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• Robe de Style.

Date: 1927

Designer/Maker: Jeanne Lanvin

Medium: Silk moiré, glass beads, pearls, metallic thread.

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the thing that annoys me the most about the bullying claim among the stark sisters is that they talk about how much it affects Arya that she thinks she’s ugly and such and like she does, but she’s so much more worried about being “bad” she killed a boy. She’s also going through poverty and war and starving and being introduced to cults/bands of “justice” by murder

but nooooo she totally is more affected by being called horse face despite being compared to SOOOOOO MANY PRETTY PEOPLE AND THAT MEANS SHES GOOD (never mind that good looking=good person should NOT BE YOUR BASIS)

I think most people, and especially girls, know exactly how it feels to worry about your appearance and feel ugly and unattractive, and I get that this is a particular pain for Arya, who apparently has never been called pretty except by her dad one time in AGOT, in an offhanded comparison to her aunt Lyanna. I don't think attractiveness is the most important thing to validate in any child, but I do think that it is good and nice to affirm to your child that they have their own beauty, so that they can then negotiate their relationship with that word from a safer place in adulthood.

It's not about telling your child they don't look a certain way (e.g. no good telling Brienne she's a normal height and her nose is hardly crooked at all), but that the way they look is something unique to them and something they should take pride in, regardless of what others say. Like I think it's an OOC moment in the show, but I think it's sweet when Olenna tells Brienne she looks 'marvellous' or something. She's not saying 'you look like bella hadid', she's saying 'I love the way you look!' to a woman who has received nothing but insults (despite looking like fuckin. Gwendoline Christie lmao). that is nice. it's not the most important compliment anyone can receive, but it embraces divergence as positive.

as it goes though, Arya is a pretty girl and it's just weird that the adults found countless compliments for Sansa and none for Arya. and that's why I find it so bizarre that everyone wants to pin Arya's self-esteem issues on Sansa, a prepubescent child!! like, would Arya have taken these insults so hard if Cat had stepped in and said 'don't listen, you're a lovely girl and your father says you look just like your aunt Lyanna! sansa i am telling you off for calling people names'. children are always going to call each other mean names! it is one thing that is practically guaranteed to happen in any sibling relationship, and anyone who says otherwise is an only child or lying.

but it is much harder for a child to manage that hurt if they're getting called those names, and society seems to be reifying to truth of them at every turn! Septa Mordane is calling her ugly! Cat is calling her a mess! Ned has never complimented her till AGOT! etc! she has never received a compliment before! so how on earth can you say 'and Arya's self-esteem issues can all be traced back to the playground bickering between she and Sansa and Jeyne' when Arya is obviously getting the same message from what seem like far more authoritative sources! is it not worse that those sources are all complimenting Sansa all the time and never Arya? does that not make it worse when Sansa acts like a child about it? like!!

and yeah I agree that there are other more painful insecurities Arya is struggling with. I do think at least part of the reason that this argument keeps coming up in fandom is that people keep trying to claim that Arya's story is similar to Brienne's, in that she IS ugly according to society's standards and that's ok! which isn't true, Arya is canonically a pretty kid with a dirty face and unbrushed hair. that's all it is. so if we could just accept that, there'd be no excuse for the insistence that this is an important aspect of Arya's story.

because it isn't. like im sorry but the ugly duckling means nothing when there are plenty of people who don't grow up to be swans. they get called ugly as children, and they get called ugly as adults. look at Brienne: she has suffered far, far worse prejudice as a result of her appearance in childhood, and she doesn't get the catharsis of growing up pretty to show them all how wrong they were. Brienne has been treated like a fucking monster for how she looks, all of her life. this is a character for whom her appearance IS actually an important theme, and it will be meaningful to see her realise it's a strength, and find love etc. I'm sorry but Arya growing up to be beautiful doesn't mean shit to me lol. I fully accept it's canon, but it is not a meaningful story beat, in a story with people like Tyrion, Brienne and Sam. Arya's story has so many more fascinating themes about identity, trauma, justice, war, friendship and family. if Arya was pretty all along, why should I care?

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I went to a psychic, and she told me that I would be totally heartbroken in 14 years. 

I felt so bad about this, I went and got a puppy.

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This really ought to top every, “Best Opening Lines,” list. The 21st century reading public is sleeping on Dorothy L Sayers.

#just want to note #“what this country needs is a hitler” #is implied to be the speaker trying to get the guy he's talking to #a builder #on side

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Tom Pullings:

a. “have you seem the james d’arcy depiction. come on.”

Dorothea von Biron:

"A great beauty and gracious hostess, possibly the most beautiful of four extraordinarily attractive and scandalous sisters, said to posses an extraordinary charm. But what makes her The Sexyman is the feat of managing to captivate the old wily devil Talleyrand and becoming the greatest and last love of his life… while, technically, being his niece by marriage.”

#COME ON DOROTHEA #So much effort to be sexy

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I noticed earlier that Tyrion often thinks of Tommen and Myrcella, who he is very fond of, as Jaime’s children, but never Joffrey who is in Tyrion’s narration Cersei’s son only. Until the moment he is dying and then all of a sudden he has Jaime’s eyes.

again, the Catelyn/Cersei parallels. also thinking many thoughts about how Tyrion thinks he should run away but instead he goes towards Cersei, like he wants to comfort her, and then of course she accuses him instead.

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It's incredible how people have been protesting pants and skirts not having pockets but not a single peep is heard over the fact that skirts no longer have underskirts by default. Underskirts (or lining) was a thing when I was a child, no skirt would be made without lining, you didn't have to think and check if your whole ass is visible in a skirt because lining was a thing!!!! Now most skirts don't and it's simply because it's cheaper, fuck the fact that a customer doesn't want their panties shown in broad daylight, it saves a couple of cents on material.

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ab. 1883 Evening dress by House of Worth (France)

yellow silk brocade, cream silk crepe, silk net, chenille, magenta silk velvet, glass faux pearls, and seed beads

(Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology)

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(inspired by @elucubrare, naturally)

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silas calling palamedes an inbred and implying that he has an improper relationship with his cavalier only gets funnier the longer i think about it. if silas knew that people shipped him with his nephew, i think he’d step off that cliff for realsies.

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so there’s this story that my grandmother loves telling (well, in recent years. for the first seventy years of her life she did not talk about her childhood at all.)

the story is that a family friend of theirs was Austria’s finance minister*, and Jewish, and after the anschluss he realized he was in trouble, but like many of Austria’s Jews he seriously underestimated how much trouble. by the time he realized it was too late to get out safely. He was also old and in failing health, so dramatics weren’t ideal.

so he asked a family member to drive him to the mountains on the Italian-Austrian border, and he’d cross there. It was easy enough to avoid the Austrian authorities going out, but you didn’t have a chance of avoiding the Italian ones, and they stopped him. 

“Oh,” he said to them, “Benito knows me. Tell him I’m here and he’ll call me a car.” And indeed, they called Mussolini and he called him a car. My reaction the first time I heard this story - and the reaction of everyone I’ve told it to - has been “so Mussolini opposed the Holocaust? He was helping smuggle Jews out of Austria?” And, no, he didn’t and wasn’t. But he knew this guy, they were old friends, the guy was in town, so Benito called him a car. Which is more characteristic of humans than the version where Mussolini was secretly a decent person, really. A million is a statistic, but this guy? I know this guy. He’s a great guy. There’s the phrase ‘the banality of evil’, and I think it applies, but the word that’s always come to my mind is the myopia of evil, the tendency to treat People well but just not look out at the world and see billions of People, not believe that the principles you apply to the ones you know apply to all of them everywhere.

#holocaust #antisemitism

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Medieval Oxford had a murder rate about three times higher than London’s during the same period, and some sixty times the level Oxford has today. (At between sixty and seventy homicides per hundred thousand people, medieval Oxford’s rate compares, roughly, to that of present-day New Orleans.) The town was in decline as a center of the wool trade but alive with the mayhem of some fifteen hundred young men—loosely supervised, theoretically celibate, armed with crossbows—the scholars of the university. In the twelfth century, Oxford began to emerge, alongside Paris and Bologna, as one of Europe’s prime seats of learning. (All three had crime problems.) “If I wanted to give advice these days about, well, what could you do to really seriously increase levels of violence in our society?” Eisner said. “Probably I would say, ‘O.K., take a few thousand fourteen-year-olds, just males, out of their context, give them knives and lots of alcohol, and put them into halls—and wait and see.’ ” In the Oxford murders that Eisner has looked at, more than seventy per cent of the victims and the perpetrators were students. Ninety-nine per cent were male. (During the same period, eight per cent of London’s murderers were women.)

Colin Dexter vindicated

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Not only can Penny Rose know how to open the dog door, but she can also fit out said dog door, and we did in fact find her, naked - as in buck ass - outside hugging a tree.

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Therapists aren’t people who you “pay to pretend to care about you”, therapists are people you pay to teach you how to care for yourself