Cropped image of medieval-stylized printed text, focused on a line which reads: “This wenche thikke”
/end image description]
Thank you for adding this image description! Just wanted to clarify that it’s not stylised, but actual Middle English. The text is from The Canterbury Tales.
Okay, had to track it down. It’s from the Reeve’s Tale, and it’s a description of a 20yo young woman:
This wenche thikke and wel y-growen was, With camuse nose and yën greye as glas; With buttokes brode and brestes rounde and hye, But right fair was hir heer, I wol nat lye.
In modern English (had to look up “camuse”, so that’s as good as my source, but I know the rest)
This wench was thick and well-grown With a pug nose and eyes grey as glass; With buttocks broad and breasts round and high, But right fair was her hair, I will not lie.
The fact that Chaucer had “big butt” and “I will not lie” within two lines of each other is causing me disproportionate amusement. Also the fact that “this wenche thikke” works equally well in Middle English and in modern slang.
disney: we’re taking all of our movies off of streaming services and we’re going to charge you $10 a month to watch them on our own streaming app
me:
More like
Disney: “We’re going to take all our movies off of streaming sites INCLUDING THE ONE WE ALREADY OWN (Hulu) so we can put them on a separate one and milk even more money out of you.”
If you were to resort to piracy over being exhausted over the various streaming services recreating the nickling and diming of the cable television industry (and I’m not saying you should - just… if you happen to find yourself there), a full VPN is not required.
You can have your torrent activity go through a proxy (while the rest of your traffic isn’t shuttled through there) using services like BTGuard. All the torrent activity is run through the proxy:
If your ISP has bandwidth caps, you’ll still run into those. But they won’t know what you’re transferring.
Just… information out there that you might find useful, in the age of ten-thousand different streaming services that all want you to keep adding more paid subscriptions.
look…………….. write as much shitty fic as you want. nobody can stop you. you’re learning constantly and it’s better to write hackneyed implausible ridiculousness than it is to not write at all out of fear of fucking up. you’re good
There was an experiment a professor did. I think it was pottery students. He did an experiment of “quality” vs “quantity”. One half of the class he told; you have to make as many pots as possible. Good pots, bad pots, shitty pots, whatever. The more pots you make, the higher your grade.
The other half of the class were told, “you can make only one pot”. But that pot had to be perfect. The quality had to be high; the highest quality pot would get the best mark.
But when it came to the grading, they noticed something weird.
All the best quality pots were in the ‘quantity’ group.
The guys who were literally churning out pots, trying to make as many as possible, not concentrating on the quality. But every pot they made, made them better at making pots. By the end of the month (I think it was a month) - they had some pretty awesome pots coming out, because they enjoying finding all the ways and all the things they could do to make all their pots. Where as the ‘quality’ guys had spent their time reading up on pots, and technique, and researching and planning; which was all great but they’d had no further practice at actually making pots.
The best way to get really good at something, the only way to be really good at something, is to make lots of shitty attempts at that thing several of which will fail. If all you create are perfect things then you won’t improve, because how can you improve on perfect?
oooh have you ever done a post about the ridiculous mandatory twist endings in old sci-fi and horror comics? Like when the guy at the end would be like "I saved the Earth from Martians because I am in fact a Vensuvian who has sworn to protect our sister planet!" with no build up whatsoever.
Yeah, that is a good question - why do some scifi twist endings fail?
As a teenager obsessed with Rod Serling and the Twilight Zone, I bought every single one of Rod Serling’s guides to writing. I wanted to know what he knew.
The reason that Rod Serling’s twist endings work is because they “answer the question” that the story raised in the first place. They are connected to the very clear reason to even tell the story at all. Rod’s story structures were all about starting off with a question, the way he did in his script for Planet of the Apes (yes, Rod Serling wrote the script for Planet of the Apes, which makes sense, since it feels like a Twilight Zone episode): “is mankind inherently violent and self-destructive?” The plot of Planet of the Apes argues the point back and forth, and finally, we get an answer to the question: the Planet of the Apes was earth, after we destroyed ourselves. The reason the ending has “oomph” is because it answers the question that the story asked.
According to Rod Serling, every story has three parts: proposal, argument, and conclusion. Proposal is where you express the idea the story will go over, like, “are humans violent and self destructive?” Argument is where the characters go back and forth on this, and conclusion is where you answer the question the story raised in a definitive and clear fashion.
The reason that a lot of twist endings like those of M. Night Shyamalan’s and a lot of the 1950s horror comics fail is that they’re just a thing that happens instead of being connected to the theme of the story.
One of the most effective and memorable “final panels” in old scifi comics is EC Comics’ “Judgment Day,” where an astronaut from an enlightened earth visits a backward planet divided between orange and blue robots, where one group has more rights than the other. The point of the story is “is prejudice permanent, and will things ever get better?” And in the final panel, the astronaut from earth takes his helmet off and reveals he is a black man, answering the question the story raised.
IIRC “Judgment Day” was part of the inspiration for the excellent Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Far Beyond the Stars.”
for people who can’t watch the video: THE AMYGDALA CHANGES TRADITIONALLY FOUND IN MOTHERS SHOW UP IN ALL PRIMARY CAREGIVERS REGARDLESS OF SEX
Changes in this part of the brain were previously used to previously used to argue that women are the ideal primary caretakers of children in all cases. And apparently, it’s false. The reason they found these changes in women was that women were already the primary caretaker in almost all cases, not because there’s something inherent to women that makes them better parents.
this is big news for SAHF and single dads!
This is also big news for adoptive parents and queer couples! Many people try to argue that adoptive parents aren’t real parents because of biology and blah blah blah. Bigots will also argue this case against queer people. So, to all my traditionalists: it’s not science! It’s bigotry and sexist!
What we should talk about: HRT access, queer self-defense, the failure of respectability politics, building up community resources
What we talk about: Is it valid to be bi? Is it valid to be pan? Is it valid to be queer? Is it valid to be kinky? Is it valid to be ace? Is it valid to be trans? Is it valid to be non-binary? Is it valid t
