dancingchopines

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#I did laugh

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So, the thing about Don Quixote.

The thing about Don Quixote is that he tilts at windmills - tilts in the archaic sense of ‘charge at with a lance,’ because it’s the story of a guy who read so much chivalric romance that he lost his mind and started larping as a knight-errant. He was, if you’ll pardon the phrasing, chivalrybrained.

The thing about Don Quixote is, sometimes people take it as this story of whimsical and bravely misguided individualism or ‘being yourself’ or whatever, and they’re wrong. If it took place in the modern day, Don Quixote would absolutely be the story of a trust fund kid who blew his inheritance being a gacha whale until his internet got cut off so now he wanders around insisting that people refer to him as ‘Gudako.’

But the real thing about Don Quixote is that it was published in the early 1600s, and the thing about the 1600s is that Europe was one big tire fire. This is because 1600s Europe was still organized around feudalism (or ‘vassalage and manorialism’ if ya nasty), which assumed that land (and the peasants attached to it) were the only source of wealth. And that had worked just fine (well, ‘just fine,’ it was still feudalism) for a long time, because Europe had been a relative backwater with little in the way of urbanization or large-scale trade.

That was no longer true for Europe in the 1600s. The combination of urban development, technological advances, and brutal Spanish colonialism meant that land was no longer the sole source of wealth. Sudden there was a new class of business-savvy, investment-minded upwardly-mobile commoners, and another new class of downwardly-mobile gentry who simply couldn’t compete in this new fast-paced economy. Cervantes saw this process with his own eyes.

One of the symbols of this new age was the windmill, a complicated piece of engineering that was expensive to build but would then produce profits indefinitely - in other words, a windmill was capital.

The thing about Don Quixote is, when he tilts at windmills, he has correctly identified his nemesis.

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Happy Neil Day! Please enjoy the very rare alternate Neil images!

#omg I missed it by one day #one day late oops

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Throwback thursday to when I was like 12 and I was putting out new writing DAILY...... Like entire Chapters of my then-current wips just, over an afternoon. What the fuck was I on

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Sorry for being incapable of answering a question without like 900 "It dependssss" prefaces. Unfortunately too many things depend on too many things

#callout for my one parent who is a lawyer #always 'it depends' #pls just answer the question

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how long have I been out

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What do conductors even do like actually

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SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN dir. Stanley Donen + Gene Kelly 

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Happy ides of march everybody!

#happy ides of march #queued this up because I am actually away in the very country of the deed!!!!

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Happy plagueiversary

#what I would give to go back in time and stop this #I would pay a lot of money

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with greece legalizing gay marriage and everything i'm so tired of people diminishing queerness in greece to "oh your ancient greek ancestors would be proud ! alexander the great would be proud ! achilles would be proud sappho would be proud plato would be proud" etcetc.

queer rights progressing in greece wouldn't make our "ancient greek ancestors" proud because they had an entirely different concept of marriage than us, viewed women as objects to be sold and traded and only accepted homosexuality between men, or even more likely, a man and a literal underage boy.

gay rights in greece aren't benefiting some people who died a few thousand years ago or are Literally Fictional. greek queerness isn't just some ancient dionysian fantasy of feeding each other grapes and reciting poetry to each other by the sea. actual greek people who do benefit from this still exist. it doesn't honor some ancient guy who condoned slavery. it honors greek queer people who were out there protesting at the controversy this law raised with the church and actually made the effort to win this fight.

ancient greece isn't the epitome of queerness, not even close. absolutely in no way when it concerned exclusively just gay men. the epitome of queerness is the trans kid from my hometown who insisted on cutting their hair and dressing masculine even within their transphobic high school environment and strict orthodox family, or the woman who taught me programming who was married with children and realized she was aromantic fifteen years into marriage, or the gay punks who kept cops out of the university's anarchist hotspot.

greek queer people aren't history or mythology, and ancient greece isn't the queer utopia you make it out to be. we're still here, and we're fighting against the exact ideas our ancient culture perpetuated.

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i hate high-budget star trek you have no business with that. put a unicorn hat on a cocker spaniel. wear felt

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#yeah

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Hey all, you know how internet searches suck now? When the results are awful, full-of-AI, death-of-the-internet levels of bad?

Start appending date constraints to your searches - "before:2023".

My results have gone from 90% AI bullshit to ~60% usable - which frankly at this point is a huge improvement.

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Tatiana Blass, Penelope, wife of Odysseus 

#this is sick #art #I love this

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i just remembered a story my first plug told me. she's butch and gets mistaken for a man a lot. one time she was walking home when a guy pulled a knife on her and asked for everything in her pockets. panicking, she said "ok" and the guy hearing her voice was like "oh shit, are you a girl?" and she was like "yeah" and he put the knife away and said something like "sorry. i can't do this to a woman" and left. feminist ally.

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(after misunderstanding what someone said and embarrassing myself) oh great now they hate me and want to kill me with rocks