinity of options and paths, friends and lovers, work and play. i love u

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No tech CEO or NYT bestselling novelist will ever match the creativity of a humble French postman who decided on a whim to spend thirty-three years building a surreal, majestic palace with the bricks and mortar of his dreams.

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My feelings about queernormative worlds in SFF is that I can often enjoy it, but I rarely believe it.

Almost everything surrounding gender, sex, and sexuality, and all the different social norms and expectations that different cultures build up around them, derive ultimately from the various realities of sexual activity and pregnancy: who can have it, who can’t, for how long, who does have it, who doesn’t, and what that means for society. I’m not being bioessentialist here, because human bodies are all quite different and different cultures develop different ways to react to that, and rates of and reactions to fertility can be different, and what different sexual and gender roles mean in different cultures and who can and can’t embody them can get extremely different. (Hell, how pregnancy itself even works can be different depending on where you live, what your lifestyle is like, and what your diet consists of!) But like, the reason gender even matters, historically, has been because of reproduction. And the reason reproduction matters, in agricultural societies anyway, has very often been because of property ownership and the need to work on farms.

So I’m totally here for queernormative worlds. But to interest me you have to answer the questions of: okay, but how does your culture work though, and how is kinship structured, and how is reproduction seen, and how is property inheritance understood, and how does gender fit into all this, for me to feel like you’ve actually tried. (And don’t say that there ARE no norms, so no one falls outside of them. There’s no culture where that’s true.)

Sci-fi worlds can get away with this easier than fantasy worlds, imo. Partially because they can posit that it is our future but we’ve gone through all of the Social Justice Struggles already and solved them, but also because technology can really alter all of these topics. The Vorkosigan Saga, for instance, makes it clear that Beta Colony is as gender-egalitarian and free-love as it is because of contraception and uterine replicators, which FULLY decouple “the ability to have children” from “the need for anyone to be pregnant.” This is huge, and the Vorkosigan Saga treats it as appropriately so! Ancillary Justice is another one that thinks a lot about how the genderless culture that decenters romance as a core social organizing principle works. But I read so many low-ish-tech fantasy worlds that are happily queernormative and gender doesn’t matter and they just feel shallow. I don’t believe this world. I don’t dislike it, exactly, I just don’t believe it, I don’t believe people would be like this because you’ve put no effort into imagining a world that works like this makes any sense.

Which is totally fine for people’s D&D games and cute oneshot comics and personal works and such, but when you want me to take your worldbuilding seriously, you’re going to have to convince me! And a lot of it is not convincing.

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Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)

People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.

Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.

Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.

Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.

Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.

The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.

References

Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.

Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science 27(5) 737–747.

Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish: Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.

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welp. it was bound to happen at some point. looks like the whale was feeding and nabbed the guy by accident, and immediately spit him out:

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after all of murderbot's unreliable narration as relates to personal relationships, plus its off-handed mention of three's "possibly apocryphal friends", i can't help but suspect that this: (ASR)

might be narratively equivalent to this:

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You ever hear that old chestnut about how most people neglect the part of the story of Icarus where he also had to avoid flying too low, lest the spray of the sea soak his feathers and cause him to fall and drown? You ever think about how different the world would be if Icarus died that way instead? If the idiom was to Fly To Close To The Sea? A warning against playing it far too safe, about not stretching your wings and soaring properly? You ever think about how Icarus died because he was happy?

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Ok, concept, after System Collapse those two random SecUnits Murderbot gave the hacking directions to decide to go absolutely nuts with sharing it around and it goes,,, kind of viral. Resulting in a community of new FreeUnits who,,, obviously need ways to share info and help each other out

The result is FeedFreeUnit, a hyper-encrypted feed that eventually spreads to, like, every port. It starts out as just tips and helpful code and instructions on how to get to Preservation and stuff, but eventually it also turns into THE social media for FreeUnits, basically

Which means memes. And they're kind of wild. (Sorry, I got the idea for ONE of these and it turned into a whole bunch)

(Yes, FeedFreeUnit calls Murderbot "MB". Yes, Murderbot HATES this. Yes, it causes the first known instance of construct Discourse.)

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fake relationship but its a king and his concubine that was once an amazing soldier but he couldn’t go up the ranks for whatever reason so the king was like listen. hear me out. you can be my strategy dude. u just gotta be okay w walking around shirtless a lot. and soldier dude is like man that’s an UPSIDE and yknow they end up falling in love

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The most beautiful thing about Chengqing to me is that if their roles were reversed, say if WRH won; if the Jiang were on the brink of extinction and the Dafan Wen were struggling to regain their political foothold; if under those circumstances, Wen Qing came to Jiang Cheng and said "Jiang-gongzi, I can –" his response would be the exact same as hers was in canon:

"Wen-guniang, what can you do?"

Because she can save him, but not his people. And they both know this. They look at each other, and they know that they are two of a kind: they would choose their families over each other, and in doing so, over themselves. In a heartbeat, they would. That is why they could have been in love. That is why they never will be

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chicago pope tweets

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Colombian hair braiding competition