Maria Skłodowska-Curie's notebooks are crazy once you think about it. They're so radioactive they have to be sealed in a lead box. Imagine a world where atomic theory is forgotten and a dude just goes "yea there's a book that details the secrets of the universe, the machinations of the creation of existence down to its barest essentials, but if you get close to it you fucking die. The more you read it the more your body slowly disassembles into mush." like wat excuse me

my understanding and interpretation of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” cannot be untangled from the fact that it was originally published to follow her poem about childhood sexual abuse, “Rage”

i just don’t think it was unintentional that these were presented flush against each other

cw: disordered eating, cw: eating disorders, cw: food, cw: eating, cw: orthorexia. spoilers for The Long Game.

I... would like to talk about "disordered eating" Shane.

Firstly: as much joy as this general narrative and the show have brought me, I think it may be helpful to acknowledge at the start that these books are just not that well written, in the sense that most characterization questions and most complex issues are not fully explored, and so we're all (as transformative works people do) pulling at strings as we try to find and make meaning in this text. I should also say that if I’d written some fun romance novels and then people started deep-diving as if I’d been intending to write Ulysses, the way I mean to do now, I’d find it pretty fucking rough, so I also accept that. But I think these things are important, and a lot of people have written really intelligently on the shallowness of both Shane’s and Ilya’s characterizations, particularly as it relates to their racial and ethnic identities. Here is one such person!

With this context:  I should also say that if you are reading this and your own absolute sense is that Shane is struggling with disordered eating—hey, not to kick it back to the 60s, but death of the author, man. We've created different meanings as readers while engaging with this text, and I respect that.

I personally, however, do not really believe this. And this is not a hill I would die or even comment on, except that I think this question intersects with two other things about the books that are worth exploring or are challenging/worth challenging (I will resist using the word 'problematic' not because I'm being wishy-washy but because I think that word is expected to do an awful lot of heavy lifting these days, which can make it unclear). I think considering these things more deeply can help flesh out how we understand the book, the narrative, the question of Shane's relationship to eating, and Shane himself. This is helpful for writing, I think! Or at least it has been for me.

These two things are:

1. Limited understanding of/interest in portraying certain aspects of hockey and a life in professional sports, which is tied to the (logical) choice to structure the books entirely around the Ilya-Shane relationship (it's romance!) and the way in which there is (I think) a general expectation on Reid's part that you will suspend your disbelief on these matters for enjoyment's sake.

2. More importantly, the limited and restricted (and restricting) ways in which Shane is conceived of and presented as an Asian, gay character by Reid, and how he is perceived by us, the readers.

ultimate boss of sound guys

so many. stupid fucking people. smugly wrong. the term . "all art is political". does not mean. every artist puts political intent into their work. no. the guy drawing dicks on the subway did not intend any deep message by it. HOWEVER. all art. IS political. he chose to draw that dick. for a reason. society shaped what he finds funny. what he finds shocking. the fact he chose to draw a dick at all says something about his society. actually, the fact it is a dick and not a pussy is itself political. we are all. ALL. shaped by our environments. in an alternate universe a woman is drawing a vulva on the wall. and shes saying "TCH! this isnt political. stupid liberals". all art. has political CONTEXT. that is a more specific way to phrase it. because we live in a society. who has access to art? where is the art located? who is the artist? why did they draw that in that specific location. what led to them even having the sharpie they used to draw the dick to begin with. their society shaped their tools! their society shaped their choice of subject! their society shaped the location of their art! but these people are too stupid to understand this. so theyll continue pretending that they are not shaped by their political environment. SAD!

These posts are sisters

you ever read a fic and you're like i KNOW this author has never been in an actual bar. are you under twenty one or are you a secret puritan

the neighborhood spot where people drink after work does not have cocaine and sex happening in the bathroom. peace and love

Bought my uncle a burger and milkshake in exchange for letting me disrupt the holiest day of the week, NFL Sunday Football, so I could install a Pi-hole and free the household of ads...the thing abt the specific boomers I live with is they told me not to trust people on the Internet but they do not understand the algorithm or online advertising and think that Facebook has their best interests at heart. And every time I have tried to explain to them that no, blorbo from my dashboard is not selling my kidneys on the dark web but Google from your capitalism is definitely selling your web searches to every advertising company on the planet, they think I am paranoid. How could their personal friend Mark Zuckerberg want anything bad to happen to them etc. I am fighting battles I did not know existed!!!

Update I have had Pi-Hole successfully installed for two (2) hours and have since learned that 40% of the web traffic in this household went to advertisements. FORTY FUCKING PERCENT. We live in hell. This is the greatest gift I have ever given my family that they will not understand or acknowledge or feel any gratitude for.

Update #2: it was rising all night but the number it finally settled on was...60%. 60% of the web traffic in this household went to advertisements. I can't tell if this high number is bc I live in Silicon Valley and probably am subject to the Algorithmic Internet in ways people outside of Silicon Valley are not or it is normal to have 2/3rds of your web traffic be ads, but it did make me set up a recurring donation of the EFF lmfao.

Okay I have had multiple people ask, so here are the useful websites that me and Beryl used to muddle our way through:

Using Pi-hole and Raspberry Pi (on the Raspberry Pi website, really good overview of what Pi-hole does)

Tumblr-archived Twitter thread about one household's experience with Pi-hole (this is what sold me on it. Also the tweets were published in 2022 and Pi-hole is actively being developed, so I think some of the teething problems he mentioned might have cleared up or are at least being addressed.)

Pi-hole website (gives broad strokes of the software and imho is not actually that helpful, however this proves that I am not making shit up)

Pi-hole documentation (read prerequisites carefully, you do NOT need the newest model of Raspberry Pi to run this thing!! You don't even need a Raspberry Pi at all, you can run it on a bunch of Linux systems however I'm very stupid when it comes to Linux and when my options are install and learn a whole ass new OS or spend $$ on a Raspberry Pi and hook it up to my TV with a wired mouse and keyboard I will unfortunately be spending money)

Privacy International's guide to setting up Pi-hole on a Raspberry Pi (bro this one saved our asses)

You guys can ask me questions if you want but I guarantee I will not know the answers bc I don't know shit about fuck, I just followed the directions and reaped the rewards. It did take us 2 hours to set up bc I'm bad at following directions (and it's kind of complicated if you've been out of the software game for a while like I have), and you do have to be sososo brave about fucking around with your internet provider's configuration. So make sure you eat before you do it!! However it has been so worth it for me so far, given that now all my devices at home are running faster and I'm not seeing any ads while web browsing. We will see what complaints my family comes up with, but I love it so far.

Also!! if you've never heard of Raspberry Pi, which I realize are not all of my followers are lost in the Silicon Valley sauce so you might not have, here's is their website and their page for using Raspberry Pi at home.

(And here is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that fights for digital privacy, free speech, and innovation, if you, like me, were presented with cold hard data about your personal internet usage and suddenly realized that our internet is fully a dystopia. haha.)

After a few months with pi-hole, I recently switched to AdGuard Home. It was recommended/is co-promoted in a pi-hole discord server, and it seems to be blocking a bit more successfully/consistently for me than the pi-hole did.

I also use Blokada on my phone when I'm not home and have the Windscribe browser extension which includes 10GB of free VPN traffic and has uBlock integrated into it. (AdGuard does technically make things that do this but I like those better; ymmv).

It all takes some setup and tinkering, but I highly, highly recommend taking steps to clear out some of the internet garbage and protect your info.

i think i have an essay in me about the way the well-deserved success and popularity of heated rivalry has brought to light a really nasty tendency online to erase or police the contributions of queer women in fandom, especially when it comes to writing and engaging with m/m content, by reducing them to the stereotype of the hetero fujoshi who views gay men as mere fetish objects. i have been in various fandoms for much of my life and can probably count the number of ACTUALLY heterosexual women i've ever encountered in those spaces on one hand. almost everyone i've ever met in these environments is some degree or flavor of queer or trans themselves. and it's also interesting to me that we don't have the same energy over whether gay men can write about lesbians - lesbians love carol, a film directed by a gay man! and even when they're bad, they don't get the same backlash: the wedding banquet remake was PURE ASS, but nobody got online to ask how dare andrew ahn, as a gay man, write about a lesbian couple dealing with fertility issues who magically solve all their relationship problems by keeping the oops baby one of them conceives after sleeping with their gay friend while blackout drunk! nobody gets mad when gay men stan chappell roan! (hell, lesbians love pluribus, a tv show created and written by a straight man!)

and lesbians and queer women have historically been very mutually supportive of gay men who respect and celebrate us - like, there's a reason kori king and lydia b kollins are two of the most successful/beloved drag race alums from recent seasons and it's because they LOVE their lesbian fanbase and have really put in the work to cultivate it and make lesbians feel like we belong in drag and queer spaces and aren't just Annoying Bachelorette Party Str8s Lite! the HR cast and creator have been very cognizant of this and explicitly shout out their lesbian and queer female fans regularly because THEY are aware that we are all starved for the same kinds of stories, and there doesn't need to be animus or gatekeeping over who gets to love a story or feel seen by it! we are all literally just queer people living in the same modern hell world!

but the thing i kinda hit on while thinking about this earlier today, that i think really drives a lot of the animosity against women who engage with stories about gay men or are vocal fans of gay celebrities, is that i think there ARE men in the community who feel like they're too good to be in community with women in any other context besides an ariana grande concert, or - a spicier take, but undoubtedly a part of the issue here - a lot of transmasc dudes who never unpacked and outgrew the "ewwww, i'm not like THOSE girls" mindset and (in part because of pervasive transphobic rhetoric suggesting as much) now feel a need to constantly assert that they're a REAL gay guy and not just an icky cis girl LARPing as one. that's an understandable source of angst, but the way in which it plays out as just pure uncut misogyny against an easy target, as well as erasing the identities and the lived realities of the many, many queer women who are drawn to and engage with m/m stories, is still not acceptable behavior from anyone regardless of their background or trauma history. not only is it just belying an evident lack of personal empathy and the ability to view things from another person's perspective to insist that YOUR lived experience as a gay dude in the mid-2020s is just so deeply unknowable to anyone outside of your own demographic - especially a yucky WOMAN ewwww - it's also just, like... oh, this is so telling.

like. that's the whole crux of it. it's so much easier for some of these guys to erase our identities as queer people and accuse a "straight" woman of leering at gay sex for the wrong reasons than it is for some gay men to accept that they might have things in common with the women in their own community. that cognitive dissonance would be too much for them if they accepted that identity alone does not bestow divine knowledge of the universe and not only do many gay men not live the scene-y big city gay lifestyle they're claiming we can't understand, some gay women actually do live and experience the world in ways which are not so dissimilar to their own lives. and the cocktail of misogyny and cognitive dissonance ultimately leads to this denial of reality (that m/m romances have always, and will always, appeal to queer women for a plethora of reasons even if we don't personally want to have sex with those guys ourselves, or are engaging from a standpoint of, like, gender envy or appreciation of masculine gender performance, rather than sexual desire for the male body) and substitution of a much easier-to-swallow narrative: that m/m romance appeals to straight women who are just mindlessly flicking their clits to the two big sweaty men going at it because they view gay men as fetish fuel and nothing more.

idk. just a thought. i might fuck around and turn this into a substack post but just wanted to throw it out there and see if anyone else has been thinking the same things...

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:

The difference is that jealous Ilya looks homicidal while jealous Shane looks suicidal

@raccoonboywrites coming correct as always

(from @ruffboijuliaburnsides)

If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading

afaik the only augmentative suffix in English is -zilla.

You are forgetting "2: Electric Boogaloo".

-apalooza, perhaps?

-ocalypse, -ocalyptic, -tastic.

fuckzilla, fuck 2: electric boogaloo, and fuckapalooza work, fucktastic definitely works, but fuckocalyptic doesn't sounds right 🤔

-athon, for duration

training for a half fuckathon

Its actually -pocalypse, as in fuckpocalypse, but as an irregular augmentative you can shorten it in whatever way works best. I'm not sure fuckalypse hits as hard as fuckpocalypse, though

-itude, like "not with that fuckitude it won't"

Fuckalyptic works great

Lest we forget -gate, e.g. “this post is a linguistic fuckergate.”

Russian in Heated Rivalry: a Masterpost

hiii everyone haii so... I am Here to Talk about the Russian Language in Heated Rivalry. we'll cover scenes by episode, with timestamps, in terms of translation, tone, and pronunciation because I <3 am a russian canadian and certifiably insane about my (russian) canadian show. thank u thank u. strap in.

as a preamble: Connor's russian is not perfect, but very good. he has an accent, he speaks with slightly unnatural inflections, and a native speaker would guess that he is not one. however, he could plausibly pass for someone like Ksenia (I believe her first language is russian, she just doesn't use it frequently). when I watched episodes 1–2 with a russian friend we were both convinced Connor grew up speaking russian, or perhaps another slavic language, and around the age of like 10-12 kinda stopped, because, having been around many bilinguals, we have a frame of reference.

and then we looked him up.

anyway. to the point!!

When it comes to glimpses of a better world, I remember encountering some woman's anecdote about how she's muslim, and being free to wear pretty much whatever she wants at her job, she wears a veil that covers her face while at work, but not in her free time. None of her coworkers know what she looks like, so she never has to worry about being seen and recognised by someone she knows from work while she's off the clock. Imagine having so much freedom to wear whatever you want that you can just decide that you don't consent to being seen at work. Your job does not have seeing-your-face privileges.

hold for part 2

okay go. become a habs fan NOW