you gotta make your own stuff work out

You’re fourteen and you’re reading Larry Niven’s “The Protector” because it’s your father’s favorite book and you like your father and you think he has good taste and the creature on the cover of the book looks interesting and you want to know what it’s about. And in it the female character does something better than the male character - because she’s been doing it her whole life and he’s only just learned - and he gets mad that she’s better at it than him. And you don’t understand why he would be mad about that, because, logically, she’d be better at it than him. She’s done it more. And he’s got a picture of a woman painted on the inside of his spacesuit, like a pinup girl, and it bothers you.

But you’re fourteen and you don’t know how to put this into words.

And then you’re fifteen and you’re reading “Orphans of the Sky” because it’s by a famous sci-fi author and it’s about a lost generation ship and how cool is that?!? but the women on the ship aren’t given a name until they’re married and you spend more time wondering what people call those women up until their marriage than you do focusing on the rest of the story. Even though this tidbit of information has nothing to do with the plot line of the story and is only brought up once in passing.

But it’s a random thing to get worked up about in an otherwise all right book.

Then you’re sixteen and you read “Dune” because your brother gave it to you for Christmas and it’s one of those books you have to read to earn your geek card. You spend an entire afternoon arguing over who is the main character - Paul or Jessica. And the more you contend Jessica, the more he says Paul, and you can’t make him see how the real hero is her. And you love Chani cause she’s tough and good with a knife, but at the end of the day, her killing Paul’s challengers is just a way to degrade them because those weenies lost to a girl.

Then you’re seventeen and you don’t want to read “Stranger in a Strange Land” after the first seventy pages because something about it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. All of this talk of water-brothers. You can’t even pin it down.

And then you’re eighteen and you’ve given up on classic sci-fi, but that doesn’t stop your brother or your father from trying to get you to read more.

Even when you bring them the books and bring them the passages and show them how the authors didn’t treat women like people.

Your brother says, “Well, that was because of the time it was written in.”

You get all worked up because these men couldn’t imagine a world in which women were equal, in which women were empowered and intelligent and literate and capable. 

You tell him - this, this is science fiction. This is all about imagining the world that could be and they couldn’t stand back long enough and dare to imagine how, not only technology would grow in time, but society would grow. 

But he blows you off because he can’t understand how it feels to be fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and desperately wanting to like the books your father likes, because your father has good taste, and being unable to, because most of those books tell you that you’re not a full person in ways that are too subtle to put into words. It’s all cognitive dissonance: a little like a song played a bit out of tempo - enough that you recognize it’s off, but not enough to pin down what exactly is wrong.

And then one day you’re twenty-two and studying sociology and some kind teacher finally gives you the words to explain all those little feelings that built and penned around inside of you for years.

It’s like the world clicking into place. 

Ex:

Call this one Fought A Grizzly And Won

Call this one the Industrial Workplace Accident

Exhibit A: He Is So Fucking Gender

Hippie energy/fashion sense in a masculine/butch way. But not in a way that makes you feel like he thinks smelling good is unhealthy/unnatural (if you grew up in that community You Know What I’m Talking About). The FLOWERS, the LEAF DECALS, the EARTH TONES, the SANDALS, also everyone who draws him with a pierced ear and/or a laurel wreath is holding my heart in their hands.

TATTOO SLEEVE TATTOO SLEEVE TATTOO SLEEVE TATTOO SLEEVE TATTOO SL-

Crew cut but in a soft Gender way, not an Aggressively Heterosexual Dudebro way.

Hot Manlet Representation (I am not even two feet taller than this man, short hot men give me life)

Built like a male ballerina/Greek athlete, just, yeah… yeah.

Exhibit B: You Are My Dad Boogie-Woogie-Woogie

It is very possible Orym may have kids, presumably (hopefully) grown adult kids. We don’t really know how old he is. Halflings live to 150-200ish, Scanlan may have been the oldest PC chronologically but he was only like, a tenth of the way through his life and had a full grown kid. Long lived races just Do That lol. We know there’s probably a dead husband in there somewhere so like, maybe?? Regardless of whether he’s an actual dad, his DILF energy is off the charts!

Unfortunately For Him, he is the smartest, most practical party member two campaigns in a row. #Relatable

“You really tied the whole room together” DAD JOKES

He Is So Tired, but he’s super sweet and patient anyway.

Treating not knowing Jack shit about magic being treated like not knowing Jack shit about technology: wigging out after being sent messages, the Sending Stone Shenanigans. Again #relateable

Exhibit C: Built to Protect and Serve aka He Is So SOFT

Literally built mechanically to protect his friends. Designed to take hits for other people by either leaping in front of them with his shield or goading them to pick on him instead. Amazing.

Is immediately ready to throw down bow matter how cautious he was being before if someone, NPC or PC, is in danger.

Absolutely REFUSED to take a healing potion unless it was suggested he could save someone else with it. (And then he did!)

Generally being the moral compass/soft leader of the group, soft steady handed direction, love it.

Not really soft boy thing, but that investigator shit is like, sexy but in a Columbo way. Unassuming guy being really good at checking shit out.

Exhibit D: He’s Just A Little Guy Come On He’s Just A Smallest Little Tiny Dude Aww Man And Also It’s His Birthday He’s Just A Little Birthday Boyyyy

Climbing creates in order to open them

The ‘to scale’ sandwich situation

“I pat him on the hip”

Jeezus I am a short king myself, and this man is canonically up to my elbow like what

He is just So Small

Just a tiny little man

He fumkin BOUNCE, like the worlds most lethal Tigger

Weird hang ups about pie

Flirting with Dorian just a wee bit (just like he is wee)

“World’s Littlest Punching Bag” D:

Liam method acting and constantly reminding us physically and verbally he is Oh So Small to distract us from the fact Orym has the most HP aside from Ashton

In Conclusion

haven’t watched CR in ages, but love all the hot boi Essek art i’ve been seeing, so have some from me! (partly thanks to @horacia putting said content on my dash :) )

“No one knew!” has been repeatedly disputed and disproven, to the point where the mass narrative of it has become terribly indicative of people’s need to dispel feelings of guilt and shame above all else. Even above telling the truth.

Im p sure the original narrative of “no one knew!” was in part the result of low-level German and Polish bureaucrats seeking to avoid arrest and prosecution, because there was a dearth of specific written orders in regards to outlining the machinations of The Final Solution. Which allowed many to claim ignorance and innocence. But it also has been useful in the reimagining of the allies role in the Holocaust, reimagining their complicit silence and inaction into the shock and disgust of witnesses and good liberators.

Because people DID know. Jan Karski infiltrated the Warsaw ghetto before it was liquidated and witnessed firsthand exactly what was happening to the Jewish people. He was sent by the Polish Underground to the UK carrying a message for the UN titled “The Mass Extermination of the Jews in German Occupied Poland.” He had a direct audience with Roosevelt, where he attempted to provide details of what was happening to compel the allied forces to act before it was too late. This was in 42-43.

In 1944, the New York Times published a story about the Warsaw ghetto uprising WHILE IT WAS HAPPENING. This wasn’t a mystery in the states. People knew about the forced ghettoization of the Polish Jews and what they faced as they fought back.

Lanzmann’s Shoah presents several interviews with Polish onlookers outside of Treblinka who, in laughing and awkward remembrance, explained how they would slash their fingers across their throats at Jewish people arriving in cattle cars to “warn them about their fate.” This was in the early period of the Holocaust, before the mechanized, mass exterminations of Auschwitz.

Also in Shoah, several Polish women and men in villages outside of Sobibor (who smilingly explain that their lot in life improved after the local Jews were rounded up and transported to the death camp) acknowledged that yes, at the time, they knew of the fate of their neighbors. They knew they were going to their death and would not be returning. Which is the only way we can explain how quickly Jewish homes and businesses were taken over by their neighbors and city councils.

“The big ghettos, such as Warsaw, took on a kind of colonial appearance, as rickshaws replaced automobiles (stolen by Germans) and the streetcar service (restricted by Germans). The luster of subjugation attracted German tourists, who often returned home with a pleasant sense of imperial mastery.”

Snyder points to Elisabeth Harvey’s “Women and the Nazi East: Agents and Witnesses of Germanization” for more details about early/prepatory elements of the Holocaust as a purposefully tourist-accessible spectacle.

From the beginning, the Holocaust was driven by publicly visible violence and deprivation, and often was deliberately made as visible as possible because it served as propaganda to a huge cohort of Germans who actively supported the Nazi regime’s actions and in many cases specifically participated in them.

The next morning the “scrubbing parties” began. Members of the Austrian SA [the Nazi paramilitary], working from lists, from personal knowledge, and from the knowledge of passerby, identified Jews and forced them to kneel and clean the streets with brushes This was a ritual humiliation. Jews, often doctors and lawyers or other professionals, were suddenly on their knees performing the menial labor in front of jeering crowds. Ernest Pollak remembered the spectacle of the “scrubbing parties” as “amusement for the Austrian population.” A journalist described the “fluffy Viennese blondes, fighting on another to get closer to the elevating spectacle of the ashen-faced Jewish surgeon on hands and knees before a half dozen young hooligans with Swastika armlets and dog-whips.”

Admittedly, that’s from the Anschluss period, which usually is framed as preparation for rather than the enactment of the Holocaust. That said, Snyder lays out the clear historical case that from those kinds of specifically public humiliations to later attempts to incite pogroms in conquered territory emerged the ideas of ghettoizing, then starving, and ultimately systematically killing Jews.

Worsted: Nothing to see here. This is the archetype of yarniness and I am the archetype of knitting. Stable. Secure. Can pass off hobby as casual if need be. 

Bulky: I am a WIZARD and I am making VAST amounts of cloth appear by MAGIC. You get a hat! And you get a hat! Everybody gets a hat! Also my scarf is now 18 ft long but that’s just…you know. For fun. 

Baby/Sport: I am making littol things. Every stitch represents tender love. Yes I did listen only to horror podcasts while making this but what does that matter? There’s a lace flower but a baby’s existence is all about showing off what you can make, just because I’m not a parent doesn’t mean I can’t be part of that.

Sock/Fingering: Completely unhinged. Every project is the building of an obsession-washed edifice, that will never, ever, ever be done. Time ceases to exist. Worse podcasts must be found, worse movies must be found, because the most important parts of the brain must serve THE PATTERN.