the older i get the more i understand the weird shit my grandma says like she say “some people have never cleaned a bathroom in their life and it shows when they speak” and honestly? tea.
This is probably investigatory behavior! As we talked about a couple years ago on the blog, sharks have lots of little sensory organs around their nose and mouth called Ampullae of Lorenzini.
They’re basically little gel-filled pores that sense electric current, and they’re why sharks investigate everything with their faces. Sharks bump things with their nose to put their ampullae near them in an attempt to learn about them – like finding out if you’re animal, vegetable or mineral, and if you could potentially be edible.
From the video linked, we can see the shark is swimming around checking out the divers (who appear to be hanging out at a decompression stop), before coming over closer to the guy who is filming. This isn’t aggressive behavior – it looks like simply curiosity. It’s not a shark kiss, it’s a shark question: what are you?
cishet was coined to mean cisgender heteroromantic heterosexual
aces can’t be cishet, as they are asexual
aros can’t be cishet, because they are aromantic
aces and aros deserve to be loved, accepted, and understood
aces and aros don’t deserve the nasty things aphobes say they deserve
troll blogs love demonising ace and aro people by pretending to be one and y’all fall for it every god damn time
aces and aros aren’t confused, incomplete, or broken
aces and aros aren’t cringy
feel free to add onto this if you want
“Cishet” was coined to help trans people talk about specific oppressions they face and it’s extremely insulting that bigots have turned a tool of liberation into another means of oppressing people
Þrymskviða. Compressed down, it goes like this: A Jotun steal Thor’s hammer Mjolnir and says he’ll only give it back if he’s given Freyja to marry, as she is the most beautiful goddess in all of existence. The gods argue over what to do for a while before Heimdall suggests they stick a bridal veil on Thor, says he’s Freyja, and pretend they’re giving Freyja (Thor) to the Jotun to marry so Thor can get close enough to the Jotun to steal Mjolnir back.
Now typically when people talk about this story, it’s with an element of disbelieving comedy. “Oh my god, who would believe Thor was a woman, let alone Freyja, the most beautiful goddess in the world?”
But I propose a different way to look at the story.
See, different cultures have different beauty standards. Modern western beauty standards may be a delicate hourglass supermodel, but that’s not always been the case. Greece, for instance, depicted Aphrodite like this:
Yeah. A Greek sculptor was told “sculpt the goddess of beauty” and they thought “alright, fat rolls, that’s where beauty is at, let’s do this”. And everybody else apparently agreed with them, because up went the statue. Beauty is a malleable concept is what I’m getting at.
Now this is where it becomes relevant that Freyja is not just the goddess of love, sex, and beauty. She’s also the goddess of war. And the righteous dead. Goddess of war in the same Viking warrior culture that gave us shield maidens, women who wielded seven fucking kilogram (15 lbs) shields in combat.
Sooooo … when the Norse storytellers said, “This is Freyja, goddess of war and the righteous dead, who rode giant murder cats into battle, she is the most beautiful goddess in the world”, I’m guessing they weren’t thinking of her as some willowy waif. No, I’m guessing they probably thought more along the lines of:
190 cm (6′3″), broad shoulders, built like a brick shithouse, with a jawline like whoa, and fully capable of murdering everything in her path.
Put in that context, the story of Thor dressing up as Freyja sounds less like a punchline about “how could anyone ever mistake Thor in a veil for Freyja?” and becomes more a case of “ohhhhhhhhhhh, no wonder all the gods thought this plan would work”.
Design, patterns and sewing made by me. The dress is renaissance inspired, with some personal modifications. The whole dress was hand sewn, including the hems. More pictures of it and a tutorial can be found on my blog.
I can’t even begin to express how beautiful this is
The Paradox Machine 