and then THE FINAL RESULT. where “look behind” came so so so close to winning, but “i trust that she is there” came out ahead by 0.1%. so maybe, maybe, we did it right this time. maybe this time we were able to save her.
we could only do that because Orpheus had already looked. because we knew what would happen. she’s been dead since the beginning.
the “came back wrong” trope except like… they didnt. like this mad scientists wife died, and so he studied necromancy, brought her back, and she came back and it all worked. like she came back exactly the same as she was before with literally no difference. but the scientist guy is like “oh no… what have i done…. shes Different now!!!! she came back Wrong!!!!” and shes just like. chilling. reading a book. cooking dinner. shes just so so normal but in the guys mind hes like “oh shes soooo weird” but shes just normal
They made 3 styles in several colours using 3 styles from the the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries from their current exhibition “In Bloom: Flowers and Footwear”, and are currently in pre-sale, with estimated deliveries between July and August 2023.
Let’s take a look:
We start at the 18th century with the Primrose shoes, based on their Dunmore model, accurate for 1770s-1790s they are embroidered on satin and are $179 USD while in pre-sale and later will be $199. The original style is in black and pink silk satin, and OF COURSE that’s my favourite variation, but the green ones are a close second.
Images from top: 1780s shoes, Bata Shoe Museum / Primrose shoes, American Duchess.
From the 19th century we have this style called Flora, accurate for the late 19th century (1870s-1900), are $230 USD while in pre-sale and later will bee $250. This embroidered boots with satin ribbon laces are probably my favourite style from the collection. Of course my fave colour is black, which is also the colour of the original piece, but the lavender ones are just *chef kiss*:
Images from top: the original French embroidered boots by Francois Pinet, late 1870s-early 1880s, Bata Shoe Museum. / Flora boots, American Duchess
Finally, the 20th century style is the Daisy, accurate for the 1920s-1940s. A vintage style full of flowers and colour, this T-strap style is perfect to pair with a simple dress from any decade and have a very decent 6.3cm heel, so you can dance all night in these art deco shoes.
1920s shoes, Bata Shoe Museum / Daisy shoes, American Duchess.
The sales from the In Bloom collection will support The Bata Shoe Museum in their study, outreach, and conservation of historic footwear, and we’re here for it.
imagine being sappho of lesbos writing some poetry abt ur gf and then 2000 years later ‘there are two common adjectives for love between women and you won’t believe who they’re named after!’ ‘by the delights of athena, you can’t mean that one of them is named after me?’ ‘no both of them are’
Sappho is also the only person I am aware of who has both a form of sex as well as a form of poetry named after her (an aeolic verse of four lines is called a Sapphic stanza).
Horny literary bastard Lord Byron just managed to squeak in there with a type of literary character named for him, and the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch gave their names to half of sadomasochism each, meanwhile Our Queen Sappho of Lesbos casually became the eponym of a ubiquitous form of ancient poetry that still shows up to this day AND love and sex between women. Absolutely unparalleled.
(Speaking of unparalleled, the “Lesbian rule” a measuring device that is notable for being, wait for it, NOT STRAIGHT, is actually not named after Sappho at all, but fuck it, let’s give her that one too)
I’ve been telling some people lately that I’m no longer into popular sci-fi author Becky Chambers’ writing because I’m put off by the racism. When I googled around for some critique about this, I found that there wasn’t much, so I wanted to take the time to explain in some detail why I feel this way.
The Wayfarers series has an overall problem of “post-racial” sci-fi in which humanity has supposedly intermixed so much that everyone is everything and race doesn’t exist anymore. I am completely in favor of science fiction that depicts a future without racism, but this is a very short-sighted way to do so. A future without racism isn’t a future where all of humanity is homogenized; it’s a future where all types of humans and all of our cultures are equal, all respected, all thriving. (For an example of science fiction without racism that doesn’t homogenize humanity and culture, see the Twilight Mirage season of the podcast Friends at the Table.) This vision of how to overcome racism reminds me of color-blind racism, in which people claim to not be racist because they don’t see race. By this same logic, if everyone is mixed, then we’re all the same race and there’s no racism.
More specifically in the Wayfarers series, I’m troubled by the tradition of the Exodus fleet shown in Record of a Spaceborn Few in which families get their surnames from the surname of the first family to live in the family quarters they do, regardless of their relationship to that family. This cultural practice means that any family living in the quarters first inhabited by, say, the Achebe family, would have the surname Achebe, even if they have no connection to Igbo culture. There is no examination in the book of what this might mean or how it might be troubling. This feels like another form of color-blind racism: we’re all the same, so any family can have any surname and it doesn’t matter.
There’s another form of crypto-racism in the Wayfarers series and A Psalm for the Wild-Built that is based on a deeply settler-colonial perspective and an ignorance of indigenous ways of life. In the Wayfarers series, Earth has been set aside as a nature reserve without humans so it can recover from pollution and climate change. In A Psalm for the Wild-Built, half of the terraformed moon where people live in the future is also set aside as a human-free nature reserve. The clear message here is that Chambers believes that humans and Terran ecosystems are better off if we interact with them as little as possible. This belief is false, and it is based on a settler-colonial understanding of ecology. Indigenous peoples have positive, healing relationships with their traditional lands, which are deeply beneficial both to the people and to the ecosystems they tend. And if you can’t take indigenous people’s word for that, there are Western scientific studies which have shown that indigenous harvest practices have a positive impact on the plants they harvest. Becky Chambers’ ecological “utopia” in which humans and Terran ecosystems do not interact with each other is in fact a dystopia.
Usual disclaimer that if you enjoy Becky Chambers’ novels, you can continue to enjoy them; I am not coming for your faves. I just think it’s important to point this out.
