How Very Silly

GUYS. DID YOU KNOW YOU CAN WRITE CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE FICS ON AO3

Other things you can do:

Its fucking amazing. Ao3 is fucking amazing. Can I legally marry a website?

WHAT

One of those times I'm reblogging something so I can find it again later

Mobility assistance

The guy who makes these posts in the hvac subreddit a lot and I love his memes

Some of my favorite by him

Fun History Fact: The overwhelming majority of cowboys in the U.S. were Indigenous, Black, and/or Mexican persons. The omnipresent white cowboy is a Hollywood studio concoction meant to uphold the mythology of white masculinity.

Thank you.

I will always re-blog this

I think it was high school when i overheard some white girl put on her best semi-disgusted and confused voice and go “why do so many Mexicans dress up like cowboys?” and I had to be the person to tell her.

Why do you think the whites say buckero? Cause they couldn’t say vaquero.

I dunno if I reblogged this before but fuck it, y'all gon learn today.

Teach the children.

also, cowboy culture was hella gay. like, write-poems-about-your-cowboy-partner gay.

IF people acknowledge it, they play the necessity card– there weren’t any women out on the range, so they had to “resort to men.” this claim completely erases 1) the romantic (not just sexual) writings of actual cowboys, 2) the acknowledgement of cowboys’ potential homosexual activity by writers at the time, and 3) the possibility that some men would deliberately become cowboys with the intent to seek out homosexual encounters.

no one wants to admit it, but cowboy culture was just. so inherently gay.

Im here for the gay POC cowboys

👆🏿👆🏿👆🏿👆🏿👆🏿👆🏿👆🏿👆🏿👆🏿👆🏿👆🏿👆🏿

Support your local gay cowboys

Don’t buy other stuff

I absolutely will die on this hill, access to fiction that makes your skin crawl and open discussion about it is the best way to keep that skin crawling fiction from happening in reality.

It doesn't matter if it is ~positively~ or negatively portrayed. If you censor it, we don't talk about it, then we can't protect against it.

If you are seriously against CSA, then you should absolutely read Lolita. Yeah, the book that set the western world on fire with weird sexual conversations. 

That book perfectly breaks down what a lot of very real sex abuse looks like. It details how predators look for victims (family members), it details what happens to the child who is enduring abuse (she acts out, she screams randomly, she does very poorly in school, etc, etc), and it shows who the most dangerous perpetrators are (intelligent, well liked, charismatic). 

That book will make your skin absolutely crawl! Once you get out of the head of HH long enough to look at the world Dolores was dumped into, you’ll cry your eyes out. But you know what it’ll do? It’ll open your eyes. 

That book has a lot of weird reactions. Some people turn on Lolita, some people turn on HH, some people turn on Nabokov, but it came out when Freud was still respected. That book came out in the middle of “little girls want to fuck older men and it’s their fault it happened and they’re crazy”. 

It turned the world around. Some of the discussions about the book are nasty!!! Even from Kubrick and Nabokov. Their discussion about Lolita makes my SKIN CRAWL!! They talk about it in a very POSITIVE and WEIRD way. But it opens your fucking eyes and that’s the POINT. 

Embrace disgusting fiction and then fucking talk about why it’s nasty. Now YOU have the power over reality. 

Embrace disgusting fiction and then fucking talk about why it's nasty. Now YOU have the power over reality.

Emphasizing this last sentence because it's so well put. We have to engage with things that make us uncomfortable so we can learn to be better.

Yes! I recall reading a quote from Nabokov about why he wrote it. What I remember him saying was “I read in the news about a man who was arrested for molesting girls, and I became curious. Why would a person do that? So I wrote from the perspective of someone who would.”

That’s… that’s not even weird, I don’t think. I wonder why people do horrible things all the time.

I don’t actually think Nabokov had everything about it right. It seems to me that many real molesters are much more aware of what they’re doing and sometimes even perving on the cruelty of what they’re doing. HH seems kind of quaintly Freudian in comparison.

But that’s what Nabokov would have seen around explaining it, so it makes sense.

And Nabokov really does seem aware, on my reading, that HH is doing harm, and that the idyllic love affair he’s dreaming of is in his head. What’s actually going on is just seedy and gross.

It’s hard to read, hard to understand, and messy.

But those things are what make it good, rather than just “hey look I picked a shocking topic have some torture porn.”

(I hate the term torture porn but it’s the best term I can think of rn)

Nabokov gave extensive interviews and talked about Lolita often. He gets such a raw deal. I have compiled a bunch on my main blog here. i just hate nabokov misinformation so here are three for you:

By all accounts and backed up by extensive interviews, Nabokov wrote a psychological thriller and expected people to be shocked and compelled by it in the same way you can't look away from a train wreck. His worst crime was total naivete. He literally never expected that anyone would take it as a romance.

nabokov wrote "don't create the torment nexus" and then children showed up at his door dressed as the torment nexus and people forever will be like "you wrote about the torment nexus, which is the same thing as being in support of the torment nexus".

The first time I asked a person about the book Lolita, they told me "it is a romance, it is about a young woman and an older man falling in love". Then the second time someone told me about it, they said it was a nauseating accusation of society. And the third person told me it was a terrible story about an adult predating on a kid.

I really wish the first interpretation never existed. I wish the author's naivete over expecting utter shock and disgust from everyone wasn't naivete but how society really is.

I don't believe censorship is the solution, but I do think such books should be restricted to the classroom with a good learning structure so as to give people context, or at least they should be released with additional commentary so a new reader can understand the entire context.

Also, such books need trigger warnings. I was a victim of CSA. When I was a kid I had a veracious need to read every book in existence, and had I accidentally come across that book and started reading it, that horrible book would have completely wrecked me. Perhaps permanently. It certainly did my head in as an adult to find out that people think such a thing was "romance".

That is censorship. Restricting who can read a book is censorship. That is exactly what it is.

As frustrating as it is that people read things "the wrong way," and they do, and they always will, making sure people "read the book in the correct and approved way and take away the correct and approved meaning" is... not a thing that should ever be hoped for.

Commentary editions are great! Restricting where and how and by whom things can be read? Not so much.

The problem is that you can’t stop people from having bad opinions. Even if you make your intentions really obvious in your text. That’s what the torment nexus meme is about. It’s pretty much impossible to make art that is safe from harmful interpretations or bad faith readings.

So starting to censor media because it might be harmful to traumatized children or adults we end up with the Hays Code and we end up with the Comics Code and with sanitized media that makes it impossible to actually talk about or even acknowledge real life harm.

Lolita should probably have trigger warnings, it also isn’t a book for children. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be accessible.

You can't stop people from having bad opinions. You could literally tell them to love each other and especially to love their enemies, and within a couple hundred years people would be killing each other over what you meant by that.

for a tragedy the iliad is pretty funny. compiled some of my favorite things about it (not in chronological order)

- patroclus barely speaks for most of the book but EVERYBODY loves him. like he’s literally the entire greek camp’s precious meow meow. the ORIGINAL sweet little meow meow. even the GODS are sad and feel bad when he dies. even HOMER loves patroclus, always calling him “faultless patroclus” “my patroclus” “gentle patroclus” “sweet patroclus” WE GET IT. achilles, briseis, menelaus, ajax, literally every member of the greek camp is down ATROCIOUS for patroclus all bc he’s just one Really Nice Dude. just one very Sweet and Polite Fella. one Extra Special Guy <3 his whole narrative purpose is simply to be everyone’s special little scrunkly

- in one of the MANY passages where achilles is lamenting about how sad it is that patroclus is dead he promises patroclus’ corpse that he will have many deep-bosomed trojan and dardanian women weep for him. he tells his dead buddy “i will get the absolute THICKEST hoes with the BIGGEST mommy milkers for your funeral” honestly? id be honored

- all the arguments escalate so quickly. an old man very politely appeals to agamemnon to pretty please give his daughter back and offers him a huge fortune for her and agamemnon calls him a crotchety old bitch and tells him he’ll fucking kill him if he ever sees him again

- that same old man is a priest of apollo. you know, the plague god? anyway priest calls in a favor and apollo curses the greeks with a plague

- to address this, achilles decides to resolve it by calling all the greeks together and passive aggressively going “HM! i WONDER what could have caused a PLAGUE! it’s almost like we OFFENDED the PLAGUE GOD somehow. now WHAT could WE (cough agamemnon) done to offend the PLAGUE GOD?????” all in front of agamemnon

- zeus spends most of the book desperately trying to keep the gods OUT of the war. then once he’s finally had enough he just calls them all together and says “go nuts” and then they do

- artemis talks shit on the battlefield so hera calls her a bitch, steals her bow, and beats her with it. artemis then goes back to zeus and cries

- polydamas says to hector “hey you killed patroclus and achilles is gonna be fucking pissed. we should probably go back to the city while we can” and hector calls him a bitch and tells him to stfu. achilles then chases them back to the city and hector decides to stay outside and get killed by achilles instead of going in with the rest of the army bc he didn’t wanna hear polydamas say “i told you so”

- diomedes is about to fight with a guy called glaucus but then they realize their ancestors were friends or something so they decide not to kill each other, and diomedes says “hey! why don’t we even trade armor! :) just as a show of friendship! :))” and glaucus is like “yeah sure!” and gives diomedes his really nice gold plated armor while glaucus gets diomedes’ shitty plain bronze armor

- achilles makes a bitchy comment to his horses about leaving patroclus to die and the horse momentarily gains the ability to talk just to tell achilles it wasn’t THEIR goddamn fault, tells achilles he’s gonna die soon, and then goes back to being a normal horse.

- zeus with his daughters: oh child ❤️ oh my dear ❤️ oh there there i didn’t really mean it ❤️ sweetie why don’t you go help the greeks?❤️

- zeus with his sons: “ares you fucking donkey”

- everyone calling paris a stupid coward bitch every time they see him. all of troy fucking hates him. hector fucking hates him. helen fucking hates him.

- paris getting dressed up in fancy armor and prancing to the front lines going “i’ll fight ANY of you greeks!” and menelaus (the guy whose wife he stole) goes “alright bet” and paris nearly pisses his pants and tries to hide but then his brother hector calls him a piece of shit and tells him he hopes he dies and makes him fight menelaus. menelaus promptly ROCKS HIS SHIT. literally starts dragging him by his helmet like a rag doll, would’ve killed him if aphrodite hadn’t teleported paris outta there (BOO)

The fact that all of these are dead accurate to the plot with zero exaggeration. OP, please provide more greatest Iliad hits 🙏😭

For the Star Wars Day (May the Fourth / May the Force Be With You) there was shared (with the permission of the Pratchett Estate ) a Terry Pratchett story from the Star Wars Universe that was only published in a newspaper 45 years ago! Very excited to read a new Terry's piece! :)❤ (tweet)

Also, Terry Pratchett writing fanfiction 45 years ago, can I hear a wahoo? :)

Note: I am by no means a professional in health or otherwise. This is personal experience. I made this as a metaphor to help my parents understand me better.

k.b. // by jennifer johnson

when they say shakespeare is inmortal and eternally relevant what they mean is that he was making one brain cell jokes in the 1600s

And Beatrice is not shy about implying where he keeps the last one :)

what if nothing we did changed anything (what if we had the power to change everything). what if I forgot how to be myself (what if I only remembered you). what if none of it mattered (what if we were the only things that mattered). what if it was inevitable (what if it was all our fault). what if I couldn't live without you (what if I ached with the weight of two souls overlapping). what if we were already dead (what if we never existed in the first place). what if I forgot my own name (what if I gave you mine).

What if all I ever wanted to do was make you happy but I kept forgetting who you were and who I was and who we both were to each other but never how much I cared about you, and you knew so much more about the world than I did and you were frustrated by how much I kept forgetting but you stayed with me anyway, because we’re Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, travelling companions… or was it Guildenstern and Rosencrantz? And then we died and it didn’t mean anything because it’s all going to happen again now so toss the coin and we’ll both pretend to be shocked when it lands on heads for the 76th time in a row.

Natalie Portman being confused by the fact that you have to say “hi” to someone before starting a conversation in France got me like ?????

“I feel there’s a lot of rules of politeness and codes of behavior there you have to follow. […] A friend of mine taught me that when you go in some place you have to say “bonjour” before you say anything else, then you have to wait two seconds before you say something else. So if you go into a store you can’t be like “do you have this in another size,” or they’ll think you’re super rude and then they’ll be rude to you.” [X]

#wait you don’t do this is other countries??

So that’s it guys. French are not rude, we just don’t like it when people don’t say “Hello” or “Hi” when they start a conversation. 

Don’t everyone say “Hi” before they ask something to someone? What’s next? Saying please is also a french thing or others countries does that too? 

Canada is similar. We say sorry and please. The Hello thing seems strange, but it actually makes sense.

Bro, this threw me for a loop when I moved up north. Like in the southern United States you say “Hi, how are you?” And then make a few seconds of small talk before you ask your question or order your food and when I went to Connecticut they were like “What do you want?” Without any hello or anything. In other places they just STARE at you waiting on you to place your order and gtfo.

I laid my hand over my chest the first time, and the only way to describe my look was “aghast” before I said “Good lord!” My husband said it’s the most southern thing he’s seen me do. He thought it was hilarious. But…. Like??? That’s rude as fuck??????? Don’t y'all say say “Hello” before throwing your demands at someone??

maybe this is why everyone thinks new yorkers are rude

this is absolutely why ppl think new englanders r rude. no one has any fucking manners

african culture, at least in ghana, demands you greet a person before you ask them something. if youre in an open market they may even ignore you if you dont.

We do this in Australia as well. If you just started straight off saying “yeah I want XXXX” we’d think you’re rude as all fuck.  You say hi, then make your request.  It’s basic acknowledgement of the other person as a person rather than some random request-filling machine.

Huh. Speaking as a New Englander, I usually go with “Excuse me,” but sometimes “hi” or “hey,” but with no pause – it’ll be, “Excuse me, hi, I was looking for X?” From my POV, it seems rude to get too chatty and waste some stranger’s time; I assume they have better things to do than make small talk with me, so I just get my request out there so they can answer me and get back to whatever needs doing. I always thank folks for their help afterwards, if that helps?

(The rules of etiquette are strange. People say New Englanders are rude and cold, but once during an unexpected snowstorm here in Seattle, my car got stuck and I was standing by the side of the road at a busy intersection in the snow for half an hour waiting for my housemate to come pick me up, and not a single person stopped. Back in Massachusetts, every other car on the road would’ve been pulling up to check to see if I was okay, if my phone was working, did I need a lift, etc.)

No but this was the first thing my cousin told me in France? you never ever ever start a conversation with anyone, not even like “Nice weather today, huh?” without saying Bonjour first. You HAVE to greet them or, just like Ghana, they’ll ignore the shit out of you, you rude little fucker

(And “excuse me” or “pardon me” doesn’t cut it. you still have to open with bonjour)

[and I can’t speak for New England but coming from Chicago and then moving Out West where the culture is VERY influenced by the South and DETERMINED to think of themselves as small town folk… I HATE when I have to make small talk before ordering food??? Like, if it’s a coffee shop that’s pretty much empty I’ll chit chat for a few seconds, but I’m still not going to make inane conversation about the weather unless the weather is extreme.

In a big city it is rude as fuck to waste my time making small talk with me when we are not even friends or neighbors??? I am here to get shit done. There are four other people in line behind me, and I don’t want to waste their time. I am here, I HAVE MY ORDER ALREADY DECIDED BY THE TIME I GET TO THE FRONT BECAUSE I AM NOT A CAVE WOMAN, and I am being polite by saying both Please and Thank You and not wasting other people’s daylight.]

I live in a small northern city, and I feel it would be rude to engage someone in more than maaaaaybe a sentence of small talk before placing my order. In addition to feeling I was wasting their time, I’d feel like I was demanding emotional labour (small-talk is emotional labour for *me*) that they weren’t being paid to give.

so bizarre.  New Yorker here.  Saying hi, how are you, etc before these kinds of commercial interactions is what’s rude to me - because ffs, there are people in line behind you, we have lives, move it along.  It’s really just a dramatic cultural difference - but borne of a real practical necessity.

Oh my god saying ‘hi’ takes less than A SINGLE SECOND YOU ARE NOT WASTING ANYBODY’S TIME In Spain you have to say hello to people before you talk to them even people who work in retail deserve that bare minimum courtesy hello??

Transplanted New Yorker here, and the feeling here is: people who work in retail deserve the bare minimum courtesy you would afford anyone else, which is to not waste their time.  You maybe say a half-second “hi” and/or possibly “excuse me” to be sure you have their attention, then you get to the point as quickly and concisely as possible.  You don’t wait to get a “hi” back, you probably don’t ask “how are you”, you definitely don’t talk about the weather.  You smile and keep your tone of voice courteous-to-friendly, you say please, you thank them when you’re done, and you do. not. waste. their. time.

Except ”time” is really only shorthand for the concept:  you don’t intrude on their lives more than you have to.  NY is a very very crowded city which allows for very little personal space, so New Yorkers have developed a form of courtesy that involves minimizing our unavoidable intrusions on each other.  Which is why we hold doors without making eye contact, and why we tend to feel that in any interaction with a stranger, it’s actively rude to do anything but get to the point immediately.

Interesting discussion of regional differences in conversational convention.  But the amount of “my way is the right way; everyone else is super rude and also wrong” going on in this post is giving me hives.  

Hey.  Listen.  "Polite” and “rude” are relative concepts.  Something you were taught was rude may not be seen as rude elsewhere, and might even be the polite thing to do.  Conversely, something you might have been taught was polite might be seen as rude elsewhere.  Saying “no one has any manners” about a group of people whose culture and, by extension, whose conversational expectations work differently than yours is really arrogant. 

In the US the thumbs up means good job or great. In France and Germany it means one, they start counting with the thumb instead of the index finger. In Greece it’s an obscene sexual gesture.

This guy I knew in college worked with the campus d/Deaf/HoH group and told a story about the dinner they had to welcome everyone in. They were trying to tell this little old lady what one of the dishes was, something casserole I forget what kind, and she was getting really flustered. Finally they figured out they were speaking to her in ASL and she was from South Africa. The ASL sign for whatever it was (spinach maybe?) in South African Sign means sex. They were offering this little old lady a sex casserole.

There’s an Italian toast ‘chin chin’, mimicking the sound of the glasses clinking together. It becomes hilarious when Japanese folks are around since in Japanese chin means penis.

As for the South, I will bet you anything that how we have conversations at the register stemmed from the homestead days when a farmer would come in to town maybe once a month and this would be the only time they’d get to talk to someone they didn’t live with. I like talking with customers! If I can get them to smile then it’s a victory and I have a better day for it. It only becomes emotional labor if they’re an outright ass or are sexually harassing me. But in the big crammed city of New York it makes sense to take the get your shit and get out approach, people have a subway to catch. Out here I had to drive myself anyway since it’s fifteen minutes to the edge of town from where I live, so what does it matter if I spend an extra minute at the register?

It’s important to be aware of the differences and ultimately there’s a degree of ‘when in Rome’ that has to happen. Someone who moves from Greece to the US is going to be startled by the amount of thumbs up but ultimately they’re going to have to adjust. Someone from the US is probably going to be shocked that telling someone they did a good job was taken as an insult and they similarly are going to have to adjust. Mom’s a damn Yankee transplant and said it was weird moving to the South and having cashiers younger than her daughter call her dear, but that’s just what we do. Sweetheart, darling, honey, sugar, they don’t have overtly romantic/sexual connotations here. As long as there’s not a leer attached to it if a guy calls me ‘sugar’ when I’m at work it doesn’t parse as a flirt because it’s not one, it parses the same as if he called me ‘miss’. But when a busload of Californians came through it took me three people to realize that ‘baby’ was not flirting, it was just California. NOTHING is universal.

This is the biggest place I’ve ever worked so it took some getting used to, like any skill, but even being socially awkward it’s easy to tell what scripts to follow. Test the waters, if they don’t respond then okay this is a move them through kind of person, be quick and efficient and to the point, feel good when they smile at ‘last question I promise, do you want your receipt’. If they do then pull out the five small talk scripts, get a smile, feel good when they laugh at the cat small talk script.

It’s also important to note that claiming your culture’s way of doing polite right is a fantastic way to fall into some really bigoted nonsense. In Puerto Rico the personal bubble is much smaller than in the US proper, like RIGHT at your elbow close. I had a cashier who was super uncomfortable because our steward was getting in her personal space constantly and he was pissed off because he was trying to HELP her with moving orders why is she mad at him? Once I sat them down and explained the difference they both had this aw shit moment because from their own standpoints they were being polite and from the others’ standpoints they were being rude. After that they were fine, when he got a little too close she’d say ‘whoa man my bubble’ and he’d laugh and shake is head and step back.

Lots of non-white cultures have things like that, particularly since white America has serious problems with sexualizing ANY physical contact to the point we’re all touch starved. The normal speaking voice is at a higher volume or it’s more acceptable to show your emotions or gesture when you speak. None of this is WRONG, but when people star getting into ‘my culture is the only right culture’ then guess who comes out on top? It ain’t the little guy.

One of my labmates was from Poland, and she had a tendency to come off as kind of abrupt and brusk, verging on mean. In particular, when she was providing feedback on a presentation or paper she could come across as SUPER cutting. Which was not her intention! From the way she would explain it, we had a running joke in the lab, “it sounds nicer in Polish.”

And this is actually true; there are scientific articles comparing the cultural contexts for communication! It’s really neat.

So in (most parts of) America, we equate indirectness with politeness. “Excuse me, would it be possible for you to perhaps pass me that salt, if you don’t mind?” The more roundabout you are, the more we consider that a signal of social courtesy.

In Poland, not only is indirectness viewed as rudely wasting the listener’s time, but directness is viewed as communicating intimacy and friendliness. “Give me the salt.”

…It sounds nicer in Polish. :)

Omg I love this

The Effects of Capital, Labor, and Class on Local Etiquette Across International Boundaries

I was talking to a man who’d grown up in Africa (I don’t remember where, apologies) and as a child was been playing with a friend and they’d gotten in trouble. They were both scolded on their doorsteps, and he clearly remembers his (white, English) mother saying “Look me in the eye when I’m talking to you!” just as his neighbour friend’s mum said “Don’t you dare look me in the eye while I’m talking to you!” to his friend. Cultural differences of polite/appropriate behaviour are fascinating and strange and require attention.