The YouTubers watch a crazy Japanese music video that went viral called, ME!ME!ME! feat. daoko by TeddyLoid!
my best friend and i, talking about dnd
best friend: centaurs should have horse heads
me: absolutely not. why do you want me terrified that they'll eat my fingers?
Look I just think centaurs should be more visibly horrific and wrong! Their rib cages are a nightmare and I hate it, so let’s just pile on the problems
hey i just wanted to put a quick post up for people that may not know, cuz i certainly didnt until a couple years ago, but the whole prescription glasses industry is a massive racket, and i wanted to let people know about the more affordable options for buying or replacing glasses
when you go to an optometrist to get your eyes tested, they take a lot of measurements and will give you a prescription that lists things like how near or farsighted each eye is, spherical and cylindrical measurements for astigmatism, etc, but one measure they almost always leave out of the portion they give you is your interpupillary distance, that is, the distance between your pupils, measured in millimeters
the reason they leave that out is because if you have your full prescription, including the interpupillary distance, you can just go online and buy glasses from a place like zenni optical for less than $20 USD. and if you go and buy them online, thats ~$200 they dont get to bilk from you
so, you have two options, you can either request your interpupillary distance number when you get your eyes tested, which they cant legally withhold from you because its medical information
This Is Specifically Enforced By The Federal Trade Commission!
they dont get to withhold this! a lot of them will lie to you, or try to skirt around it, because they want your money. raise a fucking stink. this is an argument you can win.
the other option is to measure your interpupillary distance at home, using either a ruler and a mirror, or a phone app which is made for this purpose
https://www.zennioptical.com/measuring-pd-infographic
once you have your full prescription information, you can buy glasses online, made to your specific prescription, for well under a TENTH the cost of ones you would buy at a brick and mortar store
here are some other options for cheaper glasses! DO NOT LET YOURSELF BE SCAMMED BY LUXOTTICA if you live in the US or canada!! places like bon look (canadian) and warby parker (american) will give you paperwork to get reimbursed by your insurance plan, as well.
Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?
Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"
Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.
Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/
Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain. You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.
It is free.
It is legal.
I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.
I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this. I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this. Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this. When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here. It’s a great resource.
Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!
If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!
And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!
I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!
Anonymous asked:
What's the harm if we call historical people Trans or Queer. So what if they didn't have the language, we do now and they would probably have used it if they were living today. Isn't it better to call them Trans or Queer even if it might be incorrect, instead of staying with the safe labels but probably erasing their Queerness. We're here we're Queer and we have been here for a long time!
thatlittleegyptologist answered:
Are you asking scientifically or for your own personal headcanon? If you feel a particular affinity for a historical figure who is queer or gnc, and you want to use modern labels that’s fine. The problem comes when people insist on definitively labelling someone scientifically is that that person doesn’t know those terms, they have different words that we may or may not have discovered yet, and even if you could explain those terms to that person they may not identify that way or feel that it fits them even if you personally think that it should. By insisting you know better than someone’s lived experience, you actively erase that lived experience. This is why we tend to use more general terms like queer/gnc/mlm/wlw etc when discussing queer people in history, because it correctly identifies their queerness but doesn’t force their identity to conform to our modern ideas of it. In Ancient Egypt in particular, categorisation based on sexuality is simply not a thing, and thus they do not have words for it, so we have to use our words for it carefully.
I refer you to @lost-in-the-land-of-stories who is an expert on sex and gender in Ancient Egypt, and this article by Deborah Sweeney who is an expert of the same:
Just click the button that says ‘pdf e-scholarship’ and you’ll have it.
eta: if any queer historians can elaborate on this further please feel free to do so. I’m mostly over here with a sign that says ‘I don’t go here, but I support you wholeheartedly and this topic is very complicated’
Hi there, queer historical professional speaking! The example that I’m going to give doesn’t relate to Ancient Egypt, but hopefully it can serve to illustrate the point we’re trying to make.
Love stories documents the development of the concept of homosexuality through legal documents, newspapers, and the writings of Walt Whitman beginning in the 1840s and continuing through the rest of the 19th century. It is an excellent book with solid historical evidence, and I would highly recommend checking it out.
The full title of the book is Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality, and this is important, because at this point, the concept of men who only have sex with men does not exist. While there are certainly men who only really want to have sex with other men, most “sodomites” of the 1840s also engage in sex with women. Importantly, sodomy is seen as so dangerous because any man can be tempted into having sex with other men.
Would the sodomites of the 1840s feel represented by the word gay, or even bisexual? We can’t know because we can’t ask them, and to apply those labels to them in retrospect erases the nuances of their identities formed in an entirely different cultural era. Let’s take another example:
Abraham Lincoln had what was, by all accounts, a romantic relationship with another man. It is the focus of one of the first chapters in Love Stories. However, at the time that this relationship is taking place, the concepts of sex and romance are not culturally linked. One can feel romantic love for another person without wanting to have sex with them. This is the kind of relationship that Lincoln—and many other men—had. The label gay or bisexual doesn’t apply because both terms apply to the concept of having a romantic and sexual relationship with the same person*. Lincoln might even object to the MLM label because even that assumes sexual attraction.
The book also investigates men who dressed as women for the purposes of engaging in sexual encounters with other men. In this case study, the outrage generated by the discovery of this practice had less to do with the sex of the individual than it did with their race. Again, this is because during this time and culture, any man can be tempted to have sex with other men, just as he can be tempted to have sex with women.
Would this historical person who dressed in women’s clothing feel represented by the word trans/transgender/trans woman? Was her gender identity as tied up with their appearance and presentation as ours is today? How did they feel about dressing and living as a man for some of the time? We can’t know because we can’t ask, and we cannot presume that our own notions of sex and gender apply to all people across all time.
*There are, of course, people who do not fit into this most common definition, but modern people who love differently than what is encompassed in the widely accepted definitions of sexual orientations might also feel similarly misrepresented by these labels. It’s an individual thing, and we can’t know historical people about the way a label applies to them like we can with living people.
TL;DR modern concepts like gay, trans, or queer can only be applied to people living in the culture in which those words were developed. To superimpose our current cultural understanding onto people of the past is to erase the many nuances those people would have experienced during their lifetimes.
Hi yeah I would love to add to this, @chaotic-archaeologist thanks for the book rec btw because I totally need to be reading that.
Anyway, the entire point is kind of that when we are researching sexuality, gender, and queerness in the ancient world we want to actually be looking at and perceiving the full diversity of the past, instead of just placing it in our modern containers - saying we try not to use the word homosexual or heterosexual does not mean we consider the past cishet, far from it in fact. If anything I think the past is far more queer than most people consider it to be.
I actually really like using ‘queer’ because it’s a more broad term and also within academic discourse has a history that makes it particularly useful when looking at these kinds of marginalised communities, but even that comes with like, difficulties.
The thing is like, that terms like hetero/homosexual, and cis/trans are inherently very western* terms in and of themselves, even in the current world not everyone uses them or likes using them. There are so many communities in our world that use other terms and concepts to understand their own identities, and there is a very inherent western-centric thing about just applying ‘western’ identifyers to everyone in both past and present. You could look for example at the kothi and hijra in India, who do not simply match western identity labels, but are very much their own. The past is much the same, often specific terms for specific types of queer relationships or persons existed, and the more we find those, and use them, the more we can understand queer history.
There have always been people that didn’t fit within their societies gendered standards, just like there have always been people with sexual identities that did not match the norm. This has never not been true. But what those people are called is up to them to decide, not for us to impose upon them.
All this is to say, that to be careful with what terms we use to describe people is actually a way in which historians, archaeologists, and other researchers who are working in good faith try to make sure we don’t erase people from the past and their lived experiences; their queerness. The past is infinitely diverse, just as the present is, and we should try to respect it for what it was in its entirety. On top of that there is also the fact that sometimes by oversimplifying we are both glorifying and white-washing certain aspects of past cultures, not only in colour but also in how gruesome or fucked up some stuff in the past was.
Now of course, none of this means we shouldn’t be super clear about the fact that the past is super diverse and not cishet, and that we should highlight stories, people, and objects that make that clear.
It’s just that I think we should be doing that without oversimplifying something that deserves to be seen in all its vibrant colours of the historical rainbow.
There are certainly people who do try to erase these kinds of things when they talk about the past. But that does not mean we should be oversimplifying things simply to counter that, if anything it makes being intellectually honest all the more important because it’s a far better way (in my opinion) to shut those kinds of people up.
I also want to be super clear though that here too context matters - there are certainly situations in which I will use a modern label as shorthand, and I think that there are moments where this is necessary and fine, such as in for example museum catalogues. Because if I’m searching for ancient representation, I don’t want to be learning 5000 words. I just want my museum catalogue to give me what I need if I were to use the searchterm “queer” or “lgbt”, and the fact that this is not yet always possible is certainly a problem. But it’s a far different problem from what I as a researcher should be doing when I’m engaging with the past.
*mind you, the term “western” is also super complicated but I’m not getting into that right this second.
moving this to my actual egypt blog sdfdsf
For all of you who are confussed.
Oh
As an older millennial, I bless the people who created both the meme and the timeline because, YES, THIS
Culture is so obsessed with the idea of lone geniuses that it doesn't really appreciate that most of the progress of science (and likely every other discipline) occurs collaboratively, in babysteps, and usually through a lot very tedious, utterly unsexy, work.
Here’s a media literacy rule of thumb: any time you hear about how the courts have done something outrageous and absurd to some poor, long-suffering, gigantic, wildly profitable corporation…dig deeper.
The canonical example is the “McDonald’s Hot Coffee Lawsuit” (aka Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants). You know, that time that an old lady got burned by her McDonald’s coffee and then sued for for $2.7 million?! Most people heard that story — and they heard it for a reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald%27s_Restaurants
The Hot Coffee story was propaganda — specifically, it was propaganda for the idea that corporations should be shielded from legal liability when they maim or even kill the public through gross negligence. The real Hot Coffee story is a lot more complicated than the “lady gets millions because her coffee was too hot” tale that circulated widely.
One of the best explorations of the Hot Coffee story is Adam Conover’s excellent “Adam Ruins The Hot Coffee Story” video from 2016. In that episode, Conover explains what really happened.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9DXSCpcz9E
The coffee that burned Stella Liebeck in New Mexico in 1994 was served at 190°F. It caused third-degree burns that permanently disfigured Liebeck, required multiple skin grafts, and disabled her for two years. The surgery was so drastic that Liebeck lost 20% of her body-weight while she was recovering.
McDonald’s had a history of serving coffee that was dangerously hot. It had received 700 complaints about the matter, and had had to settle numerous claims from people who were horribly burned by its coffee. However, it declined to settle with Liebeck, who initially sought $20k to cover her medical expenses.
Denied a settlement, Liebeck sued. The jury did award $2.7m, but the judge clawed it back to $640k. Liebeck likely didn’t get that amount — she and McDonald’s reached a confidential settlement under threat of McDonald’s appealing.
So, the real story isn’t: “Old lady spills coffee and gets millions.”
It’s “McDonald’s ignores hundreds of dangerous incidents for years, then maims a customer for life and refuses to pay her medical bills or change its practices to avoid future incidents. A judge says she’s due a fraction of the jury award, but she doesn’t get it because McDonald’s uses its massive litigation war-chest to force her into a confidential settlement.”
So why did you hear so much about this story? And why was the moral of the story inevitably about how bloodsucking lawyers are victimizing poor l’il multinational corporations like Mickey Dees?
It was propaganda. The “bloodsucking lawyers preying on innocent corporations” story is a creation of the business lobby, which has, for decades, argued that it should be immune to legal consequences when it harms or kills the public. The cause of “tort reform” is, in actuality, a corporate charter of impunity.
It worked. Over the past four decades, corporations have steadily whittled away the public’s right to civil justice, no matter how egregiously a corporation behaves. The main mechanism for this was the expansion of binding arbitration, a 1920s-era law that initially allowed big companies to agree to have their contractual disputes worked out by a mediator, rather than going to court.
Since the 1980s, a series of Supreme Court decisions have steadily expanded binding arbitration, allowing corporations to add “arbitration waivers” to their terms of service, employment contracts and other non-negotiated boilerplates. Today, the mere act of removing some shrinkwrap or clicking a link can result in the permanent loss of your right to sue, no matter how badly a company treats you.
Instead, your grievances will be heard by a corporate arbitrator, a pretend judge who is paid by the company that wronged you. Your case must be heard in isolation, and not part of a class action. The proceedings are secret, and even if you win, you don’t set a precedent for others who are similarly wronged. It’s “a justice system just for corporations.”
http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/we-now-have-a-justice-system-just-for-corporations
American corporations pushed the expansion of binding arbitration waivers as a get-out-of-court-free card, and for many years, it worked. Remember when Wells Fargo forged millions of its customers’ signatures to fraudulently open high-fee accounts in their names? The company argued that because the forged agreements included arbitration waivers, those customers couldn’t sue over the fraud:
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-ceo-of-wells-fargo-might-be-in-big-big-trouble/
Everybody got in on the act. If you’re a Pokemon Go player, you’re stuck in binding arbitration:
Same with Airbnb customers:
https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/2908/terms-of-service
Unsurprisingly, Trump loved binding arbitration. One of his first acts as president was to strip nursing home residents of the right to sue, which was great news for the nursing homes that murdered patients by abandoning them to covid:
(Older voters love the GOP, but it sure as hell doesn’t love them back.)
Forced arbitration wasn’t just a matter of civil justice — it was also a matter of economics. As Lina Khan and Deepak Gupta showed in their 2016 American Constitution Society paper “Arbitration As Wealth Transfer,” “Forced arbitration clauses are a form of wealth transfer to the rich”:
https://www.acslaw.org/issue_brief/briefs-landing/arbitration-as-wealth-transfer/
But the business leaders who bankrolled the forced arbitration epidemic were — characteristically — overconfident. It turns out that arbitration has weaknesses. It’s possible to do mass arbitration — to automate filing arbitration claims by thousands of corporate victims, which triggers hundreds of millions of dollars in arbitration fees, which the company is on the hook for, win or lose.
Uber was one of the first companies to discover this, when thousands of drivers brought arbitration claims at once. Not only would Uber have to pay for arbitrators in each case, but because arbitration decisions do not constitute precedents, it would have to argue each case, over and over again, even if it won. The company surrendered and paid drivers $146m:
This spooked Amazon, which amended its terms of service for Alexa to remove binding arbitration:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/02/arbitrary-arbitration/#petard
Law-tech firms like Fairshake created automation systems to enable mass arbitration filings at scale and on a budget:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/11/socialized-losses/#justice-restored
Something wonderful and wild started to happen. The companies that had argued for decades that binding arbitration was, well, binding, began to argue that arbitration waivers were unconstitutional, despite the precedents that they, themselves had bankrolled, at enormous expense.
The poster child of arbitration buyer’s remorse is Intuit, a company that has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars in tax-prep fees from the poorest Americans by tricking them into fake “Free File” products using dark patterns on its website.
Intuit is now facing arbitration at scale — more than 100,000 claims — and a court has ordered them to hire arbitrators to hear each and every one of them. After all it was Intuit — not its customers — who put the arbitration clauses in its terms of service, claiming that court cases were a bad way to resolve their disputes:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/11/socialized-losses/#justice-restored
Which brings me back to McDonald’s, hot coffee, and juicy stories about giant corporations being abused by the courts.
Have you heard about the Geico STD judgment? A woman caught an STD from her then-boyfriend when they had sex in his car. She won a judgment against him for $5.2m. Geico insures his car. A court has ordered Geico to pay that judgment.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/jackson-county-woman-says-she-222907031.html
But it’s more complicated than that!
It’s not a court that ordered Geico to pay the judgment — it’s an arbitrator. Geico is one of the companies that forces its customers into arbitration. Why would an insurance company want arbitrators to hear cases about its refusal to pay claims, rather than judges?
I mean, duh. Insurance companies have a long, dishonorable tradition of taking your premiums every month, then stranding you when you actually experience an “insured event,” arguing that the obscure, obfuscating language in their contract doesn’t cover your losses.
The real Geico STD story is this: Geico demanded that the case be heard by its arbitrator, who ruled against Geico, because Geico’s insurance terms did cover this event. Now, Geico is claiming that the arbitration it insisted upon “violates the company’s due process rights” and that its own arbitration agreement is unenforceable.
The case that’s being reported on isn’t about the $5.2m award for the STD. That happened way back in 2021. The case that’s in the news this week is a court telling Geico that when it forces its customers into arbitration, it has to abide by the arbitrator’s decision, even in those rare instances in which the arbitrator finds against the company who pays their fees.
But you wouldn’t know it from the coverage. All this stuff about arbitration is buried way down in the story. The headline is: $5.2m judgment for a venereal disease!
This is McDonald’s Hot Coffee 2.0. Someone pitched this story, and the pitch emphasized the poor, downtrodden corporation (Geico is owned by Warren Buffet and has $32b in assets) — not the fact that Geico is reaping what it sowed. The real story here is: “Corporation seeks to replace civil justice system with a kangaroo court, and gets kicked by its own kangaroo.”
Incidentally, if you miss Adam Conover’s “Adam Ruins Everything” and you have a Netflix password, check out “The G-Word,” his incredible new show about regulatory competence and the deadly threats it holds at bay:
https://www.netflix.com/title/81037116
[Image ID: The Adam Ruins Everything title card for ‘The Hot Coffee Case.’ It is a split panel with Adam Conover on the left at a judge’s bench, banging a gavel, and a confused Hamburgler on the right, in the witness box. They are separated by the center of the ’M’ in the McDonald’s ‘Golden Arches’ logo. Superimposed over this separator is the Geico lizard.]
The good people at Citations Needed released an episode on this criminal reframing of tort reform, called “Pop Torts and the Ready-Made Virality of Frivolous Lawsuit Stories.” A great listen for the cynical and soon-to-be-heartbroken!
kawaiibarbariansublime