a pot of daisies

puts my uncomfortably wet hand on your shoulder. see here, gay boy- can i call you gay boy?

[i.d.: a photoset with images from black sails, with words overlaying each one to form a longer quote. the images are: a younger miranda hamilton and james mcgraw on a boat, young miranda crying, a close up of alfred hamilton, a medium shot of alfred in a chair, miranda screaming in peter ashe’s dining room, colonel rhett holding up a gun, miranda lying on the floor with a bullet wound in her head, below the deck of a ship, flint looking out to a burning charles town, and peter ashe slumped over on the ground. the quote reads, “oh now you pull out your code of justice - call me accursed, demand my exile! what about them? what about him? this man who, without a second thought, as if it were a goat dying, sacrificed his own child. isn’t it this man you should have sent into exile, to pay for that polluted deed? instead you pass judgement on me! well i warn you, threaten me all you like and yes, if you crush me, you’ll be giving the orders. but if some god ordains the opposite, however late, old men, i’ll teach you your place.”]

please, where are these excerpts from? they're hilarious I wanna read more

It’s from this essay by Renaissance historian Ada Palmer comparing two adaptations of the story of the Borgia family

Li Bai, Fall River Song #10, from Seventeen Fall River Songs

i don't really want to weight in on the "using big words in your writing is ableist" discourse happening on tiktok because i'm like 90% certain it's an anti-intellectual psyop to stir up drama in online circles to promote the use of ai to summarize literally everything and thus feeding the LLMs and lowering the populace's mistrust of such tools but i also have to say: dictionaries and thesauruses are the most accessible they've ever been. if you use an e-reader of any kind you can look up a word without leaving the page. there's a plethora of online dictionaries and if you just type a word + "meaning" into google it'll usually give you a definition. we used to have pocket dictionaries we used when reading in class. i have two on my shelf right now that i used in high school. stop letting the fascists purposefully misuse anti-ableism rhetoric to trick you into never thinking again.

white women in the us have had the right to vote for 106 years. that is such a middling number of generations back. my great-grandmother grew up during the great depression and like. i knew her. she was a person alive in my life. and she was part of the generation of my family that included the first women who grew up with the right to vote. isn't that crazy. i was born with the right to vote and so was my mom and grandma and great grandmother but not anyone else. that's as far back as it goes. 106 years. i'm always thinking about this these days i'm always thinking about how rights are much less entrenched in history than they seem . and this makes me incredibly unforgiving to passive misogyny. NOT funny DIDN'T laugh misogyny impacts every woman alive every day in one thousand ways . i hope that in fifty years or whatever someone asks me if [aspect of misogynistic culture] really used to be true because it sounds so crazy and egregious and would never happen in 207X. my point is i am getting meaner about misogyny and you should too because not only is it an extremely big deal but every feminist norm and right you've grown up with is so incredibly new.