The Lazy Magpies' Nest

Hey, thanks for the feedback!

We’re exploring more ways of making Tumblr financially sustainable, so we can keep this weird ship afloat. You don’t have to buy into it if you don’t want, but like Matt, current interim Tumblr CEO, said in a recent post:

Remember that right now Tumblr costs a lot more to run than it makes, part of that bet is predicated on the idea that it’s losing money now but it’ll grow and make it up later. We just have to make it through this interim period by listening to users, iterating quickly, and shipping high-quality updates.

Love,

Everyone who bemoaned the advertiser-friendly porn ban or got exhausted by the introduction of autoplaying ads with sound on the mobile app ought to be celebrating.

This is the most exciting policy decision tumblr has made in a decade.

Not only does this show a genuine good faith effort to engage with users now.

It gives tumblr financial incentive in the future to listen to our needs instead of advertisers.

This is probably the most user friendly thing tumblr has ever done. It could be one of the most user friendly things possible.

This is amazing, and we need to be lining the fuck up to support it.

You know that phrase, "if you're not the customer, you're the product"?

Reblog the positive and enthusiastic posts about it, get the word out.

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* star sweeper *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

I’ve been checking some of the other large Tolkien fan communities (theonering.net, Tolkien Society, Silmarillion Writers’ Guild) to see if anyone has released a statement about the new policies, but I haven’t seen anything yet; nearly all discussion so far has been relegated to the site’s new appearance and the new artwork released on it. (Although there is this hilarious Reddit discussion about the new policies.)

I’m not sure how many Tolkien fanfic sites are left since I only use AO3, but this makes me wonder what could happen to the fanfic sites that haven’t yet moved their archives onto AO3 and don’t have the protection of AO3′s lawyers, should the estate decide to crack down on Tolkien fanfic sites. This could really deal a blow to some of those communities if the estate firmly enforces the new policies.

Plus, this:

Almost every damn country in the world has a Tolkien Society! They’re not for profit, they live from donations and do literally nothing else except a) sit around and discuss Tolkien’s work and b) promote Tolkien’s work at events. They’re literally providing free advertising. Now who wants to bet that these annual licenses will be prohibitively expensive??

Oh, they also don’t want any music inspired by Tolkien’s works…

other things they want to be able to deny people permission for:

Any public readings of Tolkien’s work, even non-commercial ones. Tolkien Reading Day has been a well-established event in the fandom for years, and they would very much like this to not be a thing.

Documentaries. They will only accept requests from “established commercial broadcasters” so I guess that rules out video essays and other amateur documentaries.

Using his name in the “promotion” of “events or festivals”. What is an event or festival? Well, I don’t know, but it’s a good thing the pandemic isn’t over yet, ‘cause if you had planned a Tolkien panel/talk/whatever at a con (of any kind) that would potentially fall under this. To reiterate: If you want to talk about his works at a conference you essentially need permission to do so.

Fanzines, or more specifically: “Unfortunately permission cannot be given for publications which use the name TOLKIEN or the Tolkien Estate’s copyright materials”. Of course “fanzine” is a very broad category and also, it clearly says “publication”. So essentially, you are not allowed to independently publish critical analysis of Tolkien’s work, ever.

Making songs for Tolkien’s poetry. Honestly this probably pisses me off the most. Tell me the professor wouldn’t be absolutely delighted by the vast number of artists who have made songs out of his words.

In conclusion, you may only interact with his work by giving money to the Tolkien estate, you may not talk about his work, you may not take inspiration from his work, you may not utter his name without asking permission (and presumably paying a license fee).

- urgently marched into A&E and said ‘we’re having knee pain!!’ to the confused receptionist. i had to explain that it was only my knee and that he was just worried

- when asked to tag me in a meme of ‘what water are you?’, said ‘you are the ocean: home to all friends’

- loved ‘filthy gorgeous’ and, rather than learning the words, learned ‘all three parts in the song where they ring a triangle’

- after we had an argument about him not ‘getting’ my ADHD, i caught him halfway through a three hour playlist of lectures on ADHD, with a pen in hand, taking notes

- he suffered a TBI last summer and he did not like the orienting questions they ask (’what year is it? what day is it?’ etc). when asked ‘do you know where you are?’, he cracked one eye open and angrily said ‘in bed!’

- he played knack 2 and hated it. when i asked why he was still playing it, he said ‘so i never have to play it again’. he got every achievement and as soon as he got the last one he stood up, ejected the disc and returned it to the store

- lately he’s given up on making lunch so he just drinks huel which is a meal replacement shake, except huel is kind of boring so he sometimes puts nesquick strawberry powder in there

- my favourite drink is pepsi max. when asked about his dreams for the future, they often involve ‘being rich enough to find a way to pump pepsi max directly into our house’

- one time in our first year of dating i hadn’t seen him in weeks, whereas we normally saw each other all day every day, so i was gonna go stay with him for a couple days. he had a temporary job (i’m talking 2 weeks total) at the time and i was bummed that i was gonna be alone at his for a bit, but w/e. he was texting me like ‘work is going okay, in the line for the canteen right now’ while i got on the bus. i found the key where he said it was, i found a note on the table like ‘hi love! the wifi code is [password], I’ll be back at 5!’, and then I went into the lounge and he was there. he was lying on a fold-out bed with Marvin Gaye playing. the TV was on a powerpoint slide that said ‘Welcome, Jess. I quit my job.’ he was entirely naked except for a cushion with the letter ‘D’ over his crotch. im 95% sure there were candles

- we play the game Rimworld, where you micromanage a colony of people on an alien planet. he uses it entirely to simulate a peaceful colony, mostly of women, who have a large number of animals they care for and train. one time he got this random event where all the women in the colony got a psychic mood boost and he was like ‘honestly that’s my life goal’

- when he was in hospital and his cognitive functions were slowly coming back, he looked up from twitter with horror and said ‘jess… is the american president a racist?’

- we were playing Articulate, which is a game where you have to describe a word without saying the word itself. His partner said ‘when you’re beginning sex, you are…’. he, without a second of hesitation, yelled ‘FOREPLAY’. the answer was actually ‘initiating’, but my ego grew like fourteen times

- one time he asked me what guacamole was, and i told him, and he said ‘if it’s made up of things that already have names why does it have a different name?’ i have not let him live this down yet

- i used to have an eating disorder, and whilst i’m good 99.9% of the time now i occasionally do have wobbles. one time i’d eaten some mini-donuts and i told him ‘i kind of want to check the calories on those…’, so he immediately pulled the label off and ate it

- i lost him for like twenty minutes at a uni event, and when i found him he presented me with a pepsi max badge and said ‘i rode this mechanical bull to try and win you a year’s supply but i fell off pretty quickly. sorry.’

- we won the ‘best couple’ award in our year at uni, but neither of us were there to collect it because i was ill and he left halfway through to come home and take care of me

- one time he wasn’t paying attention while making lunch and he cracked an egg directly into the bin. the look of confusion on his face was priceless.

PAGE ONE NEXT->

Here is a short comic that I’m finally making (after all these years) of @audaciousanonj ‘s changling au from the pap chat logs on ao3 !! was reminded of this au by a dear mutual so…here we go babey.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/11021085 here is the original !

The function of a growl is as a warning. It is a communication that violence is available as a tool, but is not preferred. Other outcomes, besides your death, are available and should be considered.

But the creature that wants to kill you will not growl.

If your death is the goal, then growling will only serve as a delay and may result in your escape, which runs counter to the goal. There will be no growl, no warning. There will be no snarl or hiss or bluster. The creature that bares its teeth with the intent to kill only does so to bring closer its fangs to your demise.

The creature that growls does not want to kill you, but will if it must.

A friend of mine told me yesterday that he didn’t realise how much Ukraine meant to him until now. I posted yesterday about the time we spent there, and we’re all getting super pre-occupied about the invasion. As I said in that post, I can’t get our waitress out of my head. I can sort of remember what she looked like now. She had an undercut. I think maybe her hair might have been blue? But - I will never know if she lives through this, and it’s driving me very slightly mad.

So naturally, my husband spent all day yesterday obsessively researching everything he could about it with the help of his journalist friends, as a way to help me process it.

This post is me putting it all in order, as a way to try and process my own emotional response as much as anything else (I freely admit there is an element of self-indulgence here). Please don’t take me as the spokesperson for Ukraine right now, nor as a solid reliable news source. But, I haven’t seen this stuff except in bits and pieces on Tumblr, so here we go.

(This is also not about why the invasion has happened. This post is solely about what has happened, and how the invasion is going.)

So, Putin and the rest of the world believed that this invasion would take 1-4 days. The plan was to push through fast, take Kyiv, and force Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian President, to surrender. Given Russia’s military might, it really looked likely.

Here is the conclusion of all that’s happened so far:

Ukraine is absolutely nailing this??? Actually???

They managed to defend every single city overnight, including Kyiv. They started rolling out and using these WW2-style anti-tank thingies that look a bit like angry gabbions, look, here’s a picture of one being delivered:

A bunch of spare iron girders turned into a hefty octopus of Russian misery, basically.

But it’s not just tanks they’re taking down, oh no. Ukraine successfully shot down a transport plane 20km from Kyiv. That is, I shit you not, the single biggest hit to the Russian military since the Second Chechen War. Volunteers from Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Azerbaijan and Israel are all entering Ukraine to help fight and bolster the anti-Russian forces, which is probably illustrative of how Eurovision voting is going to run for the next decade. Most countries have banned Russian planes from their air space. To help stop the Russian advance, Ukraine has made and installed new road signs, like this one:

I can only say a handful of sentences in Ukrainian, Tumblrs, but as I understand it, from top to bottom, it says:

“Fuck off”

“Fuck off again”

“Fuck off Russia”

Meanwhile, it turns out the Russian military might we feared is… possibly not quite as advertised?

They’re underfunded and badly trained. Ukraine captured 200 soldiers in one go, and most of them were confused 19 year olds with no training. The equipment is shite. The tanks keep running out of fuel. Russian soldiers keep abandoning their tanks and handing them over to the Ukrainian army. Putin’s plan was to take Kyiv fast and move on, and he didn’t have a plan B - hence these kids, playing soldier. Here is an image of a Russian tank receiving roadside assistance from Russia’s finest, an old Lada.  

No one expected Zelenskyy to survive the night; but he did. America offered him asylum in the White House.

But he said no. 

Zelenskyy remains in Kyiv, with his people.

And Putin, in his desperation to be adored, has turned Zelenskyy into a global icon and hero.

Here is something you may not know about Volodymyr Zelenskyy - he used to be a standup comedian. Was he any good? No idea - but what he IS good at is producing funny short videos he can put on Twitter and that, which are absolutely fantastic for Ukrainian morale. And morale is vital in an invasion like this, and Ukraine are smashing it out of the park there.

They are utilising the internet to its fullest extent. In addition to Zelenskyy’s videos, they’ve made sure that the final words of the Ukrainian defenders of Snake Island are known and now echoed around the world: “Russian warship, go fuck yourselves.” A video has gone viral of Ukrainians mocking a group of Russian soldiers whose tank had broken down and who didn’t know the way to Kyiv anyway, presumably because of all the new road signs. They have created a website that lists every single Russian death they can identify, partly so Russian mothers can have closure (thus also painting themselves as the defenders of decency and humanity), and partly for the enormous morale boost of the world knowing, categorically, that they’ve already killed 3700 Russian soldiers (over 100 of which were from that transport plane.)  Not one word has leaked of Ukrainian casualties. I’m sure they’re devastating, but for morale purposes, they’re being kept quiet until the dust settles. Ukrainians have started setting up fake Tindr profiles to catfish Russian soldiers for intel, and they’re all 19 and lost, so it’s working. Plus, they’re using Grindr to actually track where the soldiers are, because it turns out Putin was not entirely correct about there being no gays in Russia.

So, Russia wants to cut their internet access. Can the Ukrainian Minister for Digital Transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, shame a billionaire into providing aid?

This is crucial, remember. Atrocities happen best in the dark, and the world is watching - because of the internet. Morale is vital to maintain. Can they convince Elon Musk to help?

Yep.

Ukraine now has the fastest internet service in the world. The fastest, most stable internet service in human history, in fact. Russia cannot now disable it. The world watches.

Which is just as well, because then Anonymous decided to get involved, and have leaked the website database of the Russian Ministry of Defence. Lol. Also this happens:

And then the Russian propaganda channels started broadcasting the truth of what is happening in Ukraine. Double lol.

So what is the political response?

Well, in addition to closing airspace to Russian planes, loads of countries are sending weapons to Ukraine. Those that can’t are offering asylum. They’re also offering asylum to any Russian soldiers who surrender or defect, which is startlingly good tactics, and there are rumours of around 5000 Russian soldiers who have done just that. Germany, of course, has long had a block on lethal weapons transfer; but Germany recognise this shit for what it is. They’ve lifted the block, thus allowing the Netherlands to send weapons. Efforts are now underway to fast-track Ukraine into the EU. I presume they will consider the lack of pint glasses with crowns on to be a worthwhile price to pay.

So what about Russia’s supporters?

Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenka helped Russia with this invasion. Now, this has happened:

Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya was actually elected president, but some wild nonsense kept her out of power. She’s now running a government in exile. I have literally no idea what this means or will mean! But my god. She has a spine of steel, and this is not a good time to be happening for Putin. 

And it’s really, really not, because then intel on a meeting of Putin and assembled Oligarchs LEAKS (hello Anonymous, probably). The highlights:

This war is costing Russia $15bn a day

He expected it to take ONE TO FOUR DAYS TO WIN

It’s been two days and he is losing very badly, currently

They will run out of rockets by day 4, maybe sooner

After that they will be down to rifles and ammo

It will take 3-4 months to make more significant weapons, except they need raw materials, and the countries that can provide them… have cut supply lines

If the war lasts 10 days, Russia will have completely run out of money and weapons

It’s only day 2, and Russian soldiers are knocking the doors of random Ukrainian homes begging for food and water because they’ve already run out

So, out of desperation, Putin turns to his greatest, closest and most trusted ally for help: Kazakhstan. 

And Kazakhstan

SAYS NO

And then Ukraine shoots down a second Russian plane.

Anyway, I’m going to finish off with a final point. Morale is vital in this situation, so here is the message from the Ukrainian government at the minute, to everyone watching around the world:

Be VERY SUSPICIOUS of any negative news about Ukraine. Russia uses misinformation and propaganda. They will want to damage Ukrainian morale.

Use your social media to spread news of Ukrainian victories. 

Don’t give oxygen to negative stories. Especially since they might not be true.

That’s genuinely something we can do to help. Every victory of Ukraine, blast it far and wide. So on that note, I’ll leave you with this:

The idea that only one person would  habitually do all aspects of cooking for multiple other people was invented in the comparatively severely recent history.

Human history is something like 200,000 years long. Urbanization which started some of these process that we consider normal today, started around about 7000 years ago. So the idea of anything like this at all, let alone being a dominant way, has only taken up about 3.5% of our most recent history.

That 3.5%, as above, was mostly in the context of people delegating food tasks for money and having other people cook for them a notable portion of the time.

We really only see the modern way of looking at things begin to emerge as a consequence of class division during the industrial revolution. Where how much time could be devoted to cooking and housework depended on socioeconic status. So we’re talking kinda around the mid-ish 1700′s. Or somewhere around the most recent POINT fifteen percent 0.15% of human history. 

As the Industrial Revolution evolved. Poor people, men and women, had to spend most of their time at work. It was only in the growing middle class where there was enough wealth for one person to support a family and to therefore delegate the JOB of being a housewife. This was done in part to mimic wealthier people who could PAY for staff to do that work. Essentially having a housewife was a status symbol. It showed that the family was of a higher socio-economic level than the alternative. If you’ve seen Downton Abbey, then you have some idea of how the wealthy lived, there was no housewife making food and individual staff did not usually make food for their individual families, instead it was a paid group effort where everyone ate from the same stores and effort that was delegated around. It was the specific space of the middle class that was trying to thread that needle of the woman who had the wealth to have her primary task to be in charge of her household but did not have the wealth to delegate those tasks to others. 

Behold the housewife. This is incidentally why she is shown as glamorous. Because she is that status symbol, a way to show the family’s wealth.

Then came World War 2. And if you really want to know where the modern way of looking at things came from this is it. Less than 100 years ago. Less than 0.05% of our history. WW2 started with all of this and then took male factory workers away, creating a deperate need for women to take over that job. 

The state called:

There was active recruitment. Forget being a Housewife, the state needs you. there wasn’t really a rosie the riveter by the way, this was Rosie, the model, but Rosie was a fictional character the same as Paul Bunyan, a creation for the sake of advertising / propoganda. 

Fine. But two things happened. 

The majority of food production was taken over by companies delegated by the state, to provide food for the war effort and those in support of the war effort. This will come back later. 

But of more direct import, the War ended. People came home. They needed work. The work currently being done by the women who were pretty happy with the personal autonomy it afforded them. 

So policies were instated to help men get the jobs that the women now held. Such as promotions to hire veterans. And a new active campaign started. Instead of Rosie the Riveter, we get the created figure of the 50′s housewife

In commercial activities, Magazines, Radio, and Television, this mythic figure who never really existed in real life until families began to copy her. And there wasn’t only this myth. There was plenty of stick to go with that carrot.

To quote from The American Experience:

“Americans turned to the family as a bastion of safety in an insecure world… cold war ideology and the domestic revival [were] two sides of the same coin.”

Rigid Gender Roles The dramatic dichotomy in gender imagery in the 1950s makes people laugh 50 years later. In Dick and Jane readers, advertisements, educational films, and television shows, post-war Americans saw feminine, stay-at-home moms cleaning, cooking, and taking care of children while masculine dads left home early and returned late each weekday, tending to their designated roles as lawnmowers and backyard BBQers on the weekend. In More Work for Mother, Ruth Schwartz Cowan wrote that psychiatrists, psychologists, and popular writers of the era critiqued women who wished to pursue a career, and even women who wished to have a job, referring to such “unlovely women” as “lost,” “suffering from penis envy,” “ridden with guilt complexes,” or just plain “man-hating.”

Yet Married Women Worked With the international expansion of the American economy after the war, men’s wages were higher than ever before, making it possible for the first time in U.S. history for a substantial number of middle class families to live comfortably on the income of one breadwinner. Yet the figures reveal that by the early 1960s, more married women were in the labor force than at any previous time in American history.

Domesticity and Money Pressures The reality of many middle- and aspiring middle-class families’ finances didn’t match their dreams. Many families wanted extra income – and required a wife’s earnings — to afford the lifestyle they desired. Yet middle-class women felt the pressure of the culture telling them to stay home.

Why? Because it was what the US thought it needed to do in order to maintain social order and thereby international supremacy. On the housewife was put the burden of proving AMERICA’s wealth, she wasn’t just the family’s status symbol anymore, she was the nation’s. It’s also important not to forget that the end of WW2 marked the emergence of America as one of the two super powers. The US chose gendered division of labor to prove its ideology. While its opposite, the USSR, chose to show its ideological might by having women work the same as men, in an equally mythological fashion. So the two states had to double down, the housewife became part of the symbol of Americanness as opposed to the take of the Red Menace where women should work in the factory.

Remember, this was not literal. These were cultural myths designed to achieve an end. And it did its job well. Enough so that even some eighty years later, families still feel this pressure. And because of the US’s socioeconomic might, this message was exported. Americas largest export from WW2 on has been entertainment. So all the propoganda we put into our entertainment for our own purposes filtered out to the rest of the world. 

But I include the Domesticity and Money Pressures bit at the end for a reason. This stuff wasn’t real. And most people couldn’t really do all this.

So we return to the first thing that happened as a result of WW2, having turned themselves in to food making machines for the war effort, the factories and corporations now had a problem. They were made to make food and for the most part that food was now unnecessary. But there’s another market. A larger market. A desperate market. All those “housewives” who can’t really do the housewife thing because it was a myth. But if they BUY help, they can fake it.

And there was faking it. There’s evidence that a lot of housewives lied about making food from scratch while they did not because their husbands were under the impression they SHOULD be able to, from all the propoganda, when they simply COULDN’T because it was propoganda instead of real life. 

Vast amounts of psychological work went into getting people to buy this stuff and to carry on the lie. You add milk to Pillsbury cake mixes not because the mix NEEDS to have milk seperate, it’s entirely possible to have dehydrated milk as part of the mix so no one has to add anything. But having the milk added strengthed the myth of the Housewife’s work while giving her some capability to live up to it which wouldn’t exist without it. 

This post WW2 miasma of mythology is the modern inheritance: more work than a woman can do, made maybe possible by spending even more money to get hidden help that the non-cooks never see. So the non-cooks assume that these tasks can be done and they tell everyone else, until even the people who know it isn’t possible start to believe it and struggle to make the “home cooked” meal with all those fresh ingredients.

It’s the same reason why there is plastic wrapped show furniture in a house. Because the myth says a woman should be able to keep a house spic and span while doing all the other things she needs to do. When it’s impossible. It can’t be done. Unless you cheat and have plastic wrapped show couches that the regular family can’t use normally just to show off to company. It’s a way to make the lie work instead of acknowledging that it IS a lie that a single woman can take care of herself, her husband, her 2.5 children, her house, all of their food, and bring in a little income on the side because her husband isn’t actually earning enough to make the income necessary to allow all this to happen. 

But whenever a struggling woman goes over to someone else’s house what does she see? A home cooked meal. A perfect couch. The other woman perfectly back from the salon to be ready for company. She sees the lie as if it is real and has no choice but to wonder if there’s something wrong with her that she is barely able to do this when everyone else pulls it off. 

Same reason discussion of salary is discouraged in the case of “traditionally men’s work,” because everyone seems to be making it work on the same lines so long as no one talks about the details. Talk about what is really happening and the lie falls apart. So it’s important to keep the secret recipe secret so no one sees that it isn’t really working. 

A survey once found that the majority of a country’s (sorry, can’t remember which one) secret family recipes, all supposedly handed down along seperate lines, the recipe held close to the chest to preserve it as the family recipe. All actually came off the same Betty Crocker box. The silence was a way to preserve the illusion that the impossible could be done. 

We, having grown up with those illusions, have ingrained in us that this should all be possible. So why can’t we? But that opinion was intentionally fostered to get people to behave the way we as a society think is necessary without regard to the history or capabilities of people. 

hee hee

Brick stole ur phone and took a selfie and put it as your phone background

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