The Lesbrary is Looking for More Lesbrarians!

Do you love reading queer women books? Feel like talking about them at least once a month? Want to be buried in an insurmountable pile of free bi & lesbian ebooks? Join the Lesbrary!

Once again, I am looking for more reviewers at the Lesbrary! You just have to commit to one review a month of any queer women book and in return you get forwarded all of the les/bi/etc ebooks sent to the Lesbrary for possible review. You also get access to the Lesbrary Edelweiss and Netgalley accounts, where you can request not-yet-released queer titles.

If you’re interested in joining the Lesbrary, send me an email at danikaellis at gmail with a sample of your writing. We’d love to have you on board!

(Any reblogs would also be appreciated!)

What people call “adulting” these days — chores, errands, personal finance, bureaucracy & taxes — is hard for a lot of people, and we’re all vaguely embarrassed about it. We feel like it should be trivial. We rely heavily on technology that makes it easier, and wonder how past generations managed.

For some things, I think it genuinely used to be easier. Back when corporate employment was more paternalistic, the company did a lot of the “adulting” for you. Planning a vacation? You didn’t have Travelocity, but the company did have a travel agent.

Notice how a lot of “adulting” has to be done during working hours? When you’re kind of stealing time from work to do it? How are you *supposed* to do it? I think the answer is “that’s your wife’s job.”

But isn’t this kind of hard for your wife too? Like, it’s hard to go to the bank if you’re dragging a couple of screaming kids, right?

First of all, this only works if the kids are in school most of the day. Second of all, it used to be a lot more normal to have *servants*. Third of all, you can squeeze more work out of people if they feel they *must*, and sexism is great at that.

The 20th century system was never set up to allow a person to work full time *and* do all the chores necessary for a decent life on his/her own. Weird “millennial” ways of filling in the gaps — roommates, software apps, cleaning/laundry services, company perks — are substitutes for old solutions like non-wage-employed family members, servants, government services, and company perks. Sometimes better solutions, sometimes worse, sometimes exactly the same thing under a different name. But the fact that “adulting” is time-consuming and sometimes difficult isn’t a result of some inherent moral turpitude in Millennials. Chores have *always* taken time.

Also the nuclear family has always, always been a lie. In human history no one! Has ever lived like that! Not our grandparents, even! It’s a lie perpetuated by the capitalist model to get you to pay more money and even most modern censuses are thwarted by the fact that people have people in their homes– grandmothers, cousins, family friends. It just makes more sense to live together instead of trying to do everything miserably alone

You are just as responsible for your fandom activism as creators are for their fanworks.

More so, in fact, because your primary purpose is telling people what to do or not do. Any instructive value in creative work is understood to be subordinate to entertainment and self-expression, but if you’re out there explicitly advocating for something, you’d damn well be ready to own it. Including all its implications and potential negative effects.

That means: If you’re urging people not to create some kind of fanwork because you think that’ll protect a vulnerable group, you’d better be ready to account for the members of that group who make it, enjoy it, and find solace in it.

That means: If you’re urging retaliation against creators, you are absofuckinglutely responsible for the harm that befalls them as a result, including harm to members of the group you’re trying to protect.

That means: If you’re holding everyone else to high standards about how they could affect someone with a trigger-able mental illness, you need to hold yourself to the same standards, including effects on people whose anxiety manifests as over-scrupulosity or intrusive thoughts.

That means: If you’re shaming erotica you find “gross,” you don’t get to blow off conversations about how that shame plays into conservative sexual-purity enforcement. You don’t get to wash your hands of the implications, whether or not that’s what you meant. Explicit activism has far more duty to consider indirect implications than anyone’s personal pursuit of sexual fulfillment does.

That means: If your activism has garnered you a huge follower count, you are responsible for the exposure you inflict on the people you pick fights with, and the dogpiles or hate mobs you incite. This can be a tough thing to learn if you get popular overnight, and even well-meaning people fumble with it at first, but it’s something you have to figure out. And don’t fucking give me that “it was just a block list, I didn’t mean for anyone to go into their askboxes on anon and tell them all to kill themselves” crap, the only people fooled by it are the ones looking for an excuse to be fooled.

That means: You are responsible for assessing the relative power and influence of the people you’re addressing, and not griefing marginalized subcultural small fry over artistic sins that are far more egregious among canon creators. Especially canon creators who are just as accessible on Twitter as fanwork creators are on Tumblr.

(Pre-emptive response to objections to the preceding paragraph: Only going after people you know you have social power over isn’t activism, it’s bullying with a thin veneer of activist lingo smeared over it. Only trying to clean up your immediate surroundings isn’t activism, it’s complaining to the local homeowners’ association–valid enough if someone’s running their chainsaw at 2am, but if you just can’t stand Betty’s problematic lawn flamingoes, dressing it up as concern for what tacky decorations say about the neighborhood is a little precious.)

If any of that is too burdensome for you, I suggest you take the advice fandom activists tend to have for fanartists and authors: if you can’t do it without doing damage and you’re not prepared to deal with the consequences, abstain. Restrict your activism to shit that’s not going to hurt people, even if that’s just being the best role model you can be.

You want to set yourself up as a moral authority? You want to dictate what people can and can’t create without activist blowback? That’s power–and yes, local power in a community can exist irrespective of society-wide systemic advantage. With power comes responsibility. Use it wisely or not, as you choose, but don’t act like you get to hold anyone accountable for their art’s indirect potential to harm if you don’t want to be accountable for your direct advocacy.

Addendum: if you coerce someone into disclosing an intimate trauma or outing themselves as a member of a vulnerable group on a public blog just to avoid harassment… yes, you bear partial responsibility for any subsequent abuse of that information. Also, fuck you, fuck your “activism,” and maybe try taking a break and minding your own fucking business for a while.

If there was a way to run SUPER MEGA AD BLOCKER on this website I fucking would

“Please oh please open up your computer to a porn virus! If you don’t you’re evil!”

Freeloader Comin’ through!

We didn’t start this war internet users have with ads - We might have moaned about banner ads, but it was only when they started making noises when we might be listening to music or a podcast or whatever, causing two sound sorces at once, that we started trying to block ads universally rather than just a specific type of ad (pop ups).

And since then ads have gotten worse - Actual malware rather than merely breaking one of the fundamental sins of web design - though shalt not autoplay anything with sound. And the more aggressive a website is with ‘please turn off adblock’ the less I trust it to bother to vet ads and advertisers to make sure they’re not installing malware.

Not to mention that the idea that avoiding ads is “freeloading” is hilariously backward. Advertisement is a transaction between the platform and the advertiser, the user has no obligation to provide the views/clicks the platform has promised. Using an adblocker isn’t freeloading in the same way that leaving the room to get a snack during a commercial break isn’t cheating the tv network.

Ok y’all, I work as a web developer and I’m here to tell you that you are 100% right and that it’s shit. SO I’m going to tell you how to get around websites that block you from using their website if you’re using an adblocker. 

Every website uses a language called JavaScript; long story short it’s a website language that allows developers to do the crazy shit you see on websites. Now the easiest thing to do is to disable JavaScript to stop them from knowing you have an adblocker:

Oh no! I’m blocked from viewing the website. It would be a terrible shame if I were able to right click and select the “inspect” feature

Click the three dots in the top right and open the “Settings” Menu

And then scrolled down to “Debugger” and checked the “Disable Javascript Option”

And then just refreshed the page

Hey Tumblr, I’m gonna spill a little knowledge on triggers and blacklists. TW: Many of my examples mention actual triggers, like sexual assault, self-injury, intimate partner violence, gore, common animal phobias, and a few fandoms.

A “trigger” is a stimulus that involuntarily causes you to have an unpleasant and aversive psychological reaction. In plain English: When you see/hear/smell/touch/read it, your brain makes you feel NOT GOOD. The specifics can be really diverse and complicated! I know people keep trying to say “well MY kind of trigger is the only REAL kind of trigger” but I’ll pull out my Master’s degree in psychology if I have to on this one: there is no one true form of trigger or trigger reaction. Our brains like to freak out over all KINDS of shit, and they do it in all KINDS of ways. 

Trigger warnings are how we talk about difficult things. The first place I ever saw them used was the Bodies Under Siege mailing list, which started in 1997 as a forum for people who self-injured; because they found that talking about their self-injury could cause other vulnerable members of their community to self-injure, they began warning each other of the content of their posts, so each member could decide to read a certain post, or avoid it for their own mental health. The practice soon spread to feminist blogs that discussed sexual assault, then elsewhere.

Some triggers are rather predictable because most human brains come pre-equipped with a set of hardwired triggers for disgust or distress, like corpses, blood, other humans being in pain, and the taste and smell of rotting food. Others are often highly unpredictable and random, because literally anything can become associated with trauma.

A trigger is not a moral judgment. Just because something causes you distress, it isn’t necessarily bad, and won’t necessarily harm anyone else. That’s a separate conversation. So whether something is a trigger for you is 100% about how it makes you feel, not about whether anyone else should have anything to do with it.

It is entirely reasonable to ask other people to let you know if something meets the description of one of your triggers. “Hey, could you tag everything with spiders in it please?” “Hi, does your story have any gore onscreen?” “Hello, which of these books has sexual assault in it?” Not everyone is able to fulfill this request, the same way not everyone can promise their kitchen is gluten-free or that their sweater has never made contact with a cat, but it’s reasonable for you to ask.

It is not reasonable for you to ask that other people have nothing to do with your triggers because they trigger you. Whether something is fundamentally evil is a separate conversation. If they routinely make you deal with stuff that triggers you, yeah sure, you’re totally entitled to conclude they’re treating you badly and cut contact with them. But on the other hand, when you’re not there, it’s their right to eat a food that triggers you/watch horror movies you can’t deal with/date a guy who bears a physical resemblance to your abuser/reblog pictures of the animal you’re phobic about/whatever else that triggers you but that they’re into.

If you’ve been asked to help people figure out if something will trigger them–say, for example, that you’ve been asked to tag all your Tumblr posts about politics–then you can answer one of two ways pretty fairly. One way is to agree, and find ways of tagging that work for you and them and anyone else involved–maybe tagging “New York tw” or “Sherlock mention” so they don’t show up in the main #New York or #Sherlock tags, or finding a reasonable compromise for things you don’t know how to properly nail down, like tagging “creepy crawlies” for things that aren’t necessarily insects or spiders, but are… some form of creepy crawly? And trigger them? (What even ARE lobsters anyway? Wait, don’t tell me, they still freak me out.)

The other way is to say, “I’m sorry, I don’t think I can accommodate you.” Maybe you aren’t good enough at telling when something meets their criteria; maybe it’s too hard for you to remember all the things you need to tag; maybe your own anxiety or scrupulosity are triggered by the expectation that you remember to keep someone else safe. People might get upset at you, but I’ll defend the right of individual people living their own lives to do this. The bigger, richer, and better-staffed someone or something gets, the more I expect out of them, the same way I expect more of other disability accommodations like captioned videos or image descriptions; but small blogs, like individual homes, are often only as accessible as limited means and human resources make them.

The advantage to posting your list of triggers publicly is that if someone wants to make their blog accessible to you, it’s easy for them to know how; the disadvantage is that it hands someone who wants to ruin your day a Top 10 list of how. It’s up to you to weigh the risks and benefits. Maybe your trigger list is an “ask to know” thing, instead of something preserved on Internet archives for all eternity.

There. Now you know how triggers work. Go forth, curate your blocklists, ask people to tag, and have much better Internet experiences accordingly.

Growing up with parents who loved you but were lazy, emotionally stunted or both is really hard.

Because you either become like them and the cycle continues, or you one day realise you are more mature than your parents and you will never really got the support you needed and you never will.

Because when people cannot be introspective and proactive about their own faults, they will not be able to stop themselves from harming you and they will never grow enough to truly make up for it.

And it doesn’t always matter when you realise it. You can realise it young, or realise it old, but it hits hard. That the people who were supposed to be the rocks you could cling to in a storm were instead often playing the role of cement blocks tied to your feet and dragging you under.

Not all damage is caused by malice, a lot of it is caused by emotional immaturity.

Please read this!

+

@deadcatwithaflamethrower don’t know if you’ve seen this yet but looks interesting and helpful

Queer is the label we used when we weren’t sure. Queer is the label we used when we were sure no other label would do. Queer is a gender that is my own and only my own. Queer is a sexuality that defies definition. 

Queer is the label which became genderqueer, and from which non-binary and genderfluid sprung. Queer is the label which is the un-box, in which everyone who is not cishet (including ace people!!) fits. Queer is community.

Queer is activist. Queer is in the streets screaming ‘we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!’ Queer is not ashamed.

Queer was ours from the beginning. Queer was ours a century ago. Queer was used against us, and we said ‘fuck you,’ and we took it BACK. Queer is butches and bears with bats, protecting our community.

Queer is blue-collar. Queer is working-class. Queer is poor. Queer is people who can’t afford to sit out Stonewall quietly and then go fight for marriage equality when the tax bills come due. Queer is a distinct identity, and queer is the un-box.

Queer makes TERFs and exclusionists angry, because it doesn’t let them define people by gold stars and terms like ‘SGA’ that come from conversion therapy. Queer doesn’t give a shit about historical revision to exclude members of the community who have always been here, because queer has always been here and always will be.

Queer is the life raft onto which we climb. Queer is community. Queer is important, and people will have to pry it from my cold dead hands. I’ve been queer for thirty years. My community is queer, and it is opt-in.

If you tag my fucking posts ‘q slur’ or any variant thereof I will immediately fucking block you. Don’t fucking do it. If you feel obligated to tag my posts ‘q slur,’ don’t interact with them. My identity is not a bad word and does not require censoring.

“slur” isn’t the same as “bad word”. everything this says perfectly illustrates that you literally don’t know what a slur is.

queer is a slur and none of this changes that fact. is it so hard to have some respect for LGBT people who choose not to reclaim it?? it wasn’t “ours” to begin with. society took a word that means “weird” and used it against lgbt people (AND continue to do so!) some people have chosen to recclaim it and thats fine! what i do not understand is how you have no sympathy for people in the very community you claim to love so dearly that you willingly throw their pain at their face while also delegitimizating their pain.

like. at least others who recclaim that word can at least recognize that its a slur ??

Cool, so everyone is gonna stop using “gay” all the time, because that’s the word that was used to attack me, and is still a widespread slur across the US? We’re all gonna have respect for that now?

No? Because that’s an okay reclaimed slur, but queer is so toxic that somehow in the last two years and only on Tumblr it’s become such a discourse point that y'all gonna ignore that the first uses of queer for our community are a century old, and come from within the community?

Literally everything you said is either incorrect or can be equally applied to gay. So, no, I’m not going to censor my identity out of sympathy, because I have to listen to people call themselves gay every day and do so with the knowledge that it’s their identity word and is important to them. I, you know, made my trauma my business and worked on it and didn’t insist that other people stop being gay (and calling themselves gay in my earshot) because that’s the word that got weaponized against me.

I have PTSD. I know how trauma and triggers work. I also know my trauma and my triggers are my business to manage, and not the business of another person to change a core part of their identity so I can manage my trauma. Insisting that other people change their identities for the trauma of others has nothing to do with “sympathy,” it is about control. This sudden upswell in “q***r” and “q slur” and “q*eer” - censoring an important identity word as if it is a swear word, making it a word so bad it can’t be spoken, as if it’s a community’s Voldemort - did not come from nowhere.

We literally sat here and watched it happen. We watched TERFs start this particular virulent bit of discourse, marrying “queer is a slur” - with the implication that “slur” means “irredeemable and unable to be redeemed” - and we watched exclusionists pick up the water of TERFs and carry it for them. This isn’t some bit of old contention that goes back decades - five years ago, the word we had PSAs about how it shouldn’t be weaponized was gay.

But queer is everything I said: it doesn’t let TERFs and exclusionists know for sure if they should be hateful because it’s the un-box. So that just can’t be tolerated.

The “queer is a slur (and slurs aren’t reclaimed and slurs should be censored and slurs should not be used for a group but gay is fine, gay is not a slur like that)” thing isn’t about individual trauma and it never was. This “queer is a slur” thing is about gatekeeping and control, so no, I’m not here for it, and I’m not for my identity being censored as if it’s a bad word when people interact with my posts.

Lest you forget, the most famous mantra we had as a community coming together was… We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it. You can’t erase that. It’s the name for academic studies of our community (which btw, is always led by queer people themselves). You can’t remove the label for people who are still trying to find their place in the community. For the people who never mind a word who describes them as well. Most of our labels are words that have been hurled back at us in hate. So you have to ask, who in our community started to say it wasn’t acceptable? And do you want to stand for what they do? Piss off a TERF this Pride by reminding them that we’re here, we’re QUEER, and they can just shut the hell up.

God am I sick of this asinine fucking discourse. I see we’ve reached the point where not being comfortable with a word that is regularly used as a slur means these clowns are going to imply you’re a transphobe because guilt by association which is totally sane and reasonable. Like I identify as queer and don’t consider it a slur in most usages but I still have the capacity for empathy and thus can respect that my comfort zone is not the be all and end all of acceptable positions to have on the issue. It costs me nothing not to call people queer when they dont want to be.

Saying “when you repeat ‘queer is a slur and should never be used’ you are repeating TERF talking points” isn’t calling you a transphobe, it’s saying that you are using the same talking points as transphobic people, talking points that were deliberately created to try to split the community.

I understand it’s much easier to say “wah how dare you say I’m a transphobe by association” than to acknowledge that you’ve been taken in by people who are working very hard to split the community, so if you don’t want to do the work of examining where you got your talking points and who your talking points benefit, I guess I understand, but that doesn’t mean that’s what I said.

Just because the truth that TERFs are behind the “queer is a slur” discourse makes you uncomfy to acknowledge doesn’t mean you get to change what I said so it makes you comfy in your unchallenged assumptions, and reassure yourself that you’re not saying the same things as TERFs!

You are. If you don’t like that?

CHANGE WHAT YOU’RE SAYING SO YOU’RE NOT AGREEING WITH TERFS, YOU CABBAGE.

No one is under the obligation to pretend you’re not agreeing with TERFs just to make you comfy.

When I tell people to delete anon hate, to not publish it, it’s not me saying “ignore it and it’ll stop; don’t fight back.” It is 100% petty and spiteful. Honestly, I can’t think of anything better than the person who sent the hate obsessively checking your blog and refreshing and refreshing, waiting for you to reply, and getting increasingly frustrated when the ask they so masterfully crafted never pops up & you just keep posting cute pictures of your pets and talking about how nice your day was.

THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS!!!

it is the most delightfully petty and vindictive feeling to know that somewhere out there is an anon who is refreshing my blog because they sent me a shitty anon message and they want to see me respond to it, even obliquely.

And I don’t. When I get anons and delete them, I don’t even say i GOT one. Because they don’t get to have that satisfaction. I laugh about it out loud to my wife and I carry on as if it never happened.

I love it, it always brings me a vicious sort of joy.

Did you know that modern C sections were invented by African women— centuries before they were standard elsewhere?

Midwives and surgeons living around Lake Tanganyika and Lake Victoria perfected the procedure hundreds of years ago. When a baby couldn’t be delivered vaginally, these healers sedated the laboring mother using large amounts of banana wine. They tied the mother to the bed for safety, sterilized a knife using heat, and made the incision, acting quickly as a team to prevent excessive blood loss or the accidental cutting of other organs. The combination of sterile, sharp equipment and sedation made the procedure surprisingly calm and comfortable for the mother.

After the baby was delivered, antiseptic tinctures and salves were used to clean the area and stitches were applied. Women rarely developed infections, shock, or excessive blood loss after a cesarean section and the most common problem reported was that it took longer for the mother’s milk to come in (an issue that was solved with friends and relatives who would nurse the baby instead).

In Uganda, C sections were normally performed by a team of male healers, but in Tanzania and DRC, they were typically done by female midwives.

The majority of women and babies survived this, and when questioned about it by European colonists in the mid-1800s, many people in Uganda and Tanzania indicated that the procedure had been performed routinely since time immemorial.

This was at a time when Europeans had only barely started to figure out that they should wash their hands before performing surgery, when nearly half of European and US women died in childbirth, and when nearly 100% of European women died if a C section was performed.

Detailed explanations of Ugandan C-sections were published globally in scholarly journals by the 1880s and helped the rest of the world learn how to save mothers and babies with minimal complications.

So if you’re one of the people who wouldn’t be alive today without a C-section, you have Ugandan surgeons and Tanzanian and Congolese midwives to thank for their contributions to medical science.

https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/cesarean/part2.html

i always think about that study where they had adults hold a baby, and when they were told the baby was a girl the adults said she was cute and small, and when they were told the baby was a boy they said he was big and strong. they rated the baby’s ability to do things and tendency towards certain toys differently. they even held the baby differently. (x) or when they rated the baby’s physical ability to do various tasks such as climbing up a slope differently, (x) & when they measured how much parents told their girl children vs. their boy children to be careful and stop being so rowdy (x), & when they measured how often girls and boys were told to be quiet. (x) this was, obviously, all unconscious behavior in the adults. they’re not all like, raving sexists who outspokenly believe that women can’t do stuff or that girls really should just be quieter, be more still than boys. like its not even counting the direct, actual messages, its just literally how every single person in your entire life treats you, and if asked they would probably deny that its even because you’re a girl. how the fuck am i supposed to believe this doesn’t affect a child’s development when its literally constant throughout the entire process 

This makes me want to tell the next AFAB baby I see “Look at you! You’re so mighty! You’re a tiny valkyrie! you will do great things!”

I was at a naming party for a very new baby a few weeks ago, and I got to hold the infant for a little while, and I was doing the usual holding-a-small-baby thing where you jiggle the kid up and down and croon words and phrases to them more or less at random. And I found myself saying “such a pretty girl, such a sweet little girl” without really thinking about it, and I thought about this phenomenon.

So with a conscious effort I switched to saying things like “look at you, such a big girl, such a big strong girl” and I was startled at how weird that felt in my mouth. I tried considering what kind of thing I would be unthinkingly crooning to a baby I thought of as a boy, and it was ridiculously difficult to picture. (Would I say “such a pretty boy, such a sweet little boy”? … Maybe?)

Look, all of us have been immersed in this since literally before we were born. It only stands to reason that it takes constant effort to even notice it, let alone begin trying to shake it off.

We keep working.

Do Your Fucking Research *Nicki Minaj Voice*

Wow… Lmao.

Some people threw white paint on it a few years back.

They want to be a victim so bad.

Fun Fact: That’s a statue of the fist which Joe Louis used to knock out Max Schmeling, Hitler’s favored heavyweight boxer in 1938. Schmeling won the 1st bout by knockout in round twelve, but Joe Louis came back in the follow-up match and laid him the fuck out in the 1st round.

Fun Fact: Schmeling was hated by the Nazis for losing to a black man and for having a Jewish manager, and he hated them right back, stating in 1975 that he was glad he’d lost the fight because the thought of  the Nazis using him for propaganda purposes sickened him. He also personally saved the lives of two Jewish children and later became lifelong friends with Joe Louis.

So maybe don’t refer to him as “Hitler’s favored heavyweight boxer”…

Thank you for this additional info!

Reblogging this for the added facts and so people know that Schmeling wasn’t a Nazi or Nazi collaborator and was in fact a good man

Not only did Schmeling help pay for Louis’ funeral, he was one of the  pallbearers.

 - The American Experience: The Fight

I was walking in the forest during winter, and saw a wendigo sitting under a tree. I asked it if it was going to kill me. It said, “No, this is just a dream.” So I sat next to it in the snow for a bit and then he said, “The anger in your heart warms you now, but will leave you cold in your grave.” And then I woke up.

Well SOMEONE’S third eye is wide fucking open

I love this post so I made a thing.

@shitpostsampler

We were actually tagged in this twice! 

We do love that creepy deer. 

look. look at this beautiful sword meme. i’m going to cry

@petermorwood

I saw and reblogged this one a while back, but it’s always worth repeating, and this time I’m adding a bit of background info comparing common fantasy sword features to the Real Thing (with pictures, of course.)

Leaf-bladed swords are a very popular fantasy style and were real, though unlike modern hand-and-a-half longsword versions, the real things were mostly if not always shortswords.

Here are Celtic bronze swords…

…Ancient Greek Xiphoi…

… and a Roman “Mainz-pattern” gladius…

Saw or downright jagged edges, either full-length or as small sections (often where they serve no discernible purpose) are a frequent part of fantasy blades, especially at the more, er, imaginatively unrestrained end of the market.

Real swords also had saw edges, such as these two 19th century shortswords, but not to make them cool or interesting. They’re weapons if necessary…

…but since they were carried by Pioneer Corps who needed them for cutting branches and other construction-type tasks, their principal use was as brush cutters and saws.

This dussack (cutlass) in the Wallace Collection is also a fighting weapon, like the one beside it…

…but may also have had the secondary function of being a saw.

A couple of internet captions say it’s for “cutting ropes” which makes sense - heavy ropes and hawsers on board a ship were so soaked with tar that they were often more like lengths of wood, and a Hollywood-style slice from the Hero’s rapier (!!) wouldn’t be anything like enough to sever them. However swords like this are extremely rare, which suggests they didn’t work as well as intended for any purpose.

I photographed these in Basel, Switzerland, about 20 years ago. Look at the one on the bottom (I prefer the basket-hilt schiavona in the middle).

A lot of “flamberge” (wavy-edge) swords actually started out with conventional blades which then had the edges ground to shape - the dussack, that Basel broadsword and this Zweihander were all made that way.

The giveaway is the centreline: if it’s straight, the entire blade probably started out straight.

Increased use of water power for bellows, hammers and of course grinders made shaping blades easier than when it had to be done by hand. This flamberge Zweihander, however, was forged that way.

Again, the clue is the centre-line.

Incidentally those Parierhaken (parrying hooks - a secondary crossguard) are among the only real-life examples of another common fantasy feature - hooks and spikes sticking out from the blade.

Here are some rapiers and a couple of daggers showing the same difference between forged to shape and ground to shape. The top and bottom rapiers in the first picture started as straights, and only the middle rapier came from the forge with a flamberge blade.

There’s no doubt about this one either.

The reason - though that was a part of it - wasn’t just to look cool and show off what the owner could afford (any and all extra or unusual work added to the price) but may actually have had a function: a parry would have been juddery and unsettling for someone not used to it, and any advantage is worth having.

However, like the saw-edged dussack, flamberge blades are unusual - which suggests the advantage wasn’t that much of an advantage after all.

Here’s a Circassian kindjal, forged wiggly…

…and an Italian parrying dagger forged straight then ground wiggly…

There were also parrying daggers with another fantasy-blade feature, deep notches and serrations which in fantasy versions often resemble fangs or thorns.

These more practical historical versions are usually called “sword-breakers” but I prefer “sword-catcher”, since a steel blade isn’t that easy to break. Taking the opponent’s blade out of play for just long enough to nail him works fine.

NB - the curvature on the top one in this next image is AFAIK because of the book-page it was copied from, not the blade itself.

The missing tooth on that second dagger, and the crack halfway down this next one’s blade, shows what happens when design features cause weak spots.

So there you go: a quick overview of fantasy sword features in real life.

Here’s a real-life weapon that looks like it belongs in a fantasy story or film - and this doesn’t even have an odd-shaped blade…

Just a very flexible one…

If you want more odd blades, Moghul India is a good place to start…

Ugh, this is super disappointing :/ why does everyone drink the anti kool aid???

It’s also extremely stupid, because while I don’t go around talking to co-workers in detail about the erotic fiction I read and write (because that would be sexual harassment - please DON’T do this), my whole office DOES fall all over itself every Monday discussing every single new episode of Game of Thrones, which is absolutely full of underage sex, rape, and incest (there are brother/sister and aunt/nephew pairings front and center, very major characters, who get erotic scenes on-screen) - and is also the most heavily-awarded and most popular show on TV currently, so mainstream that even people who don’t usually like fantasy are watching it.

So the answer to that question is, most people out in the real world these days don’t give a shit about taboo things in fiction.

for real, though, why do recipes consistently tell you to use less herbs and spices in than you should. fuck your “two cloves of garlic,” fuck your “half teaspoon of cinnamon,” and you can absolutely go to hell with your “dash of black pepper”

I’m pretty sure that the only time I’ve ever actually managed to overseason food was when working with balsamic vinegar, which is the most overpowering motherfucker of a sauce known to man

i appreciate the energy and anger in this post, which is righteous and just

A friend once tried to replicate my burrito bowl recipe from the same online link I used and was upset it didn’t come out as flavorful, so I had to tell him to imagine that every online recipe is written by a midwestern white lady who thinks ketchup is spicy and adjust the spices accordingly. He nailed those burrito bowls next time.

“imagine that every online recipe is written by a midwestern white lady who thinks ketchup is spicy and adjust the spices accordingly“

2 cloves of garlic? i think you mean 14

The one exception to this rule is anything involving tumeric where the recipe is written by a white person. Half the amount. Maybe quarter it. Turmeric is super good for you, and it makes shit a cool yellow colour, but it tastes like shit. The only people who like the taste are people who’ve destroyed their tastebuds eating actually toxic shit like apricot pits and blue-green algae because someone on instragram told them it was a super-food.