Enjoying adulthood so far

Coffee shop AUs are, like... fine. They're not my thing, but they're hardly going to end the world. We don't need to have a moral panic about people enjoying coffee shop AUs. I'm also not about to come for anyone seeking escapism in the current hellscape.

However, I do think it's interesting to examine the tendency within these AUs to project a sort of idyll onto the coffee shop: here is a whimsical place where you can spend time with your friends and potentially meet your true love; here is a world where the greatest dilemma you may face is choosing the right coffee syrup for a new beverage or sneaking your number onto that to-go cup without being obvious.

The fantasy of the coffee shop AU is divorced almost entirely from the reality of an actual coffee shop. There are no abusive, creepy customers or bosses; there is no mention of the barista's wages; we don't see the dishwasher sweating at their station, the cashiers' aching feet; the person whose job it is to clean the (customer-only?) toilets. These topics are Political and Depressing and Must Be Avoided, because Political and Depressing things are antithetical to this kind of escapism.

The coffee shop AU exists, not in a world without capitalism (because this is a setting where commerce is actively happening) but in a world where capitalism has no teeth: a world where capitalism somehow works. In order to be convinced and soothed by this fantasy, you must suspend your disbelief and avert your eyes. You must filter the coffee shop through a neopastoralist lens.

"What's wrong with Coffee Shop AUs?" Dude nobody shat on your coffe shop AUs I beg you to read the post.

"Stop grilling people for liking Coffee Shop AUs!!!" Again please read the post, this is not about you.

"People have always written fluff!! [cites some example]!!" Nobody said it never existed before, please read the post.

"Not everything was better in the past, you know! It's fascist to say things were better in the past!" Actual comment from another post. I beg people to raed

"Is there really more fluff tho? Sure, people demand wholesome fics now and low-stakes happy-ending-only stories for queer characters, BUt.... are there really more coffee shops?" .......dude is so close so getting it... they notice the trend too... they are just confused by the absence of Coffee.... I'm gonna scream.

I pulled some data from the most commonly used tags as well as the basic archive warnings and ratings and some other relevant ones, covering the last year and then the 2010-2015 time period:

Red means less common in in 2025 than 2010-2015; green means more common in 2025. The 2010-2015 range is just the time I personally was curious about. I did also look at the data 15+ years ago, but that period has a glut of older works being uploaded.

ESA has new astronauts and 8 of them are women! Before today ESA had only a single female astronaut. More detailed post to omce in the next few days.

Sophie Adenot  France  Career Astronaut 

Pablo Álvarez Fernández Spain Career Astronaut

Meganne Christian  UK  Member of the Astronaut Reserve

Anthea Comellini  Italy  Member of the Astronaut Reserve

Rosemary Coogan  UK  Career Astronaut

Sara García Alonso  Spain  Member of the Astronaut Reserve

Raphaël Liégeois  Belgium  Career Astronaut

John McFall  UK  Parastronaut Feasibility Study Member

Andrea Patassa  Italy  Member of the Astronaut Reserve

Carmen Possnig  Austria  Member of the Astronaut Reserve

Arnaud Prost  France  Member of the Astronaut Reserve

Amelie Schoenenwald  Germany  Member of the Astronaut Reserve

Marco Sieber  Switzerland  Career Astronaut

Aleš Svoboda  Czech Republic  Member of the Astronaut Reserve

Sławosz Uznański  Poland  Member of the Astronaut Reserve

Marcus Wandt Sweden  Member of the Astronaut Reserve

Nicola Winter  Germany  Member of the Astronaut Reserve

Things you need to know about this whole bloody farce:

firstly, as some people have pointed out, he’s not exactly in the library, which is probably for the best, because that honestly just hands students an excuse not to go to the library on a plate. “Sorry I didn’t do the reading, but Jeremy fucking Bentham was staring into my frightened soul again.” Universities rely on students not dropping out because they’re too afraid to study under the watchful eye of an eldritch abomination, so he’s in the cloister, apparently. Not that that’s much better.

secondly, no, that is not his real head. Don’t panic. You aren’t staring into the sunken eyes of a corpse. Instead, you’re staring into the sunken eyes of an eerily lifelike wax head, deliberately coloured so as to give the pallor of death and mummification which, as I’m sure we can all agree, is just fine. Why mummification, you ask?

well, because Jeremy Bentham was a bit weird, all things considered. From the age of 21, Bentham had bequeathed his body to be dissected by a family friend, which honestly is not what I’d personally use my illustrious family connections for, but that’s fine. This pal ultimately died before Bentham did, so Bentham’s dissection was carried out by his philosophical disciple, Thomas Southwood Smith. Bentham also instructed Smith to create an ‘auto icon’ of his body, which is a fancy way of saying ‘put me in a goddamn glass box and make me look as not-dead as possible’. This was to consist of his skeleton, padded out with hay and dressed in his favourite gladrags, and his actual mummified head, which was to be mummified so as to resemble Bentham as he was when he lived. However:

Bentham, although probably not ever in line to become the 6th member of One Direction, did not look like a raisin. His mummified head, though? Oh boy. Oh boy, did Smith fuck that up. He was something of a maverick, and decided to mummify Bentham’s head based on practices perfected by indigenous peoples of New Zealand. Those practitioners had had centuries to perfect their art. Smith did not. The end result is honestly too creepy for me to post here, but needless to say, it did not look like Bentham did in life. Unless Bentham looked like a shrunken prune with wispy white hair, anyway.

for a long time, Bentham’s body was displayed with the skeleton and wax head making up his ‘auto icon’, with his real head in a box by his feet. A side note here: I once saw a photo of this as a kid and it gave me nightmares for about 6 months. Howevs, Bentham is on display at a university, so you know what that means. Yes, it means that students kept stealing the head as a fun prank. Let me repeat that: for a jovial funtime goof, teens stole the disembodied, shrivelled skull of the father of modern utilitarianism. Which is fine.

the only real parts of Bentham in that figure now are his hair, which they took from the skull, and his skeleton. Not that that makes it any less creepy, but this is essentially a headless classroom skeleton in a fancy padded outfit with a wax head. Writing it out, that kind of makes it worse.

the real head is now locked away, ostensibly so that students can’t keep terrifying their flatmates with it by using it as the world’s most haunting Scream mask, but probably in reality just to stop the fucking nightmares.

in case of the faith of the seven / for those who follow the old gods / valyrian wedding ceremonies

octavia paulina was a six year old girl whose sarcophagus was found in her family’s tomb at via triumphalis in rome, dated roughly around the third century a.d. her parents mourned her mors immatura, her premature death, by having the wall behind her sarcophagus painted with the image of a giant meadow with children and a chariot pulled by doves accompanied by hermes leading an unconscious girl into afterlife. (to my knowledge, the doves and the fact that they were led by hermes was a symbol for hope.)

the sarcophagus itself shows athletic competitions between girls and boys alike, and in the most important one on the front, octavia paulina appears as the winner (a palm branch in her hand, which is meant to symbolize her strength and honor, her virtus). her opponent is sitting on the floor, upset. what really stands out is that octavia paulina’s parents ordered a common sarcophagus that was usually used to bury boys with athletic interests or futures but then proceeded to have it remodeled — smaller heads and genitalia cut off etc — to include girls in the relief.

i just get very soft when i think about parents ordering a sarcophagus for their little daughter who think it’s perfect for her and who remodel it to make it even more accurate for her. the thought of parents more than 1.700 years ago thinking their six year old daughter deserves a sarcophagus that fits her personality (rather than what was expected of her as a young girl of the time) despite none being available and then ordering for it to be altered makes me wanna scream because it’s such a human and caring thing to do. maybe octavia paulina even had a say in this because it took weeks to months to make a sarcophagus this detailed.

The young man, Carvilio Gemello, was around 18 when he died, likely as a consequence of a bone fracture in his leg. The woman, Aebutia, was around forty forty-five when she died and was buried wearing this ring (now housed in the Palestrina Archeological museum)

Behind the quartz window we can still see the face of Carvilio Gemello engraved in a golden miniature that his mother commissioned. 

So it’s not really like their friend’s pigeon now knows how to read. He’s not going to be terribly interested in a novel you hand him (unless he decides it looks like a good nest.) However pigeons are remarkably good at pattern recognition, especially visual patterns. They out-perform humans when it comes to things like identifying artwork/distinguishing between different artist’s works. So it is pretty easy for them to recognize a visual arrangement of ink, such as a printed word, and be taught to respond to that particular pattern. So when looking at an ingredient list the pigeon learns to pick out the specific pattern(s) he’s been taught to react to among the other patterns (words.)

So he sees “wheat” and doesn’t read it the way humans do (w-h-e-a-t spells wheat), but rather sees the arrangement of pigment that he has been trained to slap. So he slaps it.

He will have to be taught every single gluten containing ingredient for it to be super useful, but it is definitely possible, which is super cool! Plus it makes a little kid’s life easier, and enriches Gray Boy.