Katherine The OK(ish)

😂

DS9 once again delivering some of the best Found Family I've ever seen in media. Jake and Nog had a beautiful friendship despite their many, many cultural differences and the initial resistance from the adults in their lives.

don't be the road rage people

#jane austen#is truly a better woman than me#because idk if I could ever be so charitable to women I find hateful at worst or annoying at best#and yet the sentiment lying therein is something more women could adopt#we *should* want women to be safe#even if we don't get along with them#because women are already at the mercy of a merciless society#women should be able to have a safety net *somewhere*#and Jane gave that to pretty much every woman in her stories#that's a lovely thing to do#for real tho#my history people#19th century (via @elizabeth-karenina)

For people who don't read a lot of literature from that period, I cannot overstate how many of Austen's characters would have died/been forced into a life of prostitution for their "sins". That was the literary expectation because you didn't want to risk the impressionable young women reading the novels to think it was okay to enjoy sex or otherwise not be a paragon. Jane Austen made the intentional choice not to write that kind of outcome for her stories ("let other pens dwell on guilt and misery") and she was going against the tide big time by doing so. The balls ovaries on that woman. She knew the world could be cruel to women, but she also knew the world could be kind to them, and she chose kindness every single time.

I am high-key in love with the fact that Sir Terry, who wrote that line about a man not being dead, will quite likely be the first person whose name actually never stops being spoken, and it will always be accompanied with GNU, even if people forget what that part means

i think everyone in the whole world forgot that mystery doesn’t have to equal crime

sometimes it’s just like. what happent ?

Also mystery doesn’t have to equal murder either. Where are the kidnappings and jewel thefts of yesteryear?

1868's The Moonstone was one of the earliest detective/mystery novels and it didn't feature a crime, either. Just "uh, where the fuck did the diamond go?" It did, sadly, hinge on the main characters spending over a year refusing to use their words like adults, which was the only thing that kept the mystery from being solved in the first chapter, but writers still do that kind of thing so i can't complain. But seriously, bring back mysteries that are just inexplicable shit happening and needing to be sorted out. Imagine how much cozier the Cozy genre would be!

i don't really want to weight in on the "using big words in your writing is ableist" discourse happening on tiktok because i'm like 90% certain it's an anti-intellectual psyop to stir up drama in online circles to promote the use of ai to summarize literally everything and thus feeding the LLMs and lowering the populace's mistrust of such tools but i also have to say: dictionaries and thesauruses are the most accessible they've ever been. if you use an e-reader of any kind you can look up a word without leaving the page. there's a plethora of online dictionaries and if you just type a word + "meaning" into google it'll usually give you a definition. we used to have pocket dictionaries we used when reading in class. i have two on my shelf right now that i used in high school. stop letting the fascists purposefully misuse anti-ableism rhetoric to trick you into never thinking again.

as someone who regularly shits all over Lovecraft for his overuse of big words (among other reasons I shit all over him -- but seriously, the man was constitutionally incapable of just writing the word "moon" ... it was always gibbous or eldritch or gibbous AND eldritch), sometimes you just NEED big words to describe things because otherwise you're spending a half a page to say that a conversation was circuitous, or that someone was deliberately obfuscating by being loquacious It's actually GOOD for people to encounter words they don't already know. Keeps the synapses firing. Also, it's so fucking insulting to pretend that the dumbing down of literature is done for the sake of the disabled. You can tell when something is being done for our sake because people complain about the time/effort/money/pointlessness the entire time they're doing it and then expect us to be grateful.

he very famously told her in the dialogue preceding his second proposal that he couldn’t bring himself to hope she’d ever change her mind about him and would never mention his feelings for her again if she told him not to

Is it just me or is the whole original post a little disturbing? Girls like men who won't take no for an answer? Women enjoy being treated like prizes rather than humans? It's super sexy when guys don't respect your boundaries? We need to stop thinking "no" means "no"? WHAT (and i cannot stress this enough) THE ACTUAL FUCK? What the hell was this TheresaK person reading, because it sure as fuck wasn't Jane Austen where the key to a woman's heart is respecting the hell out of her.

being creative is hard. this is why supportive friends are so important 😂

when I was a kid I thought the weather guy on TV controlled the weather and he was just telling us what he was gonna do for the next few days. when he said "30% chance of rain Thursday" I thought he was just guessing how likely it was he'd wake up in a rain mood that morning

I feel like I need to explain. there was a whole internal logic here. there was fucking worldbuilding. I knew there were different weather people on the news in different places and I thought each one was the weather decider for their local area. I knew the word "meteorologist" and thought it was a scientist who had expertise in weather control technology. I never questioned why there was bad weather sometimes because "bad weather" was subjective, after all, I liked cloudy days and snow. and the plants need rain, right? so I figured the weather guy probably had regular meetings with local farmers and gardeners to make sure the amount of precipitation and sunlight we were getting was working out for the crops. I never spoke about this to anyone, because I thought everyone knew. at some point my parents had said "this guy on TV tells us what kind of weather we're going to have" and I misunderstood exactly one fundamental point and built out an enormous set of logical conclusions from there. this lasted from like age 3 to age 6 btw