meerkat ramblings

"Capitalism tends to destroy its two sources of wealth: Nature and Human Beings"

These chucklefucks support the notion that birth control is harming women. Can it be harmful? Sure, talk to your doctor about that. But as a whole, birth control has enabled women to stay in school longer, to have higher paying jobs, to have better economic status, to keep from unwanted marriages, to keep their health in many cases, and, most importantly, to not have unwanted children. This has led to a declining birth rate, and white supremacists are convinced that white people not having babies is allowing people of color to "out-breed" and overtake the white population. Tradwives and their supporters push the idea that birth control irrevocably changes your brain chemistry (it doesn't), makes women manlier (it doesn't), makes men into women via trace birth control in the water (it doesn't), and causes sky rocketing rates of heart disease, embolisms, and cancers (mostly untrue... Birth control can sometimes cause clots but that's a rare side effect. Again, talk to your doctor).

They also reject basic and well settled science on nutrition and food safety. It should be no surprise that the raw milk movement is directly connected to the traditional family movement.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be a stay at home mother. There is nothing wrong with wanting to have a piece of land where you can raise some chickens and a nice sized kitchen garden. There's nothing wrong with wanting to live as naturally as possible and avoid unnecessary medicine or medical treatments. But that's not all this movement is, and they take it all to the worst extreme and for the worst reasons.

And let's be really truthful. Convincing young women to discard higher education and personal development to undertake this extremely labor intensive, health eroding, intentionally isolating and fully dependent lifestyle within a year or two of graduating from high school is setting them up for physical, emotional and financial abuse that will also be meted out to their children.

And when their husbands tire of them because they have put their foot down about no more babies or because they have complained "too much" about their workload or simply because a middle aged woman with life experience isn't as enjoyable to a "traditional husband" as a naïve, nubile teenager, they are left with nothing. No skills, no income except whatever support they are ordered, (which will be paid begrudgingly, slowly, or not at all) and no good way to start all over again with limited money and a bunch of kids they'll still be primary parent for. And that's a part of the movement too, keeping women compliant, agreeable and silent through fear of what happens if they are left.

This time I decided that historical laundresses probably knew what they were doing, and grabbed a metal pole to stir my DIY laundry cauldron and poke the floaty bit back under the surface. Historical laundresses were right, it works great.

As I stood there, I had a moment where I though, ‘oh wow, so many women in my family tree must have done this exact set of motions throughout history.’ Which should be a humbling and heartwarming feeling of connection, right?

Wrong. I swear I could feel twenty generations of shtetl women going “For this you went to college? You want to work with old shmattes all day, fine, but you could have saved the tuition to buy a house.”

not to be a pedant but this sort of post annoys me so bad bc ☝️☝️ in fact it’s the reverse: fantasy series often reflect societal biases. there is nothing evolutionarily “menacing” about wasps in comparison to bees. bees have better PR because we like to eat the stuff they make. that’s literally it. “agur only destruction” as if wasps don’t fill many of the SAME ecological roles as bees. they’re pollinators! they CREATE!!

Like last week, I had to mail a package and my local USPS was absolutely SWEALTERING. And the staff only had a few fans, some of which they were using faced towards customers, to try and keep us cool.

While doing my transaction, I was chatting with the worker about how crazy this was and how I hoped she had her own fan too, because I could only see the customer-benefit ones. She said yes, but I also asked if there was anyone I could complain to on her behalf and she immediately said yes again and to please do it! She wrote a more direct customer service number on my receipt which I was able to call Friday.

To be clear, I was kind and polite; I stressed how good the workers at this office were and how efficient always: "It's my local post office," but also how unbearable the heat was and how I couldn't imagine MY poor local staff having to suffer in that heat all day. I don't know yet if it will have an immediate effect for the workers, I hope it will though.

I’d like everyone to see this

At some point, I am going to try to come up with a pseudo-scholarly explanation of those conventions and presuppositions.  I’d say that probably the defining feature of fanfic is that the reader is expected to come in with prior knowledge of characters and (if not marked AU) the quirks and conventions of the source medium, so that some things can be taken as read before the story even begins.

Like any genre, this means that fanfic can do things that no other genre can do.  Me, my particular crack is to really lean into the dramatic irony.  There’s also a heavy overlap with romance, in which the conclusion of a particular story is already known and in fact inherent in the label (Kirk/Spock slow-burn, for instance) but the adventure is in the getting there.

However, like any genre, people who are not familiar with the conventions (or uninterested in what it has to offer) are likely to be thrown off, and from there often conclude that what they’re reading is no good, rather than realizing that they’re using the wrong toolset.

For an example in another genre, say that I’m accustomed to contemporary stories and I read a science fiction story that opens by saying, “Rashid was missing his sceptrim.  He rolled his eyes and looked under his bunk.  The starship was small.  It couldn’t have gone far.”  Someone who only reads conventional fiction would be all like, “What the hell is a sceptrim?  It’s not in the dictionary.  How do you expect us to know what’s going on if you make stuff up and then don’t explain it?”  An experienced reader of science fiction, meanwhile, is thinking, “A sceptrim.  This will be explained as we go.  Right now, we know (a) it could fit under a bunk, and (b) either it is not important enough to immediately panic about, or Rashid is not prone to panic.”  Thus, the experienced reader has absorbed information that completely missed the inexperienced reader, and you could say with some accuracy that the inexperienced reader is not, in fact, absorbing the actual story.  Because they don’t know the conventions.  Because they may be an expert at reading romance or contemporary, but here, they don’t know how to read.

Fanfiction is like that.  By drawing on the source material, I can make sure that the reader has information that I never state.  I am writing a Doctor Who fic featuring an original character who works in a shop; she thinks, “Huh, new mannequins.  I must have missed the staff meeting where they said we were getting new mannequins.”  Using info from the original show, I have put up a giant sign saying DANGER IS PRESENT AND PEOPLE ARE LIKELY TO FREAKING DIE.  But you have to be somewhat familiar with Doctor Who to get what I’m doing.  Similarly, say I’m writing a Kirk/Spock college AU, and Kirk (my viewpoint character) goes off on a mental rant about how Spock is an uptight prick and what’s with being known only by your last name anyway?  My reader knows (a) these characters have an epic bond that has been inspiring people since the sixties, and (b) I marked the story Kirk/Spock rivals-to-lovers slow-burn, so the question is not whether Kirk has correctly analyzed this character, but how he learns he is wrong and exactly how they get together in the end.  People who don’t read fanfiction or romance may be annoyed to find out that everything I establish about Spock in my first chapter turns out to be completely wrong; people who are here for a rivals-to-lovers slow-burn were relishing the dramatic irony from the beginning.

this is my best friend, the dipylon oinochoe. its a beautiful little wine jug from the late geometric period. 22cm tall. you may know it from such hits as “paper talking about the early greek alphabet,” or “paper talking about the early greek alphabet,” etc etc. i’ve been researching him for a project lately. and i think i’m the only one who understands him now.

anyways it’s one of the oldest longer inscriptions we have from the late 8th/early 7th cent BCE. everyone and their mother wants to translate this little guy. they’re all reading it and going “oh wow! its got a perfect hexameter at the start! ‘whoever of the dancers dances most delicately!’" and then they all go "Wait What Do Those Last Signs Mean.”

there are 24 different interpretations. but thats fine. whatever. beef over the last signs seems normal enough. you see that a lot. personally i think its too broken to really tell for certain (those fractures are a bit unfortunately placed tbh) but i fear i am also just a very skeptical guy when it comes to definitive translations so my take on that should be considered with a grain of salt.

but because im researching this oinochoe, i'm reading all these articles arguing over what it Means and what the Implications Are. and you would think… its 2025… we’ve kinda all agreed “pots aren’t people” for several decades… surely there’s an analysis somewhere that focuses Solely On This Pot’s Context... idk like trying not to focus solely on its inscription for once???

but no. no, this is too much to ask for apparently. everyone’s going “well it must've belonged to a dancer! lets talk about dance competitions and homer and the gymnasium how this is all reflected in this one jug!” someone even dropped this one line theorizing it was “passed around at a party,” like it has just been consistently assigned as belonging to a dancer you cannot escape this idea. i tried to find any different ideas. i could not.

so i’m stuck here going “Where Is The Context” because it seems to be, uh, Not Discussed Anywhere. every article is citing back towards stephanos koumanoudes (the guy who purchased it in 1880) but they are Also saying “yeah it was found in 1871! source: koumanoudes!” But He’s Not The Guy That Excavated It, Guys, Where Is It From? nobody is giving me the answer. my favorite one is culhed, he just says “under obscure circumstances,” which is quite possibly the least helpful way to describe this somehow nebulous provenance. but then culhed offhandedly cites someone else. just in the footnotes, as you do. and that someone is yannis galanakis, my new hero.

now yannis galanakis (2011) does not give a single flying fuck about the dipylon oinochoe. he is here for one thing and one thing only: an unpublished stirrup jar that was bought by a totally different guy. most of his article is just concerned about this stirrup jar, how it was sold with a skull (??), and Who Sold That Skull. but galanakis’ stirrup jar is, coincidentally, from this same excavation in 1871. so in his article, where he’s referencing all these people associated with private excavations northeast of the dipylon gate (around modern-day plateia eleutherias), galanakis casually drops the line “among the finds associated with these excavations are some of the most important examples of late geometric pottery, like the dipylon oinochoe.” this is 1) more than Literally Everyone Else I Have Been Reading has been saying and 2) PROVIDING PRIMARY SOURCES FOR THIS DIG?

and these sources.... these primary sources have never been mentioned in Any Other Publications re: the dipylon oinochoe??? except MAYBE one from 2013 (coulié) thats in french, apparently only available in print, and the nearest copy is a library 2hrs away from me (so i cant actually verify what she says yet). but every other article about the dipylon oinochoe is basically like “yeah, see powell 1988” -> “yeah, see koumanoudes 1880” -> “i bought this from some guy named ioannes, lol” and its just created this Massive Echo Chamber where the provenance is "Koumanoudes" and the context is "Dancer." when... we have... two publications... written by people who were actually involved in this private excavation (which to be clear here was very much illegal at some points, but ioannes palaiologos do not care abt the government saying Stop Excavating Please). these two sources are hirschfeld (1872) and rayet (1888).

the provenance that these 1870s/80s accounts are providing isnt Actually That Detailed, but there are parts that line up pretty well (ie, swords/spears/knives being found in the graves, murex on top, several layers of successive tombs) which are Totally Absent from later articles talking about the purpose of this vessel, of its inscription, and of its owner/transcriber (which i dont think can be determined Anyways [cf Arrington 2024, this is just a Normal Take i think] but like whatever i guess Pots Are People Now, according to Powell 1988+Binek 2017+Osborne 2006). i phrased it in my paper and my presentation as “its like this oinochoe been totally disconnected from its context” and its to the point where its so egregious that someone will, in one article, drop a reference to galanakis’ research on the excavation of 1871 (where he cites two eyewitness accounts) and not. Not Once have they looked into it.

because if they had. and this is the fucking crazy part ok this is where i Lost My Shit For A Solid Week. there is, in hirschfeld 1872, an identical oinochoe (number 48, page 147 in this journal) with the same damn height (22.5cm; powell 1988 says the dipylon oinochoe is about 23cm) and decoration (a grazing deer) and concentric lines its a goddamn identical piece just judging from the description of it (and hirschfeld very unhelpfully did Not include this jug among his plates). deers grazing arent very common in late geometric pottery, its mostly just the dipylon workshop cranking them out AND theres only a few oinochoe attributed to dipylon workshop so This Is Quite Possibly The Same Vessel (or so i thought, we'll get to that). the one problem is that this vessel is just NOT from dipylon??? its from the old military hospital in athens??? which was built south of the acropolis in 1834??? and they found roman mosaics during that construction??? so this mentioned vessel could actually have been found in the 1830s??? and again nobody has said jack fucking shit about this connection, afaik i am the only one who has ever actually sat down with these Implications all lined up in a row, so i had to try and disprove myself on my own like it was 5d chess. i was the “I Want To Believe” meme but if it was about the dipylon oinochoe being from somewhere near dipylon.

and i'm digging through as many sources as i possibly can find to prove there's a mysterious second jug that might be from this hospital area (which, granted, was still a funerary space during the geometric period). i went through all of hirschfeld's references to alexander conze's plates showing pottery shapes, but they just ended up also being oinochoe, which made me lose my mind even more. hirschfeld would be like "yeah this deer was in this position from conze taf VII-2" and you go "ok so whats conze taf vii-2 look like? oh my fucking god its a GRAZING ANIMAL AGAIN." at some point i ended up reading a phd dissertation from the national and kapodistrian univerisity of athens to know more about this military hospital?? and then i switched gears and went searching through coldstream 1968’s list of geometric pottery (it might be outdated now, but it was the only thorough source i could find atp) and went through Every Single Oinochoe from the dipylon workshop and almost every single one was totally different. like they just could not be this mystery oinochoe (in which case, I Would Have Some Really Bad News About The Dipylon Oinochoe).

until i found my second best friend. munich CVA 3 taf 112. who literally nobody except me gives a shit about. its taf description is 2 paragraphs long. its the exact same height as these two aforementioned oinochoe. it has the exact same deer grazing motif. fuck it, its even got an unknown provenance because it was acquired from Some Guy Named Paul in 1907 (who also has connections to people like furtwängler [most unfortunate last name ever], another guy who wrote about the dipylon oinochoe in 1881). so in my quest to achieve some sort of emotional resolution here i possibly found a sister vessel to the dipylon oinochoe??? and maybe even that jug's provenance. who knows. i dont wanna say anything definitive yet. also if anyone has access to paul julius arndt's personal papers and especially his financial records, hit me up, because where the fuck did he get this identical looking jug.

however. most modern scholarship about the dipylon oinochoe does not care about munich cva 3 taf 112 (and its similarities to the dipylon oinochoe), or the few references to the 1871 excavations at palatia eleutherias several blocks northeast of the dipylon gate (and what little context/descriptions they provide of funerary remains), because they do not care about the dipylon oinochoe. they care about the letters inscribed on it, and they want to debate the meanings of those letters in a self-inflicted vacuum devoid of all other evidence beyond 35 legible signs and 11 fragmentary/illegible ones.

But I saw a comment from someone that made me realize the rest of the intention behind these words is being lost.

Fanfiction is provided for free, but it is not produced for free.

Authors pay their effort, including physical and emotional and mental. Authors pay their time, in planning the story (mental time) and writing the story (physical time). Sometimes it’s less than an hour for something quick and dirty, like askbox prompts. Sometimes it’s years of their lives in epic fic hundreds of thousands of words long. Authors pay additional time to alpha read their own stories, trying to make sure that they’re free of SPAG errors and make sense and sound good. Beta readers pay their time and effort alongside the authors for editing the stories. Authors pay for posting their stories with all of the anxieties that come from allowing their work - which to this point they have invested all of the above - into the public eye because while it has certainly cost them a good amount to produce the story, fandom history has proved that many other people out there enjoy fanfiction, and authors believe that at least someone else will enjoy their story, too.

What I am saying when I say “fanfiction is free” is that it costs the writers a lot of something in order to produce it. A lot has already been paid into a piece of fanfiction by the time it is available for readers to read. The expense of fanfiction creation is, by and large, resting squarely atop the shoulders of writers.

What I am saying when I say “fanfiction is free” is that readers don’t have to pay the cost of creating fanfiction.

What I am saying when I say “fanfiction is free” is that readers don’t have to pay in anything - not time, not money, not effort, not anything - in order for fanfiction to be created. It’s a donation. It’s a gift. It’s available for you to take or leave, at the expense of someone else.

Writers have, for a very long time, requested donations of one thing as remuneration for everything they put into making fanfiction: comments. Authors have asked, in so many different iterations: “If you have consumed what I have labored and invested in to create and if you have found any enjoyment in it, please tell me, so that I can recharge enough to do this again.” Some of them may recharge on critical comments, but most of us don’t because we’ve already paid everything we want to pay to create the story.

What I am saying when I say “fanfiction is free” isn’t just that it doesn’t cost you any money. I am saying “Please respect the time and effort you didn’t have to pay into creating this thing you enjoyed, by respecting the individual creator’s requests.”

What I am saying when I say “fanfiction is free” is “be kind to authors, they have paid a lot for this gift they’re sharing with all of us, and they deserve to feel like it was worth it.”

What I am saying when I say “fanfiction is free” is “please don’t charge authors more time and emotional effort than what they’ve already provided you at no absolute cost.”

I’m not saying any of this to argue. It’s a fact that authors pay into providing fanfiction. They do it for fun. They do it out of love. They do it because they enjoy writing. No one is making them do it. No one is paying them to start or finish the story. That doesn’t mean it’s not WORK. And the only return they get on what they put into the story is the kindness of strangers that invest a little bit back by leaving a nice comment. That is why they stay, that is why they do it again, that is why we have fanfiction.

What I am saying when I say “fanfiction is free” is “please don’t be the one charging authors so much more that they leave.”

fanfic that I like