Jolene Meghan

[Video description: Four videos that have been stitched together; the first three are captioned. One: A lawyer in a suit says smugly, "I sued a 9-year-old kid and won!" Two: A bearded person sits outside and says ironically, "I challenged a nine year old kid to a basketball game and won." Three: A person wearing a yellow bandanna as a sweatband says dramatically, "I challenged a nine year old kid to a bench press competition, and won." Four: A (presumably) nine year old kid walks across a lawn, shaking their head slightly and sounding out of breath as they say, "I had the worst day of my life." End description.]

January:

February:

From a reverse image search, I found the website Show Your Stripes, run by the University of Reading in the UK, which is likely where the above graph originated. It provides temperature data for various regions of the world from approximately 1900-2025. For example, here are graphs for Canada, India, and Papua New Guinea:

the path of wisdom is sometimes to hire a plumber.

aka I, an archeologist, am here to review the accuracy Penelope's loom in the 2024 movie 'The Return' because I want to avoid thinking about all my papers due next week. For context, I am currently writing my bachelor paper on Minoan textiles, and while I am definitely not an expert, I do know a thing or two about bronze age textile technology

So first point of pedantry: that is not at all a bronze ago loom.

I can't say exactly say what kind of loom this is, as I've only studied bronze ago looms. Whatever kind of horizontal/draw/treadle loom this is, I can confidently state that this would not have been used in Mycenaean times. I'd say that we only see these kinds of looms in Europe from the medieval period, somewhere around the 11th century.

In the bronze age, there are three types of looms in use (as far as we know). The horizontal ground loom, the two beam loom, and the warp-weighted loom. Most traditionally, we see iconography depict Penelope weaving on a warp-weighted loom, like this beautiful vase does.

We can clearly recognize this as a warp weighted loom, because we can see the weights: they're the little triangles at the ends of the vertical threads (the warp). The warp-weighted loom is also the only loom we can find archeological remains of, as the loom weights were often made of clay (sometimes pebbles), while the other types of looms were purely wooden.

Furthermore, I have genuinely no clue what she is supposed to be doing with her weaving in this short clip. There is no visible shed, which is the separation between the warp yarns, through which you pull the weft, so that you can actually weave something.

Here's a picture of the shed, as you can see, every other thread is pulled up, and the shed can then be switched around to create a woven pattern.

In the short clip we see, she seems to just be drawing some threads through the warp, which is more than a little nonsensical. If one was weaving a smaller fabric or a tapestry, one could perhaps use a pin or sword beater to pick up individual threads of the warp to pass your horizontal thread (the weft) under, and create patterns that way. That is still not what she is doing here. Additionally, she is weaving a solid red fabric, which would not make it a very interesting tapestry.

Perhaps she's undoing her weaving in this scene? It would make a little more sense if that was what she was doing, as no one would ever be actively weaving at night! It required a lot of light to be able to see what you were doing. Candle light just did not suffice. It still looks a little strange to me, as I don't actually see any woven fabric on the loom that she could be undoing. It's all just loose warp threads.

Honestly, it kind of looks like they picked up a loom from the nearest interactive history museum and plunked it into their movie without doing any research. I think it's a little sad that when adapting a work that centers weaving as much as the Odyssey does, the filmmakers did not do any research into bronze age weaving. You really don't need to be writing a paper on this stuff to find sources for this!

i do actually think it is offensive for an author to dismiss queer characters' concerns of homophobia as just internalized shame and selfishness and self-hatred and cowardice. i do actually think it is offensive for an author to bring up homophobic legistlation in russia as a major concern for an immigrant character only to then decide it doesn't matter to him at all, actually, because writing him as an immigrant and doing any research about immigration is somehow too much to ask of ~a romance novel~.

and frankly, i think people who go "oh my god it's just a romance novel!!! you guys are asking too much/reading too much into things!!! it's misogynistic to criticize the romance genre like this!!!" are actually far too comfortable insinuating that the entire romance genre is, by default, full of homophobia, racism, and lazy writing. i actually think it's entirely possible for romance novels to treat the subjects they invoke with care.

if reid didn't want to write about closeted queer people with any compassion, and instead wanted to accuse them of only being closeted because of shame, selfishness, and cowardice, she could have made up a fictional world in which homophobia is simply not as severe an issue as it is today. instead, she chose to invoke homophobia as it exists in the real world, and then simply victim-blamed her closeted characters for being impacted by it.

ultimately, she writes as though the closet is the ultimate sin. this is why she discards ilya's immigrant storyline and doesn't care about the impacts of russia on him as soon as it no longer plays into the ~forbidden romance~ trope in hr. the closet is evil, and wanting to stay closeted is shameful, and therefore ilya (her obvious favorite character) must want to come out. the long game follows the same exact formula as game changer, just with more cruelty in its ending. (it's like if game changer included two sentences about scott getting physically hatecrimed at the end, but glossed over it immediately because he was just sooooo happy to be out it didn't even matter.)

And if there is a demographic shift and that same job becomes male-dominated, then the average wage increases. Societal respect increases.

The converse is also true. If a job shifts from primarily male-dominated to primarily female-dominated, the average wage will drop. Societal respect decreases. A big example of this phenomenon is secretarial work. In the 1800s, being a secretary was actually considered a man’s job, and it was a very elite one at that. If you were a secretary, you were being groomed for leadership. It was a position of status.

That position shifted to a female-dominated field after the invent of the typewriter. Women were hired for the role as typists, and the position was quickly stripped of its respect, mobility, and high wages. As it was feminized, it was devalued. The work was perceived as less because it was performed by a woman. It is yet another microcosm of misogyny.

The inherent devaluation of what is perceived as feminine is blatant in many aspects of life, but I think it has been achingly apparent in how the heated rivalry fandom has treated romance as a genre.

Romance is a genre that is often perceived as being written for women, by women. It is a feminine genre. And so it is devalued.

This devaluation is another well documented phenomenon. Romance as a genre has long been treated as low-brow. It is the empty calories of literature. There is a pervasive mindset that you read it as a guilty indulgence, not because it’s really good.

But it can be.

This idea that the romance genre is lesser or low brow is a fundamentally false one. I had another post here about what genre is and what the romance genre in particular is, so I won’t get into that here. Romance is just a type of story. It in no way dictates how that story is executed. And any story can be executed well.

We are still studying Pride & Prejudice centuries later because from a mechanical perspective, it is a masterclass. It is a serious and complex work of literature. And it is a romance novel. And Pride & Prejudice is not unique in its excellence. There have been many excellent works of literature over the centuries that can be classified as romantic in nature. Some of Shakespeare’s finest works were his romances. The mere fact that a work is romantic does not demand that it is executed with any less skill. But we still act as if you should expect less from a story because it is “just a romance.”

This mindset is rooted in misogyny. There is no genre out there where every artist on the planet got together and decided that it would be the place where they shuffled off the literary duds. That’s fucking bonkers. And there is no other genre where we act like we did that, because there is no other genre as feminized as romance. It is treated as lesser because it is perceived as being for and by women.

Any story can be written well. And the fact that a story focuses centrally on romance does not exclude it from tackling societal issues in a nuanced and complete manner. A romance novel does not need to be a sociopolitical thesis because no book needs to be anything. But it can be.

I think it is telling that one of the most common defenses of these books is not “no, they handled that topic well” but is instead “you can’t expect them to be well executed because it’s just a romance novel, aka the place where dumb fucks go to die.” There is nothing about the fact that these books are romantic that makes them inherently less. And we need to seriously inspect this communal instinct to act like it does. Because the devaluation inherent in that is based in misogyny.

Authors have the freedom to decide what topics they try to tackle in their books, and the audience expects them to do it well. If they do not do it well, then they open themselves up to criticism about that fact. That has been an understood and expected facet of literature since we invented fucking books. Literary criticism has always been a part of society’s experience of literature. We have spent centuries tearing apart each other’s writings and pointing out what we think was done well or poorly. And we have never rushed to the defense of other works with “no no no no no don’t criticize it like that—it’s supposed to be bad, you’re just taking it too seriously.” Authors pick their own conflict. It is not too much to demand that they handle that conflict well.

Polysyndetons are a rhetorical device where you repeat coordinating conjunctions in a sentence, i.e., “He ran and jumped and laughed and sang.” The repetition of the coordinating conjunction, in this case “and,” makes a polysyndeton.