The Big Not Very Wee Hag

In 2021, Swarovski (the company that makes the very sparkly crystals you see in certain jewelry, on figure-skaters' twinkliest outfits, on red carpet dresses), decided they didn't want the grubby fingers of small-time jewelers, clothing designers and costumers and crafters on their shiny beads and rhinestones anymore. They decided to limit their sales to "luxury" and couture creators, not girls who sell stuff on Etsy. The tenor of their press release on the subject was snide and insulting. Resellers (like your favorite bead shop) would no longer be allowed to carry their product; the average Jane on the street would not be able to purchase them. You could only get them if you had an authorized business agreement that bound you to very strict brand behavior. And those of us who still had good stock of the crystals would no longer be "permitted" to use the brand's name in our listings for sale.

Every bead shop and craft supply place and many, many small clothing makers--wedding shops, prom and dancing dress suppliers, the sort of salt of the Earth mom and pop time machines of shops that are the backbone of the field--scrambled to find something that could replace them. The last of the stock dwindled quickly, all of us grabbing what we could get while there was any chance of it, and then it was gone and we no longer had any access.

I was Big Pissed about it at the time. It was just so goddamn stuck-up, when wholesalers and indie jewelers had made them so much money, when some people I knew--when *I!*--had been brand-loyal for decades. But with no recourse, everyone pivoted fairly quickly, most of us to Preciosa Crystals. Those are Czech, quite sparkly, and considerably less expensive than Swarovski. The faceting method they use is different, but not worse; any differences are hardly noticeable when you're seeing them as a hundred pinpoints of light.

Well, out of nowhere, Swarovski just dropped this: https://www.harmanbeads.com/swarovski-brand-policy-update

"Effective June 1, 2026, Swarovski updated the distribution and brand usage policies introduced in 2021. Businesses may now purchase Swarovski Crystals without signing a Brand Control Agreement, and Authorized Distribution Partners may once again sell Swarovski Crystals to resellers, including bead stores and online retailers. Businesses may also use the Swarovski brand name when following Swarovski’s Proper Use Guidelines. Designers, manufacturers, artists, brands, retailers, and resellers are now eligible to purchase Swarovski Crystals through authorized distribution channels."

They want us back. A lot of the companies who could have kept a brand relationship with them also have swapped to Preciosa, over the last half-decade, in solidarity with indie creators and out of a sour awareness that it could be them, next. And it doesn't hurt that Preciosa was able to expand their line quite a bit now that everyone who wanted sparkle had no choice but to go to them.

And I'm not seeing nearly anyone who intends to return. The feeling is, "Y'all told us to fuck off! Off we fucked! And now, that's what you can do, too!" I'm seeing a lot of "How many of us did you stab in the back?" comments from the people whose money they're hoping to attract.

If so, I found this entry which lists 'slaw bunk' as a specific type of bed, citing a book written in the US in the late 18th century.

apologies if I'm completely off here! very curious about this mystery :)

hold on! that's absolutely in line with the way this writer forms his ws!

it's a shame that that contemporary account doesnt describe what a slaw-bunk is, only that it exists and the mattress was straw

HOWEVER!

a book called "colonial days in old new york" by alice morse earle (1896) describes them:

"The sloep-banck, or slaw-bunk, was another form, a folding-bed. This was also set within closet doors or hanging curtains. It was an oblong frame filled in with a network of rope or strips of wood, set apart like the slats of a bed. This frame was fastened to the wall at one end, the bed’s head, with heavy hinges; and at night it was placed in a horizontal position, and the unhinged end, or foot of the bed, was supported on heavy turned legs which fitted into sockets in the frame. When not in use, the frame was hooked up against the wall and covered with the curtains or doors."

thank you thank you thank you!

all of which is preface to me being kind of a mean little hater and saying that some romance novels have this very distinctive style that I call Heckin Valid that's soooo annoying because you can Tell the authors are coming from a place of really well-meaning but pretty shallow 2010s internet-style #diversity rhetoric. some of the hallmarks of Heckin Valid style, to me, include:

main characters have Identities that they often feel the need to mention often and frequently Explain, even in their own internal narration.

there is often a Trans Friend. if the Trans Friend cannot be readily identified by using they/them pronouns, their trans status will either be dropped gracelessly in the narration OR the Trans Friend will verbally identify as such by saying something akin to "now, speaking as your Trans Friend..."

this may also be done with a Fat Friend. the Fat Friend is almost universally a woman, and it will always be emphasized that she is Very Beautiful because it is important to remember that fat women can be hot.

the narration is very invested in identifying the racial identity of every non-white character, regardless of how minor they are.

before engaging in sex the main couple will dutifully report to each other that they have both recently gotten tested for STIs and do not have any.

YHMAH is actually what got me thinking about this because it's an offender for basically every one of these, including this bone dry line about obligatory therapy from the epilogue

Spoons can be used pretty much anywhere.

Carnival tickets are only good for the carnival, and it’s only in town for a limited amount of time.

SHAPE HELL

Roughly paraphrasing his response: “well by your own admission you live on a diet of shellfish and wine, and you came into my office dressed like a vampire. Like. Yea man you gave yourself Gout. You want me to check you for Consumption while I’m at it? Go eat some vegetables, please.”

About what "Protect the youth" has become. Idk what it was like in other countries and I know that it very likely could have been stricter than it was in my country back then. But generally:

He was like "When I was 16, there were two kinds of adult content: Horror movies and explicitly depicted sexual content. The first made me have nightmares, the latter (as in what you could get in video rental stores) generally wasn't of much interest to me because it wasn't something I, as a 16 year old, could relate to. And other sexual content that was interesting (and/or helpful) WAS freely accessible. So whenever I saw an "18+" label somewhere, I just completely ignored that content because I knew it wouldn't be interesting at all to me.

But NOW, what's declared 18+ is even an excessive amount of swear words in streams! NOW, when I see an "18+" label, I don't know if it's horror movies that'll give some 16 year olds nightmares, if it's completely unrelatable porn, OR if it's educational sex ed, a 20 year old talking about their really healthy relationship with their partner (that includes intimacy), education about consent in BDSM (which affects 16 year olds as well, there's no age limit to curiosity), a live stream of wholesome musicians who happen to drink a couple of beers during kind of therapeutic talks, or simply people who aren't puritans and say "fuck" a lot! An 18+ label isn't worth anything anymore!"

And yeah... That's just it.

People who talk about body changes during their (first!) puberty are even labelled adult content. Even though puberty very much happens BEFORE adulthood. It's helpful content for minors. And it's labelled "adult" to "protect the youth".

And then generative ai was created.

And now I get it. I get why nobody on Star Trek spends all their free time in the holodeck. I get why all the crew are putting on stage plays, and holding music recitals, and building models, and playing poker. I get why everyone was so skeptical and mean to the Doctor on Voyager. I get why the ONE TIME we see someone obsessed with the holodeck it infringes on people’s likeness rights and permissions.

Because fundamentally at the end of the day we are human beings and we ENJOY working with our hands and making REAL human connections. A person who learns to play an instrument is always going to be viewed as an artist over someone who asks the computer to generate music for them.

Even as recent as Lower Decks they were making fun of the fact that the crew were putting on amateurish plays and holding music recitals. But after living with Ai for so long and seeing how detrimental it’s been to the world… I’d much rather watch my friends put on a stage play than “participate” in a holodeck movie.

What’s most amazing about this is that it was completely unintentional. I do not for one second think that the writers of the time in the 90’s were really thinking about the larger issues that generative ai and chatGTP would cause. How could they? Text to speech back then was still robotic as heck. More likely they wrote that stuff in because it was cheaper to film on sets the owned than try to build, film, or rent out different locations each week.

That’s the down to earth logistical real reason Data is reciting poems about his cat or Riker is in a play put on in ten forward. It’s just cheaper to do that than to build a whole new set or move production to a new location.

Yet at the end of the day, I think that unintentionally speaks to a very human need that ai is making more and more prevalent to us day in and day out.

(I am chucky in this scenario above)

Chihuahuas are tiny but mighty and I would think their tenacious attitudes would be a net positive. I will address how MANY chihuahuas i think you would need to = the pulling strength of an Iditarod team below but I want to address some other factors a hypothetical chihuahua musher would face with this...unique team makeup:

1.) Chihuahuas need small frequent meals most of the time due to their size while arctic breeds tend to use the same amount of food more efficiently. Obviously we are going to need MORE Chihuahuas than a Alaskan Husky Iditarod team (16 dogs at max capacity), but they will also probably need to eat more food per pound than the huskies not only because of the husky ability to need less food per pound, but also because Chihuahuas are a breed that was developed for warm weather they have much shorter hair and lack the double coats of even Alaskan Huskies so they will also spend more nutrients keeping warm. Iditarod sled dogs consume an average of 12,000 calories per day and the race takes about 10 days more or less to complete at a competitive pace.

2.) Chihuahuas are actually pretty good at pulling stuff and several compete in weight pull, so pulling is a good outlet in a non hypothetical scenario with the right precautions. SOME. VIDEOS .

Adorable.

3.) A dog's ethical "working load" for longer distances can be determined by a % of its body weight and scaled for conditioning and breed size. A larger dog is typically going to be able to pull more weight per pound, but little dogs shouldn't be counted out. For small dogs up to 25 pounds it is typically said that 10-20% of the dog's body weight can be safely pulled (for large dogs it's usually more). In a weight pull scenario like above, which is very short distance, dogs can pull up to 3x their body weight (sometimes more but not often).

Okay let's do math (which i'm bad at, but calculators exist so thank god):

The Chihuahua standard says that dogs must NOT exceed 6 pounds/2.7kg and Alaskan Huskies are often not more than 60 pounds/27.2kg and less than 35 pounds/15.8kg (for reference my smallest Alaskan Malamute is 75 pounds/34kg and my largest is 110 pounds/50kg....)

Loaded with gear an Iditarod sled weighs around 200 pounds/90.7kg.

Most Iditarod dogs are not at the maximum size/weight range, mostly closer to 45 pounds/20kg on average. For the purposes of this exercise I will use 5 pounds/2.2kg for the Chihuahua. I will assume that these Chihuahua's are at their maximum strength and conditioning much like sled dogs and use the 20% metric for the amount of weight they could pull. Because our average Chihuahua is 5 pounds in this scenario it makes the math easy. 20% of 5 is uh.....1.

So to conclude it is likely that you would need a team of 200+ Chihuahuas to pull an Iditarod sled (and omg the amount of food...). That paints QUITE the visual.

Here is Jeff Deeter from Black Spruce Dog Sledding, an Iditarod kennel, running a 29 dog team for reference of what a large amount of dogs in harness might...be like?

anyways whose gonna make a visual of the hypothetical chihuahua team bc i would like to see it

You are pressed to find a soul alive today that can testify to the experience of several hundred horses charging at your direction and you know they intend to charge past, over, and through you. The realization is alone enough to shake your will.

Hobelars were mounted on small gaited native pony-horses called hobbies; carrying no gear and wearing no armour and riding practically bareback, a feat made possible by the fast smooth pace of the hobby (whose gait would presumably resemble the Icelandic pony’s tölt or the Mongolian war pony’s joroo.) the Irish Hobby is now extinct, but the name is where we get the word “hobby” from - an activity done for pleasure. This sounds made-up, doesn’t it? You can read a long post by myself and contributors here, which includes this poem from someone describing their fighting style and how annoying it was:

And one amang, an lyrysch man, Uppone his hoby swyftly ran; Hyt was a sportfulle sygthe, How hys darttes he did schak ; And when him lyst to leve or tak, They had fulle gret dispite.

There are a few reasons why you haven’t heard of hobelars (god forbid people have hobbies). It is important to the imperial construction of the myths of the British Isles (and the French) that Celtic people be negligible and subjugated in any narrative of medieval warfare. They did not correspond to a social class outside of warfare: you can spin so MANY sexy aristocracy-reinforcing tales of chivalry around knights that we’re still doing so today. Sexy tormented superhero with his ARMOUR and his SWORD and his big HORSE - let’s roleplay this 5 million times, and for political comfort, rather than trampling the peasants he now rules, we shall enshrine and repeat the safe metaphorical image of the “dragon” for him to fight as well…

Guy Who Just Caught A Wild Hobby From A Bog And Doesn’t Wear Armour (and runs around bareback, throwing stuff and being incredibly fast and annoying, and vanishing when you tried to kill them back) is just… less sexy. They literally weren’t superheroes. There is discomfort as well - if we kept their imagery, we couldn’t give them fictions to fight; hobelars were not romantic, they had no fixed honour; they were always a scrambling skirmishing fighting unit for killing people. As an academic puts it:

The hobelar is very much the poor relation in the study of the English armies of the fourteenth century, eclipsed by both the man-at-arms and the archer. Our understanding of his origins and role has been wholly based on only two major studies of this troop type: J. E. Morris’ ‘Mounted Infantry Warfare’ in 1914 and J. Lydon's ‘The Hobelar: An Irish Contribution to Medieval Warfare’ in 1954. The lack of interest might be considered surprising, given that Morris saw him as the precursor to the mounted longbowman, while Lydon called him ‘the most effective fighting man of the age’, referring to the hobelar as ‘an entirely different type of mounted soldier’. Yet other historians have been happy to accept the conclusions of Morris and Lydon, considering the hobelar only in passing. Perhaps the reason that so little work has been done on him is that he is always considered in comparison to the man-at-arms – the elite warrior, in his shining harness, doyen of chivalry and a core element of the medieval political and social elite – and the longbowman – the almost super-heroic, Hundred Years’ War-winning, nationalistic symbol of medieval English, and Welsh, martial prowess. By contrast, there is little if any mention of the hobelar in the battle narratives of the middle ages; they have no great role to play in the successes of the English over the French. They do not form a political and social class within medieval society and there is no way, therefore, to discuss their impact outside of the military sphere. It is also almost certain that their Irish origins have counted against them too. Medieval Ireland has been considered militarily backwards by most historians of warfare, who seem to have inherited something of the dismissive tone of their English sources…

Right. 

You’ve read the posts above. You have dutifully pictured the mental image of being a pikeman, Just Some Guy with a big pointy stick, while thousands of pounds of steel-armoured horseflesh ridden by braying Tories comes at you. You have understood that this is inherently alarming, even if you understand the military theories involved, and are prepared to make horse-kebabs.

Now picture being that pikeman when hobelars turn up. First off, the hobbies are WEIRD. They’re fast and tiny, and they move Wrong:

Rather than lining up to be kebabs, as you expect, they feint - dance up to you like weirdos and turn away. They show off how - unencumbered and in good control of their hobbies - they can pretend to do the scary charge thing, breaking your will, but not get kebabed. They are not wearing armour; they’re not using saddles or stirrups, but some of them appear to be archers (?!) sometimes the hobelars get off and wind you up a bit and then jump back on their stupid hobbies. Psychologically they seem more like YOU, but then there’s the horses. They throw spears, or arrow-spears called “darts.” They laugh at you. They have amazing control of their hobbies, who turn away from pikeheads on a dime. The sight of hobbies skirmishing was described (above) as “a sportful sight” - presumably if they weren’t doing it at you, when it would be SO annoying.

There is zero expectation that Celtic mounted skirmishers will break a wall of pikemen. The hobelars have been sent to annoy you. What if this is part of their function, a natural activity in their wheelhouse, and they have perfected it. What if it’s working. What if, by the time the big shiny horses with their big shiny nobles come, you’re already a bit shaken…

Not saying this scene ever happened in history, but you can see from this a bit of how these histories are constructed: here is a unit that was effective and influential in its time and gave its name to “hobbies.” Here are the places where it would seem logical to use them. We have lost much of what would have been known about how they fought at all. The primary source for the quote of the “iyrysch man upon his hoby” is preserved in one single corrupted document in a corner of the internet that took me a morning to find. We will never forget knights, but with a strategically placed EMP, we would probably lose our ability to remember and connect over hobelars (why would anyone care.)