Butterfly

The mirror replied "To whom?"

"The miller who made the flour for my bread," the queen would say, or "Whoever spun the thread my shawl was made of".

The second time, she says "To the King," and she is pleased to see herself once more.

The third time, she says "To the Royal Advisor," and is once more satisfied to see herself.

The fourth time, she says "To the scribe who takes the King's letters." She is shown the man's wife. And she seethes, but quiets herself, for it is only right that a man loves his wife.

The fifth time, she says "To the Court Wizard," and is shown the man's departed mother as he remembers her from his youth, radiant and smiling and warm and larger than life.

The tenth time, she says "To the Stable Master," and is shown the fastest horse in the stable, majestic and free as the wind even in captivity

"To the baker," she is shown the man's daughter, young and adorable and full of joy and laughter.

"To the artist who did my portrait," she is shown a painting of a woman done by the man's teacher, who he still looks up to now that he is well established himself.

"To the Royal Knight," she is surprised but not displeased to see the castle's entire guard force in the middle of doing drills.

The one hundredth time she asks the mirror, and it asks her "to whom?" she once again says, "To me." And she does the same the one hundred and second, and again and again and again.

thought about this because it's so frustrating when people argue that 'dying in childbirth' is a historical sort of event that doesn't happen nowadays (false) and therefore is irrelevant to the legal status of abortion, since it's not a real danger.

except it super is, and i think a lot of people haven't noticed that this argument in addition to simply being incorrect is basically the same as when people say we don't need vaccines for deadly diseases because no one gets those now anyway.

Like you will see these huge unsourced numbers where its like 76% of all Slovaks want to return to communism. And then you look into it and the closest thing you can find was a survey where part of the response was 74% of people said they miss how low crime was under communism, but also in that same poll 71% say they like the shift to a market economy

And idk its weird bc for USAmerican tankies every ethnicity in Eastern Europe exists in this weird quantum state where they both hunger for the return of communism every day of their lives while also being infected with genetic Nazi disease where anyone with Hungarian or Ukrainian or whatever background is polluted with Nazism from birth any requires constant surveillance by Russian troops to keep this at bay

But if we look at the actual opinion data, we find that this nostalgia is deeply influenced by specific nationalistic and economic impacts and concerns, rather than some general preference for a planned economy or Marxist ideology

(put this map together from survey data from Gallup, Pew, Levada, and a couple local pollsters)

Armenia misses the Soviet period bc the collapse of communism resulted in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict

For Russia, Soviet nostalgia is deeply rooted in bemoaning the loss of superpower status

The East Slavic republics Belarus and Ukraine and the Moldova republics have experienced significant economic difficulties since the fall of socialism. Ukraine had a positive view of the Soviet past until the Russian invasions of Crimea and Donbass soured them on the whole thing

The Baltic States and the West Slavic nations have meanwhile had really great economic performance since the fall of communism, so capitalism is much more popular there

Hungary is hard to gauge but local pollsters found pro-Kadarist sentiment so I'm going with that

Bulgaria and Romania more or less kept their authoritarian governments while transitioning to market relations in the economy, an arrangement that people seem dissatisfied with

Hears a cool video about it.

so, yeah, a lot of people who live in the city and walk/public transpo to and from grocery stores either bring two or three very sturdy bags, their backpacks, or as @transarsonist said, a folding cart!

but this also means that people shop strategically--if there's something big they need, sure, they may drive, or they will plan ahead for that shopping trip and bring multiple people, or get the littler, less cumbersome items at another point in the week.

Pictured: supermarket and grocery stores a few blocks away from my house, in the suburbs of Madrid:

This kind of response to things I say about sex work, which isn't always phrased like this but almost always focuses on me being male or a man or my pronouns, shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why mansplaining is bad.

I am a sex worker. I have been for a decade. The majority of people I know are sex workers and I'm embedded in sex worker community. I started before 18 and have done it in brothels, cars, my own home, clients' homes, saunas, and hotels.

The concept of marriage in American society is a legal construct, not a religious one.

Residents had serious concerns about the project. While companies often win major tax breaks by promising jobs and economic stimulation, data centers bring few permanent jobs and can drain municipal water resources, drive up electric bills, rob cities of tax revenues, and cause damaging noise, light, and air pollution. Already, Wisconsin residents have seen some of these impacts at data center sites in Port Washington and Beaver Dam. Residents in Port Washington have complained about the disruption caused by around-the-clock construction at the new data center. Families near the construction in Beaver Dam have reported that their wells have run dry.

Although the Menomonie City Council voted to annex and rezone the land for the data center in early September [2025], pressure from local campaigners was so great that Mayor Randy Knaack announced at a Sept. 22 city council meeting that he had notified Balloonist that the city would not be moving forward with a development agreement. More good news came in January when the Menomonie City Council voted unanimously to place additional regulations on data center projects.