Happy Halloween

choose your fighter: Eef edition

A Very Gentle Reminder...

what's been going on for the past week

tea party birds

sometimes i wonder what my cat named me

During yet another quick research dip into Wikipedia, I stumbled across Macaroni fashion in the 1700s.

As in "Stuck a feather in his hat / and called it Macaroni"

I was aware before now that Macaroni referred to the Macaroni Club-- though I had been told that it was an actual fashionable club in Italy, whereas Wikipedia claims that it's a ribbing term for men who took a Grand Tour in Europe and became Worldly and Cosmopolitan as a consequence-- a club that's entered by doing a thing, rather than a specific group of people who know each other (the way we use the Mile High Club in the modern day). The name itself references the fact that people who'd spent time in Italy would come back with a taste for pasta.

Macaroni gentlemen were fashionable. Very fashionable. Kinda extremely so. Which leads us to caricatures like these of such people:

But what really struck me was a contemporary description of members of the Macaroni Club:

"There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender, lately started up among us. It is called a macaroni. It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion." -- The Oxford Magazine, 1770

Now take the above caricature and compare it to this one:

Because when you look at the Fashionable Gentleman in this (yes, racially insensitive) cartoon, he's got big hair, sure, but nowhere near as big of hair as either of the Macaronis were portrayed as having. And for all his fashion sense, he's missing the Macaroni ruffles. His lady friend, however, is not.

Another quote from the Wikipedia page:

Design historian Peter McNeil links macaroni fashion to the crossdressing of the earlier molly subculture, and says "some macaronis may have utilized aspects of high fashion in order to affect new class identities, but others may have asserted what we would now label a queer identity".

And the thing that really gets me is that not too long ago, I noticed another bit of queer history from this rough time period, specifically the Italian cisibeo-- often an openly gay man who'd act as a woman's companion at social events in place of her husband.

And I wonder how many young people went on their Grand Tour, stopped in Italy to see all these openly gay people in parties, and came back having learned a thing or two about themselves. And meanwhile the folks back home are all going "seriously, what's going on in Italy that's making all our boys turn androgynous? Is it the pasta? Must be the pasta."

“dude” but like romantically

Lucifer: It’s really cute that you’re gonna defeat me with the “power of friendship” and all, but again, I am the DEVIL, from the BIBLE, so I don’t know how well that’s going to work.

MC in the basement, trying to shield Beelzebub and Luke from Lucifer: 🧍

Dear friends not in America don’t take this the wrong way but please don’t tell us to just read a book or go outside

This is proof we do not live in the land of the free

We are finally starting to realize how much power our government has

They have taken a platform of free speech and thought and expression away from us

A place we can get extremely up to date news from around the world

And they have taken it

Some of us are on here on tumblr or other platforms but loosing TikTok is proof the government doesn’t care about us

Say it’s for our protection all they want. If they wanted to protect our data or us as people they woudl have banned Facebook and all other social media a long time ago bc that stuff gets breeches all the time