Nerdgate Hobbit

There are real labor problems here. Base pay is often insulting. Customer tips carry too much of the burden. Workers need better protections, more transparent algorithms, protection from arbitrary deactivation, and actual recourse when the app or a customer screws them over. Car-dependent delivery is also an environmental and infrastructural problem, though in a denser city I’d still be doing this work; I’d just be doing it by bike.

But when people talk about delivery work, I rarely see them talk to actual delivery workers. I see a lot of abstract arguments about convenience, consumer decadence, “hustle culture,” and internalized neoliberalism. Meanwhile, when I’m out working and waiting in restaurants for orders, the other Dashers I meet are usually people who only speak Spanish, people who read as neurodivergent, visibly physically disabled people, or some combination of the above.

I have not met this mythical Disco Elysium poor ultraliberal hustlegrinder-wannabe people seem to be arguing with. Maybe that archetype exists somewhere. If it exists among any kind of gig worker, it would probably be rideshare drivers. But most of what I see looks less like “rise and grind” and more like “this is one of the few forms of work available to people who need flexibility, low barriers to entry, limited managerial surveillance, or a way to work around language barriers, disability, burnout, chronic illnesses and injuries with symptoms that come and go unpredictably, caregiving, résumé gaps, or discrimination.”

That does not make the current system good. It means the current system is filling a real gap that a lot of supposedly better systems do not even acknowledge.

As a disabled person who is burnout-prone and demand-sensitive, contracting as a delivery driver has given me an unprecedented level of financial flexibility. I can work when I have capacity. I can stop when I’m deteriorating. I can build my day around my actual body instead of being trapped under a manager who thinks “reliable” means “able to perform the same way every day no matter what.” That matters. It does not cancel out the exploitation, but it is also not fake just because it is politically inconvenient.

And delivery itself is not some inherently decadent evil. Sometimes people live alone. Sometimes they are sick. Sometimes they are disabled, exhausted, overwhelmed, grieving, overloaded, or recovering from something else - perhaps the stress and fatigue induced by their own job. Sometimes they need medicine, groceries, or a meal that will actually unplug their sinuses instead of whatever generic community-care slop someone thinks they should be grateful for. Humans are allowed to need specificity. “Food” is not the same as “the food I can actually eat right now.”

A serious labor critique would ask how to make delivery work safer, better-paid, less tip-dependent, less car-dependent, less algorithmically punitive, and less precarious. It would ask what kinds of flexible, accessible work should exist for people who cannot thrive in conventional employment. It would ask how cities could support bike delivery, worker cooperatives, public infrastructure, and real protections without simply replacing one bad system with a moral sermon about how nobody should ever want takeout.

But a lot of the discourse does not do that. It treats convenience itself as suspicious. It treats wanting flexible work as false consciousness. It treats the needs of disabled people, immigrants, and other people who can't fit into traditional employment structures as details to be swept aside in favor of a cleaner political image.

The Black Nerd. A common character type, the nerd will always be very interested in all things nerdy: science, video games, mathematics, etc. In an continued effort to combat stereotypes, the Black Nerd will be lack athleticism, probably being asthmatic (the nerdiest of conditions). The Black Nerd will dress smartly, suspenders and bow ties. They’ll always talk smart too, using proper English with complex words.

Now, I don’t have a problem with a black character being a nerd, indeed black people are a people; we aren’t all the same and we all have varying personalities. The problem I have is that too often we see a distinct disconnect between Blackness and the Black Nerd. The Black Nerd doesn’t listen to hip hop or rap, only classical music. The Black Nerd only has white friends, the only other black characters are into not nerdy stuff. The Black Nerd never ever uses AAVE at any time in any context.

Well @dumbey, seems we’re in similar boats

A SEAMSTRESS, in a historical sense, is someone whose job is sewing. Just sewing. The main skill involved here is going to be putting the needle into an out of the fabric. They’re usually considered unskilled workers, because everyone can sew, right? (Note: yes, just about everyone could sew historically. And I mean everyone.) They’re usually going to be making either clothes that aren’t fitted (like shirts or shifts or petticoats) or things more along the lines of linens (bedsheets, handkerchiefs, napkins, ect.). Now, a decent number of people would make these things at home, especially in more rural areas, since they don’t take a ton of practice, but they’re also often available ready-made so it’s not an uncommon job. Nowadays it just means someone whose job is to sew things in general, but this was not the case historically. Calling a dressmaker a seamstress would be like asking a portrait painter to paint your house

A DRESSMAKER (or mantua maker before the early 1800s) makes clothing though the skill of draping (which is when you don’t use as many patterns and more drape the fabric over the person’s body to fit it and pin from there (although they did start using more patterns in the early 19th century). They’re usually going to work exclusively for women, since menswear is rarely made through this method (could be different in a fantasy world though). Sometimes you also see them called “gown makers”, especially if they were men (like tailors advertising that that could do both. Mantua-maker was a very feminized term, like seamstress. You wouldn’t really call a man that historically). This is a pretty new trade; it only really sprung up in the later 1600s, when the mantua dress came into fashion (hence the name).

TAILORS make clothing by using the method of patterning: they take measurements and use those measurements to draw out a 2D pattern that is then sewed up into the 3D item of clothing (unlike the dressmakers, who drape the item as a 3D piece of clothing originally). They usually did menswear, but also plenty of pieces of womenswear, especially things made similarly to menswear: riding habits, overcoats, the like. Before the dressmaking trade split off (for very interesting reason I suggest looking into. Basically new fashion required new methods that tailors thought were beneath them), tailors made everyone’s clothes. And also it was not uncommon for them to alter clothes (dressmakers did this too). Staymakers are a sort of subsect of tailors that made corsets or stays (which are made with tailoring methods but most of the time in urban areas a staymaker could find enough work so just do stays, although most tailors could and would make them).

Tailors and dressmakers are both skilled workers. Those aren’t skills that most people could do at home. Fitted things like dresses and jackets and things would probably be made professionally and for the wearer even by the working class (with some exceptions of course). Making all clothes at home didn’t really become a thing until the mid Victorian era.

And then of course there are other trades that involve the skill of sewing, such as millinery (not just hats, historically they did all kinds of women’s accessories), trimming for hatmaking (putting on the hat and and binding and things), glovemaking (self explanatory) and such.

IRIS WEST APPRECIATION WEEK • day five 

here she is insisting on performing at a party in an effort to quite blatantly show off ("Elizabeth was in agonies" lmfao):

just to pull the most significant line: "such an opportunity of exhibiting was delightful to her" (emphasis mine)

here she is saying that most girls are boring and basic and thus uninteresting to her:

here she is reacting to lydia's elopement with a moral judgment on female virtue:

(for context, this is literally right after they find out lydia's run off and everyone's freaking out about where she is and if they've married or not)

and here's her ending, in which austen basically says that now that she's the last unmarried daughter she kind of has to socialize more, but now that her sisters aren't around to make her feel insecure she's fine with it:

(all text from the gutenberg project)

and i mean. there's nothing wrong with changing a character for your own purposes when you do spin-off/adaptations/reimaginings like this. but i think it's a fundamental misreading of the text to claim that mary is the overlooked, ignored sister, because she's not as pretty or charming as her sisters. austen is very clear that mary herself knows that she's not as conventionally beautiful, and as a result has wildly overcompensated by competing with everyone around her to constantly be the most intelligent in the room. mary is, in her own way, as rude as lydia and kitty. she's portrayed as rather obtuse, insensitive, insufferable. and she's definitely not quiet or shy, which is where the other bennet sister really loses me lol.

it's like the "i'm not like other girls" trope blown up and portrayed as empowering, but that's really still what it is, at its heart. and i, personally, just find that rather boring. like if it were me, i'd want to read a love story about this mary, who's purposefully oblivious to social graces and sort of impolitely blunt and judgmental and antisocial. she's great fun, when she shows up randomly to just say something incredibly insensitive and then disappear again - it's really so funny.

and this is one of my favorite moments, also:

mary thinking that mr. collins would be a fine husband to have because he's definitely smarter than her sisters, but he'd have to study very hard and catch up to her level so he can have a hope to be as smart as she is. like, that's hysterical. she's fucking hilarious. but also think about that for a second: austen is comparing mary to mr. collins, but she's saying mary is worse, lmfao

of course this is a very pointed satire of a very context-dependent sort of personality, which in regency novels are often referred to dismissively as "bluestockings." feminist scholars have debated mary bennet for a long time, over how to take this exaggerated portrayal of a female intellectual, and i think you're free to take your own reading of it from our modern perspective, about a young girl who's acutely aware of her beauty (or lack of it), and how she reacts to the culture she's raised in as a result. i think a feminist reimagining of mary would be amazing, but personally i don't think the way to do it is to round off her sharp edges and turn her into a poor sad neglected nerd girl. (like, if i can think of any direct parallel to mary, it's not elizabeth or charlotte, it's caroline bingley. you know, the other character who expresses her insecurity by projecting superiority constantly?) that's not at all who she is, and i don't think it's particularly empowering to sand down a female character into something more palatable in order to give her her own story. that, on principle, offends me a little.

IF THE ANSWER IS NO, TYPE WHAT FLAG YOU GOT INTO THE COMMENTS

I'm a blacksmith's daughter, remember?