Creature Of Mad Enthusiasms

Gallery of Fashion, vol. V: April 1, 1798 - March 1 1799

what you'll notice is that it's not drab. the accessories are brightly coloured, the hats are either bright pastels themselvs or trimmed such, and the trim on the gowns also follows that pattern. these are not just fanciful illustrations, they were guides to what was trendy at the time. fashion plates, in the absence of extant gowns, are often the best historical reference we have to a lot of fashions from the time before colour photography existed.

and again, i cannot stress this enough, it is not the brown drab you see in so many modern adaptations. they may not have had aniline dyes yet (that wouldn't be until the mid-1850s, i believe) but it's not like the only options were dark and sober colours. to see something like sense and sensibility with those boring brown and tannish gowns is pretty ahistorical, even for women who may not have had a lot of money to spend on clothing. you got the best you could afford, and like today, it followed the same styles rich people wore; if rich people were wearing bright colours, anyone who could afford it was also wearing bright colours.

so i'm begging people to realise that the drab clothes of these modern adaptations is not actually historically accurate. i'm not going to insist on period-accurate clothing (though i definitely prefer it), but i will require that people are honest about the fact that they are not using period-accurate costuming. don't insist that you did all of this research and when people who actually know what they're talking about suggest that you're incorrect, especially don't double down like you, the non-historian, are somehow magically more correct. (not naming names, but a certain director is coming to mind.)

'To be sure, this gray is the closer make, and would wear the longest.'

'I don't care,' said Sylvia, still rejecting the dull gray. 'I like this best. Eight yards, if you please, miss.'

Like, a flogging bottom might be praised for their ability to take pain and know their limits, or a rope bunny might be recognised as keeping themselves in good physical shape so they can hold complicated stress positions for longer than a novice, but even the most beginner of beginner bootblacks has learnt a little bit of materials science (Will this type of brush scratch this patent finish?), a little bit of basic chemistry (If these were last polished with a silicone wax, how do I remove that to start to bull them?), a little bit of leatherworking history (Is that natural fibre stitching on those surplused Warsaw Pact boots, will my polish rot it?) and spent time practising techniques on their own boots.

And it's one of the few kinks I can think of where the top is so immediately physically and emotionally vulnerable to the bottom in that way: I put my foot in the hands of a stranger bootblacking at a party, and I trust that they won't damage the boots I was gifted by my long-dead Master when I was 17, that they won't soak the stitching and start the rot of the boots I was wearing when I first fucked the love of my life, I trust that they'll carefully work around and treat the cuts and scuffs in the leather that I picked up wearing these same boots marshalling at a dozen prides and going toe-to-toe with strikebreakers and scabs on twenty years' worth of picket lines. The experienced bootblack can look at my soles and where my boots crease, and see that I have a weak hip, that I'm slightly bowlegged, that I don't drive and that I walk even in the weather where I'd rather not. And I trust that they'll see that worn-out, poor, slightly sad old man and still call me "sir".

It’s great for him because he can talk to people and give them this little sample of the kink in a non-sexual setting, but here’s a flyer for the next event where we are doing it sexually and you can get to thinking about if it awakens anything in you to explore. He’s also a wheelchair user, so it’s a perfect way for a friend to help setup his purpose-built platform and cushions, and then all the fun interesting people who like leather in some capacity come talk him.

Often gets to have deep conversations with people, too, which is so needed in a time many of us feel isolated. He’s there reminding us community is built on mutual care. He cares for the boots and the person in a way that fulfills him. That person might bring him food or show their art. Maybe they form a friendship that helps them both get to other events. Good boots in the winter to bring burritos and aid to our homeless neighbors. Or that walk the floors of a local hardware store helping the people build their contraptions. In return he gets tips about a shipment of way more shoe polish than ordered coming in and the store being eager to move it.

He has an aura of care and reciprocity that is so clear to even people outside the kink, and he’s a great ambassador for getting into it. His presence does a lot to make people naïve of kink culture have favorable views. Gets them curious about the classes and books at the local radical love sex and gender shop when they see the ads or event calendar in the paper. A little love live competency porn to spruce up the place. And if anyone objects to his presence, we all know he’s staring and the complainer’s getting ejected as the true threat to the community.

TV Appreciation Week 2024  : Day 7 : Free choice → Favourite show nobody watched (Galavant)

My work for the @very-sincerely-yours-zine !

What an incredible honor to be surrounded by such talented creatives in a celebration of queer life, love, and perseverance 🩵🩵🩵

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

This year’s is different. They are now federal REQUIREMENTS, which means there’s no flexibility. As was said previously, the 400 pages are not singularly devoted to being absolute shitheads to trans people. Theres a lot of stuff in there, some of which is the standard dry boring grants stuff, some of which is the horrible ideological warfare outlined above.

This document is issued by the OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, which is currently lead by fucking Russell Vought, the principal architect of Project 2025. This is how they’re going to implement all the horrible shit in there that wasn’t covered by Executive Order. Russell Vought is actively coming for my job, my marriage, and my kid, and most of my friends lost their jobs last year because of him. He is the fucking arch villain behind the heinous shit the current regime is doing.

things fall apart and there’s anarchy everywhere; falcons fly freely and can’t be compelled.

Dimming the tide there is blood in the water and everywhere customs of innocence drowned.

Held by the worst is a fervent intensity; lacking conviction the best run aground.

Surely there must be some kind of apocalypse; surely epiphany must be at hand!

Visions unbidden from Spiritus Mundi of something awakening out on the sand:

Head of a man with a leonine frame and a pitiless gaze that’s as blank as the sun;

sleep became nightmare by passage of centuries long before eons of slumber were done.

Higgledy piggledy, beast of antiquity, imminent, just as the prophecies warn,

From ancient to abstract, this one sure got around.