My grandfather died the day I turned eleven, and now, two decades later, the memories I have of him are few and far between. I remember his face; his voice, but mostly I remember what he taught me. The names of trees; what berries were edible. How to fish, and shoot, and camp in deep winter and build fires in the snow. I don’t remember the words he used for these lessons, but the knowledge is his.
He had a woodshop, which outlived him by many years; he wasn’t the one who taught me to use the tools in it but they were his nonetheless. I learned on his band saw, his drill press, made little things out of lumber he felled and milled and laid away for projects he never got to. The cutting boards I use for special occasions are black walnut he milled the year I was born, that I planed and cut and sanded in his woodshop eighteen years after his death. The woodshop, too, is gone now, but I have many of his tools still. Hand drills and files, vices and hammers and a thousand little jars of screws and nails, which will likely last my lifetime and more. I have tools from my great-grandfather, too, who I never knew, but the hand planes still cut long curlicues of wood smooth as butter.
And I have his china. Gifted to my grandmother as an engagement gift; an extravagant expense, carried in his hands bit by bit from Japan, a hundred and twenty pieces chipped and cherished through generations of family thanksgivings. A poor man’s gift to a rich man’s daughter, with gold on the edges.
I know as the years pass I will remember less of him. Memory always fades. But I have, far less fragile, his knowledge, his tools, and a hundred and twenty pieces of proof of his love.
one of the funniest thing that happens to me regularly is when i’m dressed The Way I Dress, esp in very short shorts or very audacious trousers, and straight women start giving me A Look that’s meant to be like. a policing look between women, to show social disapproval
but then they look up at my face, realise i’m a man and NOT a woman, and you see them doing like. a double take, often with their jaws full on dropped
bc their intention was to do the crab bucket slutshaming thing at another woman and it doesn’t apply to me… or does it?
bc sometimes they decide to go back to Plan A and do the slutshamey lipcurl of disgust (they’ve decided i count as a woman) and other times they sort of tut and avert their eyes entirely (they’ve decided i count as a homo)
and other times they just. stare. (forget to decide)
favourite reactions by bystanders to my general mode and manner of dress:
straight women who do the above. they do it most if i’m in a crop top, and middle aged cishet women get Particularly Mad about it
straight (or “straight”) men who are staring at me, and then i make eye contact with them, and because of Rules of Masculinity they hold my gaze to show they’re manlier than me. the longer this goes on the more he realises he is making meaningful eye contact across a public place with A Homosexual (Known) and the more visibly unsettled he becomes until he breaks eye contact
straight men who look at my waist/ass and look appraising, then see my face and blanche with disappointment at the fact that All That belongs to man
the same thing but when it’s lesbians 😔 i’m so sorry, ladies
but also when elderly queer ladies and leather dykes see me and make like. big hand gestures and go “YEAH!!” and similar and i do the same about their outfits bc they always look cool as fuck 🤝
goth and alt people, queer people, people in lolita or other subculture clothing, etc who see how i’m dressed and grin, either at me and exchanging smiles, or privately to themselves after seeing me and then passing me by
ditto the above who see me, grin, nudge their friends, and are visibly enthusing over my dress w them
children who stop stockstill to stare up at me. bonus if they do it in groups (which they often do). bonus bonus if the adults they’re holding hands with / leashed by stumble at the abrupt brakes put on by their spellbound children seeing the species homo homo for the first time
Silly idea for a novel: the maintenance guys for ancient temple traps.
They’re a team of travelling engineers and quality assurance experts, who have to stay a step ahead of the assorted adventurers and archaeologists. The job is to make all the puzzles and traps authentic to original design, difficult to solve (but not too difficult. They want a staggered fatality rate so the final traps and puzzles get a chance to shine as well), and to stay ahead of schedule.
They’re all members of the reportedly long lost people who built the ruins. How or why this might be is never addressed. They carry themselves like regular tradesmen, all ‘well there’s you’re problem’ while dangling on a harness over a spike trap to fix the giant swinging axe. They have a water traps guy but he’s sick so the mechanical engineer is filling in. The spring loaded traps are all sticking this year due to humidity. The spinning clockwork puzzles are waiting for a part. The guy who replaces the tiles on collapsing floor traps thinks that’s bullshit. The stone worker who fixes the facades after the repairs has a UST-drenched rivalry with the botanist who arranges the moss and vines over hidden entrances and faded murals. The poison darts guy and the snake handler are siblings trying to fill their dad’s shoes. The final assessor is the grizzled old expert who’s seen it all and everyone respects. He has final say on whether or not the work is up to scratch and they can move onto the next temple. He gets injured/falls into a bottomless pit at the end of act one and they have to do the big job without him. The pressure is on to do him proud.
The archaeologists/adventurers have no clue about any of this. They’re constantly traipsing through the jungles, trying to decode clues, and loudly dying in the background. This is treated like a standard inconvenience.
Occasionally they run into vengeful spirits or surviving priests, who treat them the same way you treat a plumber who is fixing your sink: and tentatively offer them a sandwich and a cup of tea and try not to complain about them wearing work boots in the house.
This also outlines the idea of a greater objective among the trap-builders, a higher mission that drives the maintenance crew to their difficult job and inspires their adherence to quality standards.
Hi I’m a fantasy writer and now I need to know what potatoes do to a society
They drastically increase peasant food security and social autonomy.
The main staple of medieval agriculture was grain–wheat, barley, oats, or rye. All that grain has to be harvested in a relatively short window, about a week or two. It has to be cut down (scythed), and stored in the field in a safe and effective way (stooked); then it has to be brought to a barn and vigorously beaten (threshed) to separate the grain from the stalks and the seed husks. It can be stored for a few weeks or months in this form before it spoils or loses nutritional value.
Then it has to be ground into flour. In the earlier middle ages, peasants could grind their own flour by hand using small querns, but landlords had realized that if they wanted to get more money out of their peasants, it was more effective for the entire village to have one large mill that everyone used. Peasants had to pay a fee to have their flour ground–and it might say something that there are practically no depictions of millers in medieval English literature in which the miller is not a corrupt thief.
Then the flour has to be processed to make most of its nutrients edible to humans, which ideally involves yeast–either it’s made into bread which takes hours to make every time (and often involves paying to use the village’s communal bread oven) and spoils within a few days, or it’s made into weak ale, which takes several weeks to make, but can keep for several months.
Potatoes, in comparison…
Potatoes have considerably more nutrients and calories than any similar crop available in medieval Europe–they beat turnips, carrots, parsnips, beets, or anything else all to heck. I don’t know if they beat wheat out for calories per acre, but practically…
When you dig a potato out of the ground (which you can do at any time within a span of several months), you can bury it in the ashes of a fire for an hour, or you can boil it in water for 20 minutes.
Then you eat it. Boom. Done. (I mean, if you’re not fussy, you could even eat them raw.)
You store the ones you don’t want right now in a root cellar and plant some of them in the spring to get between a fivefold and tenfold return on your crop.
Potatoes don’t just feed you–they free you. Grain-based agriculture relies on lots of people working together to get the work done in a very short length of time. It relies on common infrastructure that is outside the individual peasant’s control. The grain has to be brought to several different locations to be processed, and it can be seized or taxed at any of those points. It’s very open to exploitation.
TW: Genocide The Irish Potato Famine happened because the English colonizers of Ireland demanded rents and taxes that were paid in grain, and it ended up that you didn’t really get to keep much of the grain you grew. So the Irish farmed wheat in fields to pay the English, and then went home and ate potatoes from their gardens. And then, because they were eating only one specific breed of potatoes, a blight came through and wiped all their potatoes out, and then they starved. So English narratives about the potato famine tended to say “Oh yes, potato blight, very tragic,” and ignore the whole “The English were taking all the grain” aspect, but the subtext here is: Potatoes are much harder to tax or steal than grain.
So… yeah. I realize it’s very counterproductive to explain to everybody why I’m always like “OMG POTATO NO” when I wish I could just chill out and not care about this. But the social implications of the humble potato are rather dramatic.
I’m a little curious tho, how does just seeds from the grain go bad?
Like if they lose their nutritional value so quickly how do they get planted the next year?
Part of how medieval farmers avoided the problem of grain spoilage over the winter was to plant their grain crop in the late autumn, and let it start growing over the winter. Then they’d sow again in early spring. The winter crop might get blighted by the cold, or it might come up early; the spring crop might not sprout as much and would take longer, but it might help you out if your winter crop failed. They were kind of hedging their bets in an imperfect system.
Faster causes of of grain spoilage are visibly “something has ruined this grain”–insects, molds, or vermin get in at the grain, so your grain is much more likely to be eaten, pooped on, or rotten when you take it out of storage.
If you can get grain to survive those quicker methods, eventually grain can spoil simply by being exposed to air. After a few months the oil inside it oxidizes, which destroys a lot of its nutrients. You might get it to sprout six months later, but it’s a lot less nutritious if you eat it, and if you grow it the plants will get less of a head start before they have to rely on their root system to bring in nutrients from the soil.
Very occasionally, archeologists turn up ancient seeds that still sprout, but those seeds are usually exceptionally well preserved–for example, sealed in a jar in a tomb that was undisturbed for thousands of years and magically it never got hot or wet enough to spoil. But you can’t store large amounts of grain like that, partly because the simple existence of large amounts of grain will attract pests that will spoil it. The ones that survive are the one-in-a-million cases.
My absolute favourite under-acknowledged agricultural hazard is self-heating and thermal runaways.
If a plant isn’t actively growing it is, in fact, decomposing - the speed at which it’s doing that depends on things like external temperature, moisture, etc and can be anywhere from very slow to very fast.
Stuff that is decomposing produces heat.
Grain is an amazing insulator, so all of that heat gets trapped in the middle of the bin.
High heat encourages more decomp. Which produces more heat. Which produces more decomp. Which, eventually, can lead to a thermal runaway, in which the grain passes its ignition point and begins to smolder. (And if you’re really unlucky, that can spark a dust explosion.)
This is one of the reasons that grain farmers are Very Concerned about moisture content - high moisture content means faster decomposition, and thus faster spoilage but also the risk of your grain bin blowing up. Modern farmers carefully control the moisture content and air circulation of their stored grain to maximize quality and shelf life, while avoiding inconvenient explosions.
I don’t know that medieval farmers ever would have produced enough grain to be at risk of thermal runaway - but there are hazards to storing large amounts of grain even aside from pests and loss of nutritional value.
I feel almost certain I’ve read of medieval city fires that started in moldy haylofts and silos.
Thermal runaway can happen to hay as well. Hay stored indoors under a roof will last well as usable animal fodder for a long time, but only if it is VERY dry when put in, and a leak in the barn roof can cause a fire by this method– if the hay gets wet and starts to decompose, then it’ll catch itself on fire. This is still a problem in the modern day, and causes barn fires to this day.
I ended up on the Wikipedia page for “oldest dated rocks” and it’s got me feeling all sorts of fucked up about the sheer size of geologic timescales.
Rocks from the Hadean eon — the time when Earth was first forming — are extremely rare because the majority of them have been eroded or melted, or perhaps deep in the Earth, but there are some examples:
The oldest estimated Earth rock is a zircon sample with an age of 4.404 ±0.008 billion years. A few things stand out about that. First, the age of the Earth is estimated to be about 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years old. That’s less than100 million years between Earth’s genesis and the creation of that zircon sample. Second, the margin of error on the age of the zircon is 8 million years. That zircon is so old that that’s the most precise guess at its age.
The Earth has changed so much, geologically speaking, that a contender for the oldest known rock made on Earth was actually found on the Moon. Lunar Sample 14321, aka Big Bertha, was collected during the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. In 2019 it was estimated at over 4 billion years old. This is a meteorite from Earth, back when our planet was still forming and was being impacted by massive asteroids. There may even be others older than Big Bertha on the Moon, possibly making it the best place to learn about the Hadean eon.
But you know what has me really fucked up? The oldest known rock on Earth isn’t actually from Earth. The Murchison meteorite fell in Australia in 1969. Parts of it are estimated to be about 7 billion years old. Again, the age of the Earth is roughly 4.54 billion years old, meaning that this meteorite is 2.5 billion years older than Earth — older than the Solar System and the Sun, even. Our Solar System was just a large cloud of space dust when this meteorite was formed. It’s that old.
These rocks were formed on timescales so far beyond our comprehension that I feel insane just thinking about them.
Something that didn’t hit me until the end of the post-that tiny 100 million year gap between the oldest earth rocks and the Earth’s formation is longer than the time since the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
Deep time is quite something, isn’t it?
A professor I TA’d for did an amazing project in his geology course for undergrads.
He laid out two enormous tape measures, a total of 450 feet long, totaling 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history.
He had students write out events in Earth’s history, and then we went outside and they pinned those events down on the 450ft long timeline.
It was stunning, even to me as a geologist, to see how far apart those early events were.
It was wild to see how crowded and dense the youngest part of the timeline got, even though the students thought they’d picked topics “deep” in time, far back into Earth’s history.
To see that the death of the dinosaurs was only 6.7 ft from the end of the timeline that was 450 ft long blew my mind.
67 millions years feels like a long time, right?
Not when it’s on a timeline 450 ft long, it doesn’t. It feels so close you could touch it.
As a leftist Jew who believes strongly in the cause of dignity and freedom for the Palestinian people, and that Israel has abused them, I am begging fellow leftists to understand that real life is not a comic book. A government being “the bad guy” in a situation does not automatically make anyone who opposes it “the good guy”.
Hamas denies the Holocaust. Hamas disseminates the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—the conspiracy theory it paints is what they mean by “Zionist”. Hamas forbids foreign aid educators from teaching human rights to Palestinians, and claims that even teaching that the Holocaust happened is a war crime. Hamas has written the aim of annihilating Israel (the country and its people) into its charter—the mass slaughter and violent expulsion of 7 million Jews from the land is written into its laws.
There is no crime any state could ever do that would justify any of that; there is no act of state repression that could ever make it acceptable to side with the organization spreading Nazi pamphlets and Holocaust denial.
Oppose Bibi Netanyahu. Oppose Israel’s far-right, authoritarian government. Oppose its apartheid policies. Oppose its violent abuse of the Palestinian people. That isn’t antisemitic. But Hamas is—verifiably, beyond a shadow of a doubt, to its core—antisemitic. Its portrayal of Israeli Jews as blood-thirsty, child-killing master manipulators that control international media and finance is antisemitic. Its insistence that Palestinian freedom necessitates the death & expulsion of Jews from the land is antisemitic. Its redefinition of “Zionism” as a pejorative to mean genocidal Jewish/Israeli Supremacy is antisemitic.
Supporting the Palestinian people in their plight is a noble and loving goal; please never stop that. But do not let Hamas co-opt that into excusing or denying their rampant antisemitism and war crimes.
Seriously, like …
Really horrible regimes often get power and popularity from resisting or violently countering external oppression. Like this is a long-standing, extremely predictable part of how humans in groups work under oppressive threat: those who are on the literal sharp end of the oppressive action often latch on to any way to lash back, and anything that feels like it promises either safety or at least the emotional satisfaction of retribution.
That being where it comes from doesn’t make the horrible regime less horrible. That’s where the Taliban came from. It’s a major force behind the Rwandan genocide in the 90s. It’s tangled up in the massacres and ethnic cleansing of the Balkans.
(And these regimes are universally just as oppressive and violent to ‘their own’ people - they usually need the external enemy in order to maintain the unity that gives them power. This is why Hamas is more concerned with getting people to throw themselves in front of IDF fire than it is with making sure people are fed.)
That Hamas is itself horrific and totalitarian does not actually make apartheid policies, settler encroachment and the abuses perpetrated on Palestinians, many of which end in death amongst all the other suffering, okay; and the fact that Israel as a state/political entity carries out those policies and abuses does not make Hamas’ stated, impassioned goal of retributive genocide, or the steps it tries to take towards that goal, okay.
These things do not balance each other. There is no balance. There is no cancelling out; this is not a set of scales. This is a dialectic that needs to be faced head on.
If you feel like that leaves you without someone to “root for” in an uncomplicated way, maybe consider the fact that massive complex conflicts involving the legacies of hundreds to thousands of years of the ways that human beings are shit to one another and kill each other aren’t a fucking sports match.
It feels shitty; it makes everything feel more awful, and scary, and further from a solution. But it’s also how shit is.
Israel wound up like this in the first place because it was shaped by experiencing the world as a constant parade of oppressions and violences, and the assumption that anyone who got the chance would kill them, which then justifies any level of violence and repression since the alternative is obliteration, and peace was never an option anyway.
Mirroring that back again cannot ever in any way result in Good Things. The fact that it’s a natural and in some senses even justified-by-context reaction on both sides doesn’t make it righteous or even ultimately all that useful. Let alone a framework that can yield one party who’s wholly justified in the actions deriving from that motive, and one who isn’t at all.
white people please just purchase native artwork and jewelry from native people i keep seeing idiot white people be like “waaah i wish i could support native creators but its cultural appropriation” girl why would beaders sell you their earrings then. just dont get a medicine wheel or a thunderbird then like damn it is that easy
If Native folks are making it to sell to white people with the approval of their tribe, it’s not “appropriation”–its support and appreciation! So yes, buy that native-made dream catcher, but not the mass produced fakes made by white people. Like, you can go to a pow wow and buy native crafts there, too.
here are some places to get native/indigenous goods and merch online if you can’t find something local or if physical access is an obstacle:
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