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Okay so. The Romans think that sex doesn't count as real sex unless Someone Is Getting Penetrated By A Dick Or Dick-Adjacent Object. Very sort of dick-centric system.
So Latin has six words for "to fuck", divided into three pairs: one pair for each of the possible Holes (ass, mouth, pussy). In each pair there is a word for topping and a word for bottoming.
Most people who know a little about Latin fuck verbs know 'pedicare' and 'irrumare' from the first line of Catullus 16 (Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō), which is a poem about saying "absolutely shut the fuck up and piss all the way off" to fandom antis and purity police who are making repulsive accusations about you personally, based on things they're reading into your work from a bad-faith perspective. Catullus was so real for that and it's incredibly endearing to me that he was dealing with the same thing we are still dealing with. I got a hater in my askbox doing this about The Wisdom of Emperors just the other day, but I took the high road and, unlike Catullus, did not tell them "I will assfuck you and I will facefuck you"
So here sort of a chart about the verbs:
Topping | Bottoming
Mouth: irrumare | fellare
Ass: pedicare | cevere
Cunt: futuere | crisare
Another fun fact related to the fuck verbs was that the Romans didn't think about sexual orientation in terms of who you're attracted to, they thought about it in terms of "which is your favorite hole and what do you like to do with it." So you'll get graffiti (ancient roman subtweeting) about things like "Marcus is a fututor [cunt-fucker] and a pedico [ass-fucker] but omg girlies I also heard he's a fellator [cock-sucker] 👀👀👀👀" In the modern day we'd just call him bisexual, but in Ancient Rome it is not enough to know if someone is bisexual (they think it's kind of perverted if a man only fucks women, like do you have some kind of freaky pussy fetish???? you've never once even fucked a twink??? dat's gay, bro. gay to not be bi), you also have to know if he's being bisexual in a respectable sort of way
You will notice that pussy-eating is not on this list, because those words do not mean "to fuck", they translate more directly to just "pussy-licking" (cunnilingus), and because the Romans are sexist as all hell and think that's gross and filthy anyway. This is not ONLY because of pussy terror, it's also that the mouth is the most sacred part of the body -- so eating pussy or sucking a dick is actually considered slightly more "shameful" than getting fucked in the ass. (Please note as well that the fuck verbs are gender neutral -- if you're a roman man and your girlfriend owns a strap-on, she can [pedicare] you. but be careful because your sworn enemy in the forum will have a fucking FIELD DAY if he hears about that and will write a Mean Poem about you or subtweet you on a public wall)
The moral of this story is that the Ancient Romans were absolutely *GAGGING* for social media (see Martial's Epigrams, aka My Best Tweets), and the second moral of this story is that if this was a fun post for you, you should look at my kickstarter for alllllll of this kind of nonsense in the form of A Fantasy Novel That's Pretending To Be An Academic Paper With A Fake Bibliography And Foonotes aka The Wisdom of Emperors. And please signal boost this so everyone can know about Latin Fuck Verbs and Roman Subtweeting, we've really learned so much here together
THE FUCKING KICKSTARTER FOR THIS FUCKING BOOK LAUNCHES FUCKING TOMORROW AND IM FEELING SUPER FUCKING NORMAL AND NOT REMOTELY FUCKING STRESSED ABOUT IT, PLEASE SEND SOME FUCKING HELP*
*i put six "fucking"s in this post so you could assign one to each of the latin fuck words as per your own sense of the vibes for which hole/position is appropriate in which place
A new fantasy novel by Alexandra Rowland, author of A TASTE OF GOLD AND IRON, RUNNING CLOSE TO THE WIND, & YIELD UNDER GREAT PERSUASION
the fact that we only have “herculean task” and “sisyphean task” feels so limiting. so here’s a few more tasks for your repertoire
icarian task: when you have a task you know you’re going to fail at anyways, so why not have some fun with it before it all comes crashing down
cassandrean task: when you have to deal with people you KNOW won’t listen to you, despite having accurate information, and having to watch them fumble about when you told them the solution from the start (most often witnessed in customer service)
feel free to chime in i ran out of ideas much faster than i anticipated
Promethean task: opposite of a Cassandraean task. You have the right information, and SOMEONE has to share it. But it's all in the delivery and if you're the person to identify the problem you WILL be hated forever.
Oedipal Task: (1) Attempting to avoid an unspeakably awful outcome and in doing so creating the circumstances that will bring it about.
(2) Trying to solve an problem and discovering that you are in fact the problem you are trying to solve.
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About ten, fifteen years ago I wrote a story about a guy living in a Capitalist dystopia. His walls, furniture, and tableware are all covered in smart displays. Basically animated wallpaper. It's sold as being able to turn your room or objects into anything - A nice forest view, outer space, a fantasy realm... but the companies that run this stuff keep sneaking ads in.
It gets so bad he's always being woken up by adverts that offer insomnia cures and better bedding that play when he tries to sleep.
So he buys the ad-free tier, and it's great... for a few months. And then he starts getting adverts from 'premium partners'. So he goes up a level... and the same thing happens.
So he jailbreaks his wallpaper and sends all the ad servers to 0.0.0.0 and voila... he can sleep.
Until this SWAT team blows his door off and drag him off to jail. The Ad companies are suing him for loss of revenue for the products he' notionally have bought if he'd watched their adverts, based on some weird 'The average consumer buys X products with an average value of Y' calculation.
The judge is like 'well I dun wanna annoy the sponsors' so he RICO's this guy's house and possessions and sends him to jail.
... which is a nice relaxed non-volent offender jail for the corporately disenfranchised. But because these people have no money... there's no ads and now he's happy because the only place he's free... is in prison.
Which at the time was a bit much and now it's like: Called it.
Elon's suing companies for not advertising because he's losing revenue. He's also cranking the price of Ad Free Twitter. Disney and Amazon play adverts on their paid service when services used to be free because of the adverts... and now you have to pay to watch the adverts or go up a couple of tiers.
And google's going around freaking out about ad-blockers.
don’t like it when I’m about to board a plane to America and discover it just came from there not one hour ago and is getting sent straight back, like please put this girl in the stables and give her some oats, rub her coat till it shines, she’s earned a rest
Not to worry! My father was a pilot for several decades, and explained to me that planes are always eager to get back to the skies, and that being made to stay grounded for too long can be far more stressful for them. It might also ease your mind to know that they have home territories that they prefer to visit regularly, and if they've come from America, chances are good they're far more antsy to return home than to wait around in unfamiliar territory with other strange planes. An hour or two is plenty of time for them to eat and drink, and they digest better in the air than on ground, so it may be a matter of their comfort to get going again!
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#excuse me but are you telling me that the Apollo pic is made with the help of the SUN and the Artemis one with the help of the MOON??? #that's actually so poetic i want to cry
@gorandomshesaid wait i need to sit with this one. wait.
Very strong retired jockey (tm) vibes if they haven’t come through from the photo.
Gentleman was about 5’ or possibly shorter (shorter than me, I’m 5’2”.) they were tall boots but not, like, Dressage Tubes That Encase You.
He could move fairly quickly in them.
Spotted in the UK - Chepstow races.
They had a bit more of a pretty heel than normal riding boots.
Male jockeys often don’t mind “women’s” items if they fit properly and aren’t otherwise gendered.
Jockeys are often fairly dapper, particularly if the old school, and often buy handmade/custom tailored. These are almost certainly out of my price range, and may be beyond me entirely as a person.
Very slightly laced at the front but exquisitely plain otherwise, giving the impression of being moulded to the calf for the express purpose of showing off one’s calf muscles.
Yet they were generous enough in cut to tuck in some breeches!!! “Women’s” “fashion” boots could never!!!
They were cognac-coloured leather and they GLOWED.
I didn’t ask him myself because he was simultaneously entertaining three whole ladies with three separate conversations while keeping a border-collie stare on every single horse in sight, and I thought; that man’s brain is so busy right now; as a fellow gentleman and scholar i shan’t trouble him to be polite to me
I have to thank everyone who identified them as polo boots, with particular admiration for @twospotsoverhere for finding they are specifically French polo boots (with a back zip) and finding a maker:
www.argentinapolo.com/bootfrench.html
Something particularly fascinating about this maker is the way that these polo boots are custom-ordered. Graciously, they are customised at all the usual sticking points, including calf-width and height-from-the-ground. You are apparently expected to have different measurements for right and left feet and legs, too!
They’re also comparable in price to decent fashion boots.
It’s very clever to have something fitted past the sticking points. The full back zip access means that, despite age or disability, it’s easier to get tallboots on by yourself.
All in all, in addition to being very cool, it’s also a neat way to turn out looking sharp and horseful in your silver-fox years.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
At root, enshittification can only take place when companies can move value around. Digital tools make it easier than ever to do this, for example, by changing prices on a per-user, per-session basis, using commercial surveillance data to predict the highest price or lowest wage a user will accept:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
Digital "twiddling" represents a powerful system of pumps for moving value around, taking it away from users and giving it to business customers, then taking it from businesses and giving it to users, and then, ultimately, harvesting all the value for the company's shareholders and executives.
Twiddling is powerful because it's fine-grained, allowing businesses to extract more from their most vulnerable customers and workers, while reserving more equitable treatment for more empowered stakeholders who might otherwise take their business elsewhere.
But long before digitization made twiddling possible, businesses that found themselves in a position to make things worse for their customers and workers without facing consequences were accustomed to doing so. Think of the airport shop that sells water for $10/bottle: that's a ripoff whether you're in coach-minus or flying first class, and it's made possible by the TSA checkpoint that makes shopping elsewhere a time-consuming impossibility.
The airport shop is the only game in town – a "monopolist" in economics jargon. When a business has something you really want (or even better, something you need) and it's hard (or impossible) for you to get it elsewhere, they can take value away from you and harvest it for themselves.
The most obvious forms of monopoly extraction are high prices and low wages. Dollar stores are notorious for this, using their market power to procure extremely small packages of common goods in "cheater sizes" that have high per-unit costs (e.g. the cost per ounce for soap), while still having a low price tag (the cost per (small) bottle of soap). These stores are situated in food deserts, which they create by boxing in community grocers and heavily discounting their wares until the real grocers go out of business. They're also situated in work deserts, because driving regular grocers out of business destroys the competition for labor, too. That means they can pay low wages and charge high prices and make a hell of a lot of money, which is why there are so many fucking dollar stores:
That's the most obvious form of value harvesting, but it's not the only one. There are other costs that businesses can impose on their customers and workers. Think of CVS, the pharmacy monopolist that uses its vertical integration with bizarre, poorly understood middlemen like "pharmacy benefit managers" to drive independent pharmacies out of business:
If you've been to a CVS store recently, you have doubtless experienced a powerful form of value-shifting: understaffing. CVS (and the other massive chains in the cartel, like Walgreens) have giant stores with just one or two employees on the floor, often just a cashier and a pharmacist.
This makes them easy pickings for shoplifters, so all their merchandise is locked up in cabinets and when you want to buy something, you have to find the lone employee and get them to unlock the case for you. This is CVS trading your time for their wage-bill.
Then, you're expected to check out your own purchases – shifting labor from workers on CVS's payroll to you – with badly maintained machines that often misfire and require you to wait again for that lone employee to come and override them.
Meanwhile, that employee is absorbing a gigantic amount of frustration and abuse from customers who are paying high prices and enduring long waits – another cost that CVS shifts from their shareholders to someone else (workers, in this case).
Finally, CVS demands that publicly funded police respond to the inevitable shoplifting and other security problems created by running a big-box store with a skeleton crew, shifting costs from the business to everyone in the local tax-base.
In "Not Enough Workers For the Job," The American Prospect's Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein looks at the systemic trend towards understaffing that has swept across every sector of the US economy over the past five years:
Kaiser-Schatzlein lays the blame for many of life's frustrations at the feet of this business trend: "long lines, messy grocery aisles, organized theft, high hotel costs, frequent flight cancellations, deadly medication errors at pharmacies, increased use of medical restraints in nursing homes, and, more generally, a palpable and rising dissatisfaction with work."
As you can see from that list, understaffing affects everyone, from people with the wherewithal to buy a plane ticket to vulnerable elderly people who are literally tied to their beds or drugged into stupors for the last years of their lives.
There's academic work to support the idea that understaffing is on the rise, like a 2024 Kennedy School survey of 14,000 workers where a majority said that their workplaces are "always" or "often" understaffed. A 2023 study in the Journal of Public Health Management and Practice found that public health institutions need to hire 80% more workers to be adequately staffed. New York's Mt Sinai hospitals paid a $2m fine in 2024 for understaffing its ERs, as well as oncology and labor units. Another study blames understaffing for the rise of use of antipsychotic "chemical handcuffs" in nursing homes:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35926573/
The hits keep coming: the DoT Inspector General says that 77% of air traffic control is understaffed, with NYC ATC staffed at 54% of the correct level. In Texas, county jails have had to reduce their capacity due to understaffing (they have enough beds, but not enough turnkeys). Understaffing is behind much of the unprecedented union surge, with workers at Starbucks, railroads and elsewhere becoming labor militants due to understaffing. 83% of white-collar millennials say they're doing extra work to make up for vacant positions in their organizations. As Starbucks union organizers can attest, workers need unions if they want to have a hope of forcing their bosses to adequately staff their jobsites, so it's not surprising that understaffing has emerged at a time when union density is at rock bottom.
Kaiser-Schatzlein quotes the Kennedy School's Daniel Schneider, who identifies understaffing as a deliberate business strategy. Businesses don't hire enough workers because that makes them more profitable. It's not because "no one wants to work anymore" (though doubtless repeating that fairy tale helps shift the blame for long lines and poor service from real, greedy bosses to imaginary, greedy workers).
Private equity firms lead the charge here, "rolling up" multiple, competing businesses in a sector and then cutting staffing across all of them. Putting all the businesses in a given sector and region under common ownership means that when these businesses hack away at staffing levels, workers and customers have nowhere else to go. This is especially pernicious at nursing homes, where PE companies drastically reduce headcount, putting staff and patients alike at risk:
Private equity has just about declared victory in its decades-long war on community pharmacies, consolidating pharmacy ownership nationwide into just a few chains that are the poster-children for understaffing. These ghost-ships aren't just frustrating places to shop – they're a danger to their communities. As Kaiser-Schatzlein reports, Ohio fined CVS in 2021 for boarding up the walk-up pharmacies in its stores and forcing customers to use the drive-through, because there was only a single pharmacist on duty.
Without help, the lone pharmacist was unable to process deliveries, so CVS pharmacies' floors were littered with unopened parcels. Patients had to wait over a month to get their prescriptions filled. CVS refused to hire additional staff to process the backlog, and the on-duty staff worked under declining conditions, as the undermaintained air conditioning quit and indoor temperatures soared. Unsurprisingly, these stores had massive staff turnover, which also hampered their efficiency.
Understaffing in pharmacies leads to serious medication errors, which are proliferating across the US, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans every year. The errors are incredible, like the woman who died after getting chemotherapy drugs instead of antidepressants:
Pharmacists at chain stores like CVS are at elevated risk for kidney stones because they don't have time for bathroom breaks, so they adopt a practice of not drinking water during their shifts. One CVS pharmacist told Texas regulators, "I am a danger to the public working for CVS."
As ever, covid provides the ideal excuse for shifting value from customers and workers to shareholders. Today's high prices never came down after the "greedflation" that bosses boasted about to shareholders, even as they told customers that it was because of "supply chain shocks":
Likewise, staffing levels never came back from the covid skeleton crews that we all learned to deal with in the days of widespread acute illness and social distancing. Kaiser-Schatzlein spoke to hotel workers like Jianci Liang, a housekeeper at Boston's Hilton Park Plaza, who described a post-pandemic jobsite with 20 fewer housekeepers: "I sleep with pain, I wake up with pain, I go to work with pain." The Bureau of Labor says that hotel staffing levels are down 16% nationwide.
Prices (and profits) are up, though. Hotels are posting record profits and paying record executive salaries, wrung from facilities where the pools are closed and room cleanings happen on alternate days.
Workers absorb the cost of understaffing in their bodies and their psyches. It's not just physical exhaustion, it's also the abuse that is directly correlated with lower staffing levels. Frustrated customers vent their anger at grocery workers, flight attendants and other front-line workers.
I can't help but see a connection here to the AI bubble, which is fueled by the fantasy of a world without people:
The billionaire solipsists who have directed hundreds of billions of dollars in AI investment like to rhapsodize about a future where a boss's ideas are turned into products and services without having to be funneled through workers:
That's why AI has taken over customer service – the multi-hour waits for a customer service rep were always a way of shifting value from customers and workers to shareholders. Businesses could increase staffing at their call centers. Businesses could offer better products and services and reduce the number of people who need customer service. By refusing to do either, they make you wait on the line until you are suffused with murderous rage, and then expect their workers to deal with your anger. Turning the whole thing over to AI makes perfect sense – your problems won't be solved, and they don't have to pay the chatbot at all when you get angry at it:
"We don't care if this is done well" could well be the motto of the understaffing craze. The technical insights that sparked today's AI investment bubble could have happened at any time, but the ensuing investment tsunami is a product of a world dominated by large firms that are "too big to care" about the quality of their products – or their jobs.
There's psychological damage being done to the workers. When I was working at Starbucks and we were understaffed, the bosses blamed the workers. We got lectured and yelled at for not being fast enough. In reality, we needed at least five more people in that store to meet their speed and quality demands. But I didn't realize that.
I was young. I took it deeply to heart, that I (supposedly) wasn't able to ever do a good enough job. I don't think I was the only one; our shift lead cried in the dry goods supply closet at least once. When you're yelled at and told you're not good enough, day after day, when they make you feel like they're always on the verge of firing you, it's hard to bear.
"Concept expansion" (AKA "Semantic drift") is absolutely fine. It's a feature, not a bug:
As I wrote last year:
The fact that a neologism is sometimes decoupled from its theoretical underpinnings and is used colloquially is a feature, not a bug. Many people apply the term "enshittification" very loosely indeed, to mean "something that is bad," without bothering to learn – or apply – the theoretical framework. This is good. This is what it means for a term to enter the lexicon: it takes on a life of its own. If 10,000,000 people use "enshittification" loosely and inspire 10% of their number to look up the longer, more theoretical work I've done on it, that is one million normies who have been sucked into a discourse that used to live exclusively in the world of the most wonkish and obscure practitioners. The only way to maintain a precise, theoretically grounded use of a term is to confine its usage to a small group of largely irrelevant insiders. Policing the use of "enshittification" is worse than a self-limiting move – it would be a self-inflicted wound.
if i can impart any one piece of wisdom to y’all, it’s to, whenever possible, assume good intentions
assume people are trying their best, want to be good and treat others well, and that when their behavior doesn’t align with those goals, it’s because of outside factors that are pushing them to their limit
it’s hard to do, it doesn’t always come naturally, but it’s worth it
before anyone jumps in with an “op has clearly never worked in the service industry,” i work in a public facing library job
i have a patron who is mean as a snake. won’t respond when you greet her, barks orders at you, and is generally nasty
i couldn’t stand her & dreaded the moment she walked in the door, until i stopped one day & went “wow, to walk around feeling unhappy enough to treat people so horribly every day. what a difficult way to live.”
and so my tactics changed. i made a point to be extra kind & friendly to her. she changed her hair color one day & when i complimented her on it, she was very caught off guard & said “oh, thank you. my whole life i’ve thought i was ugly.”
now we’re at the point where she shows me pictures of watercolor paintings she made & says hi when she walks in the door. she’s not my favorite patron, but she’s perfectly okay. most unpleasant people aren’t inherently rotten, they’re just unhappy & coping with it poorly
assume people are always doing their best, even if their best happens to fall a bit short. assume good intentions
Look, it's simple. If a person has to actively work to make money, they're not "the rich" and they're not the problem. A surgeon making $200k a year still stops making money if they stop showing up to do surgery, because they're still selling their labor. The radical discrepancies in how we value different skills are certainly a problem, but the guy who makes money when he doesn't even get out of bed is the one making money on the value of other people's labor.
Uh, hey, be careful about that, because it sounds kinda like you think people on disability or social security (for retirement especially) are a problem
I'mm'a be real, bud, that is such a gross misreading of what I've said that I almost have to assume you're not arguing in good faith. To argue that people on disability are "making money on the value of other people's labor" is a colossal stretch. Hell, in the current system, it's a stretch to say they're making money at all. "Barely surviving, if that" would be more accurate.
People on disability aren't "making money on other people's labor". They're being supported by taxes because we as a culture believe that all people deserve to have their basic needs fulfilled. If your response to "aim your anger at capitalists, not laborers who get paid more than you" is to whatabout with disabled people, who rarely have any capital at all and are in no way the subject of this post, you may be doing exactly what the post is warning against, and aiming your anger at the wrong people.
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I think it could be cool to put together a board of the top Tumblristas in the world, that could see previews of what's coming up and advise on strategic direction. Who should be on it?
Okay, look. We're gonna do it like this, Matt. I used to work in market research. This one is free, next time I expect a month of free premium and if there's a third time I expect a job.
TO EVERYONE ELSE:
A series of ten reblogs is about to follow, since you can only have one poll per reblog. Please answer all ten polls. If you don't see them all, check the notes (this shouldn't take me long so if it's more than like, fifteen minutes since I posted this one they should all be there.)
7) with the understanding that Tumblr needs to attract new users or convert more current free users to paying users in order to stay online, what do you think of Matt's "top tumblrista" idea?
Absolutely not--this is very famously the influencer-hating site
Absolutely not--this site is too diverse for that to work
Absolutely not, for other reasons
I'm actually liking this poll method
The poll method is clunky but something similar would be great
In the following question, "pre-social media" refers to platforms like LiveJournal, forums, alt.net boards, early MySpace, and similar spaces.
9) thinking about the given definition of "pre-social media," how much do you agree with the statement "I think most tumblr users I know would prefer pre-social media to modern platforms like Facebook and X"?
"Strongly agree" is not strong enough
Strongly agree
Agree
Kind of maybe agree?
Neutral/I don't know enough about pre-social media to say
it's meee I'm your guardian angel hiiiiii 😇 okay🙏 so. in about six months, you're gonna die of starvation. 🥺 and if I don't protect you, I will get: #fired! 🫢 and that is No Good 🙅♀️ hahaaa So. 🙏 I looked into causes of starvation, and it turns out: Your death is totally preventable! 😯 Uh oh! 😆 There's more than enough food to sustain you without interfering with anyone else's survival, but you're not allowed to have it! 🤨 Whaaat? 🤷♀️ Apparently, your death is premeditated by thousands of things called "shareholders." So. 🙏 I've been killing people,
germansingergirl
ellievsbear
vaporwave
stormborns
areudirty
janainaart
pixelskylines
