デニーズ

Reader-submitted drawing of Mario and Peach featured in a 2003 issue of the Japanese Nintendo Dream magazine.

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

It might look something like this: Goodwife A is great at getting stains out of clothes and enjoys laundry as a task, so everyone takes their laundry to her. Goodwife B pays her in milk and butter from their cow, and Goodwife C shows up to keep her company and take care of EVERYONE'S mending and darning, and Spinster D runs her father's bakery so she pays in bread and muffins, and Alewife E pays with the best beer in the county, and nobody's kitchen gardens are as productive as Granny F's and Widow G's so they've got veggies and herbs galore to exchange.

We DO criminally underestimate the value and prevalence of women's labor in history, but we also underestimate how much more fluidly communities functioned than they do now. Every woman absolutely did learn how to sew from the time she was a tiny child -- but once you're an adult and you've learned that you Hate sewing more than anything, maybe you make a friend who loves it (or at least who doesn't mind it). Then, as long as you buy your own cloth, she's happy to sew clothes for both your family and hers in exchange for you doing all the cooking, or watching the kids and teaching them to read and do basic sums, or churning the butter from the milk of both families' cows.

An awareness of historical women's labor is crucial -- but without an awareness of women's businesses, we can sometimes end up playing into the conservative propaganda that people don't need each other, that it's possible to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, that women are incapable and unenterprising, and that therefore their place is In The Home, being worked to the bone doing every task (and if they don't do every task, then they're lazy and a failure of a wife).