Call me Red. 30+. Queer, they/them. Traumagenic system, endo-friendly. Multifandom blog, currently hyperfixating on the Undertale Multiverse. Any NSFW posts will be tagged. I write over at rhapsodyred-writes
someone in the notes on that “stop fetishizing old houses” post commented that builders before the 1970s were too concerned with elegance and grandeur, and that was all really just wastefulness
and I think about my apartment, a duplex from 1912, surely built for a middle- or working-class family. spartan, really; quite basic and no-frills. not much to look at from the outside. just like a thousand buildings of similar provenance in the Boston area.
there are flowers molded in the chunky, cast-iron radiators
there’s a design of concentric circles in the carved door-lintels
many buildings of this type have a little stained-glass window somewhere
I think about ornate door hinges in the staff wing of a country estate from 1878. think of patterned wallpaper in a mansion’s kitchen, from 1797. I think about purely functional spaces someone looked at and said, “this needs beauty”
the past was certainly guilty of waste in many ways. but I cannot call making a house more than just a box to live in one of them
Minimalism is just propaganda to make people accept souless surroundings
you know what else is pretty amazing about those older houses from “before the 1970s?” No. Engineered. Lumber.
Gonna put my firefighting hat on and lecture for a minute here. Engineered Lumber is that shit made of wood chips that have been laminated together with glues and epoxies to make new boards out of waste material. That’s a good thing, right?
No. It really is not.
See, there’s other things that “waste material” could go to make or be used as, that do NOT include filling them with toxic chemicals that reduce the burn time of a piece of wood. Also, those pre 70’s boards were real, full, complete boards. So not only do they not off-gas massive quantities of toxic fumes when burning, it takes a lot longer than 2-4 minutes to burn through one. More like 15-20 minutes to burn through one. Also, yeah, there was waste in the way they built those old houses. It was called OVER-ENGINEERING. So when ONE of those boards burned through, you weren’t at risk of losing the entire roofing or flooring or ceiling SYSTEM because the materials to construct a structure have been pared down to the absolute minimum and even less in places.
Roof trusses were nailed together with NAILS, not “gusset plates”. Nails penetrate INCHES into the wood. Gusset plates? ¼ of an inch usually. Know how quick ¼ of an inch can char and cease holding onto the teeth of those gusset plates? I’ll give you a hint: it’s measured in a couple hundred seconds, rather than the tens of minutes a nailed truss gets.
TL;DR? Yeah, there was waste. They used thicker wood and a lot more of it, not even taking into account all the beautiful little embellishments like molded plaster reliefs and tin ceiling panels… But that thicker wood saved lives. It didn’t burn toxic, and it burned for a LOT LONGER before it became unsafe to be in.
Modern house like your typical McMansion? By the time we arrive on a typical structure fire, it’s already too dangerous to enter, because too many of the engineered lumber pieces will have been compromised, thus endangering entire building systems. We’re talking if it’s been burning for 5 minutes or so, 10 at the outside, we KNOW it’s not safe to enter. (If there’s someone in there, we will anyway - risk a lot to save a lot - but we also know to be a thousand times more careful about putting weight anywhere). That 1900 farmhouse that’s been burning for 30 minutes? It’s still plenty strong enough to go in and do what we gotta do. And we don’t have to be paranoid about breathing the smoke in outside, either.
Long story short, not only does minimalism kill the soul, it KILLS REAL PEOPLE’S LIVES.
how old must we be before we are allowed to think about sex, i can never remember, they keep moving the goal posts.
Weâre never allowed to think ab sex sorry. Teen years are hormonal but being horny before 18 is a sin. When youâre horny and 18-25 its cringe. When youâre horny 25-35 âyou should get a partner and stop being openly horny.â When youâre horny 35-45 thatâs weird because youâre âkinda old.â When youâre horny 45-55 youâre a creep. And when youâre horny 55+ youâre an old person who canât and shouldnât be horny. This is how they think. Sex bad, basically. Thinking about sex is bad. Wanting sex is bad. Anything even mildly related to sex or sexuality is bad.
Yall do NOT hop on a cosmetic surgery hate train during an ongoing campaign against trans Healthcare I am fucking begging
My tits didn’t smaller themselves, fuckos. Either you believe in bodily autonomy or you fucking don’t.
The sacred bond between trans people who’ve had plastics and cis people who have had plastics is fucking sacred and I will not tolerate anybody in the queer community trash-talking plastics no matter what it is and who is getting them and for what reason!!!
I want there to not be a line between ‘costmetic’ and 'necessary’. If there’s a line, then insurance companies and whoever-the-fuck-else will decide everything is 'cosmetic’. That happened to me with getting my jaw rebuilt when I was A CHILD. 'oh it’s cosmetic’ My insurance wrangler lady and the surgeon had to write SEVERAL LETTERS to the damn insurance company detailing out just how graphically I would DIE if I did not get my face rebuilt before I was 18! If 'we won’t pay for cosmetic plastics only necessary ones’ wasn’t a thing, that wouldn’t have had to fucking happen!
So you know what? I don’t want to hear the word 'cosmetic’ out of anyone’s mouth. it’s ALL just plastics. And all plastics are still 100% the person’s choice to get, I don’t care what the reason is, all reasons are your business and should be honoured and that’s as it should be. As Sweaterkittens said, you either believe in bodily autonomy or you fucking don’t.
Signed,
A Transman who has had exclusively plastics for all FOUR major surgeries throughout his life.
[ID one: the âwho wants toâ meme, which shows a man giving a speech in front of a crowd of people. In the first panel, he is saying, âwho wants to befriend a mutualâ, and everyone raises their hand. In the second panel, he is saying, âwho wants to start a conversationâ, and nobody raises their hand. / End ID]
i see a convo w a character ai and i keep scrolling
listen im seeing tags about people agreeing that ai bots can be really inaccurate and i want to point out that this is NOT about that. the ai bot can be as accurate as you want it to be i still get mad at em.
its not about how good they do at emulating a character, its about that they aren’t a person making creative choices and i hate that. i want to enjoy my characters with other people. hold my hand and tell me all about why you think your blorbo is autistic or likes your favourite shitty band. i love you. if a bot randomly shuffles those opinions out idc if theyre even the same ones im exploding it with my mind.
What’s the point of loving content if I know there isn’t someone as obsessively fucked up as me sitting on the other side of the internet