a haunted house with a roaring fireplace

My handwriting is the same style as the teacher’s who I had when I was nine. I’m now twenty one and he’s been dead eight years but my i’s still curve the same way as his.

I watched the last season of a TV show recently but I started it with my friend in high school. We haven’t spoken in four years.

I make lentil soup through the recipe my gran gave me.

I curl my hair the way my best friend showed me.

I learned to love books because my father loved them first.

Maybe your parents and your grandparents and great-grandparents were among those people - or maybe they weren't, personally. Some people admittedly aren't.

But every human alive is part of an uninterrupted line of hundreds of thousands of years of descent (and that's only since we became Homo sapiens).

We, as humans, have created and built and invented and learned and treated and cured so, so much. Because we kept looking around us, and looking at the people around us, and saying, "I want a better world for the people I love. I want a better world for the people who will come next."

Or perhaps think about it this way:

Would you want your great-grandchildren (or the great-grandchildren of your loved ones / family / chosen family, if you'd rather) to be miserable?

Suddenly having 50 moving eyes can make you disoriented and barfy and the adjustment period sucks ass

It takes both more and less time than you’d think to figure out what the structure as a whole looks like and where those eyes ARE

After you get used to it the entirety of the structure itself and all of the eyes you can see from feels like an extension of your nervous system in a very bizarre way. Like I have dreams now from the perspective of A Building and I’m not sure how to describe that.

On my COMFORTABLE system, the one I spent the longest time on, I never had to think about what code I needed to punch in. If I needed to watch a specific person, I could follow them all over the site without thinking about it.

Now at a different location, all the manual equipment and codes and lag and resolution are different, and it feels like going from playing the piano to driving stick shift on the left side of the road with my feet

a little comic about greener pastures

The one that ends, "You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur."?

LEVEL 0: People exist

LEVEL 1: "Man" and "Woman" roles are constructed; posed as a strict binary with discrete and disparate traits and roles.

LEVEL 2: Man wields power; Woman relies on Man's approval. One role is perceived and valued as better, stronger, smarter. Requiring Man's approval, Woman cultivates inner "man" in order to see herself from Man's perspective as a tool to better anticipate Man's desires.

LEVEL 3: Man perceives Woman's "inner man"; Man perceives anticipatory and appealing behavior as deceptive and manipulative. The potential ability of Woman to manipulate and deceive Man places Women in a position of power above Man, which Man perceives as a threat. In response, Man cultivates "inner woman": a tool which he uses to perceive the "inner man" who Woman uses to predict and appeal to Man.

LEVEL 4: Man "sees" the caricature of "Man" further distorted by the caricature of his conceptualized "Woman" and feels threatened and inferior, but at the same time trapped by the binary which generates this power struggle. Inside of him is a deceptive and threatening "Woman" who he rejects; inside of HER is the Ultimate Man, who this image of Woman supposedly desires the approval of.

If Woman can predict Man, then Woman is an opponent who leverages power through engagement with Man. The only way for "Man" to escape the Threat that Woman poses is to cease engagement. He retains "victory" (escape from woman) by maintaining distance from Woman, and because explicitly admitting the possibility that Woman could ever hold power over Man is Losing, has no option but to tell himself that this is not Fear of Losing Control, but a natural consequence of Posessing Control.

Man rejects any but the most surface-level engagement with Woman, but because "Hiding From Woman" means "Woman Is Threat", and BELIEVING "Woman Is Threat" is unacceptable, Man attempts to cut Woman from the narrative.

LEVEL 5: Man, possessing the "inner woman"'s "inner man" but determined to escape the influence of "woman", mentally erases "Woman" but retains the caricature's caricature of "inner man", who is desirable to BE.

Man possesses exaggerated image of Man, who now exists solely as the Ultimate Desireable Form. In order to achieve this form, Man must constantly see through his eyes, but in order to remain safe in his position of power over Woman, he must erase any trace of evidence that he is DOING this for Woman.

Man must Be the Ultimate Man, because [redacted], who requires Man's Approval.

Ad for The New Yorker, 1936.

she is the maid's BOSS

they are not FRIENDS

the maid probably does not DESIRE her friendship

the servants are not your confidants in this scenario. IRL, the notion of the Loyal Family Retainer was most common in sentimental literature for the employing class (which btw was like upper-working-class on up, although the lower you go, the more work the family would be doing alongside them) and sometimes weaponized by them to try and get extra emotional or physical labor out of domestic workers

did emotional intimacy develop sometimes? absolutely- and it was often encouraged for upper-class 19th-century children in the US and UK, who could spend a lot of time with their nanny and in the servants' sphere in general. was classism a factor? 100%.

.also, scale reference! just the wheel is 70 feet in diameter