This blog is a garbage fire

Crown made in the year 1465 by Pere Àngel.

49,3 x 64 x 2,5 cm. Girona Art Museum.

It was commissioned by Peter of Portugal, who had been elected as King of the Catalans in 1463 during the Catalan civil war between the Government of Catalonia and the king John II.

He commissioned a diadem-shaped silver crown to be offered to the Virgin Mary of Castelló d'Empúries (town in the Comarques Gironines area of Catalonia). It was made by Pere Àngel, a silversmith of Italian origin who had been living and working in Girona (Catalonia) for many years and who had already made two religious diadems for Saint Mary and Baby Jesus statues in the nearby Roses Monastery the previous decade.

i feel like the problem with this question is best illustrated by a conversation i had with a friend a while back, where i said something like, "i feel very safe with you because you don't do subtle hints and you are always very straight-up with me about what you are thinking and feeling."

No subscription. Just program.

On your computer. You got to use it forever and ever and never had to worry about it going away.

Because it was physically on your computer. As a program. That you actually owned. Not because you got it separately, but because it was a standard inclusion with your computer.

I'm sorry but I'll just never get over it. I remember when companies cared about their products being usable out of the box. I remember when our things belonged to us.

eyeshells aoolia zeelool lakoh vooglam lens alter

like, eyeshells in particular has a startlingly vast collection of asymmetric glasses:

(this isn't even all of them)

and also this steampunk nonsense that I love so fucking much and cannot justify spending any money on:

while aoolia has...tbh a lot of the frames the other sites have, but more expensive, but also, a collection of the gayest people you've ever seen:

though tbh not nearly as gay as whatever lens alter has going on:

and vooglam has uhhh...whatever this is!

huh.

(I can't vouch for any of these companies ofc, though I think I'll get something from at least one of them. ideally not the slime glasses, but hey!)

but honestly the absolute best thing I found in all of this is this site that makes vintage fashion, and which happened to have:

these replica victorian railway glasses like the bisexual guy in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter had, AND WHICH

you can even buy with prescription lenses, jesus fucking christ you have no idea how hard it is to not immediately drop $180 on this shit, I'm having to physically restrain myself, I want them so fucking bad

and hey, if you don't need prescription lenses, y'know what else you can buy from this site?

the glasses from national treasure 😭😭

I truly sacrificed to create this ridiculous mug. biting clay is a bad sensory experience 😔 who would have guessed

Her example was in call centers, where an agent might take 1 difficult call in 10, which is stressful, but the person has the 9 easy calls to offset that stress and recalibrate their nervous system. But when 'AI agents' take those 9 easy calls, you, the human, are left with 100% difficult calls. What used to be a small, unpleasant portion of your day now becomes your entire day, all day, every day.

And to make things worse, your boss fired all the other humans, so rather than spreading out the bad amongst a team of people who could commiserate and provide support, it's just you, absorbing the stress, alone, forever.

What a red flag actually means: something here is an indicator of a potential problem (but might be fine with a reasonable explanation)

What people have now decided it means: abuse

I've lost count of the number of times I've now had to read variants of "My partner takes all my money and gives me back an allowance because he says it's a man's job to control finances, but he's racking up gambling debts" being met with "Wow this man is a walking red flag" no Becky that is abuse. That is not an indicator. He is an abuser. Call the police. We have lost the concept of a proxy: a thing that indicates a more important thing. And it's relevant to this conversation because I'm actually going to go out on a limb here:

With the obvious exception of paedophilia, age gaps themselves aren't a problem at all - they are a proxy for the actual harmful phenomenon. Hea me out, let me explain

The reason we don't like age gaps is because of the implied power dynamic. If one partner, usually male, is older than other - particularly if the other is still quite young - the risk is that what we're seeing is a worldly wise predator who is exploiting the lack of life experience of a young beautiful woman by mentally abusing her until she's no longer young and pretty enough to satisfy, at which point he'll move on to the next. There have been enough examples of this in human history. It's unfortunately not an uncommon pattern. Genders can also be diverse in this scenario

We can't necessarily see that dynamic from the outside. But we CAN see an inherent element of it: the ages of the people involved. So age becomes a proxy for the abuse. And, hey, it's often correct.

But here's the thing: the ages themselves are not causing harm.

The power dynamic is. The abuse is.

Plenty of age gap relationships are loving, healthy and steadfast. Two people met and genuinely fell in love regardless of the outer packaging, and have a relationship with all the highs and lows and challenges and rewards as any more traditional pairing. This happens all the time

Is the age gap a red flag? Sure! It indicates a potential issue.

Is it inherently abusive? Absolutely fucking not.

OP is right - we need to stop focusing just on the numbers and twisting the facts to fit by infantilising the younger partners, and start focusing on the actual harms. The DiCaprio Pattern of only dating under 24s repeatedly is itself a proxy, too, actually - but a much stronger one than the simple presence of an age gap.

(Even so, in DiCaprio's case, until any of his former partners come forward and describe him as abusive, actually, even that is up in the air - my personal interpretation, given how strong a pattern it is, is that he's a loser who views women as trophies (consciously or not). If any have come forward and I don't know about it, of course, fair enough. But those women were adults capable of making their own decisions, even if they might later come to regret it. And regretting poor decisions is part of life! That's how it goes, particularly with relationships. As long as they weren't abused, there's no biggie. And just as he was looking for young-and-beautiful, there's no way they weren't, on some level, looking for rich-and-famous; it goes both ways.)

Also, another element of this: I think a lot of modern extreme puritan discourse on this is actually ironically down to the age of those taking part. Up until your late 20s, ten years is actually a huge span of time to you, because in your own life you were in a completely different developmental phase ten years ago (teenager), and a completely different phase again ten years before that (child). That skews your sense of what a ten-year gap means. Whereas once you're in your 30s and beyond, ten years is like. Yeah I was an adult ten years ago, and I still am now. That's two adults. Who cares.

Take my gay cats, Tumblr!

Paid service with no ads: Well, if they're not funding it with ad revenue, they need to charge us something.

Paid service with ads: Well that's bullshit.

like ok lets just ignore the super hot canonically queer rocks who definitely have this guy on their celebrity sex list, right. and i absolutely understand why no one ships eva.

the problem is he does, canonically, have a character hes actually shipteased with:

carl

HE'S RIGHT THERE

THEY CANONICALLY HAVE A (ALIEN) KID TOGETHER AND GRACE WAS SOOOO HAPPY ABOUT THEM HAVING A KID TOGETHER THAT HE PROUDLY TOLD EVA WITHOUT ELABORATING AND WEIRDED HER OUT

HES PRETTY MUCH THE LAST GOOD MEMORY HE HAS OF EARTH. HE TRIES SO HARD TO GIVE GRACE A GOOD MEMORY IN A TRAUMATIC SITUATION.