Despicable you

So, con drop was coined to explain the drop of energy that comes a few hours or maybe a few days after attending or participating in a convention.

After spending several days on an endorphin and dopamine high, you go home and crash. Life seems dull. You feel the emptiness. You need to sign up for another convention. You're chasing the next high.

This is the same kind of feeling the BDSM community have called dom-drop or sub-drop.

The feeling can come with mood-swings, moodiness, fatigue, depression, etc.

I was aware of both, but at some point I realized it also happens to other kind of events that bring a high of dopamine. Like a party, an evening with your friends, anything where you have a lot of intense positive emotions.

Sometimes I come back from a party with my friends. And in the bus, I immediately crash and start doubting myself. And if my friends are judging me. And wondering what I said or did wrong, overanalizing every micro expression to see if they secretly hate me. (they don't).

I used to feel guilty about this. I'm supposed to have a good time and here I was, immediately crashing the moment I left.

(of course I have adhd and a weird relationship with dopamine.)

The moment I connected it with con-drop, it made sense.

So here I am after the high of the book fair, forcing myself to take it slow and not immediately start working on a new project to chase the high.

happy new year -------------_--------------------

- "the term is gendered" (it's not, and feminine equivalents were sometimes created specifically for the purpose)

- "they didn't actually do things as knights" (who didn't? The Hatchet women fought the Moors. A few other Orders had women as masters of arms. Both martial and formal examples)

...and a few other reasons that come down to "I don't like imagining my manly men in steel had women in their ranks, girls have cooties".

And the reason I say this is because recently, Wikipedia updated their page on "Knight", specifically adding a section about women with the title of knighthood, and what function they performed. And I know: "Wikipedia is not an academic source"--but every academic institution will accept the sources and articles used to back up wikipages, which confirm what has been said.

I saw this and needed to answer.

The gendered versions of 'knight' come from Romance languages, and literally just change the word to fit the gender of the subject (within a binary). So it isn't like English, where a female knight has always been a 'Dame', but, using Spain as an example, the word for Knight in Spanish is 'Cabellero'. This is the default masculine.

The feminine word for Knight? 'Cabellera'.

Similarly in French: "Chevalier" becomes "Chevaliére".

In Italian, "Cavaliere" becomes "Cavaliera".

Outside of Romance languages, "knight" is just a title for a social rank, so even the English Dame is by default a knight by rank, but may not have the title (although not impossible).

Just a note about translations and ... well, patriarchal bullshit.

When you say "Hatchet women fought the Moors" I was like "hey, that seems to be part of my local history, how have I never heard about it?", and when I googled it ... I actually have heard about it, it's the Orden del Hacha from Catalonia (Orde de l'Atxa in the original Catalan). But ... there's something odd going on. Why the fuck in English they have translated like "Order or the hatchet"? You know, in Spanish and Catalan there's no really a difference between "Axe" and "Hatchet": There's a single word for them, "Hacha/Atxa". But in English, there's a difference. A Hatchet is a hand axe, pretty much the smallest one you can think of:

So It's pretty remarkable that whoever translated the name of the order to english first decided to use "Hatchet" and not "Axe". I'm pretty sure if this was a order of men warriors the name would have been pretty different. Specially when THIS was their coat of arms: