a restless vivid thing

Is there a historical or etymology reason why even though "Lady" is the feminine form of "Lord" it feels like if you use the term "Lady" as the intended form of respect, it kinda feels like you're being disrespectful by treating them like a normal person in comparison to when you use "Lord"?

(Bear in mind that all of this is a sweeping generalisation of a thousand years of history, so while most of it is broadly true in most cases, there were definitely numerous exceptions!)

Historically, feminine titles in English peerages were typically ranked as strictly inferior to their masculine counterparts. That's why a reigning king's wife is a queen, but a reigning queen's husband is a prince (or "prince-consort", if you want to get real specific); the former case admits no ambiguity regarding who's really in charge because "king" is a superior title to "queen", but in the latter case the husband can't be a king because if he was he'd technically outrank his spouse. Indeed, in many periods the only way to access a given feminine title was to marry the holder of its masculine counterpart, since women simply couldn't inherit titles. In such cases, unmarried female offspring of titled nobility and royalty would be styled "Lady" as a sort of generic "this person is a noble in theory but isn't allowed to hold a Real Title because she's a Girl" honorific.

Vimes was beginning to wish he had looked more closely at the most recent additions before Igor came lurching up the stairs to inform him:

"They have ethcaped, thir."

"Escaped. What has escaped, Igor."

"Thome of my.. appendageth, thir."

"Appendages."

"Yeth, thir. Of the... intimate variety."

"Of the intimate..." Vimes trailed off as the dawning horror overwhelmed his vocal cords.

He rallied. "Igor. HOW have they escaped? They are not known for their... perambulatory abilities."

"Really, thir? I've alwayth found them to have a mind of their own at timeth."

Vimes was staying calm. Yes. That was it. He was staying very calm. Definitely NOT thinking AT ALL about how Vetinari and... Good lord, The Times, would react to marauding pack of penises. Would it be a pack? Or would they go off on their own?

"I wath exthperimenting with cuthtom grown oneth, you know. For thothe who cannot grow their own."

[1] where an ordinary working class child CAN form a magical bond with a horse, in the form of a pie, labeled as beef.

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? 📍

This electronic music box is not technically a new piece, but a rework of an old one!

When I first made this in 2023 I had no laser machine, and had only just started doing more elaborate art pieces. The woodwork was rough, the details/designs were made of cardstock, and the internal electronics were a total mess. You couldn’t even play the music at the same time as the rotating dancers 😬 I’ve come a long way since then!

I remade the entire base from scratch, out of engraved wood this time, and redesigned all the electronics. I’ve also re-done the halos, changed the center rotating rod from acrylic to brass, and tidied up a lot of misc internal things, with the end result being a piece that is much sturdier, cleaner, and works much more smoothly. And WHY spend hours doing this, you ask?

Art by Sam Rodil

May’s Theme: #TravellingBeekeeper

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He was 23 when his first novel was published. After six years of writing professionally every single day. The Carpet People was a lovely novel, from a lovely writer, but almost all of Terry’s iconic truth bomb lines come from Discworld.

The Colour of Magic, the first ever Discworld novel was published in 1983. Terry was 35 years old. He had been writing professionally for 18 years. His career was old enough to vote, get married and drink. We now know that at 35 he was, tragically, over half way through his life. And do you know what us devoted, adoring Discworld fans say about The Colour of Magic? “Don’t start with Colour of Magic.”

It is the only reading order rule we ever give people. Because it’s not that great. Don’t get me wrong, very good book, although I’ll be honest I’ve never been able to finish it, but it’s nowhere near his later stuff. Compare it to Guards Guards, The Fifth Elephant, the utterly iconic Nightwatch and it pales in comparison because even after nearly 20 years of writing, half a lifetime of loving books and storytelling Terry was still learning.

He was a man with a wonderful natural talent, yes. But more importantly he worked and worked and worked to be a better writer. He was writing up until days before he died.  He spent 49 years learning and growing as a writer, taking so much joy in storytelling that not even Alzheimer’s could steal it from him. He wouldn’t want that joy stolen from you too.

Terry was a wonderful, kind, compassionate, genius of a writer. And all of this was in spite of many many people telling him he wasn’t good enough. At the age of five his headmaster told him that he would never amount to anything. He died a knight of the realm and one of the most beloved writers ever to have lived in a country with a vast and rich literary tradition. He wouldn’t let anyone tell him that he wasn’t good enough. And he wouldn’t want you to think you aren’t good enough. He especially wouldn’t want to be the reason why you think you aren’t good enough. 

You’re not Terry Pratchett. 

You are you.

“Yes,” I said.  “But I like seeing how authors grow.”

I can’t. Every single sentence in this could not be more wrong if the author deliberately set out to be the wrongest person in wrongville. I just. 

I don’t care what else might be useful in this book, if your introduction is as fundamentally incorrect as this, the reliability of everything else you’ve ever said and that your editor has ever touched is immediately thrown into question. 

pictured- super easy, giving a sheep a haircut would be so much worse right? im sure the man on a horse with a whip and gun is there to make sure everyone is having a good time and finally the primary dumb part of the highlighted segment- the assumption that if cotton didnt exist you would sleep on a pile of straw. what? is this talking today or talking medieval times again? flipping NEOLITHIC folks were bright enough to lay a blanket on top of their straw pile before they took a nap on it.  even back when straw beds were common you didnt lay on the straw, the straw was a filling for a leather or canvas bag so that you didnt get poked, and even then chances are pretty good you stuffed your bed with feathers because if theres something an agrarian society has more then enough of its poultry. if you are talking today i challenge you to go to a matress store and find a cotton filled bed- theyre filled with springs or foam, and for all points and purposes the foam is just a high tech version of straw that doesn’t rot. that, and any modern mattress is synthetic fiber to combat body odor and sweat absorption

this is not how beds work

these pre-cotton folk seem to be pretty comfortable, even if they hadnt invented perspective yet. as there is no crown im pretty sure they werent importing their fabrics from india or egypt

As far as Europe is concerned, they hadn’t figured out how to dye cotton and get anything even remotely similar in quality to the hundreds of colour-fast styles they’d later run into in India. But they also knew how to weave brocades. And stripes. And repeat patterns. And a lot of them liked obnoxious colour combinations.

(This one is a cheat b/c it’s a European image of a woman in Persian clothing, but I love her stripe combinations too much to leave her out.) 

And have some plaids, parti-colours, checks and stripes for good measure:

At first glance, it genuinely does appear a book on fibercraft made it all the way to the “prize-awarding” stage without the input of a single fibercrafter at any point in the process, which is quite astonishing, since fibercrafters are not exactly Quiet and Reserved. The immense amount of interconnected knowledge contained in a single woman knitting on the train is just boiling under the surface of her skin like a living thing, waiting to leap out and sink its teeth into someone’s throat. You don’t mess around with Fiber Fandom; the unexpectedly serious Discourse will cover everything from medieval economies to the proper husbandry of goats.  

I’d be rather tempted to quietly ask the author about this, and just see if it’s something he propagates throughout the book, or if it’s just a passage he popped in for hyperbole and attempted humor to set up his argument (perhaps there’s a gotcha on the next page where he says “LOL JUST KIDDING, I WAS JUST TRYING TO SET A SCENE”) and it didn’t come off quite right. Like, deliberately attempting to mislead in order to set up a one-two punch. 

I really would be interested in hearing more about the book, OP!

The book is Empire of Cotton – the photo is of page xiii of the introduction, for the curious – and there is no punchline. Some portions of the book, including the introduction, are available for perusal on google books.

I will cop to not having read the whole book - I wallbanged it (read: politely returned it to the library shelf while quietly muttering curse words) after the introduction - but the introduction itself moves on neatly from there to discuss how nascent European capitalism made the west the center of cotton manufacture and trade. 

The book is part of a new-ish movement in material culture studies and, I assume, economics (though that’s in no way my field), looking at the global networks that facilitated movement of goods and commodities; international and cross-period biographies of things. He’s discussing cotton as a catalyst commodity for western capitalist economies, and the brutality of the slave trade that went along with the quest for cotton profits. 

Given that he’s coming from economic history as a background, it’s in no way surprising to me that he doesn’t appear to have spoken to a single fibre artist in the process. In my experience there is a vast gulf in perceived status between “academic” and “applied” experts and that certainly seems to map in this case. 

(This is normally when I’d launch into a speech about the serious underlying misogyny inherent in the academy’s treatment of dress and textile studies, the exclusion of embodied knowledge as serious inquiry, and the way subjects like fashion theory are considered trivial unless specifically couched in, say, economic terms, but I don’t have the energy for it right now.) 

I’m happy to reblog your explanation - I think it’s extremely fair and clear, and I hope that it will spread. It even looks like a book I’d leaf through myself. I think you did it justice.