Somewhat Of A Poet

them: *are having a good time together, sharing inside jokes, talking about shared interests, laughing, et cetera, and so on, and so forth, and such like*

Women have always been at the forefront of literature, the first novel (what we would consider a novel in modern terms) was written by a woman (Lady Muraskai’s the Tale of Genji in the early 1000s) take your snide “Isaac Asimov” reblogs and stick it

even in terms of male scifi authors, asimov was predated by Jules Verne, HG Wells, George Orwell, you could have even cited Poe or Jonathan Swift has a case but Asimov?

Women fought to not have to wear multiple layers of petticoats in the summer, and so a new “crinoline” (technically, a crinoline is an underskirt made of stiff horsehair) was invented, the “cage crinoline” (think hoop skirt) which became dangerous in its own right as women burned to death, became caught in machinery, and were otherwise harmed by the very design meant to be helpful.

Women fought to get rid of restrictive corsetry, inventing “emancipation waists,” (basically a sort of fitted undershirt), Union suits (yep, originally for women but quickly adopted by men), and even the “healthy” S line corset (healthy because it didn’t constrict the ribs. Sadly, like the cage crinoline, it was adopted by high fashion and became a tool of tightlacing.)

Women fought to have more comfortable clothing. Look up the aesthetic dress movement, and the earlier dress reform movement.

Women fought and fought to have swimming suits in which we could actually swim. Once we wore full dresses made of wool to go ocean bathing. Only slowly did the hemlines rise. Pants were added, then the shape became more streamlined. Women were arrested for public indecency. Still, they persisted.

Women fought to have appropriate garments to go cycling in or to ride a horse astride. Women fought and continue to fight to be allowed to attend school in comfortable clothing. I’ve said this before, but when I was a girl, I was required to wear a skirt unless the temperature stayed below 0 degrees Fahrenheit. I was not permitted to wear pants under my skirt, instead wearing woolen tights which itched and would pull down, requiring me to concentrate on keeping my clothing in order as well as my schoolwork.

“We have no one better than the under gamekeeper.”

“Then make the under gamekeeper captain.”

because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe

and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us– we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them

and then

we built robots?

and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image

and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone

but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?

the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.

This is my favorite post on this website. 

I’ve seen this post in screenshots before, and the first time I read it, I cried. Just sat there with tears running down my face. 

Because this, right here, is the best of us, we humans. That we hope, and dream of the stars, and we don’t want to be alone. That this is the best of our technology, not Terminators and Skynet, but our friends, our companions, our legacy. Our message to the stars. 

that’s hard to explain, you know. that the numbness effects your humor, too. that, sure, you’ll laugh at things, but it feels tight, tiny, like you should be happy but you’re squeezing joy through a pinhole. sometimes you look at things and think: i should like this. i should feel good when i look at this. i should find this cute or funny or heartwarming. but you feel nothing.

it’s hard to track recovery. we live by the day. measure only how well we did in 24 hours. sometimes look as far as a week. we just keep walking. the first thing i got back was crying. you wouldn’t think you’d miss crying - painful, ugly, draining, plain annoying - but i did. i missed crying. for a long while i was sort of grateful to be crying over any small thing.

I was always kind of skeptical about Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, because visiting every kid in the world did not seem reasonable. But the pirates only visited me, so they were probably real.

VERY

fucking

did not