Sunflower Girl

Like, I don't really have an issue with #GirlBoss Persephone retellings (even if I find them a bit tired because they so often have to rely on villifying Demeter to do so.) But to act like that very modern interpretation of the character and story has any basis in the classical sources is just untrue, and it is frustrating because it refuses to engage with the difficult or uncomfortable aspects of stories that are 3000 years old. It refuses to engage with the cultural differences and history of these stories that still find ways to speak to us today. Instead it just seeks to sanitize and erase the bits that don't fit into our modern sensibilities.

But the one that *really* gets me is Medusa. Because as modern audiences, the idea that Medusa being turned into a monster was *punishment* by Athena for being *raped* by Poseidon is really upsetting. And I've seen people legitimately try to say that *actually* Athena would never do that. Athena was actually *protecting* Medusa by making her a monster so that she wouldn't be assaulted again. #feminism

But HERES THE THING- the entire idea that Medusa was transformed by Athena after being raped? COMES FROM FUCKING OVID.

(Ovid is a Roman writer who HEAVILY REIMAGINED the Greek myths in Metamorphoses because he was working with a Roman world view and political agenda.)

All EARLIER classical (and actually Greek) sources have Medusa being *born a Gorgon.* (whether the Gordons as a rule are beautiful or monsterous varies, and Hesoid does mention in the Theogny that Poseidon and Medusa had a thing, but he doesn't describe it as rape. But that they "lay in a meadow of soft flowers", and theres no description of her being transformed because of this.)

So like.

No.

no.

Obviously, the idea that there is some "true" Canon Orthodox version of these myths just...isn't true. That's just not how that worked.

But no. There is no classical support for any of that.

We have 1 reference to Arachne that predates Ovid, from Virgil (Also Roman), and he doesn't name her. "The spider, hateful to Minerva, hangs in the doorway her loose-woven nets."

There is no surviving earlier Greek references or even Greek art depicting Arachne at all, at least that I can find reference to. 🤷‍♀️

So here is the question- did Ovid, or at least Romans around Ovids time if not Ovid directly, invent the myth of Arachne? Does it have any basis in Greek oral tradition at all?

And the answer seems to be...we have no idea. The lack of art seems particularly weird to me, right?

But like, ok, I found 1 website (a museum IN GREECE) that claims to have 1 vase from 500BCE which depicts the myth of Arachne.

But this is the vase.

Here is a scan of that image

... why has this been identified as Arachne and Athena? One of the women is larger (the one they have identified as Athena) but she doesn't have any of Athenas traditional iconography- the helmet the shield, even an owl. Anything. And why is that Arachne? There's no spiders, and the tapestry isn't detailed enough for illustrations to be seen. Unless I'm missing something, this is just a scene of 2 women weaving. Maybe with some funky proportions. Why not say it is Penelope and one of her slave girls? Or anyone else? Weaving was pretty popular.

But this isn't a well known or well studied piece. And I'm not an archeologist. What do I know?

But having proof of the Arachne myth from a Greek source in 500BCE would be super interesting, yeah?

So. What do you do when you're hyper-fixating at 11:30pm on an unknowable historical question?

I emailed the museum and asked.

The museum never got back to me. I posed this question to a classics professor on TikTok who said basically the same thing - the references from Virgil and this specific vase seem to imply that there was *some* version of the myth that existed before Ovid.

But even he was like "...yeah, they are identifying this vase as Arachne but... it seems a bit speculative."

He also added that Arachne having a Greek name, not a Latin one, makes it more likely that Ovid was adapting something rather than just making it up himself (since he otherwise might have just used a Latin name?)

So. Unless someone digs up another villa or temple at some point and finds new evidence.... this is just... the state of things.

Here is the description of Object CP 2038 by Gladys Davidson Weinberg and Saul S. Weinberg (1956):

See also: Williams, Charles Kaufman, J. Lawrence Angel, Peter Burns, and Joan E. Fisher. “Corinth, 1972: The Forum Area.” Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 42, no. 1 (1973): p. 13. https://doi.org/10.2307/147469.

Here's the description of the same vase from ASCSA: (https://ascsa.net/id/corinth/object/cp%202038)

woman to rt., weaving at vertical loom; long hair to below waist, wearing chiton and necklace; holds 2 rods. At rt. 2nd woman facing lt., standing on stool (?) with shorter hair, unbelted garment, holding 2 forked tools against loom. Loom: 2 uprights and horizontal cross-bar, loomweights holding warp threads, length of woven cloth at top with incised cross-hatching. Surface damaged to rt. of her: 3rd woman facing lt., possibly holding loomweights; 4th woman, very tall facing rt.; small 5th woman facing 4th; behind, 2nd loom like 1st.

As OP notes, there's nothing in this scene to relate it to the contest between Arachne and Athena. There are two looms and five women weaving, one of whom is apparently a child who has to stand on a stool to reach the weft.

Also, an aryballos is a container for perfume. It's hard to understand why such an object would be decorated with a cautionary tale, but makes better sense if the decoration is a domestic scene of women of various ages performing the normal household task of weaving.

I think that the Weinberg's interpretation of this scene is inaccurate.

I checked a few websites (the perseus.tufts.edu Art & Archaeology Artifact Browser, The Beazley Archive Pottery Database, the British Museum, and Wikimedia Commons - okay, not exhaustive, but still) and the only ancient depiction of the contest I could find is a frieze of Arachne and Minerva from the Forum of Nerva (built 85 - 97 C.E):

"Rome, Forum of Nerva, so-called "Colonnacce", detail of the frieze, scene with Arachne's punishment." Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RomaForoNervaColonnacceFregio2cAracne.jpg Image license: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International

Interesting commentary on this section of the frieze and Ovid's myth here: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/imperialfora/nerva/colonnacce.html

Good investigative work, OP!

I'm so interested in what the pre-Ovid version of this myth might have been like. His adaptations have a very specific thematic slant to them- the cruelty and foolishness of the powerful. As thinly veiled critiques of the political elite, he wasn't shy about radically changing the myths to suit that purpose.

I wish I could sit down with someone who identified that vase as an Arachne/Athena depiction and just....ask them.

Rit DyeMore dye for synthetic fabrics does not work like regular Rit dye. Standard Rit may not give us the brightest or longest-lasting colors, but it is popular because it's relatively easy to use in a variety of different applications. You can dye on a stove, or in a bucket or a sink. You can tie dye it and process that by leaving it in a trash bag in the sun. If you hate your roommates, you can even dye fabric in your washing machine. You will generally get a decent result with any of these, because natural fibers are able to hold onto pigments.

Rit DyeMore is popular because it's literally the only easily-available product that can even remotely attempt to perform the near-impossibly task of dyeing polyester fabric. It's popular because basically nothing else will do what it does. It's also popular because people are familiar with how easy Rit classic dye is and they think that using DyeMore will be the exact same process.

This is not true. This is not true because honestly we shouldn't be able to dye polyester at all anyway. You may say but hey, Dollar-chan, I see brightly colored polyester fabrics all the time! They're bright and cheerful and they don't fade when you wash them. And that's because a lot of polyester fabric isn't dyed. This comes down to the fact that polyester is plastic. It's great plastic, but it's plastic. It's plastic the same way this thing is plastic:

[image description: yellow and red Little Tykes Cozy Coupe children's foot-propelled car]

This thing is not dyed. They start out with red and yellow plastic pellets, and then melt and form those plastic pellets into the shape that they want. Polyester fabric is the same thing, except that the shape that we want is for it to be thin hair-like strings that can be turned into cloth. The easiest way to get red or yellow polyester fabric is going to be to start with red or yellow polyester plastic pellets, and then turn them into polyester fibers for polyester cloth.

If I wanted to make an orange Cozy Coupe, I could mix the yellow and the red pellets together, and then when they're melted, the colors would mix and I'd get orange. If I want to make orange polyester fabric, I can mix yellow and red pellets together and get orange polyester fibers. The important thing about this process is that the pigment isn't transferring on its own. We're not moving a pigment onto the fibers. We're mixing plastics and then reforming them. If you want to keep your plastic in the state it's currently in (coupe or fabric, your choice) and just change the color without changing what it is, you have a different situation.

It is extremely difficult to change the color of polyester plastic once it's made. That's actually one of its big advantages. The color's in the plastic, so it won't fade when it's washed or exposed to the sun. It just won't come off. That's very cool. When humanity is long gone, your XL Twin bedsheets you got conned into buying in 2009 will still be bright green and purple in the landfill.

But it comes with some limitations. One of those is that, if you want to change the color of polyester plastic, you're going to have to play by its own rules. There isn't really very much wiggle room out there for how the procedure should work. Actually, it's kind of amazing that there is a possible stovetop dye procedure for polyester dye. As anyone who does sublimation on polyester knows, which is a thing that I'm sure everyone has done, you set the heat press for 350-400F for sublimation. We can't set our stove to 350F because water boils at roughly 200F. Once the water is boiling, it stops getting hotter, so if your water is boiling at 212f then you're never going to have a dye bath at 350F, so you'll never be able to dye the fabric at the same temp that you sublimate it.

Rit DyeMore allows us to do the impossible. To get polyester dye to accept a pigment at a temperature under the boiling point of water, a lot of what we'll call Spooky Yucky Chemicals have to be used. One of the reasons why its so important to read the DyeMore instructions is that you really do not want to accidentally ingest this product. You don't want to get it on places that you don't want to get it. I don't know what's in it but I've never eaten any of it and I'm not dead, so that all sounds solid to me.

You're violating the very laws of nature by attempting to dye polyester at all. This process does not want to work. Back as recently as 2010, home dye of polyester fabrics was not actually considered possible. This means that, if you want this to work and have any kind of long lasting results, you better read the instructions, do what they say, use your "please" and "thank you"s. Tell the dye you appreciate it. Give it everything it asks for and maybe it'll actually do what it told you it would do, because it's looking for any reason at all to make the process fail.

So no, unfortunately, you can't tie dye with Dyemore. You can't sponge dye, ombre dye might look very weird. You're already right on the edge of breaking the laws of physics. Just be grateful that it works at all.

it kinda goes like this

basically, as a person or community writes a kinky story for longer, they will kind of inevitably move up a chain of 'paradigms of justification' required to make the kink continue to make sense.

the pace will vary depending on the kink, but motion is inevitable.

---

so say you decide to write some rope bondage kink. as you continue to write, you are likely to progress through the stages as follows:

Stage 0 - Baseline: i am writing A tying up B, because i want to, A wants to, and B is into it (or isn't, depending on what kinda freak you are). Regular fic goes here.

Stage 1 - Psychological: Why is does A like tying up B? Why does B like being tied up? Normal character stuff. Not yet weird. You're still normal. If you mom found out you were writing this, she'd probably still love you.

Stage 2 - Logistical: How does A afford all those rope? Why hasn't B's hands fallen off from lack of circulation? Getting odd you'd write about this, but fair enough, real kinksters deal with this. You just like to pay attention to details.

Stage 3 - Sociological: You have written the kink long enough that you need it to be normalized in-universe in order to push the envelope. You need a Federal Department of Kinky Shit Why has nobody called the cops when B goes missing for three days due to the suspension bondage setup you researched for two hours last night? Did you just invent a law so its okay for A to tie up the pizza delivery guy? Why is it not a violation of the labour code that B spends all her time literally tied to her desk? This is where the descent into madness begins. You have total freedom now to introduce new characters, but they will probably end up being A-like and B-like because that's your kink and why you started writing in the first place. People laugh when they see the premise, but keep reading.

Stage 4 - Biological: Oh, now you fucked up. See, eventually, you're going to start wondering why the world is filled with people like A and B. You're going to need to answer definitively why B didn't fucking die when you accidentally wrote a poorly conceived stress position in chapter 2. You gotta answer why there's only like 1 A for every 10 Bs. You realize with horror you accidentally implied that shibari harnesses is literally a biological requirement for human reproduction. It's over for you. This is ABO with extra steps. Get thee to a nunnery.

Stage 5 - Synthesis: "Oh fuck, it all makes sense now." Terminal brain stoppage. Death would be a mercy. ---

The thing is, once you have progressed through these stages, you are going to skip ahead in future stories because, let's face it, its incredibly convenient to have these structures laid out for you. If you've gotten to Stage 3 in a previous fic and then start a new one, well, you could fuck around justifying what's going on, or you could simply bring back the Federal Department of Kinky Shit and jump straight to the silk cord. It's efficient and we're all busy people.

I ended up following this trajectory with my first set of Porn On Phone stories pretty closely:

Hot lady am sexy kidnaps!

But why am hot lady sexy kidnap?

How am hot lady afford lavish lifestyle for sexy kidnapee?

Why am nobody arrest hot lady for sexy kidnap?

am reason related to why am no men in stories?

characters am now exclaim 'judith christ!' when stub toe.

Terminal. Put me down like the dog I am.

But the dark realization I had, right about now, is that all the normie fics out there, all the boring straight stuff?

... yeah they're already at Stage 5. The straights are living at stage 5, patriarchy is their Federal Department of Kinky Shit, they believe in alphas and omegas already.

So, put that way, it's actually totally normal and okay to do this progression, right? Like, it's subversive. This is feminist! This is feminist! I scream, as I'm dragged into the van and driven down to the river to be drowned like an unwanted kitten. I'm the normal one! You're all mad!

The straights are living at stage 5, patriarchy is their Federal Department of Kinky Shit, they believe in alphas and omegas already.

This is one of those non-poem things that are among my favorite poems.

As the OP stated, the use of alliterative consonants is aesthetically just great, especially the placement of the strongest use at the end: “fuck him on the floor.” The use of “chintz” is indeed great word choice.

Because I’m insane, decided to scan the poem:

Not only is the second sentence, indeed, perfect iambic pentameter, the entire poem is perfectly metered, though the first sentence has four iambs rather than five.

There are further things I love about this poem, though: I like the casual connotations of “keep it real” juxtaposed with “chintz.” It causes me to interpret the “chintz” more strongly as meaning something fake, a facade. There is also of course the coarseness of “fuck,” which is a contrast with “chintz” but a different kind of contrast, gutsy and carnal where “chintz” is flimsy and inanimate.

And then there is the storytelling: there is SO MUCH storytelling in just these two lines. To break it down: The speaker is having sex with a married man, in the house he shares with his wife, which is “filled with chintz”—something that here connotes fakeness, in contrast with “keep it real.”

The illicit encounter in the poem takes place within a house filled with facade, the flimsy construction of the wife’s marriage and domestic sphere, but the encounter itself is a taste of something “real.” That’s a story, and it’s just two lines.

This is EIGHTEEN SYLLABLES, y’all. The amount of meaning condensed into these eighteen syllables is stunning, and it is so elegantly done.

his wife, alas, has filled his house with chintz to keep it real i fuck him on the floor

When the first line is written in iambic pentameter, it naturally follows that the second line has the same slower, sedate "ba-Dum ba-Dum ba-Dum ba-Dum ba-Dum" rhythm.

But in the original, it doesn't! Or at least, to me, the last line's rhythm goes "ba-Dum ba-Dum Dum-ba-ba ba-ba-Dum", because following the four feet in Line 1, these lines naturally scan as tetrameter:

And THAT'S what creates dissonance imo, having stately iambs all the way up to "I fuck him on the floor", where the six remaining syllables are suddenly forced into two feet - and that's where you get that run of short, percussive sounds from.

Mom asked why I had parked outside of the city and took the T in. "Whoever designed the roads in Boston was the devil. He should be dug up so I can kill him again."

Man I never met before said a name and pointed me towards one of the historical graveyards.

I don't remember the name anymore, but we did find the grave so I could blame him. Not sure if he actually designed the city layout, but I found it delightful.

Sleepover, oil on canvas

1)cause it's good art - ridiculous use of a limited color pallete to evoke mood and energy, like what the fuck, this looks like something that could have been made between 1942 and 1989 - either for a peice for a museum or for one of those pulp covers? For a minute there I thought it was. I had to check.

2)cuz it's hot art - the hand placement? The curve of his foot? The sleeping friend's arm over his head? Bro I thought that was a mirror until I looked closer and then it was like oh! actually hotter! Holy shit. Like damn.

3)cuz you know your audience and you were like "hmmmm who will appreciate my gay art about teenage boys having covert sex on on the floor while their friends sleep. ah yes, tumblrinas."

4)that you are posting your art on tumblr at all - like damn.

Damn. It's great. Damn.

Lightning Bait

HERMES: DA FUNNY ONE

ZEUS: DA LIGHTNING (NOTE: THOUGHT HE WAS NORDIC, FATHER OF THOR)

POSEIDON: DA SEA ONE

HEPHAESTUS: DA FIRE/FORGING/STEEL ONE

APHRODITE: DA HOT ONE

KRATOS: GOD OF WAR

HADES: DA HELL ONE. ROGUE LIKE