The Grey Tribe

"My contention is that prior to the Trojan war, the political structures of the Greek kingdoms, especially in the island territories could most aptly be characterized as...

Ofc that's your contention. You're a young aristocrat who just finished listening to some wandering poet, probably that hack from Pylos. You'll be convinced of that until next month when you hear the bard from Sparta. Then you'll be taking about how the kingdoms of Mycenae and Thebes were models of divine rulership back in our grandfathers' time. That will last until next year when you're back to regurgitating Mentor's speeches about the sacred bonds between king and people and the divine right of succession.

"Well as a matter of fact I won't because Mentor completely overlooks the importance of...

"Mentor completely overlooks the importance of the council of elders in tempering royal authority, especially in matters of inheritance..." you got that from Halitherses' speech at last year's spring festival, right? Yeah, I heard that too. Were you going to plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or is that your thing. You come to a feast, quote some elder, and pawn it off as your own idea to impress Penelope and embarrass my son Telemachus?"

A bit later I had a conversation with all my family members, mother last, about the kinds of jams and preserves they like. My father likes certain preserves, but he would never go into the cellar and grab a jar of plums, or cherries, or apple-sauce. He wouldn't even open a bottle of home-brewed cider. He's completely passive. It would never in a million years occur to him to go down the stairs and get some marmalade. My father wants me to grow chili peppers, but he rarely uses them. Instead, when it's harvest time, I dry them, and then he buys chili powder at the store anyway. He doesn't like the varieties of apples in the garden. He eats lots of apples, but he buys new ones at the store.

My sister doesn't eat breakfast. She has coffee for breakfast and that's it. She doesn't eat marmalade. She likes marmalade, but she doesn't eat it. She uses home-cooked bottled tomato sauce and salsa. My sister would prefer fruit to preserved in 300ml jars and savoury sauces in 700ml bottles.

Mother often talks about opening a jar of plums, but she never actually does. She doesn't ever open a jar of marmalade that is older than six months. The next year, she says "Why not open the good stuff first? I don't want to eat the old marmalade!" This way, there's marmalade from 2010 that has never been opened. She likes apple-sauce, but she would rather cook it fresh from store-bought apples. She would never open a jar of her own home-canned cherries, because she didn't take out the pits. She would never drink the preserved apple juice.

Nobody actually ever opens a bottle of apple juice, or a jar of cherries. Everybody buys cherries and even apple juice when they need to cook or bake something with apples.

As a result, there's marmalade in her basement that is ten years old, and there are large jars of canned plums nobody eats, large jars of canned cherries nobody eats, bottles of cider and apple juice and home-brewed wine and so many apples. Apart from one of the trees, they don't really store well, but every year, I help harvest the apples and the pears and the cherries and three different types of plums, and then nobody eats the preserves.

But this year, I talked to everybody, and I got everybody on the same page, and I even got mother to agree that this is dumb. I took charge of jams and preserves, and I worked out how many jars of cherries we actually eat, how many jars of marmalade we need, and so on. If some cherries or strawberries go to waste, that's ok. If some plums go to waste, well, I don't like them anyway. I got mother to agree to only make preserves she actually eats, and unless we make cider again, we're not juicing all the apples.

There was already a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth, because mother wanted me to no be so fast with all the cherries, but I got a large pot and 20 small canning jars and I canned 8 kg of cherries – the cherries I like to eat, prepared the way I like to eat them – in one day. Usually, she processes 2 kg of fruit per day, as the buckets and baskets of harvested fruit pile up in her kitchen. This year we made 3 kg of strawberry marmalade only, and some rhubarb marmalade. I decided to make syrups out of the berries instead of jam, because we have so much jam from last year, and we made 2.5 litres of syrup. I opened some jars from 2018 and dumped out the stuff that wasn't edible any more. I even popped out all of the pits of the cherries before canning them, which mother never does, because she says it's too much work, but then the cherries spoil faster and there's cyanide in the jar. Not enough to kill you, but more than necessary.

Basically, somehow I got my way. I talked to mother in a calm and measured way, and I explained that we don't have to eat all the cherries and strawberries and apples just so they don't go to waste, and we don't even have to make preserves if we never eat the preserves. Even then, when we make preserves, we should make sure that we actually want to eat them, and prepare them according to our tastes.

Year after year, this was a point of contention, and mother made me climb into the trees and harvest cherries she didn't need, or she made me juice every last fallen apple, even though we don't drink apple juice. And this year, she just listened to me, and she agreed that we don't need that much marmalade. This year, she admitted that she doesn't like pits in her canned cherries. She admitted that it doesn't make sense to make preserves you know you won't eat.

Yeah, this isn't really about that, and I appreciate your awareness. About 20 years ago, my grandmother was like mother is now, and she told us she'd cut down the trees if we don't help her harvest, even thought it's more than she eats. But these days, my father doesn't even like to eat the apples and cherries in the garden, he mostly planted the trees for shade and aesthetics.

> give away the old preserves

It's not that easy. Neighbours wouldn't appreciate having 2kg of fresh cherries dumped on them, but they also wouldn't appreciate three 1kg jars of preserved cherries (with liquid and everything), especially when they are four years old and about to chemically decompose – still technically edible, but no longer appealing. So you'd have to give them away after two years, or something like that. Also, mother kept the pits in when she preserved cherries or baked cake. Also, mother used grandma's old re-usable canning canning jars. She wouldn't give them away. I wouldn't. If I want to gift somebody preserved fruit, I would do so as close after harvesting/canning as possible, and I would buy new, smaller jars with twist-off lids, just for gifting.

Giving somebody cherries in a jar and then asking for the jar back makes you look like a stingy weirdo. Giving somebody cherries that are already getting kind of mushy makes you look like a jerk. Giving somebody canned cherries with the seeds still in them makes you look completely unhinged.

Now imagine you have neighbours who also have apple trees, who also have cherry trees. That mean your neighbours won't be excited about a bottle of apple juice, but they might take 5kg of apples. They won't be excited about preserved cherries, but they might take 1kg of fresh cherries, but you'll still have to sort through them and you can't give them any bad ones.

They say you should completely empty your cherry tree, because otherwise the larva or "worms" in the cherries will mature and hibernate near your cherry tree, and then next year they will mate and lay eggs in your cherries, and you get more worms. The problem is mother doesn't have "a cherry tree". She's got multiple, the neighbours have multiple, the nearby park has multiple, and there are cherry trees at the edge of the forest. The neighbour's cherry trees are up to 20m in height, and our own are getting there. It's completely impossible to keep the bugs at bay. It doesn't matter if you completely empty your own trees from cherries, and dispose of the worms ones, because there's a cherry tree in your neighbour's garden that is too tall, and there's another one that nobody bothered to harvest. No matter what you do, the larva in your neighbour's cherries will turn into bugs, and they will lay eggs in your own cherries next year.

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I remember how many disabled people would lash out bitterly as if insulted. And then I thought that perhaps it was about trying to understand, to relate somehow, to connect. And a lot of disabled people were so used to everyone else pitying them that they translated attempts to relate as worse pity. I think that even if the abled person did mean it, that they would die, I would be kind about it and compassionate. Because many of us die. We should at least acknowledge that it can be terrible.

Tumblr may crush the quality of those, so I’m going to zoom in on a few details here—

He has individually rendered every discolored, separate tile on the facade of the Duomo in Florence…

And this relief of Isis is divided into discrete blocks of stone. He’s drawn every outline.

I guess maybe the most famous pre-Raphaelite painting of all is John Everett Millais's Ophelia.

It looks very nice, right? Colorful. How long do you think it took to paint?

Death of the Author is a term coined by Roland Barthes for his essay of the same name in 1967.

In brief: death of the author is the concept that analysis of a work of art should not be focused on the artist's intent; the artist's intended reading of their own work is just A reading and no more valid than anyone else's.

A good straightforward example of this in practice is the response to Andy Weir and Project Hail Mary. Weir is adamant that his work contains no politics but I would say that PHM is pretty clearly a story about climate change.

Tumblr may crush the quality of those, so I’m going to zoom in on a few details here—

He has individually rendered every discolored, separate tile on the facade of the Duomo in Florence…

And this relief of Isis is divided into discrete blocks of stone. He’s drawn every outline.

My understanding is that a lot of men in the USA do have "normal but historically actually really low" testosterone, and which seems like a real public health issue, but it's become a whole Thing for deeply concerning manosphere types who are very attached to a particular form of macho BS.