for what it's worth, i've really enjoyed your company

i'll miss you

Just saw a leather jacket that says “my other ride is your dad” on the back and I don’t think I’ll ever be the same

let’s give credit where it’s due and thank ms. bob the drag queen

btw having curly hair but not being taught how to care about it as a child means that even if you are white, the majority of hair advice being given by other white people is useless and actively harmful to you, so you literally owe everything you know to black and brown women online

The first time a black woman cut my hair she asked what products I used and when I told her I didn’t use any she hit me with ‘oh honey’ and spent an hour teaching me what products I should be using as well as giving me my first proper curly cut

this is soooo nice but the notifications tab cut it off like this:

so before clicking i thought she smacked you for not taking care of your hair properly & then gave advice

me when I "mysteriously" feel better after I "have something to eat"

writing tip: searching "[place of origin]ish names" will get you a lot of stuff and nonsense made up by baby bloggers.

searching "[place] census [year]" will get you lists of real names of real people who lived in that place.

I feel like I'm constantly shilling for them but BehindTheName.com, the only baby name site that doesn't feel like it's run by mommy bloggers, includes census-based graphs for dozens of countries/regions (though not all of them go back very far yet)

And you can expand them to see rank, number of babies, and percentage of babies and add a second name to compare. (in 1973 four percent of babies were named Jennifer! 1 in 25!!!)

Also this. Cursed.

@homoqueerjewhobbit what name did you search for your example, and what's going on with Moldova?

Those are the graphs for Samuel. They only have 1 year's data for Moldova right now, so that's why it's a straight line. Similarly, they only have 2 years for Mexico right now. The US goes back to 1880. I'm not sure how much of that is publicly available/translated records and how much of it is that it's like 1 or 2 guys maintaining a website of 27000 names and a finite amount of time to format and upload.

Here's the list of all of the countries/regions they have popularity statistics for if you want to nerd out on it!

You can't advertise BehindTheName for writers without mentioning the advanced search! You can search names based on cultural origin and usage, gender (including unisex), meaning, and even things like meter and number of syllables, or famous namesakes (you can also see a list of famous namesakes on every name's page, along with meaning, history, related names, alternate spellings in different languages, the above popularity graphs, and more).

I wouldn't even call BehindTheName a baby name site. They have a surname sister site and a random name generator with tons of variables to set that is very clearly intended to be used for fictional characters (iirc it can even generate a cause of death? I haven't looked at it in many years so it might have changed but these things predate generative AI so unless it's been forcefully enshittified it shouldn't be slop). Like, you can use it for baby names, but the website isn't explicitly intended for that purpose. This website caters to us.

[looks for you in everything] [finds you there]

[asece þe in æghwa] [gefinde þe þær]

…or is it? by colormuse on reddit.

artist's Reddit post

Domestic dispute in public

My problem with Harkness Test discourse is that in practice it's only ever an issue when somebody wants to fuck a male or not-obviously-gender-coded (and thus male by default) cartoon animal. Give that cartoon animal long eyelashes and chest bumps that kind of look like tits and suddenly wanting to fuck it is respectable!

Hate it when TikTok farm cosplayers and cottagecore types say stuff like "I'm not going to use modern equipment because my grandmothers could make do without it." Ma'am, your great grandma had eleven children. She would have killed for a slow cooker and a stick blender.

I’ve noticed a sort of implicit belief that people used to do things the hard way in the past because they were tougher or something. In reality, labor-saving devices have historically been adopted by the populace as soon as they were economically feasible. No one stood in front of a smoky fire or a boiling pot of lye soap for hours because they were virtuous, they did it because it was the only way to survive.

Taking these screenshots from Facebook because they make you log in and won't let you copy and paste:

[TEXT ID: 3 screenshots of a Facebook post from the account The Curiosity Curator. the post reads:

"When the washing machine arrived in 1925, she sat on the kitchen floor and cried for three hours-not from joy, but from grief for the fifty years she'd lost.

Mary Richardson was 62 years old when she turned on an electric washing machine for the first time. Her daughter found her sobbing, surrounded by soap and laundry, and asked if someone had died.

Mary looked up, tears streaming down her weathered face, and whispered: "All those Mondays. All those years. It didn't have to be that hard."

For fifty years-every single Monday since she was twelve years old-Mary had done laundry by hand. Not the romantic version you see in nostalgic photographs.

The brutal reality: waking at 4 AM, hauling 50 gallons of water from a frozen well, scrubbing clothes in boiling lye soap that stripped skin from her knuckles, bending over washtubs for ten hours straight until her back spasmed and her hands bled.

2,600 wash days. 26,000 hours of backbreaking labor.

Her diary entries, discovered by her great-granddaughter a century later, tell the truth history books sanitize:

"Monday again. My hands are so raw I can barely hold the pen. I watch Father reading while I scrub his shirts and think: why is his comfort worth more than my hands?"

She was only fourteen when she wrote that.

There was no "bonding" over shared labor. There was exhaustion and silent resentment. There were no songs-only groaning, water splashing, and women too tired to speak.

The washing machine had been invented in the 1850s.

Electric models existed by 1900. Wealthy women in cities had them for decades. But Mary was born poor and rural, so she scrubbed on a washboard until her hands became gnarled and her back permanently bent.

That's a 25-year gap between technology existing and Mary being able to afford it. Twenty-five years of unnecessary suffering.

When the machine finally arrived, it did in fifteen minutes what had taken her two hours of brutal physical labor. She watched it fill with water automatically, agitate the clothes without anyone touching them, and she understood-truly understood for the first time-how much had been stolen from her. She cried for three hours. Not tears of gratitude. Tears of grief.

Her daughter Alice wrote: "Mother grieved for all the Mondays she'd lost. For her ruined hands. For the life she could have had. I tried to comfort her, but what could I say? She was right. It didn't have to be that hard."

Mary lived fifteen more years. She never did laundry again-not because she was too elderly, but because her daughters understood intimately what fifty years of wash days had cost her.

At her funeral in 1940, Alice said: "My mother's hands were destroyed by laundry. Her back was broken by it.

Half her life was stolen by a task that should have been mechanized decades earlier. We're told to celebrate women like her for their resilience. I think we should be angry instead. Angry that she had to be resilient at all." The women in attendance-who'd lived their own decades of wash days-applauded. Because they knew. They all knew.

The washing machine didn't just save time. It liberated women. It gave them back their hands, their health, their Mondays, their lives.

When we romanticize "simpler times" and "family traditions," we erase the reality: women were trapped in systems of domestic labor that destroyed their bodies and stole their futures.

Mary Richardson never got to pursue education, travel, or develop talents beyond domestic skills. Because every Monday was wash day.

She was 62 when a machine did in fifteen minutes what had taken her fifty years. And she grieved for every Monday she'd lost.

Sometimes progress isn't about losing tradition.

Sometimes it's about ending suffering we mistook for virtue.

Sometimes the "good old days" were only good because we've forgotten who was hurting.

And sometimes the greatest gift isn't resilience-it's liberation from ever needing it again."

END TEXT ID]

i mean yeah, but try flipping it: imagine what we could do if we actually incentivized people to care?

actually im moving out of the tags because i didn't realize most US states don't have this. here in oregon, we have Bottledrop. since the 1970s, we can return aluminum cans and plastic bottles to outdoor stations at most grocery stores for a small reimbursement (currently 10 cents per bottle/can, but it was only 5 cents when i was growing up). you insert them into the machine one at a time, and it sucks them in, crunches them up, counts how many you've returned, and spits out a receipt for you to go inside the store and get your money.

now, the actual result of this has been stores charging a small bottle deposit when you check out. you aren't making any money when you return the cans, you're just collecting your deposit. it doesn't matter though, because it FEELS like after months of tiny 10 cent charges you didnt notice or care about, you can suddenly get like $50 for ''free.'' kids especially love going door to door asking for old cans people can't be bothered to return themselves. i did it all the time. the machines are a lot more fun when you're 12.

we also have been making the process easier and faster in the last decade or so, with people employed to sort and count your bottles for you, so all YOU have to do is drop off the bottledrop bag with your name on it and they'll take care of everything for you and send you the money directly.

you know what all of that amounts to? consistently hovering around a 90% can and bottle recycling rate, while most other states are sitting at an abysmal 30%, and even the other nine states that have bottle drop programs hovering at around 70%. just because we restructured the system so it felt like people were getting a little treat for recycling, and then did everything we could to make it easy and convenient.

so yes, imagine what we could do if instead of attributing the problem to 'stupidity', we actually spent time and money incentivizing people like we did these birds?

I call it “soft queerphobia”. It’s when you come out to your family and they don’t reject you OR encourage you, they just forget every few months again. I have come out to my father nine times

@paynewenck

also, once again, hilarious to see the “loud annoying public gays” trope being used on davekat for the 37484827th time as if they weren’t canonically a very private pair

it’s funny because rosemary are famously very loud and public about their occasionally messy relationship, as we see in the comic, but for some mysterious reason nobody talks about them

when ur friends show u their ocs