the continual discovery of fresh types of nonsense

also the sweet dreams look on annie lennox like... have thought a lot about how strange it seems to me that throughout my childhood and early adolescence there were like. lots. of very famous women doing very gender nonnormative things right in plain sight (think kd lang, sinéad o’connor...), many of them on album covers owned by my mother, or in her magazines (remember THIS??), anyhow sort of all over my immediate world, like, right there in front of me, and i just. could not connect any of it to the idea that it was possible to do in real life. could not connect my mother’s skittishness about what these women looked like and what they were doing with style and self-presentation to anything but the idea that it was not a possible thing for real people to be. in spite of the evidence right in front of my eyes. it took a very very long time to realize that it was possible to look differently than my mother expected me to look. but it remains a little baffling to me. why was it so hard for me to see these women? and not just the famous ones -- every possible ring of keys moment i might have had was utterly unavailable to me until i was more or less an adult. wild.

you look at photos of steven strait like, smiling in his cute glasses with his cute hair looking like a cute nice guy and you just think. why can’t holden have a little more of that. as a treat

does anyone but starfleet think it makes sense for military vessels to come equipped with a full-service bar at all much less right in the bow of the ship

relatedly it’s weird how i have this tendency to forget that ‘working for three+ years for a man who requires constant attention and praise from women specifically and cannot tolerate anyone deviating from his own personal plans for them, while never doing any work himself toward any collaborative project or extending himself in any way for anyone unless it gratifies his ego in some way, while also accepting all credit offered him for projects he knows perfectly well he did not contribute to’ is like..... part of my whole Situation. weird! weird

so i started the oa (thank u aria) and i’m into it! i like that i have literally no idea where it’s going and i like that it is made in a way that—well, usually my litmus test for actually-good television is ‘does it trust its audience’ but i think the case here is more like, it cares about its audience. but what i came here to say is

the THINGS alice krige can DO with her VOICE !!!!!!!!

darkbloomiana replied to your photo “holy fucking shit”

it’s routine for rare book and manuscript libraries and archives to have some kind of basic screening structure in place. and for small collections in particular it’s common to want to hear from readers in advance, if only because they can’t guarantee they can staff the place adequately all the time, and if they have relatively few readers a little activity makes a big difference. (i have to email my local rare book librarian 24 hours in advance when i want to come in, for example.) and it’s not unusual for such libraries, of any size, to ask for letters of introduction. i think that particular practice is generally pretty unnecessary and pretty elitist, and kind of absurd for a library like the parker, which has a kind of built-in self-selection mechanism going for it, which is that the percentage of people who know it exists who aren’t also familiar with special collections is probably, i don’t know, fucking low. anyway it’s a gross kind of gate-keeping that excludes, among other things, anyone without a university or research library (or similar institution) affiliation. which is outrageous. but kinda normal, if starting to be less so. this example struck me egregious in the first place in the number of things it asks for (a c.v.?????) but above all in its tone. ‘application’ is preposterous enough, but the bullshit about ~making sure you know how to handle rare materials~ is so unbelievably condescending. and in any case it takes literally five minutes to teach someone how to deal with fragile materials, especially in a small library. it’s just such a throwback to an era when special collections librarians saw themselves as guardians rather than curators of the materials in their libraries, and limited access as heavily as they could -- an era i sometimes forget isn’t quite over.

okay. music and some tarot readings. that is how our evening is going to go. 

meanwhile, guys, help me remember (initially typed ‘help me forget’ which is a good index of how my brain works) that my top nonessential spending priority is a better lighting scheme for my kitchen/living room.