“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them… Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like ‘Men are stronger than women.’ We should be asking: ‘Which men?’ and ‘What do they do?’ There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”

— Ruth Hubbard, “The Political Nature of ‘Human Nature’“ (via gothhabiba)

Yes.

i’m going to kdxjdhdjhddjjdhs

unsung benefit i think a lot of ppl are sleeping on with using the public library is that i think its a great replacement for the dopamine hit some ppl get from online shopping. it kind of fills that niche of reserving something that you then get to anticipate the arrival of and enjoy when it arrives, but without like, the waste and the money.

ok so i think i do support ana's "grima runs on human souls" thing, because that's what obviously happens in the awakening endgame, right?

to resurrect grima, validar makes all the grimleal sacrifice their souls, and from how grima talks that obviously translates into a buttload of power.

but

how much juice is in one soul?

like, grima cant run on those same souls forever, right? is this some sort of grim reaper situatiom where grima can just yoink every recently departed soul into the combustion engine? does it need to be sacrificed to grima specifically?

the answer to how a thing as big as grima lives is "magic", but. consider with me for a moment.

so, baby grima. baby grima did not have a lot of food, on account of being underground. they were a lot more reasonable in size, but something that size still cant sustain itself on zombie meat. shit is rotten. grima was also said to grow incredibly quickly, which was facilitated by feeding them their creator's blood

blood from ONE PERSON is able to facilitate grima's development to larger than human size.

i of course posit that this is because blood is a medium to let grima access someone's vague Magic And/Or Life Energy, with eating souls just being the more.... direct approach. This slots neatly into how the Valentian magic system functions. It directly converts Life (HP) into spells

Grima is an HP thief.

However, spell costs in Echoes are substantial. Something like Warp can land someone at just 1 HP.

Thus Grima sustaining and growing themself on the blood of just one man means Grima is incredibly energy efficient. Male Sages have a base HP stat of 32 in Echoes, and I feel Sage is a good guess at what sort of guy we're working with with Forneus.

So Grima lived on 32 HP from the fall of Thabes all the way to Alm's incursion into the labyrinth, which seems like, a solid couple hundred years. Rather impressive.

this too shall pass

inspired by the scariest words my dm has ever said to me and the subsequent coolest (AND SCARIEST) scene of my life

sudden urge to burst into tears. im not a toddler i just agree with their beliefs

Not sure if you guys know about Simplicity's Adaptive Line. Links are for simplicity.com.

Unisex Dual Port Access Chemo Top and Hoodie

Crutch Pads, Bag and Toe Cover

Wheeled Walker Accessories

There are also the adaptive patterns from Mood,

The weirdest guy I ever met in a church was this boy who referred to “Buzz Aldrin and his husband” going to the moon. I was completely baffled, and when I asked if he’d misspoken, he got really angry and accused me of being deliberately ignorant of the facts. It turned out that he was somehow comvinced that Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong were married. It took five Wikipedia articles to convince him otherwise.

Disco Kitty! This chic apartment cat found a fabulous new toy~ prints in my shop

so they said i should change my icon

I don’t know which author needs to hear this right now but even if you never update your wip i would never regret reading it a time of joy is never wasted

I rly hate the Satanic Panic & the moral panic surrounding violence in video games in the 90s, coz it's now impossible to talk about the social implications of violent video games in a realistic sense.

No, violence in video games does not create serial killers in the way most people imagine it would.

However, it's very important to notice how after 9/11, a lot of violent video games pivoted their content from silly gratuitous cartoon gore to more realistic military shooters set in the Levant from a US American lens. It's also important to notice the connection of these games & their toxic online multi-player voice chats to Gamer Gate in 2014.

It's obviously not as black & white as it was presented in the 80s & 90s, I dont think everyone who played early Call of Duty games is a white supremacist who wants to join the military to kill people in the middle east, but I think it's dangerous to pretend like video games or any media can't have an impact on the way people think about violence.

I think what makes all the difference here is how that violence is portrayed, what the message behind it is, what the motives are behind the people who crafted that message, who the victims of that violence are, how they are portrayed & the greater cultural context that surrounds it.