the human heart is no small thing

Happy Pride Month to all those with chronic illness and disabilities!! Pride is not only for those who are healthy. You have just as much of a right to be here as anyone else, and you have love and support from your community.

people who are like “please stop using incomprehensible words like ‘ontological’ and ‘epistemology’ and ‘teleological’ in the social sciences”..... okay but.... counterpoint..... you could consider, god forbid, learning something

no fr. like i'm studying physics and everyone understands that a term like 'perturbative quantum chromodynamics' serves a specific purpose and that you can break it down even if you haven't encountered it before. and that's a super niche example! like, it comes up if you're thinking about the possibility of quark matter at the center of high-mass neutron stars.

but in the social sciences and humanities, if you use a word that has a precise meaning and is a VERY helpful thing to be able to refer to (e.g. if your field studies the nature of being then you might want a word for "studying the nature of being"), then people will accuse you of incomprehensibility, inaccessibility, and deliberate obfuscation. the problem must be the bad scary elitist writer, not the reader who expects to be able to understand a field they're unfamiliar with without performing a single google search.

maybe an even better example is medicine. we can accept that there's a reason to refer specifically to a pheochromocytoma rather than another type of tumor. why not extend the same benefit of the doubt to other fields?

(the answer is that some people don't have a desire to learn more because it would challenge their feeling that they know everything already. they've decided the social sciences and humanities simply can't know more than their own intuition about the world. and when they encounter difficulty in understanding the ideas of people who literally do this for a living, they decide there's a problem with their communication instead of just looking it up.)

there are genuine barriers to accessibility in academia. massive, massive barriers. this isn't one. i promise if you take two minutes to look up something new to you it will open up the whole world.

being aromantic and into whump is like. shoutout to whump for being a great opportunity to engage with stories about intimacy and vulnerability and powerful emotion and physical interactions with other people and intense relationships that are not presumptively based in romance. what would i do without you.

i truly love seeing both aro and non-aro people reblogging and agreeing with this sentiment. join me, let's appreciate intimacy and vulnerability and powerful emotion and physical interactions with other people and intense relationships that are not presumptively based in romance. i love you whump genre.

it would have been very beautiful. camilla would have had to cook (horrible bone soup)

a lot of people are talking about the state of trans rights in the uk again on my dash today and it's just occurred to me, people outside of wales probably aren't aware of probably the most well known grassroots mutual aid group for trans people here in wales, trans aid cymru. run by trans people for trans people they run social groups and give grants and help with housing and loads of stuff, i had free counselling sessions through them last year, and they have a map of trans friendly GPs project that's really helpful. they really make such a difference for trans people here and if you are trans in wales and don't know about them i super recommend investigating and if you want to donate to something that makes a material, on the ground difference to trans lives rather than a bigger charity you should definitely consider them!

hey, don't cry. night of the 26th may, ok?

Magical

i guess this is the final unless anyone else has advice for me

It’s legitimately hilarious how extensive yet scattershot Bram Stoker’s research for Dracula was. He’ll get abstruse points of 19th Century English property law right, then turn around and wildly fuck up basic geography. He accurately describes elements of Eastern European folklore that are considered obscure even in their native cultures, but was apparently completely unaware that the historical Vlad Dracula was a real person. In this, if nothing else, I can relate!

#HE DIDNT KNOW VLAD DRACULA WAS A REAL PERSON? GHKKDFHGD KING (via @hobgobbin)

I mean, probably not? The novel’s titular character is called “Count Wampyr” in most early drafts, and the historical Vlad III of Wallachia appears nowhere in Stoker’s notes. He definitely got the name “Dracula” from his research on Romanian folklore, but seems to have been under the impression that it referred to some sort of fairy tale boogieman, or possibly an alternate name for the Devil.

If we set aside biographic parallels between Count Dracula and Vlad III of Wallachia that have been interpolated by later adaptors and limit our consideration to what’s present in the novel’s text, there’s a reasonable argument to be made that Stoker had no idea who the historical Dracula is and didn’t realise he was borrowing the title of a real guy, and that any textual similarities between the literary Dracula and his historical namesake are coincidental.

(This is not, of course, to say that the modern literary Dracula has no connection to Vlad III of Wallachia. We have 125 years worth of adaptations interpolating between the two figures, and the connection between them is now inescapable. I just mean, you know, in the context of the original novel!)

Now your hope and compassion is gone

You’ve sold out your dream to the world

Stay dead, stay dead, stay dead

You’re dead and out of this world

Sea stacks

@pangur-and-grim's Scythian Chieftain pin is absolutely gorgeous in person. My horse Beau doesn't realize we are practicing to be a Scythian rider and horse for SCA, but that is going to happen.

We did it!

I have a fancier outfit for court, but Beau did wear his ibex horns for a bit while doing Activities, as well as for court (we did a mounted escort for the Queen). I want to do an update in leather eventually for being extra fancy and accurate, but it works and is safe.

explain your gender in 10 words or less without using boring words like “male”, “female”, “nonbinary”, “masculine”, “feminine” or “androgynous”.

go!

hey did I ever post the best business card I’ve ever been given by a customer?

a woman wanted me to let her know if I had a particular item in storage, and she went to get a card out of her purse and went ‘oh no. I’m out of my work cards, I’m so sorry about this’ and handed me this:

apparently her husband made them for her as a joke but then she just had like 300 of them so they’re her backups when she runs out of her real business cards.

“people will say [x] about [y] condition, but they would never say that about a person who—” stop. listen. before u continue. do not underestimate what (some) people are willing to say, especially if you don’t have whatever condition/disability you’re about to name-drop. my cousin once accused me of “choosing” to develop a walnut allergy

this fucking guy (affectionate)