"Walkable City" Is Not "City Where To Have To Walk Everywhere."

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ristay

The horribly awkward, unique and embarrassing stories of ristay.

I finished my Rome book and have now begun one about Pompeii. I’m 65 pages in and I already love it: yes, it covers the volcano, but most of the book is about “this is what the town and daily life of it would have been like, actually.” Fascinating stuff. Things I’ve learned so far:

- The streets in Pompeii have sidewalks sometimes a meter higher than the road, with stepping stones to hop across as “crosswalks.” I’d seen some photos before. The book points out that, duh, Pompeii had no underground drainage, was built on a fairly steep incline, and the roads were more or less drainage systems and water channels in the rain.

- Unlike today, where “dining out” is expensive and considered wasteful on a budget, most people in Pompeii straight up didn’t have kitchens. You had to eat out if you were poor; only the wealthy could afford to eat at home.

- Most importantly, and I can’t believe in all the pop culture of Pompeii this had never clicked for me: Pompeii had a population between 6-35,000 people. Perhaps 2,000 died in the volcano. Contemporary sources talk about the bay being full of fleeing ships. Most people got the hell out when the eruption started. The number who died are still a lot, and it’s still gruesome and morbid, but it’s not “an entire town and everyone in it.” This also makes it difficult for archeologists, apparently (and logically): those who remained weren’t acting “normally,” they were sheltering or fleeing a volcano. One famous example is a wealthy woman covered in jewelry found in the bedroom in the glaridator barracks. Scandal! She must have been having an affair and had it immortalized in ash! The book points out that 17 other people and several dogs were also crowded in that one small room: far more likely, they were all trying to shelter together. Another example: Houses are weirdly devoid of furniture, and archeologists find objects in odd places. (Gardening supplies in a formal dining room, for example.) But then you remember that there were several hours of people evacuating, packing their belongings, loading up carts and getting out… maybe the gardening supplies were brought to the dining room to be packed and abandoned, instead of some deeper esoteric meaning. The book argues that this all makes it much harder to get an accurate read on normal life in a Roman town, because while Pompeii is a brilliant snapshot, it’s actually a snapshot of a town undergoing major evacuation and disaster, not an average day.

- Oh, another great one. Outside of a random laundry place in Pompeii, someone painted a mural with two scenes. One of them referenced Virgil’s Aeneid. Underneath that scene, someone graffiti’d a reference to a famous line from that play, except tweaked it to be about laundry. This is really cool, the book points out, because it implies that a) literacy and education was high enough that one could paint a reference and have it recognized, and b) that someone else could recognize it and make a dumb play on words about it and c) the whole thing, again, means that there’s a certain amount of literacy and familiarity with “Roman pop culture” even among fairly normal people at the time.

The Goncharov meme is such a fun little spotlight on how people view media. Like, fake academic analysis about a movie that doesn't exist. Cool. But that's only the first level.

Next you have posts recreating a modern tumblr audience "discovering" an older piece of media and engaging with it through the lens of fan culture. Particularly tumblr-specific fan culture. Particularly in a way that feels like it got its blueprint from Dracula Daily. (Shitposts and memes, intense love for the most prominent female character, reads of complex romantic dynamics between characters, etc.)

Then you get fake discourse about the fake fan response to a fake movie that are quietly complaining about real ways real people respond to real media. I.e., America-centric readings, shallow, shipping-based readings, fans lionizing a protagonist not meant to be admired, etc.

(My personal favorite are posts that recreate the experience of being told a piece of media is so gay, you guys, only to watch it and find it isn't even remotely, that fans who wanted queer subtext wrung blood from a stone and thoroughly misled you.)

I also like the extra-meta ones about "this obscure movie being recently re-discovered," fake film history about copyright battles or the original cut being suppressed, etc. And of course, Johnny fucking Truant is here to give his editorial take on it, as he should be.

Pale Fire, House of Leaves, Goncharov. Humanity is such that every now and then we need to get really invested in fake arguments about a piece of media that doesn't exist.

in case it hasn’t been clear, this blog is firmly and unwaveringly pro-choice.

i love finding poetry in the mundane, and yesterday i stumbled upon something that just hits that spot

So, my partner has an old phone- It served them for many years now, but it has one issue: Charging it is hard. Their current charger is hanging on by a thread (literally), and can barely do its job. The phone and the charger came together: They've never used another charger for said phone.

Now, they've tried to replace the charging cord several times. But it doesn't matter how much they've searched what damned specific charger the phone uses, none of them work. They finally decided to bring it to a phone shop and ask what should they use.

The guy at the shop looked at the phone for a bit, and explained: "The port itself is broken. The charger you have works with this phone because they've mutually broken each other into the same shape, in a way that no other charger is shaped. The port itself has corroded in a way that only accepts the charger that shaped it like that in the first place."

And while this is of course a frustrating situation for my partner, I feel like there's a metaphor here. I could write a goddamn story about this. These two half-broken old things have been together for so long they've destroyed each other in a way that keeps them from working with anything else. They've hurt each other in a way that barely keeps them functioning together, and have been rendered useless with literally anything else.

This too is toxic yuri to me-

i love him so much😭

tHIS MAN

may i present: my favourite wesper moments

wylan yelling out “don‘t!” when jesper deals in his guns while gambling with smeet, almost blowing his cover as a waiter

after genya changes wylan’s face back: “Did you have her make you better-looking?” Wylan pinked. “Maybe you forgot how handsome I am.”

wylan worrying about jesper after they’re attacked on black veil: Would Jesper be waiting when they finally got wherever they were going? Or was he lying wounded and bleeding on the floor of the tomb with no one to come to his aid? Wylan refused to believe it. […] Jesper had to survive. (helpppp i’m crying)

jesper flirting no.1: “Things are always more interesting in the dark.”

Wylan’s first thought was that this boy had the most perfectly shaped lips he’d ever seen. (hello???)

colm’s instant approval of wylan: “That‘s why he likes you. I know, I know - it’s none of my business, and I have no idea if he’d be good for you. Probably bring you ten kinds of headache. But I think you’d be good for him.”

“Maybe I liked your stupid face.” (no need to elaborate on that one)

jesper flirting no.2: “It’s brilliant.” Jesper winked. “Just like you.”

this scene in the hotel: All Wylan wanted to do was stand as close as he possibly could to him and know that he was safe. (again, i’m crying)

jesper being the absolute best support for wylan while they are visiting his mother. “Wy, listen to me. You have to pull yourself together.  Can you do this? We can leave. I can tell her you’re not up to it, or I can just go in myself. We can try to come back some-”

the fact that jesper was being super grumpy during their journey back from fjerda because wylan was “hiding out” when he literally was standing next to him the whole time

the whole first kiss scene. peak romance. and ending with:“Wylan,” Jesper said, looking into the wide blue sky of his eyes, “I really hope we don’t die.”

jesper being super angry when he finds out the reason why wylan’s father kicked him out (“He’s your son!”)

jesper flirting no.3: “Thought of me? Late at night? What was I wearing?”

wylan being the one to jump in and lie for jesper so colm doesn’t find out about his gambling problem: “It was my fault,” Wylan blurted.

”You were pretty amazing back there, by the way.” (awww <3)

‘it’s not one. there are two of them.’

strangers from hell, ep.10 || the hole by hye-young pyun

Them afterwards tho:

Sophisticated beats to write criminals names in your deathnote to