coram deo

it is time to start italianmaxxing and stop denying who i truly am

are you just cooking pasta now

anyway I love things like having independence, being intelligent, taking pride in my skills, not feigning incompetence, referring to myself as a woman instead of a girl, aging unapologetically, having pores, stretch marks, grey hairs, wrinkles and body fat, listening to my body's needs, eating as much as I need to satisfy my hunger, being bare-faced, wearing comfortable clothes, etcetera

Yo I feel like the idea that the only historical women who counted are the ones who defied society and took on the traditionally male roles is… not actually that feminist. It IS important that women throughout history were warriors and strategists and politicians and businesswomen, but so many of us were “lowly” weavers and bakers and wives and mothers and I feel like dismissing THOSE roles dismisses so many of our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers and the shit they did to support our civilization with so little thanks or recognition.

YES. This is such an important point. Those ‘girly’ girls doing their embroidery and quilting bees and grass braiding were vital parts of every domestic economy that has ever existed.

This is precisely what chaps my hide so badly about the misuse of the quote “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” because this is precisely what the author was actually trying to say.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a domestic historian who developed new methodologies to study well-behaved women because they were

1) so vital, and

2) their lives were rarely recorded in the usual old sources.

“Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all. Most historians, considering the domestic by definition irrelevant, have simply assumed the pervasiveness of similar attitudes in the seventeenth century.”

Original article: “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735” (pdf download from Harvard)

If you didn’t know: Abagail Adams (John Adams’ wife) led a very successful effort to fund the American Revolution. How did she and her tiny army of women do it?

They made lace, and sold it to the aristocrats. Real lace (the stuff you see on old outfits in museums, not the machine-made stuff you might be familiar with from today) is stupidly difficult to make, takes a lot of time and skill, and, well:

If you watch this through, you’ll hear her say this is DOMESTIC lace. This is not fancy, this is for household objects. You can imagine what it would take to make some of the elaborate pieces you see on old aristocratic clothing, and see why it was so expensive and valuable. (Incidentally, if you’ve ever heard the music from the musical 1776, in the song where Abagail and John are trading letters and he’s like “ma’am we need saltpeter” and she’s like “dude we need pins,” THIS IS WHAT THEY NEEDED THE PINS FOR. That song was based on real letters between the two.)

And this is all those revolutionary Revolutionary women did, every free moment of every day. They pulled out their pins and their bobbins and they made lace until they couldn’t see straight, and they sold it to revolutionaries and royalists alike, anyone who would pay. Yard upon yard upon yard of lace to earn cash to translate into rations and bullets.

The war was won by a women’s craft. Not even a “vital” women’s craft like cooking or cleaning. It was won by making a luxury item whose entire purpose was to say “look how wealthy I am, I can afford all this lace.”

Lace was not the only source of income for the Revolution. But it was a major one, and it is extremely fair to say it turned the tide.

And until this post, I bet you didn’t know.

If you know Discworld, you know the observations about “ladies who organize”?

That’s not something Pterry made up. That is reality. Ladies Who Organize have been a major driving force of history - usually unremembered b/c everyone remembers the guy who was officially involved and not, eg, his wife who organized a massive letter writing campaign and seven soirées that funded Mr Historical’s entire enterprise.

Ladies Who Organize both started and ended Prohibition, as noted above funded American Independence, and were the ONLY people who got their shit together with regards to eg the 1918 Flu in a lot of cities (Philadelphia is a really great example).

Ladies Who Organize is just ONE area of history where that’s the case. It’s just they did things in mostly socially accepted ways and when they pushed the envelope they did it strategically and tactically, leveraging whatever else they had to offset that.

Now, we get to know about them because they were not only nearly universally literate but MASSIVELY WORKED VIA LETTERS so as we started actually paying attention we had sources. Imagine how many of these we’ve lost because the record ONLY contained the other stuff.

trying to explain that I don’t want Percy to rebel against the gods in an “edgy, I want him to be the villain” kind of way but in a “since the optimistic ending of the last olympian was ruined by hoo, and Percy was forced back into the fight and was distinctively portrayed as becoming jaded and resentful, you have to follow through with the repercussions and implications of doing so since the gods clearly have not changed, and that they ARE the bad guys that need to be taken down, and Percy wouldn’t break his promise to Luke nor stand idly by as demigods continue to suffer at the hands of the gods” kind of way

I fear that "fire bending didn't come easy to zuko" and "zuko isn't a prodigy" (both true) has somehow snowballed into "zuko is a bad or at best average fire bender".... which simply isn't true, especially by the end of book 3

Zuko may have started off as an average or poor fire bender as a child, but he also progresses with his bending substantially throughout the series and by book 3 he is a powerful and formidable bender. I'm surprised that this is even up for debate.

And I think this perception of Zuko being somehow forever stuck as an average bender comes from the fact that this dude has the absolute misfortunate of constantly battling it out with: the literal avatar, prodigies (katara and toph and azula), and the canonical best fire benders in the world (his father and azula again)... but none of that changes the fact that Zuko is extremely powerful. And its especially ironic that this perception of Zuko as a subpar firebender/bender seems to be so pervasive because by season 3, Zuko is beginning to beat the benders that people consistently seem to argue that Zuko could never measure up to. Like the first time Zuko ever redirects lightning is Ozai's lightning and he does so successfully!

and I do wish we had more time to see Zuko's bending prowess after the Firebending Masters episode because once Zuko is no longer relying on his anger and rage to fuel his fire bending, he is operating on a new level.

Like I know for some it's akin to sacrilege to even consider Zuko being on the same playing field as Azula, and to be clear, I am in no way claiming that he's more powerful than her, but I also don't think it's a coincidence that after his realization about fire bending, the last two battles he has with his sister end with a stalemate (he and Azula use the exact same move on the airship, and the resulting explosion actually knocks Azula back further) and then him winning the Agni Kai (which yes, I know who technically won the Agni Kai is heavily debated, but imo the entire battle was a subversion of their typical dynamic wherein Zuko was sure of himself while Azula wasn't, and once Azula realized that she wasn't going to beat him purely through raw bending, she resorted to targeting Katara).

Hhhate it when people on my side of an argument are making bad points. You’re literally right why are you being stupid about it

I love you three beverages at once

the reckless extravagance of placing library books on hold

2019 will always be 1 year ago

modern mythical creatures | faeries

A fairy (also fay, fae, fair folk; from faery, faerie, “realm of the fays”) is a type of mythical being orlegendary creature in European folklore, a form of spirit, often described as metaphysical, supernatural, or preternatural.

Fairies are generally described as human in appearance and having magical powers. Diminutive fairies of one kind or another have been recorded for centuries, but occur alongside the human-sized beings; these have been depicted as ranging in size from very tiny up to the size of a human child. 

Furthermore whoever removed the audio jack from phones should be grilled in front of congress. The fact that I need a dongle to listen to music on a modern telephone while 20 years ago I could have simply plugged a universally standardized cord into the audio jack everyone knew how to use is an anti-human move that should be punished.