CURATED

 But if you ask people who think about things, the answer is vague. Killing a hibernating bear would just feel… impolite? You can’t fucking shoot a man when he’s sleeping, that’s just fucking rude. It’s just not the right thing to do.

 Long before hunting laws were established in Finland, you couldn’t kill a sleeping bear, and what commands you is something older than law: tradition. Even at a time when hunting was a matter of life and death, and a bear fighting for its life is mainly a matter of death, you just didn’t kill a hibernating bear, you have to wake it up first. Hunters risked their lives, the lives of their brothers and everyone in the hunting party, who were friends, family and men that they loved, to give the bear a fighting chance.

 In the modern time, the hunting season of bears is in the summer, for the warmest summer months. There are many reasons for why they are allowed to tread safely in autumn and to sleep in peace through the cold months, almost all of which are rational and scientific, and do not touch the old traditions.

 Old faith says a living thing has many souls - henki, luonto, itse. Plants only have one - the one that wills them to grow. Animals have two, both the spark of life and nature that enables them to act. A human being also has the third, one that makes them a person, personality, itse, literally “self”. But the soul that travels in your dreams is not the soul that defines a human - animals have that one as well. When your dog runs in her sleep, her soul is elsewhere, where a dog is needed.

A stack of papers slammed down next to her. “More stuff Arthur wants erased from the database.”

Maria looked up to Justin and asked rather directly, “Do you think Arthur’s gonna bring us home one day?”

Justin stared down at her and smiles. “I know he will. He has to.”

He looked down out the window. “It’s all we have left.”

Maria opened up the logs and said with a heavy heart, “You’re right. You’re right.” The next purges were early antiquity. She knew it wouldn’t end here. Arthur was giving this to them in doses. They could accept some small chunks of the world vanishing forever, but now eras were vanishing. She knew what to do.

She knew what Arthur would ask her to do.

She took all parts of the database that wouldn’t be immediately useful, and eradicated it.

Technological context, historical minutiae, ideologies, works of art grand and beautiful. It was all gone in an instant. She pondered how all of human legacy could be gone in two keystrokes. Then she printed out the deletion files and handed them to Justin. His face paled, then he organized the documents, taking them to the emperor-to-be.

The author's proudly displayed fetish

The author's fetish you're pretty sure they don't realise they have

The author's fetish which they're firmly convinced everyone has and is just pretending otherwise

The author's non-sexual special interest which just sounds like a fetish because of their habitually unfortunate phrasing

The fetish the author is making a well-meaning effort to cater to in spite of clearly not understanding it themselves

The author's fetish that never quite makes it into the text because they keep getting sidetracked by the requisite worldbuilding

The author's utterly pedestrian sexual preference which the text treats like a bizarre fetish because they've got shit to work through

The author's seemingly innocuous recurring trope they're going to have a personal revelation about ten years down the road

Just like the anti-Vietnam War protest songs that we associate with the 1960s, or the early nihilism that spawned punk music in the 1970s. But he didn’t *sound* like a punk anarchist; he sounded like a country rock singer. When he released Born in the U.S.A. people completely misinterpreted (or possibly ignored) the lyrics in favor of the tone of the music.

Politicians used his music to promote their ‘Murica Yes! brand, and he had to literally explain that that was not what he was about. He’s over here asking when we’re going to have jobs and heathcare, not stanning the politicians who weren’t helping the people.

It was also kind of a big deal that he had an integrated band, because even as late as the 1980s music was still kind of segregated and MTV was straight up racist. They refused to play and promote black artists and then claimed that were no black artists in the first place. Michael Jackson’s record company had to threaten a boycott of their white artists to get MTV to play his Thriller video.

Plus, the first black/white interracial kiss on TV was in 1968 (OG Star Trek). Also it took us until the 70s to get sympathetic gay characters on screen, and the 90s to get gay characters to kiss onscreen. And all of those firsts were met with outrage.

So keep that in mind when you see Bruce Springsteen not just playing with an interracial band, but engaging in an interracial, gay kiss on stage repeatedly.

https://www.gq.com/story/this-fucked-me-up-bruce-springsteen-singing-about-clarence-clemons

It was a story where… we remade the city. We remade the city, shaping it into the kind of place where our friendship and our love for one another wouldn’t have been such an exceptional thing. - Bruce Springsteen

It wasn’t about showmanship or rejecting bigots or anything it was just. Damn right that was one of the loves of his life and damn right he was going to kiss him onstage

It gets me a little that Bruce has had a divorce, that he’s been married twice, but he loved Clarence for the rest of Clarence’s life and will presumably love him the rest of his own

Clemons said in one interview. “Bruce and I looked at each other and didn’t say anything, we just knew. We knew we were the missing links in each other’s lives. He was what I’d been searching for.” In another version of the story, Clemons says “He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love.”

I’m having some emotions about it!

“He was elemental in my life,“ Springsteen adds, “and losing him was like losing the rain.”

Not just! I love you pure and deep and true but! I am going to love you like that in front of the whole damn world!

We have fewer narratives about taking risks and making statements for platonic love rather than romantic and supposedly it would be easier to downplay this onstage than romance and! They refused! They fucking refused! In front of hundreds of thousands of people, over the course of years! In the spotlight, in word and deed, I love you!

I mean, will you LOOK at this:

This was the pic chosen for the album cover from an extensive photoshoot, too. A few others:

There was a big push to eliminate "degrading jobs" but the strategy was to eliminate the position, then create a new position outside of the bargaining unit to do the work. So like, we wouldn't have dishwashers, but we'd have people who washed dishes that weren't eligible to be in the union.

I was like A) what the actual fuck? Dish washing isn't "degrading", it's fucking vital. B) What the actual fuck? You want to create a union just to exploit different people?

The first time someone told me that busing tables was "degrading", I was like "Oh, uhh, yeah, like it's very necessary work but under compensated for how vital it is?" and they responded "No, touching plates that other people have eaten off of is disgusting."

In bargaining, someone on the Union side suggested that we eliminate all the cashiers and exclusively use self-checkouts (they were a cashier and didn't like it). The organizer told them that the union wasn't in the habit of eliminating bargaining unit positions. (This is the same person I've talked about how said that "as a prison abolitionist" we just needed to execute most criminals.)

It got me thinking, along with Ann Russell talking about how to treat cleaners (being a cleaner herself), about how we conceptualise domestic service as particularly degrading in all its forms, when, really, why is that? Why is paying someone to do something intrinsically bad?

Like, even in a moneyless, gift economy society, there would still be people whose primary contribution to their communities would be cleaning. Some people like to clean, and are really rather good at it.

I've talked ad nauseam in the past about how British attitudes towards cleaners and other service based positions today are the descendants of Victorian attitudes. That is, both the attitudes of conservatives and many progressives of that time. The trade union movement was particularly exclusionary towards service workers.

what does this have to do with boiling your surgical tools? well look, the boiling water releases bubbles of steam which carries the malign influences up to heaven. you boil a knife, you send all the miasmic particles off with the steam to heaven. if you rinse the knife off in a bucket the water isn't hot enough, the particles go into the water and then right back on to the knife. you gotta boil it to get the particles all the way away. how can a tool or rag or a bed have miasmic particles on it when you can't smell them? humans have a lousy sense of smell. look at your dog on the hunt. are there no rabbits in the woods just because you can't smell them? we know that miasma is carried on the air, and is what makes stench so dangerous, and we know that humans can't smell worth a damn compared to dogs cats horses etc. a dog can smell if a rat died in a corner of the room last week. you can't. do you think licking the spot where the rat died is going to go well for you? luckily, what humans lack in snout we make up for in brains. we have extra brains where our sniffers should have been. God set that up for a reason.

and why does a rinse with wine spirits work? man, look how fast alcohol evaporates. my guess is that because wine contains a lot more vice than water, it evaporates a whole lot faster, in sort of an equal and opposite way that a rock falls faster than a feather. if you want the miasmic particles to get off there FAST, you dunk it in something that's going back to heaven at a gallop.