Step Forward

🦀🦀🦀

I got the idea from cowcatchers old locomotives used to have.

Anyways, yesterday I uploaded the model to Thingiverse, and just hours after uploading it, the Community Relationship Manager of the whole website left a comment suggesting I enter the model into a competition that's currently being held on the site.

So I did... and now it's in third place not even a day later. First place is $500, but the competition still has a month to go.

Then the Community Manager contacted me again, telling me they want to feature my model in an upcoming design promotion.

Just, what is happening? I mostly made this thing for myself in, like, an hour, and now it's suddenly super popular? This is all a little bit overwhelming 😵‍💫

Other models I worked on for weeks didn't get nearly as popular. I swear, it's impossible to predict what people will like.

Anyways, if you want to print the wheel guards yourself, you can get the model here or here.

I also made a quiet version you can stick furniture felt pads on.

i should NOT be an elder queer, i should be middle at most. i am a middle aged queer. most of the elder queers died.

when i was growing up i didn't go to pride parades, i went to pride marches. because that's 100% what they were in the 80s and 90s.

I was always kind of grateful that the marches slowly became parades. That the protests slowly gave way to parties. It was progress, it was healing.

I was grateful for that because I never healed.

I’m still remembering how straight society turned their collective backs on us and let us die. I will never forgive or forget that. Maybe that’s a shortcoming on my part but it’s true. I’ve tried and I can’t. That scar runs too deep.

And now we’re back to the same shit again. Straight society is turning their backs on my trans brothers and sisters. Ignoring their pain. Trying to legislate them out of existence.

Even our so-called allies are saying shit like “well if we want to appeal to a broader base we can’t keep going on about the transgender thing.” Fuck you Gavin Newsom. In particular.

Make no mistake: they want us dead. Not just closeted, not just silent. Gone. Non-existent. And I say us because they’re just starting with the trans people. They’ll come after the rest of us if they succeed.

I am old and so, so tired.

AIDS is often talked about as an event that changed queer history, and sometimes I see people frustrated about how cruel it was to think that aids is "God's punishment" for gays. It could be different if society was not that homophobic.

It's interesting that if you compare it to the situation with aids in USSR, you can see the issue was also in USA medicine + social stratification where middle class+ people saw themselves as kinda *biologically* separated from others.

The USSR had aids pandemic started at the same time, and at first the government was trying to tell that soviet people are safe from the "capitalistic disease of gays, addicts and sex workers" (the language was much more dehumanizing, I just don't want to use it). And you know what? Soviet people did not believe it. They were scared as fuck, especially when the knowledge spread and they saw the first results of misinformation and secrecy around AIDS.

The propaganda did not work because people knew the medicine is the same for everyone in the country but the most powerful politicians. Soviet citizens had no control over if they will receive the donor blood of an ill person or the injection from the same reusable syringe as aids+ gay or whoever. There was not enough medical equipment, it was not sterilized properly, and nobody was protected. You could behave as the most "dignified" person ever, to remain celibate and stay out of drug usage, but if you need a vaccination, got hurt at work or have diabetes, you are damned. Every visit to the hospital was a risk. It's the matter of accident if you catch aids in the hospital or not.

It was evident in practice. Because children were first to suffer of aids. Many of them.

The first victims of the aids pandemic in the USSR were an adult man and a 12 yo girl. Almost 10 years later there was an outbreak in the children's hospital in the Asian republic, Kalmykiya, and a lot of really young children got ill. I mean newborn babies and toddlers. They had no chance to misbehave to deserve a punishment, you know.

AIDS pandemic was one of the minor reasons why the USSR collapsed. It was obvious that this government could not protect its people. It tried to use the queerphobic rhetoric borrowed abroad, and it led to the bad stuff, not only for gay people, but for every part of society. And if for the USA the homophobic negligence was at least based on reality - homosexual men were the first victims indeed, - for the USSR it was total fantasy!

There were a couple of gays and bisexual men who brought aids from abroad and were diagnosed because they confirmed the homosexual contact somewhere. But there were foreign students, who formed partnerships and families with Soviet people; there were tourists, children of aids+ parents who had no idea about aids at all, sailors working in Africa and having contacts with locals and etc. Putting the blame on gays did not work because officially the soviet union had no gays! And even when they caught some, it did not look credible.

The history went wrong and now it's forgotten that soviet gays had nothing to do with aids. The tale of gays bringing aids was told so many times that it started to seem the only one. Ehhhh, it's not that simple.

And usa was the origin of this tale, which is upsetting. May be for you the aids pandemic is mostly in the past, but oh boy it's getting only worse for post-ussr space and homophobia rises

I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.

Other materials at the time, namely clay, would absorb flavors and germs meaning that if you ate beef off a clay plate your next meal with that plate could have beef flavor and microbes common on cow meat on it.  That would leak out seemingly at random no less.  Heck imagine a sick person coughing into their soup bowl and then months later their germs hiding in the clay would pop out to infect whole new people.

Also the earliest human use of glass we know of is for its sharpness.  Pre-historic people would use volcanic glass as sharp knives for food preparation.  Also beads.  Pretty much any new substance humans get their hands on for most of our history we immediately try to make into beads.

like yeah i know i can set aside an afternoon and sketch a still life.

but also i can, like. select a random marine creature from a hat and then research them and then spend a bit of time in the evenings and weekends over the course of a few weeks making a diorama.

or i can make an abstract sculpture out of scrap cardboard and masking tape, and then paper mache over it, and then paint it.

or i can draw something with markers and color it in with crayons.

What a sentence, Chilchuck thought. It seemed to him that he’d been saying a lot of things with full sincerity that weeks ago would’ve been total gibbering nonsense.

The others had wandered off into the city like tourists. Laios was spending the day in some kind of pet shelter for dragons. Senshi had mentioned bringing Izutsumi to check out the local dwarven cooking. Rats were apparently involved, to his total lack of surprise.

He had decided to hole up in the nearest bar that would accept a fistful of foreign coins. He was at the stage of buzz that felt as though someone was wrapping a woollen blanket around his head, and it was loosening his tongue.

“And he’s a good kid,” he was saying. “He’s a good kid, he’s even a good fighter, but he’s got all the social skills of a dead donkey. This is a guy who hears that he has to eat part of his sister, and the first thing he says is-”

THE EGG IS PLACED ON TOP OF THE BACON?

He paused mid-ramble and blinked stickily at the stranger seated next to him. “Sorry?”

WHAT STRUCTURAL SUPPORT DOES THE BACON OFFER THE EGG?

He blinked again. “It’s for,” he tried. “You know. So you can eat the egg and bacon at the same time.”

INSTEAD OF CONSUMING THE ELEMENTS OF THE BREAKFAST SEPARATELY.

“Right.”

BUT IN THIS EXERCISE, YOU WISH TO REMOVE THE EGG FROM THE BACON.

“Right — right! The idea is if we take away the half of Falin that’s a dragon, we can resurrect the human half of her.”

THUS UNFRYING THE EGG.

He screwed an eye shut and tried to make out the face of the stranger through the three images swirling in the hot, lightheaded haze. It looked like a very skinny face.

“I’m starting to lose the food metaphor,” he mumbled. “My point is, the further we go to fix this problem, the worse it gets. And it’s not that i have a problem with resurrection — have you ever been resurrected?”

NO, BUT I HAVE BEEN WITNESS TO PART OF IT.

“Some people are weird about it. Senshi’s weird about it too, but he’s the one who suggested it. Anyways, it’s not that I have a problem with resurrection, I just don’t like the idea of eating an old coworker.”

Another sentence that would have been nonsense barely a week ago. He tried to shrug and missed. “I guess they say, ‘Eat to live, don’t live to eat.’”

A STRANGE THING TO SAY. A PARADOX OF SOME KIND, I’M SURE.

He was beginning to feel a slight headache. “No, it means, like — treat food as a fuel, a necessity, don’t get fussy about the experience of eating it.”

“Uh,” said Marcille — wizards on the Discworld always see what’s really there. This is true even when they’re tourists.

I HAD HOPED TO SPEAK TO HIM ABOUT THE DUNGEON. I HAVE AN INTEREST IN PLACES WHERE ME AND MINE ARE NOT ALLOWED.

“Uh.”

THERE IS A TOWER FILLED WITH TEETH.

“Uh.”

I SUSPECT THIS DUNGEON IS SIMILAR.

Common pleas: what we now call "civil" law. Citizens bringing cases against each other, usually over property. For the vast majority of this time period, only landed gentry--the nobility--could appear in this court. Serfs, peasants, and merchants couldn't bring or defend cases, they needed a noble patron to bring the case for them and speak for them if they had a dispute they wanted resolved.

Equity: kind of complicated. Evolved a lot over time. Broadly, involved situations where nobles (and eventually anyone) were like "something happened that's really Unfair To Me and doesn't have a clear case in the common pleas court, but I require the court to fix it."

Ecclesiastical: religious courts. Applying and interpreting Christian doctrine, which because Christian religious texts include many Jewish texts about law, involves a lot of law!! But not super relevant here, don't worry about these.

The King's Bench: what we now call "criminal" law. The government wanted someone punished. Also any case involving the crown and any case that they took from the other courts on appeal.

For most of this history, the "civil" cases were the vast majority of cases per year, with equity second and King's Bench far last. (In the mid-1500s the King's Bench started taking over a bunch of civil cases from the Court of Common Pleas because it was so uneven and their judges weren't doing anything all year lol)

Applying this to Ankh-Morpork, the cases that we see in canon are King's Bench cases: they involve the government directly (Vetinari's trial), or significant issues where the government has an interest (Carcer's trial). We can pretty safely assume that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of Common Pleas-type cases per year that don't show up in canon and that go before regular judges.

Historically, though, King's Bench cases weren't judged by the monarch directly: they also had judges. So why is Vetinari judging these trials himself?

Because Ankh-Morpork diverges from British Empire history in a couple of fascinating ways! First, famously: there's no monarch. Not anymore. No kings!!! Second: there's also no Parliament. Ankh-Morpork doesn't have an executive branch and a legislative branch constantly jockeying for power (with the judiciary usually a subset of the executive/monarchy, but subject to approval or control by Parliament) the way the British Empire has had ever since the Magna Carta. Instead, they have a tyrant.

This difference between canon and real history shows very clearly in the lack of legislation in Ankh-Morpork: without a Parliament to pass bills, all the major policy decisions pass through the executive directly, instead. (You also see how the Guilds have ended up taking on the governance role that executive and legislative agencies do in the modern British government, making policy and doing enforcement activities within their particular area! Going Postal and Making Money are the start of Ankh-Morpork moving towards a model of executive agencies governance in response to corporatization, the same way the USA did in the 1930-50s. Off-topic but cool!!)

Author/illustrator Trung Le Nguyen has been live posting reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time on bluesky and just hit the first proposal. The replies are basically the sickos meme