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my mom loves to lie and like she always swears she was NEVER homophobic or anything to me as a child “i even have a gay work friend” but a really funny memory resurfaced recently where i asked if i could use birthday money i had to buy a rainbow flag when i was like ??? 7?? because i LOVED rainbows. and she said no that means something Evil and god will hate you . so what did i do. but ask my grandmom for a rainbow sweater for christmas and proceed to only wear that sweater for three years when it got cold because i didnt like the idea that god hated colors and i wanted to challenge him
normal 7 year old with religious trauma: oh no god can hear my thoughts and punish me
me: either you are wrong about god or god is wrong and i will fight him and i will be the one to find out
me at 7: he would not fucking say that
yes she did she also took me in for 2 years so i could finish college and get a job when my mama kicked me out for transitioning during the pandemic my grandma has been an ally since day 1
Actually Captain Jack Harkness is SO important. During a time when we couldn't get a single queer on screen in most shows and even those few we did get ended up dead 90% of the time, he was not only openly bisexual, he was openly bisexual and LITERALLY unable to die.
They buried that gay and he still dug himself up and kept fucking
Excuse you, that man was omni-sexual
There’s a regular at the fabric superstore. She’s at least 80 years old, and she just got back into sewing after giving it up for 40 years. We’ll call her Irma.
I love Irma.
Irma is constantly surprised by the newfangled sewing gadgets our store sells. Today she bought some extra-fine glass-head pins and a magnetic pincushion. As I’m ringing her purchases up, she tells me very seriously, “did you know, if you’re careful, you can sew RIGHT OVER those pins? You don’t need to take them out!”
I told her that I liked that you can’t accidentally melt the head of the glass pins with your iron, and she nodded. “They used to all be like that, but times changed.”
I love old sewing machines and asked what kind of machine she has, and she goes, “Oh, it’s an old Singer Featherweight that my husband bought me when we were first married. It’s probably not worth anything anymore, but the thing sews fine. Have you seen the ones those girls over there–” indicating the sewing machine sub-store in my location “–have? Those things go in every direction and the needle always comes to the top when you stop sewing! Imagine how handy that is!”
I mention that I used to sew on my grandmother’s Featherweight but now there’s a intra-family war about who owns Grandma’s Featherweight and so no one gets to use it. It’s genuinely the best portable straight-stitch machine I’ve ever used.
I warn her to never let anyone tell her that Featherweight isn’t worth something. “I know, I miss my husband and it’s always going to have a place in my heart, just like your grandma’s.”
“I mean, Irma, there’s that, but they’re also worth a really notable amount of money. The Singer Featherweight is really financially valuable. I almost never see them for sale around here for less than about $400, and that’s in bad condition.”
“It’s a good thing my husband’s dead, honey, because if you told him that he managed to buy a sewing machine that’s worth more in 2021 than he bought it for in 1950, well, he’d be so smug that I just wouldn’t be able to tolerate driving home with him.”
please tell irma I love her
monstrous sapphic love, nothing else like it tbh
[Image description: an illustration of Imogen and Laudna from Critical Role. Imogen is unconscious from being torn up in battle, and Laudna towers over her protectively in her form of dread. Tree branches and flowers and fungi sprout from Laudna, and she's framed by other crooked, creepy trees in the background. She snarls ominously at the viewer, daring anyone to touch her girlfriend. End ID]
the problem with knowing things about battle tactics is that an ever-increasing subset of popular media becomes impossible to enjoy properly because you have to sit there like 'wow Captain Protagonist good to know all those dead people on your own side are a direct result of your total lack of anything resembling brains'
seriously i'm not talking about anything elaborate, just basic common sense, but common sense is so much harder to ignore once you've got systematized data to back it up, like
what do they even think a fortification is for???
what do you think a shield is for. what do you think ranged weapons are for????
make the other sonuvabitch have a hard time killing you without getting killed first! most basic goal of combat! why are movies so bad at writing characters who actually attempt this on even a very small 'army' scale?
and like i said in the first post, it's not just that it's Dumb, the thing is that once you put the character in a command role, their ability to think their way through a combat situation with some degree of optimization becomes a reflection on their character on like. a moral level.
if your tactics are dumb and reckless but you usually win and it's just you punching people that's one thing. or even if it's you and five guys who've decided they like how you roll!
but if you are put in charge of soldiers. and you throw their lives away because you don't know what you're doing. that's not okay.
it's not always avoidable! one of the basic problems with armies! but when it happens in fiction it needs to be on purpose, to make sure the military elements of the narrative remain thematically congruent.
when you have a bit where Main Character is in command and then makes avoidable bad decisions and people die who didn't have to. either the protagonist has been put in a horrific position by whatever authority figure thrust them into a role they didn't want and weren't competent to handle, without support.
or the protagonist, voluntarily assuming a management job they suck at, has committed a grievous harm against others by not recognizing their own limitations.
even if they win! i don't want to be watching a movie where the main character squanders every tactical advantage and loses 40% of their forces totally unnecessarily for Narrative Tension, but the enemy retreats or gets eaten by a dragon or loses the MacGuffin or whatever, and then there's triumphant music and a party because They Won!!!
no! they fucked it up is what they did! this is some Light Brigade gaslighting shit! shut up. our boy just massacred people who trusted him.
This is reminding me of the extremely weird experience I had watching, of all things, The Kid Who Would Be King a couple months ago, because it was one of very few fantasy movies I’ve seen recently wherein actual tactical thinking is evidenced.
And like, granted, it wasn’t especially brilliant tactics, but it was weird as hell to be watching a bunch of middle schoolers fighting hell zombies display a better understanding of concepts like fortifications and ambushes and traps and bottlenecking an invading force than most purported “good leaders” in fantasy with far more adult target audiences
Learning this was an intentional genocide changed me.
I know most of those following me know this, but just to make it super clear. An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger/the Great Famine) was a deliberate genocide of the Irish people. There was enough food grown in Ireland to make sure everyone was alive and healthy and survived. Instead it was exported, sent to England and elsewhere for profit while men, women, and children starved in the streets. While the English landlords fucked off and evicted starving families who couldn’t afford rent. While babies were too weak to cry and died at the side of the road.
They tried to kill us, but they did not succeed. And we owe so much thanks to the other oppressed peoples, in particular the Choctaw Nation and the Masai, who sent money and grain to us.
Let me repeat that. The Choctaw Nation who had just gone through the Trail of Tears sent us money to try save Irish lives. It’s led to an understanding between Irish people and Native American tribes, most recently when we donated to the Navajo and Hopi fundraisers for COVID-19 relief, because while it may be a different tribe, Irish people will never forget those who helped us and we’ll help back.
The entire population of the island is less than seven million people. We’re still a million less on this island than pre famine. And it’s not that long ago. My grandmother’s grandparents lived through it. We’ve told the stories, it literally changed the DNA of the country. We have a national fear of renting, because so many people were evicted. People joke about Irish people always offering loads of food, but it’s because there’s that cultural memory of not being able to.
They tried to kill us, but they did not succeed. We will not let them take our lives, we will not let them take our language. We lost so much, but we will not lose it all.
This is why I get so angry when people say “it was the potato famine, it was because of monoculture/microbes.”
Nope. The potatoes were the only thing Irish people were allowed to fucking eat, because as pointed out, the rest of the crops they were growing were for their landlords to ship to England. So when the one “worthless” crop they were allowed to eat rotted in the field, the English crown, empire, landlords, all shrugged and carried on. People starved to death lying next to productive fields.
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