Hate to say it, but the word “gatekeeping” unfortunately has become one of a list of casualties that has lost all fucking meaning.

There’s gatekeeping and then there’s “things actually expected of you to say you belong to a subculture or that you enjoy something”. 

I think it’s more that people have forgotten that gatekeeping isn’t inherently a bad thing and there are actually some people who you shouldn’t want in your community. Like yes I am closing the gates on you, you shit on the sidewalk and are generally hostile to the things this community cares about. Some gates exist for a fucking reason.

google docs babygirl you are so fucking stupid

may I add:

plaaastic

I love how people on here are like "we should start Discourse with the Christians again" and all the Christians are just instantly like "dont threaten me with a good time"

Types of brain fog:

Let Your Knights Weep

One of the big things I've had to train myself out of when writing medieval historical fiction?

The stiff upper lip.

This used to really bewilder my editor, who for some time attempted to nudge me away from having my grown men weep and wail and blubber, but for me it's an essential part of the setting. Whether in grief or fear, medieval people did not hold things back.

Here are some of my favourite quotes to explain.

First, a couple from two great 20th century medievalists:

CS Lewis in his Letters put it this way:

“By the way, don't 'weep inwardly' and get a sore throat. If you must weep, weep: a good honest howl! I suspect we - and especially, my sex - don't cry enough now-a-days. Aeneas and Hector and Beowulf, Roland and Lancelot blubbered like schoolgirls, so why shouldn't we?”

Dorothy Sayers, in her fabulous Introduction to her translation of THE SONG OF ROLAND, speaking of Charlemagne discovering Roland's body on the battlefield:

Here too, I think we must not reckon it weakness in him that he is overcome by grief for Roland’s death, that he faints upon the body and has to be raised up by the barons and supported by them while he utters his lament. There are fashions in sensibility as in everything else. The idea that a strong man should react to great personal and national calamities by a slight compression of the lips and by silently throwing his cigarette into the fireplace is of very recent origin. By the standards of feudal epic, Charlemagne’s behaviour is perfectly correct. Fainting, weeping, and lamenting is what the situation calls for. The assembled knights and barons all decorously follow his example. They punctuate his lament with appropriate responses:

By hundred thousand the French for sorrow sigh; There’s none of them but utters grievous cries.

At the end of the next laisse:

He tears his beard that is so white of hue, Tears from his head his white hair by the roots; And of the French an hundred thousand swoon.

We may take this response as being ritual and poetic; grief, like everything else in the Epic, is displayed on the heroic scale. Though men of the eleventh century did, in fact, display their emotions much more openly than we do, there is no reason to suppose that they made a practice of fainting away in chorus. But the gesture had their approval; that was how they liked to think of people behaving. In every age, art holds up to us the standard pattern of exemplary conduct, and real life does its best to conform. From Charlemagne’s weeping and fainting we can draw no conclusions about his character except that the poet has represented him as a perfect model of the “man of feeling” in the taste of the period.

OK, now let's dig into some quotes that I found just in Christopher Tyerman's Chronicles of the First Crusade and Joinville's Life of St Louis:

Truly you would have grieved and sobbed in pity when the Turks killed any of our men....

As for the knights, they stood about in a great state of gloom, wringing their hands because they were so frightened and miserable, not knowing what to do with themselves and their armour, and offering to sell their shields, valuable breastplates and helmets for threepence or fivepence or any price they could get....

When Guy, who was a very honourable knight, had heard these lies, he and all the others began to weep and to make loud lamentation....

They stayed in the houses cowering, some some for hunger and some for fear of the Turks....

Now at vigils, the time of trust in God’s compassion, many gave up hope and hurriedly lowered themselves with ropes from the wall-tops; and in the city soldiers, returning from the encounter, circulated widely a rumour that mass decapitation of the defenders was in store. To add weight to the terror, they too fled…

In the course of that day’s battle there had been many people, and of fine appearance too, who had come very shamefully flying over the little bridge you know of and had fled away so panic-stricken that all our attempts to make them stay with us had been in vain. I could tell you some of their names, but shall refrain from doing so, because they are now dead.

I could go on looking for quotes in all the other medieval literature I've read, but that would be beyond the scope of this Tumblr post.

In the meantime, this leads me to make some comments on how trauma was perceived.

In Jonathan Riley-Smith's The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading, the author discusses the mental breakdowns suffered by the first crusaders during the second siege of Antioch, which caused many of them to flee at the moment of direst need:

In these stressful circumstances it is not surprising that the crusaders were often very frightened. At times, indeed, they seem to have been almost paralysed by a terror that they themselves could hardly comprehend. … When the crusade was bottled up in Antioch by Kerbogha's relief force it was gripped by such blind panic that there was the prospect of a mass break-out and on the night of 10 or 11 Juney 1098 Bohemond and Adhemar had the gates of the city closed. It is worth noting that many of those whom later chroniclers, writing after the events in comparative comfort in Europe, vilified for cowardice and desertion seem to have been treated more charitably by their fellow-crusaders, who must have understood what pressures they had been under.

--

In conclusion: the way we feel about things today in the English-speaking isn't necessarily the way people felt about things in the past (and this goes for other cultures, real or imagined, too). I'm continually catching myself writing people with stiff upper lips and emotional reservations, and having to remind myself that the culture was different back them. If a grown man wanted to weep, he could. That's a good thing. (Oh, and my medieval historical fantasy? Check out the Watchers of Outremer series on Amazon or wherever books are sold!)

The cropped version from the theatrical cut of Death:

Pre-Renewal Director’s Cut (from the ADV Resurrection DVD):

From Death(true) (the WOWOW broadcast cut):

Ye olde Manga Entertainment DVD of Death(true)² :

Evagelion World display

Evangelion elevator scene (Loading Edition) thumbnail

Evangelion

elevator scene (Loading

Edition) thumbnail

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

great post everyone hit the showers

"How do I stop being scared of-" You do it scared. The courage arrives WITH the action, not before it. Don't wait to feel confident before you act because the key to confidence is usually doing the thing while still scared as fuck

But this would be really good for a children's hospital

color theory at it's best. the children would love this.

obsessed w this person who thinks im lying about having a boyfriend for clout and yells at me in my inbox whenever i mention him

I think one of the consequences of getting older is finding out that your parents were kind of right when they complained about technology? At least you can see they weren’t entirely wrong.

I’ve been hearing from friends that it’s getting harder to find quality refrigerators that don’t connect to the internet. Why exactly does my refrigerator need wifi? Or even a computer, at that? Older fridges can last decades because they have so few failure points. They have one job and they do it well. 

I tend not to use my smart TV very often because the damn thing glitches and it’s laggy and too much of a hassle unless I am really committed to watching a movie in my living room. And the worse thing is...can you even buy a non-smart TV these days that isn’t secondhand? Are they even making ordinary...yanno...televisions that don’t need software updates and internet connections, anymore?

Someone in the comments of this post asked how bluetooth earbuds are forced and everyone pointed out that a lot of phones (especially iphones) simply do not have the ports to plug in wired headphones anymore. You must get the apple wireless headphones - and I think that’s the crux of the problem. I am glad I have an android phone because I can use the old wired earbuds I've had for over 12 years. If I wanted to, I could buy wireless earbuds and use them instead, because my model of phone gives me that option.

And that's the kicker: the problem is that as things are "advancing," more and more, options are being taken away. It has nothing to do with consumer demand - obviously there are a lot of people that are not happy with these developments. But as we’re seeing, the products being made don’t reflect customer preference or choice. It’s always about is best for the companies making and selling those products.

Every day we’re hearing about new apps and tech startups and really...does anyone really want this shit? Is the nth attempt to make crypto work, the billions spent on the Metaverse, doorbell cameras; is a fridge with an IP address really allow it to do its job better? Is that actually going to improve the lives of anyone who aren’t the developers of that product? Just the other day I was reading about a tech startup that wants to be able to beam ads into your car's GPS screen. Video ads! On a screen! To tell drivers what's nearby when they can just...continue to look out the window because they're supposed to be driving a goddamn car.

The problem of a world run by tech companies is that the tech isn’t being made to accommodate us, we are being forced to accommodate the tech.

Wonder how much all this garbage has contributed to the global e-waste situation, and just general pollution as well. All the different kind of minerals and what not they need to mine for the components can't be good for the environment at all.

hi this is my favorite tiktok

Voice 1: Fuck metal straws, save the turtles in real life.

Voice 2: It’s a fucking frog.

Voice 1: Ohh my god, it’s a frog??

[Overlapping]

Voice 2: Do you not know-?

Voice 3: You dumbass.

Voice 1: Wait- 

My friend from high school looks just like Aaron Ekhart. (Sam is also an actor)

No I understand. Most of the time the thing that keeps your shit from running correctly is other people, and you can't fix those. Also, there's nobody breathing down your neck telling you what to do.

There’s two ends of the horror spectrum

Hey @staff just wondering did any of you ever study web design

Just feels like you're intentionally making the desktop interface an inhospitable place in order to drive users toward the app or off the site entirely. Is that what you were going for? If so good job I guess.

it's a lot of stuff...

You need a good foundation to build a house and the foundation is invisible once it’s built.

its no longer labor day you cant reblog the todaybor day post anymore