a winter-frozen bee

[ID: post by New-Cleckit Dominie (not sure how this will come out on a screen reader - the joke is that the text, which is a pastiche of william carlos williams' famous "plums" poem, has been poorly transcribed by OCR software so it gets increasingly garbled as it goes on):

"This is just to say

I have OCRed

the text

thet was in

tne arch:ve

and whicb

yov were prabaldy

seamhing for "breahtast"

Fargme ms

fheg mem debo:w5

sb ?mect

mmb 5c oc1b"

ID ends]

I’ve been trying to put my finger on why Hades being depicted as a villain is so annoying in other media but works so well in Hadestown, and I think I’ve figured out why: Hadestown Hades isn’t the bad guy because he’s the god of the DEAD; instead, he’s the bad guy because he’s the god of WEALTH. Usually, whenever Hades appears in a movie or video game, he has some stupid motivation like “ughh I’m tired of being lord of the underworld I wanna be lord of everything” or “I’m the Greek mythology version of the western concept of Satan, fear me!!” but Hadestown really said screw that and made his motivation “I love my wife so much but we have a shitty marriage arrangement and her long absence combined with my severe self-doubt has lead me down the hellish road to corruption by all the riches under the ground.”

#okay but you could argue! that in hadestown specifically#hades being the god of wealth and the god of death are both part of him being a capitalist#unsafe practices and hazardous materials kill or disable a LOT of construction workers#labour laws are written in blood#and it’s impossible to get filthy rich like that without exploiting other human beings

Sorry @exeiguess but your tags passed peer review. This is it exactly. The two are intertwined especially when it comes to discussions of labor and worker’s rights and exploitation, and THAT’S part of what makes him work so perfectly as the antagonist in Hadestown.

you never know what someone is going through. for instance i didnt know i was going through anything until about 2 years later. i thought i was just chilling

Does the rest of the world know about tides in Britain. In fact do British people know about tides in the rest of the world. The average tidal range in the British isles is like 5 metres. The average range in the USA is like 1. The highest is I think the Severn estuary which hits 15 metres?? The Mediterranean is like 30cm. Why is this island doing this to us (rhetorical don’t make me get into wavelengths)??? The tide in Morecombe Bay has a top speed of 10mph or 30mph in the surge channels (it kills people). Do people know about this?? I just assumed the whole world was like this you mean the rest of you don’t get drilled on looking up the tide times before you go to the beach???

Oh interesting! I (Aus) do pay attention to tide times because the shoreline in my hometown is a lot of shallow flat that isn’t swimmable at low tide.

At the surf beaches I grew up near you do keep some awareness of the tide (particularly at what point the turn from high tide is obviously what’s causing the undertow), but it’s not a hazard in itself- it’s the interaction between tide, wind and seasonal factors creating rips that you worry about. Unless you’re a surfer, the lifeguard designated swimming area will have marked out a safe spot.

I just checked, the biggest tidal difference at my favourite beach is 2m.

Huh.

cats are so naturally skilled at Writhing In Sunbeam. i wish i had even a fraction of this talent but instead i just have all these bones

Nobody really knows what makes a person go to bed

Helen Whitaker, England

" Sycamore Seed "

Glass , copper and brass

'why is so much politically-focused genre fiction centred on monarchies' many reasons, but one which I think deserves attention: monarchy is an obvious way of tying together the dysfunctions of the domestic to those of the state

obsessed with the way epic manhood is defined as being remembered– doing great deeds that will be the stuff of song for generations to come, dying in glory and being memorialized by tombs that inscribe greatness on the physical landscape– and epic womanhood is defined as keeping memory alive– helen weaving the images of men about to die, penelope weaving laertes’s glory into his shroud, cassandra raising the cry and andromache the lament for hector–

something about manhood as passive and womanhood as active in relation to memory is just… such an incredible way of framing things

oh and the way it’s helen who calls it κακὸν μόρον, ὡς καὶ ὀπίσσω ἀνθρώποισι πελώμεθ᾽ ἀοίδιμοι ἐσσομένοισι (a terrible fate, that we will become the songs of men yet to be)!

because helen wants to be a storyteller, helen is meant to be a storyteller. helen wants to encode men’s lives in tapestry and eulogy. that’s how we see her when she’s left on her own: striving for domesticity and simplicity, not fame. she is, in homer, the ideal woman, not just beautiful but devoted to her family, modest and hardworking, and so very aware of the responsibility of carrying the memories of those who die.

but her curse is to be the stuff of stories, not a storyteller. the very epitome of woman, yet cut off from the purpose of womanhood within epic.

#the ideal woman in accordance with ancient greek misogyny stays within the home and therefore has no reputation #helen is automatically disqualified by leaving with paris but also by having such extraordinary beauty that she has kleos #this would be acceptable for a goddess but not a mortal woman #helen is on the threshold of those two states as a demigod #anyway i love op’s point that women are expected to preserve the kleos of men while having none themselves! (via @terpsikeraunos)

elizabeth gaskell has written what i think is the best representation of british culture: the bus driver thought i wanted to get on so they pulled over JUST FOR ME and i can’t possibly explain that it was a mistake so you know what? i’ll just get on this bus that’s leaving this city entirely and heading for the countryside, where i had zero intention of going today, for the sole purpose of avoiding confrontation

(yes i know he did just get pied off but still)

Arthurian characters ranked by how good a geologist I think they'd be:

@currentlycryingaboutlancelot You're so right I forgot about that, she really is the geologist of all time.

i DESPERATELY need a Three POV of platform decay holy shit. it gets tapped to go on a mission and its instructions are ‘cause a distraction and then go back to the shuttle and wait for me’ and it instead decides to cause the distraction and then go on a day-long speedrun freeing as many secunits as possible. and then it gets yelled at by everyone. “can it be a we problem” “no. get in the shuttle” secunit three i love you so much

Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” that was written in 1950 is set on the day of August 4th, 2026 (tomorrow)!! Now’s your chance to read it around the time it’s based in!

Egon Schiele - Port of Trieste - 1907

The awnings III - Antonio Barahona , 2026.

Spanish , b. 1984 -

Oil on wood , 90 x 60 cm.

Sometimes I think about how so much of what makes Murderbot who it is comes down to it being a rental SecUnit. When Leonide tells Arada in Network Effect that Company Units have a reputation for being dangerous, she's probably 100% correct. Because of their nature as plug-and-play security for anyone, they have to be designed to be far more versatile than the SecUnits a corporate like BE owns. Three has to be able to secure salvage operations and mining outposts and work with BE's systems and that's kind of it. BE might need its security to fend off hostile takeovers and workplace uprisings, but Murderbot has to be able to do all those things and planetary surveys with unknown hostile fauna, and asteroid mining belts, and whatever the next client might need it to do, and it has to be able to work with whatever other proprietary software the new clients have every single time. It's better at adapting to new situations than Three partly because it's older and more experienced, but also because that's a big part of its function.

And at the same time, Company SecUnits are treated much worse than Three by virtue of being rentals. Many--if not most--of Murderbot's clients didn't want to have any SecUnits, but were required to take them per Company rental agreements for other equipment. Even the ones who specifically did want SecUnits didn't have any investment in what happened to them. They were the equivalents of the U-haul you'd rent to move your couch across town. They just needed to do a job briefly and hopefully be in good enough shape to get their deposit back at the end, but if not, eh. No big deal. Murderbot has never had the same clients for very long, and it's never had to work with the same SecUnits for very long. Every contract changes. Nothing lasts.

No wonder MB loves fiction while Three loves nonfiction. Three has seen basically nothing about reality outside of its job and wants to know what's out there. MB has seen way too much reality and would like some breaks from that shit now, please.

Op why did you sentence this comedy gold to the tags