uncommonsockeater

[uncommonsockeater]

We all know why you’re weep, Ali.

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[uncommonsockeater]

The enduring appeal of the Aubrey-Maturin books is that reading them feels like hanging out and that the characters’ spirit of friendship is infectious. A couple weeks ago, while I was reading Mauritius Command, I walked into a store and saw some coffee and had the thought, “A friend of mine just ran out of coffee. I remember hearing about that recently. Should I get them some? Who was it?” But it was not a friend of mine. It was some pretend guys from the early 19th century.

[uncommonsockeater]

Jeremy Miranda (American,b. 1980)

Tide Pool

Acrylic on panel

[uncommonsockeater]

Wachaza the Great Squid, for the upcoming publication "Spawn of Molokka: The Cephalopods of Glorantha"

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what's the guy version of a fujo because i feel like that's whatever's going on here with hozier standing by while mavis and joan have their yuri moment

[uncommonsockeater]

My toxic trait is that I am far more interested in the socio-economic and geopolitical implications of ABO settings than the smut.

For example: I can't read any ABO AUs set in England or France because while I can suspend my disbelief far enough for a gender trinary set up, I can't suspend it enough to believe those two countries would still be distinct entities in a alternate history where Richard the Lionheart could have impregnated Philip II.

If there was a viable dynastic future with Richard, Philip would have climbed him like an oak and dragged him to the altar if he had to. It's a match that makes perfect sense from both their points of view: Philip gets Aquitaine back under French rule, the best general in Europe on his council, and a powerful check on the Angevins... then unexpectedly (after Henry the Young bites it) the entire Kingdom of England for his Capetian dynasty. Richard meanwhile gets to stick it to his father, secure Aquitaine's prosperity, and gets the leverage to start pushing for his mother's release. Then when Henry kicks the bucket Richard doesn't actually have to be King of England in anything but name: Philip can run the countries and unify the Crowns and what not while Richard runs off to go Crusading.

Plus they also like, loved each other and stuff and being able to get to be together long term instead of being torn apart by politics would have been cool. But I'm mainly obsessed with the historical and dynastic implications.

All this to say any ABO au set in England or France that doesn't have them united as a singular Anglo-Frank empire is doing it wrong.

[uncommonsockeater]

Never have I been so reminded that we do not all have the same interpretations of the same text as seeing that post that's doing the rounds about what Medieval Europe would have looked like if Richard the Lionheart and Philip could have gotten married - which by the way is a really good post, but I just do not buy the claim that Richard and Philip were absolutely in love and only in love, and could have made it work and be happy together long term if they could have been together.

And like. Ok. Maybe this is just me but how do you look at the absolute clusterfuck that is the Plantagenet/Capet set up, everything that happened during the Third Crusade, the quite frankly bonkers family dynamic between the Plantagenets, not to mention that weird dynamic that is 'my dad married your mum and then they divorced so she married your dad and potentially your dad's shagging my sister who you're currently engaged to and your brothers keep conspiring with me to kill your dad and we could have been brothers but instead we've got this weird psychosexual not-quite-rivalry not-quite-bond between our two families'...and think 'aw, but Richard and Philip were both normal enough that if they'd been able to marry and form a dynasty everything would have been chill'. Like, you think gay marriage could have saved them? You think either of those men were in any way capable of that? They'd be tearing each other's limbs off by the time the honeymoon had settled and not in, like, a sexy fun way. They'd be like the royal couple in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang that keep trying to kill each other with elaborate booby traps, and England would have been dragged into the Reformation 300 years early because Richard was demanding a divorce after the first time Philip pulled a 'I'll bet your dad was better in the sack than you'. And by the way, this is not me saying that a Richard and Philip marriage is untenable, that is definitely not that, I'm just saying that anyone who feels there was love and only love between them and they could have had a wonderful relationship has a wayyyy more charitable read on that dynamic than I do.

[uncommonsockeater]

My toxic trait is that I am far more interested in the socio-economic and geopolitical implications of ABO settings than the smut.

For example: I can't read any ABO AUs set in England or France because while I can suspend my disbelief far enough for a gender trinary set up, I can't suspend it enough to believe those two countries would still be distinct entities in a alternate history where Richard the Lionheart could have impregnated Philip II.

If there was a viable dynastic future with Richard, Philip would have climbed him like an oak and dragged him to the altar if he had to. It's a match that makes perfect sense from both their points of view: Philip gets Aquitaine back under French rule, the best general in Europe on his council, and a powerful check on the Angevins... then unexpectedly (after Henry the Young bites it) the entire Kingdom of England for his Capetian dynasty. Richard meanwhile gets to stick it to his father, secure Aquitaine's prosperity, and gets the leverage to start pushing for his mother's release. Then when Henry kicks the bucket Richard doesn't actually have to be King of England in anything but name: Philip can run the countries and unify the Crowns and what not while Richard runs off to go Crusading.

Plus they also like, loved each other and stuff and being able to get to be together long term instead of being torn apart by politics would have been cool. But I'm mainly obsessed with the historical and dynastic implications.

All this to say any ABO au set in England or France that doesn't have them united as a singular Anglo-Frank empire is doing it wrong.

[uncommonsockeater]

[uncommonsockeater]

Glyn Philpot (British, 1884-1937) - Under the Sea (1914-1918)

[uncommonsockeater]

The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.

[uncommonsockeater]

dont piss me off. next time you go on a trip im filling your house with galapagos finches. by the time you return, they've evolved to fill your niche. they're a better spouse to your partner. they're a better parent for your child. and? they're a better friend to me than you ever were.

[uncommonsockeater]

Beaded octopus necklace by CafeBijou (2018, Russia)

[uncommonsockeater]

Mozilla, in its finite wisdom, embedded LLM bots into recent versions of Firefox for the vitally-important purpose of… naming tab groups. Now, some users are noticing CPU and power usage spikes caused by a background process called Inference.

Ugh. Reminder again for Firefox users to visit your about:config page, search for the browser.ml.chat.enabled key, and set that to false:

If yours says true then double-click it until it reads false.

Doing that turns off the AI chatbot features in Firefox, but also the stupid new LLM tab-naming feature that's rolling out.

[uncommonsockeater]

Jacob Anderson as Louis de Pointe du Lac INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE PART II (2024)