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I struggle with how wrong this post is. It’s strong shades of some 1960s suburban dad complaining that kids these days don’t want to be soldiers and absolutely baffling in trying to square with any knowledge of history. 

Its apparent view of masculinity is not just wrong, it's actively harmful. The kind of thing you get your enemy to believe so they’re easier to defeat. Strong shade’s of Patton’s “No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.” in the viewpoint.

And I’m not able to agree on even a potential stronger case because at no point does anyone explicate a single particular masculine virtue. Instead it just broad spectrum opens with “traditionally masculine personality traits are good for being a hunter or a soldier, but they kinda suck for anything else” without really engaging with the idea that a tiny fraction of men throughout history have ever been either a hunter or a soldier. What were they living then? What was their masculinity? Do you know? Does it bother you that you don’t know? It bothers me that you don’t seem concerned by your blatant ignorance. What the actual fuck “in ye olde days(tm), society actually needed to have 50% of the population as potential soldiers to throw into a meatgrinder for a few square miles of dirt every 20 or so years.” - did you take the incredible aberration that was Europe for four years for the Great War and multiply your number of necessary soldiers by 2-3x just to make the assessments more wrong?

Too many men training to be soldiers (implicitly by socialization?) is not an actual problem that is occurring so a solution of complete “abandonment of traditionally masculine personality traits” is not called for. Beyond just being ludicrous on practical logistical grounds, it’s without any motivation as an actual improvement of society.

How much time on average do you think men have spent on killing other humans? I’d be surprised if it was over a minute. How much time on average have men spent tending to plants? Tell me again how killing defines masculinity. Bullshit.

The vast majority of humanity were agriculturalists who shared a common language/dialect with less than a million other people and mostly confined to their geographic environs. To speak of “a” set of masculine virtues is a kind of cultural imperialism that presumably takes some quasi-mythical set of norms for kings and nobles, raises them to exemplars of virtue in a cavalierly lack of scrutiny, and ignores all local norms to the contrary from each actual community. I am neither a king nor a noble. None of my friends are kings or nobles. My masculinity is not defined by the actions of kings or nobles. My masculinity is different from whatever caricature the original argument is focused on. My masculinity is different from that of some other man selected at random from the population of my country and it’s right that this should be so. I don’t need to change how I live in order to change them and I think the message of masculinity in decline is on ideological foundations that need more explication.

Fuck it, it's late, and I wanna go to sleep, but I probably won't be able to until I've properly articulated this somewhat batshit gender social theory I've been rotating in my mind for a while now - I think that the current "crisis of masculinity" in the western world was catalysed by the invention of the nuclear bomb. Note that this post is unfiltered, unedited brain noise and bullshit

So, essentially, traditionally masculine personality traits are good for being a hunter or a soldier, but they kinda suck for anything else. If you want to, like, function in modern society, traditonally feminine personality traits are much better for that. This is why we see, for example, girls consistently outperforming boys in schools these days.

Now, in ye olde days(tm), society actually needed to have 50% of the population as potential soldiers to throw into a meatgrinder for a few square miles of dirt every 20 or so years. But at the end of WW2, the nuclear bomb was invented, and suddenly great power conflicts are something that no-one can win and are to absolutely be avoided at all costs.

So, given that a proper great power conflict will probably cause the extinction of humanity, society doesn't really need to have that many soldiers anymore. But people still haven't gotten the memo yet, and are still conditioning half of the population into soldiers from birth. And what do soldiers do when they don't have a war to fight? The recurring historical problem is that a lot of them become bandits.

The only real solution to this is *wesker voice* complete global feminisation. That is to say, the abandonment of traditionally masculine personality traits and the embrace of traditionally feminine ones. So long as we remain shackled to the corpse of masculinity, we'll never be able to move forward. This will likely be a very slow process, taking place over the course of hundreds of years and not being complete until long after anyone reading this post is dead, because frankly like 95% of people - man or woman - do not want this to happen, they want men to continue being traditionally masculine. There's a lot of societal inertia that has gotten us into this mess. This change will only happen as, gradually, over the course of many generations, people stop wanting that.

Notes:

This is one of the things that frustrates me about reactionary masculine gender influencers. By trying to bring about a great masculine revival and encouraging men to be more masculine, they are harming the very people they claim to represent, they are encouraging people to become more maladapted to the society they live in, whereas becoming more feminine would be becoming better-adapted

Japan might be a bit ahead of us here. Feminine traits in men are depicted as positive and even romantically desirable in a way you just don't see in English-language works. I suspect that if an English-language writer were to try to do that it'd come off as kinda preachy, as if they were trying to convince *themselves* to be attracted to those traits. Whereas Japanese-language writers don't need to do that because they genuinely do find it attractive.

Alright, actually going to bed now

[transientpetersen]

It does look good when flying in the wind -> https://krikienoid.github.io/flagwaver/#?src=https%3A%2F%2Fflagwaver-cors-proxy.herokuapp.com%2Fhttps%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Flsbujbb7j1391.png

Finding a colorblind friendly redesign of the rainbow flag has me happy to see a pride flag for once

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By using antibodies from a human donor with a self-induced hyper-immunity to snake venom, scientists have developed the most broadly effective antivenom to date, which is protective against the likes of the black mamba, king cobra, and tiger snakes in mouse trials. Described in the journal Cell, the antivenom combines protective antibodies and a small molecule inhibitor and opens a path toward a universal antiserum.

Continue Reading.

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Nakashima created some incredible work. Just gorgeous.

If you want to see some aspiring woodworkers aiming for that same destination, please check out the student galleries at the Krenov School (https://www.instagram.com/thekrenovschool/).

trying to buy a bookshelf/room divider feels so fucking pointless. it's a quest in futility. there's nothing worth getting, not at any price, and you know why? it's because 60-some odd years ago, god damned George Nakashima made this thing:

Look at this fucking infohazard of a piece of furniture.

Look at how fucking perfectly proportioned each and every void space is to create a subtle sense of motion and elevation, almost a landscape with just a few careful lines.

Look at how the reduction in the support pillars from left to right mirrors that ascension and proportion. How the different woods highlight each other and the near-seamless points at which they meet. How the shadowed interior boards bring out the bright highlights in the grain of the shelves and top piece.

Look at how it fits into a room, how it casts a shadow, and most importantly, how it perfectly frames and hilights every single thing placed on it.

Like. It's not some wild statement to claim that the man who defined an entire genre of woodworking and furniture making, crystalized in his book "the soul of a tree", is like. A human god of the art form. I get that i'm saying nothing revolutionary here. But this thing just. breaks me. nothing compares. i've spent years trying to find a bookshelf that can even hold the faintest candle to it. I've spent long nights up in cad modeling out my own versions based on his design, desperately wanting to take them down to the woodshop and try my hand, but like. one real, good look at this, and it's so clearly the result of decades of craftsmanship. a lifetime of the art. i love it. it ruined this type of furniture for me, and i love it so, so much.

I'll just have to stick to desks, the one thing I know Mr. Nakashima will never ruin for m-

...

fuck.

[transientpetersen]

I love Avril's presentation of Joxter. Such a perfect cat-father.

I bet that Joxter knows a lot of songs in differents languages. I like to imagine it was this way Snufkin knows how to speak so many languages!

[transientpetersen]

See here’s the thing. It’s not that Secret of NIMH is a bad movie. It’s not that themes about believing in yourself, or about The Power Of A Mother’s Love, are necessarily bad.

It’s that–

It’s that the book is so much bigger and so much smaller. So much more.

It’s that We All Help One Another Against The Cat. And that saves an entire civilization, in the end. And it saves the life of a single little boy. And those things are equally important in the end.

In Mrs Frisby And The Rats Of NIMH, everything, the whole world, comes down to this in the end: No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.

An elderly mouse sets up shop as a healer, charging nothing, asking nothing in return. The frightened single mother gets free medicine from him. Because she has a doctor to go to, she’s in the right place at the right time to see a very young crow tangled in string, and stops despite the danger to free him. Moved by her patience and courage, Jeremy refuses to abandon her and risk her being killed by the cat whose attention his struggle has caught. He is gracious and polite and humble as he flies her to her home, so she swallows her irritation at his youthful foolishness and speaks to him respectfully, so a friendship is forged between them that lasts longer than a single mutual rescue, so she tells him about the danger her son is in, so he vouches for her to an owl. The owl is interested enough by her nerve and the unlikely bond of friendship between them that he gives her his genuine time and attention and speaks to her for long enough that Jeremy calls out to her by name to see if she’s safe, which means the owl recognizes the name, which means he can send her to the rats–

Simple, understated, mundane, none of them coincidences. All of them a choice. To do what’s right and not what’s safest. To do the hard thing and not the comfortable one. To act with compassion even when you’re annoyed at the deviation from your plans.

Justin opens a cage door for eight little mice who mean nothing to him, who he’s never met before. Nicodemus sees the smaller, lighter mice in mortal peril and reaches out instinctively to grab one, two, and the rest are gone before anyone even has time to react. The entirety of A Group having seen what comes of carelessness grimly throws themselves into keeping these two vulnerable mice alive, bracing them with their bodies, holding them close, anchoring them to safe points. Mr. Ages, not Nicodemus, proposes using a screwdriver as a pry-bar. Jonathan crawls through a hole too small for rats and frees them all. Justin burns hours they cannot spare to venture back into the tunnels–

(Having escaped, having reached freedom and safety against all odds but knowing others were left behind, he turns back–)

–Calling, hoping, and they find no one and it was still worth the risk, even if no one was saved, because they might have been. The care he shows for the mice means Jonathan and Mr Ages stay with them past the escape, form a friendship that lasts years. That gives his name such respect among them that when they hear it, they drop everything to care for his wife and son.

Dragon cannot be drugged because they have no mice to run the risk anymore. The rats decide there’s nothing for it–they will work in the open. Risk not only their lives but the discovery of their entire civilization if caught, in order to move a cinder block eight inches to the right, to save the life of a single tiny child, their dead friend’s son. The child’s mother volunteers to run the risk for them. A human boy says wait, don’t let the cat in yet, I’ve caught a mouse because human boys are loud and big and clumsy and it’s traumatizing and she’s hurt but Billy Fitzgibbon saw a tiny vulnerable thing and wanted to keep it safe. And so she remains in the kitchen, and hears about the death of Jenner’s team, and is able to warn the rats just barely, barely in time.

Because Jenner was not a villain, because he was never cruel. Because he disagreed with his oldest friend but Jenner and Nicodemus never hated one another, so they never wanted anything but the best for each other. So Jenner and his supporters defected peacefully. So their terrible, fatal mistake happened in the public eye, not too far away, because there was no hostility between them. Because they only ever wanted one another to be safe and happy, in the end.

And the surviving rats escape, save for one who stumbled and fell as he ran from the gas, and one unnamed who might have been Justin, who might not, and does it matter whether it was someone we knew, does it matter, should we mourn him less if he wasn’t, does his name matter more than that he was kind and brave and died for it? That after being kinder and braver than anyone had any right to ask, he dragged one last brother out of a cloud of cyanide and then went back?

They escape, they survive, just as surely as Timothy will grow up strong and healthy and the Frisbys can now return every year to a safe, warm home and never have to leave it. A civilization deep in the forest, safe and secure and entirely their own, because Mrs. Jonathan Frisby was in the right place at the right time to tell them to hide their machines and run–

Because she was kind to a crow. 

Because she had a neighbor who dedicated his life to helping others.

Because her husband died helping the rats build a home that was their own, that he would never share in. 

Because they were his friends, because he opened a grate for them once, because they held him close and shielded him with their bodies when he was too small. 

Because a rat named Justin opened a door.

Because kindness is hard and scary and hurts sometimes, but it’s always worth it, it’s never wasted, compassion finds its way back to you in the most unlikely ways and even when it doesn’t, when you get nothing in return, it was still worth it to try.

Because we all help one another against the cat.

And how dare Don Bluth look me in the eye and try to say that isn’t good enough.

How dare you try to tell me that isn’t magic.

[transientpetersen]

When the Dwarf had a small bright blaze going, the three companions drew close to it and sat together, shrouding the light with their hooded forms. Legolas looked up at the boughs of the tree reaching out above them. ‘Look!’ he said. ‘The tree is glad of the fire!’ It may have been that the dancing shadows tricked their eyes, but certainly to each of the companions the boughs appeared to be bending this way and that so as to come above the flames, while the upper branches were stooping down; the brown leaves now stood out stiff, and rubbed together like many cold cracked hands taking comfort in the warmth.

"The Two Towers" JRR Tolkien

Stargazing with the boys

[transientpetersen]

The nature of belief is such that it's always easier to accept the things that you already want to believe. Inconceivable things that are nevertheless true are met with denial and anger.

So pay attention.

y'all know that whole left-brained/right-brained thing is fake right? and the "brain fully develops at age 25" thing? and the "we only use 10% of our brains" thing? yeah they're all complete horseshit please yell at anyone who says them

[transientpetersen]

I've always been wary of brewing compost tea because I heard that it was going to be incredibly stinky. But reading up on the process from the video, not only does the aeration prevent the kind of bacteria that are going to stink up your solution but it promotes ones that carry that satisfying soil smell. Seems worth it!

how & why I use compost tea in my garden! ☕️♻️

if y'all want more info on how to build this compost tea brewer, holla at me in the notes & I can link the schematics.

i hope this brief walkthrough is helpful.

[transientpetersen]

Hard agree that the system that produced the Peter Jackson adaptions was completely incapable of honoring the spirit of the books. For all that they were the labor of love from many enthusiasts, the relentless drive toward more epic violence came directly at the expense of what the source material strove to center.

The Battle of Five Armies is half a chapter - an equal amount of prose as spent meeting and making friends with the giant eagles. Helm's Deep is half a chapter - about a quarter of the amount of pages dedicated to Gimli, Aragorn, and Legolas seeking to catch up to and free Pippin and Merry.

Our camera narrator should just have gotten hit with a rock.

I never read the hobbit, but I HAVE read lotr and the silmarillion, but I just learned that the battle of the five armies, that part they made a WHOLE movie out of, is only 1 page in the book because bilbo gets hit by a rock and wakes up when it’s over. 10/10 no notes, that should have been the movie too

[transientpetersen]

dedication from Sherlock Holmes & The Three Winter Terrors by James Lovegrove

[transientpetersen]

Side characters in the Sherlock Holmes stories rarely get a respectful treatment in adaptation. Irene Adler is merely the most visible of such and I'd kill for a canon-close rendition but Mycroft is a close second in the race for please-just-give-us-the-character-we-actually-liked.

On the discussion of book accurate depictions of Sherlock Holmes, one thing I really want is accurate Mycroft. In the books Sherlock is very… autistically coded. At least to me, an autistic person. And Sherlock basically states that Mycroft has more “severe” autism. Sherlock says his brother is more brilliant than he is but absolutely cannot function in society and hates social interaction so much he founded a society for the purpose of minimizing it as much as possible. In addition it’s implied he becomes overstimulated so easily he has to curate his environment to be devoid of disturbance and noise.

Give me the autistic brothers but one has it much much worse

Enough of this Mycroft as the more sociable of the two who is a powerful politician. This man would have a meltdown if he had to be that social!!!

[transientpetersen]

Thou shalt not drive in these lands

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Fairytale

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2023

Think these are my favourite paintings I made this year, thanks for following!

[transientpetersen]

There are rules that will help you and rules that will hurt you. Just knowing the rules cannot tell you which is which - and it's all situationally dependent.

Remind yourself that you have more options than you think.

You can use a good story to save lives. The tools that you have to realize your intention are less important than the intention and the courage to follow through.

while i was trying to wade through the large amounts of people trying to leave the central subway station, everyone abruptly came to a halt in front of the subway turnstiles. two french girls had misunderstood the tap-out process, and one of them was now stuck behind the gate. as i was wracking my brain on how to explain the tap-in tap-out process of the milan metro to both of them with my rudimentary french while they both got increasingly upset at the closed gate between them, a young teenager suddenly pushed me to the side.

i was just about to give him my most scathing disgruntled glare when he took out his ticket and, after realizing they had no common language, started gesticulating wildly in front of the french girl left behind. he pointed at the ticket, then at her, and very seriously said: “on three, we go.” she nodded, and after he counted to three, holding up his fingers so there could be no confusion, they sprinted through the gate together, giggling profusely afterwards as if they had just pulled off the heist of the century,

it was just a small moment during the morning commute. but i realized then and there that the time i had spent trying to intellectualize the problem and wondering if my lack of language skills would be awkward the situation could have already been resolved. and that while i had been mad about being pushed aside, the teenager got it exactly right: no questions, no fear or shyness, just direct action to help where you can and rushing there to do so. i think about him every time now when i run to lift someone’s pram or ask a lost looking person if they need my help despite the fear of being rude. on three, we go.