Kurt Cobain Will Have His Revenge on the Straights

Behold, one tiny alien baby kitten.

Just an incredibly disproportionate creechur

He skipped leg day

Ohhhhh nooooooooo

My heart....

*sobs incoherently*

Eep

Accidentally woke him from his nap and he is Displeased...

Last pre-feeding weight was 128 grams, up 25 from when I got him just 2 days ago. Doing pretty well with having gained a full tenth of a pound (aka over half his initial body weight) since the day he was brought to the shelter.

Good morning Rutabaga Comblebutts! You're looking more like a normal ki-

Oh! Nevermind. You still very much look like an alien.

He spent the whole day just staring at everyone in spay/neuter

Oh! Oh! It finally happened!

Milk-drunk Rutabaga!!!

And a bonus picture where he looks like a baby cat for once

Rutabaga likes to tuck himself under his bear stuffie.

Rutabaga looks like an actual kitten instead of an alien this morning!!!

And if you look closely, you can finally see the difference between pupil and iris. The eyes are un-voiding

... For a kitten that is at minimum 18 days old he sure does stand well.... he should also be erupting canine teeth soon but doesn't even have all his incisors in yet....

In reality I think this creechur is actually at least 4 weeks old. We'll probably need to test for congenital hypothyroidism once he's big enough to draw blood from.

derinthescarletpescatarian

Rutabaga still prefers to be swaddled for feeding so he gets turned into a little caterpillar every 3 or 4 hours

Cat rescuers and rehabbers are angels but always give cats the most unhinged possible names

#so cute omg #kittens #cats #long post

curiouslilbird reblogged

daughter-of-ophelia

ok but have you ever seen a parked blimp?

why is this so goddamn funny

they are absolutely not supposed to do this btw, this happened because of unexpected wind conditions. blimps are intended to be docked horizontally. It’s still quite a sight to see.

the metal tower is called a mooring mass. the tallest mooring mast ever designed was the Empire State Building spire, which was originally built to allow airships to dock.

(this was mostly a publicity stun that never actually, ahem, got off the ground)

countesspetofi

Dammit, the old future was so cool.

diabolicalfiend

@zagreus

zagreus

(deep breath of pedantic annoyance at special interest)

NONE OF THESE ARE BLIMPS.

“blimp” means a nonrigid airship without a metal frame, like this

much smaller and very different from rigid airships like the ones above, which have sturdy but lightweight metal frames supporting them

ANYWAY otherwise yeah this is basically true, if oversimplified

On August 25th, 1927, the USS Los Angeles did fall foul of extreme wind conditions while (improperly imo) secured at the tall mooring mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey* and was blown vertical, standing briefly on its nose and causing some very minor damage as tools and equipment fell forward through the ship. No one was hurt as far as I can remember.

And as far as I know, there were never any SERIOUS practical plans to use the empire state building as a mooring mast, nor was it ever used as such. the picture above is a primitive photocomposite, think 1930s photoshop. not just a publicity stunt but a straight-up fantasy in practical terms, it wouldn’t have worked well. at that altitude the Lakehurst incident being repeated would have been inevitable and probably a lot worse

*(which they replaced with a shorter, more secure one as a result of this incident because no it was very definitely not supposed to happen)

DON’T let airships do this!!! ITS NOT CUTE OR FUNNY

A VERTICALLY PARKED AIRSHIP IS IN EXTREME DISTRESS they only dock vertically when they are VERY STRESSED!! make sure to secure them PROPERLY to their mooring posts at appropriate altitudes, and give them plenty of water and hubristic design flaws. this has been a PSA thank you!!

the goodyear blimp is the Official Bird of the city of Redondo Beach

Blimps are… real?

#holy shit #blimps #technology #history #wtf #long post

so a fun consequence of this post is I have heard from multiple people who were under the impression that blimps are fictional

curiouslilbird reblogged

daughter-of-ophelia

Concerning Juliet’s age

I find a big stumbling block that comes with teaching Romeo and Juliet is explaining Juliet’s age. Juliet is 13 - more precisely, she’s just on the cusp of turning 14. Though it’s not stated explicitly, Romeo is implied to be a teenager just a few years older than her - perhaps 15 or 16. Most people dismiss Juliet’s age by saying “that was normal back then” or “that’s just how it was.” This is fundamentally untrue, and I will explain why.

In Elizabethan England, girls could legally marry at 12 (boys at 14) but only with their father’s permission. However, it was normal for girls to marry after 18 (more commonly in early to mid twenties) and for boys to marry after 21 (more commonly in mid to late twenties). But at 14, a girl could legally marry without papa’s consent. Of course, in doing so she ran the risk of being disowned and left destitute, which is why it was so critical for a young man to obtain the father’s goodwill and permission first. Therein lies the reason why we are repeatedly told that Juliet is about to turn 14 in under 2 weeks. This was a critical turning point in her life.

In modern terms, this would be the equivalent of the law in many countries which states children can marry at 16 with their parents’ permission, or at 18 to whomever they choose - but we see it as pretty weird if someone marries at 16. They’re still a kid, we think to ourselves - why would their parents agree to this?

This is exactly the attitude we should take when we look at Romeo and Juliet’s clandestine marriage. Today it would be like two 16 year olds marrying in secret. This is NOT normal and would NOT have been received without a raised eyebrow from the audience. Modern audiences AND Elizabethan audiences both look at this and think THEY. ARE. KIDS.

Critically, it is also not normal for fathers to force daughters into marriage at this time. Lord Capulet initially makes a point of telling Juliet’s suitor Paris that “my will to her consent is but a part.” He tells Paris he wants to wait a few years before he lets Juliet marry, and informs him to woo her in the meantime. Obtaining the lady’s consent was of CRITICAL importance. It’s why so many of Shakespeare’s plays have such dazzling, well-matched lovers in them, and why men who try to force daughters to marry against their will seldom prosper. You had to let the lady make her own choice. Why?

Put simply, for her health. It was considered a scientific fact that a woman’s health was largely, if not solely, dependant on her womb. Once she reached menarche in her teenage years, it was important to see her fitted with a compatible sexual partner. (For aristocratic girls, who were healthier and enjoyed better diets, menarche generally occurred in the early teens rather than the later teens, as was more normal at the time). The womb was thought to need heat, pleasure, and conception if the woman was to flourish. Catholics might consider virginity a fit state for women, but the reformed English church thought it was borderline unhealthy - sex and marriage was sometimes even prescribed as a medical treatment. A neglected wife or widow could become sick from lack of (pleasurable) sex. Marrying an unfit sexual partner or an older man threatened to put a girl’s health at risk. An unsatisfied woman, made ill by her womb as a result - was a threat to the family unit and the stability of society as a whole. A satisfying sex life with a good husband meant a womb that had the heat it needed to thrive, and by extension a happy and healthy woman.

In Shakespeare’s plays, sexual compatibility between lovers manifests on the stage in wordplay. In Much Ado About Nothing, sparks fly as Benedick and Beatrice quarrel and banter, in comparison to the silence that pervades the relationship between Hero and Claudio, which sours very quickly. Compare to R+J - Lord Capulet tells Paris to woo Juliet, but the two do not communicate. But when Romeo and Juliet meet, their first speech takes the form of a sonnet. They might be young and foolish, but they are in love. Their speech betrays it.

Juliet, on the cusp of 14, would have been recognised as a girl who had reached a legal and biological turning point. Her sexual awakening was upon her, though she cares very little about marriage until she meets the man she loves. They talk, and he wins her wholehearted, unambiguous and enthusiastic consent - all excellent grounds for a relationship, if only she weren’t so young.

When Tybalt dies and Romeo is banished, Lord Capulet undergoes a monstrous change from doting father to tyrannical patriarch. Juilet’s consent has to take a back seat to the issue of securing the Capulet house. He needs to win back the prince’s favour and stabilise his family after the murder of his nephew. Juliet’s marriage to Paris is the best way to make that happen. Fathers didn’t ordinarily throw their daughters around the room to make them marry. Among the nobility, it was sometimes a sad fact that girls were simply expected to agree with their fathers’ choices. They might be coerced with threats of being disowned. But for the VAST majority of people in England - basically everyone non-aristocratic - the idea of forcing a daughter that young to marry would have been received with disgust. And even among the nobility it was only used as a last resort, when the welfare of the family was at stake. Note that aristocratic boys were often in the same position, and would also be coerced into advantageous marriages for the good of the family.

tl;dr:

Q. Was it normal for girls to marry at 13?

A. Hell no!

Q. Was it legal for girls to marry at 13?

A. Not without dad’s consent - Friar Lawrence performs this dodgy ceremony only because he believes it might bring peace between the houses.

Q. Was it normal for fathers to force girls into marriage?

A. Not at this time in England. In noble families, daughters were expected to conform to their parents wishes, but a girl’s consent was encouraged, and the importance of compatibility was recognised.

Q. How should we explain Juliet’s age in modern terms?

A. A modern Juliet would be a 17 year old girl who’s close to turning 18. We all agree that girls should marry whomever they love, but not at 17, right? We’d say she’s still a kid and needs to wait a bit before rushing into this marriage. We acknowledge that she’d be experiencing her sexual awakening, but marrying at this age is odd - she’s still a child and legally neither her nor Romeo should be marrying without parental permission.

Q. Would Elizabethans have seen Juliet as a child?

A. YES. The force of this tragedy comes from the youth of the lovers. The Montagues and Capulets have created such a hateful, violent and dangerous world for their kids to grow up in that the pangs of teenage passion are enough to destroy the future of their houses. Something as simple as two kids falling in love is enough to lead to tragedy. That is the crux of the story and it should not be glossed over - Shakespeare made Juliet 13 going on 14 for a reason.

catintheoffice

Romeo and Juliet is the Elizabethan equivalent of ‘won’t someone please think of the children’ it’s a romantic tragedy not a romance romantic in that it’s a love story but not a romance in the sense that it is supposed to be emulated and is likely a social commentary of something happening at the time whether it was ongoing religious feuds which did tear families apart uprisings across the country or just general malaise with how the world was going in the 1590s it’s also worth noting that R+J was based heavily on a poem writen some 30ish years prior by Arthur Brooke known as The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet which in turn was based on the work of Matteo Bandello who supposedly based most of his work on real life events making his association to Lucrezia Gonzaga an Italian noblewoman who was married off at the age of 14 likely to solidify some sort of alliance during turbulent times all the more poignant Shakespeare was and never has been the reserve of the intellectual and elite that we are taught his work without historical context robs us of the true value of his work social commentary and this social commentary would like to have a few words with your false ideas of ‘historical accuracy’ (via @thebibliosphere)

I saw this in my emails and couldn’t see why I’d been tagged in it (all the while nodding vehemently along) and then I saw my tags and ah. Yep. Still forever mad at how badly Shakespeare is taught in most schools.

Wait but then why does Juliet’s mother talk about being already married younger than Juliet currently is?

Likely because her match to Juliet’s father was an arranged match to solidify family names and houses in order to avoid conflicts or to establish wealth. (It also serves to denote the tragic undercurrent of the play ie love is secondary to wealth and power.)

It wasn’t so uncommon for children of royalty or nobility to be betrothed from birth, or even symbolically married, in order to make alliances. But that doesn’t mean they were engaging in the kind of adult relationship we envision when we think of marriage today.

Which isn’t to say some people didn’t buck the norm and do horrible things Margaret Beaufort is a prime example of this, which the Tudors would likely be aware of. Her first marriage contract actually happened when she was one year old. It was later dissolved and she was remarried at the age of 12, and her second husband, Edmund Tudor, did in fact get her pregnant before dying himself. She was 13 years old when she gave birth, and it caused major health issues for her and nearly killed her. When she survived it was considered miraculous. Which should tell you just how not normal this kind of thing was thought of even back then.

rillensora

I agree with absolutely everything in this thread of discussion. Even so, my long-standing fascination with both Shakespeare and late medieval / early renaissance history makes it impossible for me to to reblog without throwing in my extra few cents:

I. Margaret Beaufort

In my mind, there are few cases that better demonstrate the tensions between medieval norms and medieval realities than that of Margaret Beaufort. Like many other women of her time, she had only one child surviving to adulthood: Henry Tudor (later Henry VII and the founder of the Tudor dynasty). In that, Margaret wasn’t so remarkable: infant mortality made this a common enough outcome, though undoubtedly a tragic one.

Where Margaret’s case was exceptional is that Henry was also her only known pregnancy, without so much as a stillbirth, infant death, or even another pregnancy ever being mentioned in connection to her. In her own time, it was commonly assumed that her experience of childbirth at a very young age was what accounted for her barrenness, and even to us today, it doesn’t seem implausible to assume some kind of physical trauma that prevented later pregnancies from taking place, given all the medical knowledge we’ve accumulated about the risks of childbirth at either extreme of age.

But there was more to this. The vast Beaufort estate that came with Margaret’s young hand were so valuable that, to 15th/16th century English minds, it perfectly explained Edmund Tudor’s motives for having been so reckless with the health of his wife: having an heir of his own would ensure that her lands would stay with him, in the name of any children they might have together, whereas the lands would pass to someone else if she should die before having a child. Of course, most men in that situation would have waited anyway, as a child whose mother died in childbirth was much less likely to survive anyway, so contemporaries portrayed Edmund Tudor’s actions as short-sighted and foolhardy at best, amoral and cruel and worst. But Fate must have a sense of irony, because Edmund died before his son was even born, while Margaret lived, and as aristocratic women tended to do in those circumstances, she was remarried to Henry Stafford, 1st Duke of Buckingham.

Since Margaret was Stafford’s first (and only) wife, he would have depended on her to give him any heirs at all, to whom he could pass on the lands he already had, let alone any of Margaret’s own (and it would be logical to assume that the Beaufort inheritance would have been no less tempting to Stafford than it was to Tudor). He must have at least hoped for children from her, and at the time, there wasn’t any reason to expect she was totally barren either: there was the traumatic birth to consider, but she was more physically mature when she remarried, and there was room to hope that widowhood had given her time to recover. And yet, despite all this, it seems few people (if any) were surprised that Margaret did not bear any more children. It didn’t seem to doom her relationship with her second husband either: on the contrary, Margaret enjoyed a happy relationship with Stafford for well over a decade until his death, so if there was any bitterness on his part over his lack of heirs, he must have managed it well. Even in the contemporary sources (who don’t tend to be charitable towards female figures), any blame for her barrenness is laid squarely at the feet of the various men who were her guardians in her early life, who clearly abused their authority over her for their own benefit, rather than to safeguard Margaret’s well-being as guardians are supposed to do (one of them being Edmund Tudor himself… he wasn’t supposed to even be in the running for her wardship, but Henry VI actually outright broke a promise he had made to Margaret’s father to let Margaret’s mother be her guardian in the event of his death).

This indicates to me even more strongly that late-medieval / Tudor people would have not only been sympathetic towards what Margaret and women like her had suffered, but also understood that neglectful attitudes towards the health and happiness of dependents have consequences. Shakespeare’s own words make this clear, at the beginning of the play:

Paris: Younger than she are happy mothers made. Capulet: And too soon marr’d are those so early made.

Tudor audiences would have understood these lines as the words of a benevolent father protecting his daughter from the advances of an overeager young suitor, invoking what seems to have been a Tudor-era trope that early marriages do not make for happy endings… not for the woman, not for her family or husband, and certainly not for the children she might otherwise have borne. Because Capulet came off as the “good father” in the beginning of the play, it makes it all the more shocking when his attitude changes and he becomes the all-too-familiar figure of the cold, uncaring patriarch who regards his children only as pawns*. I imagine the juxtaposition would have invited Tudor audiences to feel Juliet’s sense of betrayal as if it were happening to them.

* Jane Grey, the famed “nine days’ queen” was also rumored to be such a victim of her parents’ ambition: they also saw fit to force her into a marriage that she seriously objected to, and historical records point a fairly consistent picture of their callous disregard towards her wishes and genuine happiness.

II. Consent in Medieval Marriages

Twelve and fourteen are actually also important numbers in their own right, and Shakespeare’s choice to place Juliet between those two ages has an important symbolic meaning. Late medieval Catholic doctrine defined marriage as a sacrament, like the Eucharist (Communion), or Holy Orders. Many of the sacraments require those who receive them to understand what they’re getting into for the sacrament to have the desired effect. To guarantee understanding (at least from a theological perspective), you would have to be above “the age of reason”, the age at which you were considered to be able to think for yourself. Conservative definitions of the “age of reason” sometimes defined it as the age of fifteen or fourteen (or older), but was later fixed at twelve. Since marriage was one of these sacraments, a marriage where both spouses had not fully and knowingly given their consent was no marriage at all.* Therefore, twelve was considered the absolute lower age limit at which a person could marry without compromising the very spiritual foundation of the marriage itself, while fourteen was considered a safer age at which to assume the person had full control of their reasoning capacities.

The other side of the “consent” coin when it came to marriage was that consent wasn’t just a necessary condition to finalize a marriage, it was also sufficient condition. If a man and a woman had given their knowing consent to marry one another, and if they had intentionally verbalized this promise to one another and consummated their marriage, then no earthly power could invalidate this pact for any reason (outside of a few very specific ones, like incest) without risking damnation. Witnesses were convenient as a way to prove that the marriage had taken place, if a family member or some segment of society disapproved of the match, but they weren’t needed in order to make the marriage spiritually valid. Basically, the Catholic Church at this stage somehow ended up putting the idea of consent at the very heart of the idea of what made a marriage valid or not, and this had consequences not only because of the threat of hellfire, but also because Church law was secular law when it came to domestic matters like marriage and divorce. And then it came to pass that the English Reformation left this specific area of the doctrine mostly untouched, so the Tudors would have had similar ideas surrounding the question of consent and marriage as did their late medieval forbears.

This theological point is not only the whole raison d’etre for the most central plot device in the play, but also adds an extra note of pathos to Juliet’s situation and an extra layer of moral judgment towards Lord Capulet’s behavior. If she did not insist on keeping her marriage vow, or if she married Paris knowing full well that she had already been married, both of those would be mortal sins for which she would risk damnation. And by extension, because he used duress against Juliet to try to make her comply with his sinful wish, Lord Capulet has also damned himself (albeit unknowingly, but even so, the narrative clearly presents forcing his daughter’s marriage as something he should know better than to do, anyway).

Until this point, Juliet’s marriage is characterized as an impulsive decision such as only foolish youth could make, but ironically, in that confrontation with Lord Capulet, this slip of a young girl is now portrayed as conducting herself with far more spiritual maturity and grace than any of the adults around her. Her parents are failing in their duty towards her by putting their dynastic concerns ahead of her health and happiness (when it’s been made clear they already know this is a Bad Idea), and her Nurse, who actually knows about the secret marriage and all the reasons why it cannot be taken back, is actively pleading with her to just forget it and pretend Romeo never was. Juliet’s choice here is monumental, because it involves not only disregarding her parents, but also an active decision to completely break with the woman who has been with her for literally everything in her life up to that point, a break so thorough that even Nurse herself doesn’t know that it’s happened. This dramatic turning point is a bittersweet portrait of the girl losing her innocence and growing up into an adult, from one angle, and from another angle it’s a paean to the pure-hearted idealism (different from the limpid innocence of childhood in that it’s willful and risk-taking, and fiery in quality) that can only be found in the young. Either way, it does Juliet’s character AND Shakespeare’s dramatic talents a massive disservice to portray her situation as something so simplistic or reactionary as lovelorn pining after an absent boyfriend, or rebelling against her parents, or “staying true to her own heart”.

This wasn’t just a plot device for the stage: many real-life lovers leaned on this feature of the Church’s teachings, when faced with the opposition of their families and communities, and in many cases, the Church was indeed forced to side with the couple, however reluctantly. Margery Paston, the daughter of a genteel landowning family in the 15th century, and Richard Calle, the Paston family’s longtime housekeeper, were one such case of a real-life Romeo and Juliet: they mutually fell in love, and married in secret when they came up against heavy opposition from Margery’s family. The Pastons responded by separating them, firing Calle from his job and having him sent to London, while Margery remained in Norfolk under house arrest. There, she seems to have been subjected to ongoing and intense pressure to walk back her marriage… if the couple had been married formally in church, this would not have been possible, but secret marriages were vulnerable to challenges like this because they were secret. A witness would have helped her and Calle’s case and made it more airtight, but even if the couple had had any, apparently the Pastons had succeeded in intimidating them into silence.

But even though the Pastons seemed to be winning, it’s hard to believe that bystanders wouldn’t have objected to at least some of what the Pastons were doing to try and get their way. Otherwise, Calle could not have written Margery in 1469, during their separation, saying “I suppose if you tell them sadly the truth, they will not damn their souls for us”. Their situation was objectively quite bleak. For the months they were apart, it was made very clear to both Margery and Calle that, if the couple continued to insist on their marriage, the Pastons would disown Margery and throw her out of the house, therefore leaving her with few options for survival, let alone to find her way to Calle over a distance of a hundred miles. He mournfully acknowledges that their gamble might fail, and their worst fears might come true, but there is also defiance in his resignation, as he concludes, “if they will in no wise agree [to respect our marriage], between God, the Devil and them be it.”

Margery, for her part, was no less determined. When Margery was finally brought before the local bishop, he turned out to be sympathetic towards the Paston family, and gave Margery a long speech about the importance of pleasing her family and community (so much for the theological importance of consent, but then, clerical hypocrisy was nothing new to medieval people). But Margery remained steadfast (in fact, I am inclined to think from her next words that the bishop’s words only goaded her to greater resolve) and when she spoke, she not only continued to insist that she had said what she had said, but according to her mother she “boldly” added, “if those words made it not sure […] she would make it surer before she went thence, for she said she thought in her conscience she was bound [in marriage to Calle], whatsoever the words were.” Her wording left absolutely no room for doubt in the mind of even the most flexible theologian. And when Calle was cross-examined and his testimony found to match that of Margery’s, the bishop of Norfolk had no choice but to rule in the couple’s favor.

Margery’s mother did indeed make good on her word: she did both disown Margery and throw her out of the house. She seemed to have done it more to save face, however, than to actually punish her daughter, since she does seem to have made arrangements behind the scenes for Margery to stay with sympathetic neighbors. In the end, Calle was right, the Pastons were not willing to risk their own souls. Margery and Richard Calle got their happy ending, and had at least three children (and we know about them because we know Margery’s mother left them money in her own will).

* This also meant that Edmund Tudor actually would have been Margaret Beaufort’s first husband, not her second. It was true that she had already been “in a marriage” before being married later to Tudor, but strictly speaking, it was only a precontract (what we today would think of as an engagement) with signficance limited to the secular realm; there are a lot of reasons this would not have really been considered a marriage at the time, but the most theologically pertinent one is that the bride’s consent could not have been involved, because she was too young to be able to give it. Consequently, this paper marriage was easily dissolved as soon as her guardians thought it more politically expedient to marry her to Edmund Tudor. And for all intents and purposes, Margaret Beaufort herself considered Tudor to be her first husband, not John de la Pole.

tl;dr: the study of Shakespeare cannot be separated from historical and societal understanding of the times he lived in, and frankly, it’s a terrible shame that English classes don’t emphasize this more, because then you’re throwing out about 80% of the meaning his works actually hold.

Sorry to keep reblogging this long post but holy shit this is an excellent addition. Thank you for taking the time to write all that up.

ollieofthebeholder

I will forever be grateful to my eleventh-grade English teacher, Mrs. Shaw, who taught us that when analyzing literature it is not only wise but absolutely essential to consider not only the author’s other works, but also the historical context in which it was written.

I was today years old when I learned that I was taught Romeo and Juliet wrong even AFTER being in the play.

@thebibliosphere do you know if it’s common for people to know the age of Juliet solidly and then think that the reason everything was dodgy was because Romeo was like 17/18 years old? Cause like…

Anyone I asked about Romeo’s age said “he’s like. An adult. A young one but an adult.” So for all my life I assumed Romeo was 18 going on 19 or 17 going on 18 while Juliet was just hardly a teenager.

#omg #long post #romeo and juliet #shakespeare #history #england #europe

Oh man, this is an old, old post.

Full disclaimer: I’m obviously no expert–just a former Shakespearian theater kid with a love of history–but no, Romeo is not eighteen, and nor was he considered an adult.

That’s a very modern perspective, and I suspect it comes from people latching onto the idea that if Juliet was considered legally old enough to be married at fourteen, then Romeo’s slight advantage in years must mean he was considered an adult when this is not at all how a Tudor audience would have viewed it.

Also, I don’t know where the idea that Romeo is eighteen/fully an adult came from, because Romeo’s age is unspecified in the original text, though the consensus is that he’s between the ages of fifteen at a minimum and seventeen at most. Neither an adult by our terms nor by Tudor ones.

As noted above, the minimum legal age for marriage in the Tudor era was twelve years old for noble girls, but what we did not mention was the legal age for boys, which was fourteen. So if we take the stance that Romeo is intended to be fifteen to sixteen, possibly hovering on the verge of seventeen, in the context of the times, he’s still considered barely old enough to marry, same as Juliet. He still needs the permission of his parents to marry because he is not considered legally old enough to make this decision himself.

His behavior isn’t that of a predatory adult pursuing a child (we’ll get to that) but that of a young man in the midst of his teens pursuing someone in both a suitable age range and social class for his standing. And from a thematic standpoint: the age and social class where your family might orchestrate a match to solidify alliances or to end a blood war if only they had their shit together.

This becomes very clear when you take into consideration the added context that most commoners didn’t marry until their mid-to-late-twenties when they’d had a chance to become financially established and also become both physically mature and strong enough to survive childbirth. There were, of course, always exceptions to this rule, but we’re speaking in generalities here. Only the rich married their kids off young, and most of the time there would have been clauses in place to prevent the girl from getting pregnant too young and dying in childbirth.

Basically, the entire Tudor audience, both noble and common, would have been watching this tragedy unfold on stage, clutching their pearls and going “Oh god they’re babies. Where are the parents?!”

To which the answer is “embroiled in a blood feud and not paying attention to the things that are happening under their nose until it’s too late.”

Paris, on the other hand, the suitor Juliet’s father wants to pair her with, and let’s be clear here, the man making it very clear he’s interested in her sexually, is twenty-five.

That line up above about “happy mother’s made”? That’s Paris, a twenty-five-year-old man looking at a fourteen-year-old girl and announcing that he not only wants to bed her but considers it fine for girls even younger than fourteen to become mothers. The man is a one-man parade of red flags, and that’s also what makes Juliet’s father switch so villainous. He’d rather marry his child off to a full-grown man who doesn’t care for her safety in the marital bed than resolve the feud with the Montagues, and the Tudor audience would have been deeply uncomfortable with this narrative, same as us.

So no, Romeo and Juliet isn’t a mess because Romeo was an adult. Romeo and Juliet is a mess because both Romeo and Juliet are functionally children trying to act like adults because no one else is. Not their parents, not the priest. And that’s the root of the tragedy.

It’s not a moral about problematic age gaps–though that is highlighted through Paris–it’s a moral about allowing vengeance to cloud your judgment and letting the children, the innocents who don’t know any better, try to behave like adults because you’ve left a void and would rather seek death than a peaceful resolution.

And I (still) really wish it was taught better in schools.

curiouslilbird reblogged

daughter-of-ophelia

For real your cellphone and your computer should 100% NOT be backing up your photo storage or anything else to any variety of icloud or onedrive.

I'm aware that in some ways I'm a weird luddite but this is one of the major, major problems that I have with so much of the modern technology landscape existing as tools that allow you to access your data rather than tools which allow you to store your data.

Look at the data that you have. Look at what you are storing. Ask yourself "if the internet stopped working tomorrow, would I be able to access this information?"

If the answer is "no" you have 2 problems:

1 - You don't actually have that information and can easily lose access to it.

2 - You may not know who DOES have access to that information. If it's encrypted storage you're probably somewhat secure, but IS it encrypted storage? Or is it stored in plaintext on someone else's server?

So my deal with the EARN IT Act is that I don't super duper trust any of our government systems to do fuck all. I think it's worthwhile to contact your representatives, but I don't know that it will actually DO anything.

However YOU can do something.

If you don't want your data accessible to companies that will scan it and test it and pass it on to the government, don't give those companies your data.

Store things locally. Learn how to send and share encrypted files. If you have to store things online, store them with encryption that *you* have set up.

Honestly I'm pretty sure this is going to be bad. I'm pretty sure there are going to be significant security compromises as a result of the EARN IT Act and that we're going to get so buried in breached data that it's going to fundamentally alter how we have to identify ourselves in ways that will be more difficult to use while making people easier to track.

It's shit, and I hate it, and the internet is getting smaller and more fenced in and the big fun platforms that were easy to use and that let people of all technical skill levels share and collaborate that we had a couple decades to explore are now things that will just be a means of exploitation.

It fuckin' blows, friends.

But it also means that NOW is the time to fundamentally re-think how you interact with the internet. Ask yourself how you send data, and where you keep it. Ask yourself who has your information and how it is secured. Ask yourself what would happen if someone who hated you had access to your primary email account for a day, and ask yourself how you would try to fix what they fucked up.

EARN IT sucks, but this is NOT one of those instances in which you are helpless if it passes. Right now, before it passes, talk to the non-internet people in your life about why it is bad:

- It will mean that the government can see all your stored files - It will mean the websites you store files on will not be allowed to encrypt those files - It will mean that any asshole hacker who can access those systems can access all that data that will now be unencrypted.

This shitty act will make EVERYONE who uses the websites that are subject to the EARN IT act more vulnerable to data breaches, ID theft, and exploitation from hackers while ALSO enabling effortless surveillance by our own government.

This is bad, so tell your relatives and friends and co-workers to tell their representatives WHY it is bad by using this site: https://act.eff.org/action/stop-the-earn-it-act-to-save-our-privacy

The site is very easy to use and literally you do not even have to navigate to a separate page to contact your representatives.

And in case that doesn't work, in case it passes anyway, ask yourself what you're doing. Ask yourself who has your data. Ask yourself who can see what you've stored online, and learn what you need to do to make sure the answer is "*I* own my data, and I control who has access to it."

Hey also: get used to a slow internet again.

It sucks trying to use a site like Tumblr or Twitter through a VPN or on TOR. It's slow and terrible because they are BIG sites moving a lot of data.

It's maybe time to start setting up email lists and forums for the people you want to be in touch with. Make sure that you don't only know your online friends through their social media profiles, but have other ways of contacting the people you care about.

If tumblr went down *today*, right now, who would you be able to find elsewhere on the internet and who would you lose forever? If discord got taken down tomorrow, is there somewhere else online that you'd be able to tell a friend who you are?

Pretend it's 1995, pretend you've got rudimentary internet access, because if EARN IT passes I think that's kind of what we're going to have to go back to - especially if you're engaged in any kind of activism or any activity that is frowned-upon by most of society.

No despairing on my posts, only radicalizing.

If you want to take action here are some things that you can do TODAY that will make you less vulnerable to these sorts of harms:

Create an account on Cryptpad.Fr - Cryptpad is an open-source, zero knowledge collaboration tool that is an excellent browser-based replacement for Gsuite. It doesn't have app support, but it is a really fantastic tool to work on shared documents in a secure way. You don't even have to have an account to access and work on a document. Free accounts come with 1GB of personal storage; this is actually a LOT of storage if you're keeping in good practice of storing your important files locally rather than online. It's also a great free, non-google, non-microsoft office suite that is more portable than Libre Office. If you do have the funds to support them as well as creating an account, please consider it.
Create a ProtonMail account. Protonmail is an end-to-end encrypted email service based in Switzerland that allows you to create free accounts with a limited amount of storage. Please note: while ProtonMail has zero-knowledge storage, they can be compelled to produce the user information that they have access to, including login and IP address data. If you need to make sure that no one knows you're logging in to protonmail you need to log in through an anonymizer like TOR.
Learn how to use TOR - which is very easy; it's pretty much like just using any other browser. Download it, install it, poke around a bit, and do some light-weight browsing. People think it's scary because it's something that hackers use and that governments yell about; it's not. It's also not ideal for day-to-day use, but it's good to already have it running when you need it instead of scrambling to use it in a panic if the EARN IT act passes.
Start using a password manager. If there is nothing else from this list that you do today, this is the one thing you should do. The other stuff can wait until later, but if the internet may soon be less secure as a result of EARN IT, the very least that you can do is secure your logins. Bitwarden is a free, portable, exceptionally functional Open Source password manager that has wonderful resources on its website that teach people at all skill levels how to effectively use the product. Please, Please, Please, PLEASE as the random ass hacker-type person in your life I am *BEGGING* you to use a password manager. And Bitwarden is free, but if you get the paid version for $10 a year you can get encrypted file storage and sending tools as a part of the package. Learning how to create and send encrypted files can be confusing and frightening for people who haven't done it before. It is VERY easy with Bitwarden and they have a lot of accessible info teaching you how to use that tool.

The time has come for us to all become badass security nerds, friends. These are the first little steps and the nice thing is that they are very easy steps that will take you a long way toward being more secure online.