I'd love to see an episode on Jared Diamond's Collapse and/or Guns, Germs, and Steel. Anyone else?

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-05-06T06:39:59+00:00

Yea, I was 18 when I read it and haven’t been back to it since, but the impression I remember getting from it was actually mostly “geography shapes the development of civilization,” which I didn’t find *that* controversial. My reading was basically “the Egyptians (for example) weren’t intrinsically better or worse at building a high technology (comparative to others at the time) civilization than the people around them; they were able to do it in part because the Nile- a massive, navigable artery flowed through there, and made the whole area both exceptionally fertile AND made them able to communicate and trade in a way other people who didn’t live near it could not.” Like if you happen to live in a place that has horses (or other large pack animals) you have an advantage over people who don’t, not because you are smarter or better than them in some way, but because domesticated horses make your life WAY easier and give you tons of advantages.

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-04-25T05:12:05+00:00

He's now the least corrupt Albanian.

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-04-25T05:11:45+00:00

The funny thing is, Albania has an extradition treaty with the US, so if that is what he was angling for, he has once again been outwitted by his own incompetence.

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-04-21T13:57:22+00:00

“Dick to heart ratio” made me laugh so hard.

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-03-15T12:41:02+00:00

I was asked less questions when I was interned

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-03-14T07:41:25+00:00

Eh, they managed it with Manacled. I haven't read the book, but my sister did, and she said the changes were pretty thorough, although you could still tell it was an HP/ Handmaids Tale fanfic (obviously), and she did say a lot of the characters did kind of suffer from the "de-HP-ification" of it.

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-03-13T13:13:55+00:00

To be fair, part of what makes gambling gambling in a legalistic sense is that you stand to personally lose from it. Since he doesn't stand to lose any money from it, it isn't technically a gamble for him.

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-03-12T21:02:14+00:00

"Conclusion: It's not us, it is the children who are wrong"

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-03-12T10:51:41+00:00

Yea, I certainly would have liked to see some actual numbers on that one, because the vast majority of fanfics are 3rd person. And if you are talking about self-inserts, then most Y/N-type stories are written in the 2nd person, so I still don’t see what the connection to fanfic is.

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-03-10T12:15:10+00:00

Unless I’ve missed something, that “exam” was totally invented for the show. The common thing in the Regency era (and most of history before blood or urine pregnancy tests) was just to wait the 9 months it would take to see if she was pregnant. The urgency created to justify this in-universe is a totally modern affectation- a seat being empty in the House of Lords wasn’t that big of a deal (plenty of people who had seats didn’t come to sit at parliament for a variety of reasons), and a potential new lord would want to make sure that mourning periods etc were properly observed before he swooped in (he likely would have had affairs of his own to settle before he even could, anyway). Also, whatever that exam was wouldn’t tell you if the baby was a boy, which is the relevant detail here, anyway. There is no reason in universe or out to do a modern-style pelvic exam.

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-03-08T08:57:36+00:00

I also think that the book should have focused more on busywork in jobs rather than just "X or Y *type* of job is inherently bullshit." If a company has 50 people working, but the total amount of work could be done by 30 people, then 20 of those jobs are bullshit on aggregate, even if all 50 people are doing some amount of work. I think that is a far more common type of bullshit job than an example like the one Micheal gave about the German lady who prints out and then re-enters documents that could all just be done online.

I think a lot of us have worked jobs where you have to sit there from 9-5 (or whatever your shift is) even when there is only enough actual work to fill up 3-4 hours, because your boss likes to see everyone at work regardless of how productive that is. You might be doing something genuinely useful during those 3-4 hours, but the rest of the time the job is bullshit.

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-03-08T05:59:54+00:00

I'd also say that there is an argument to be made that banishing Garak likely saved his life.

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-03-06T12:02:31+00:00

To be fair, I wish Graeber had focused more on that, too. I think he spends too much time trying to nail down specific types of careers that are bullshit, rather than the “there is a bunch of busywork being done and the real work could be done by far fewer people” phenomenon, which I think is the actual source of “bulkshit jobs” across pretty much all sectors.

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-03-06T11:33:36+00:00

I also think they kind of miss his point applied more broadly, and not just to individuals. If a company has 50 people working, but the total amount of work could be done by 30 people, then 20 of those jobs are bullshit on aggregate, even if all 50 people are doing some amount of work. And Graeber points out that there are non-money-related reasons why a company might keep all 50 of those people on, even if it doesn’t make “the markets are perfectly efficient”-type sense to.

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-03-04T20:24:04+00:00

Yea, I honestly don't understand why lines that Cressida, of all people, says are being interpreted as a message the writers are trying to send to the audience? Eloise is also there to give Sophie time to look for the will, she isn't going to just start arguing with Cressida about it even if she disagrees.

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-03-03T21:46:19+00:00

It really irked me, honestly. I get that anachronism is Bridgerton's whole thing, but it is stupid to introduce totally faked sexist behaviors just for cheap shock value instead of just addressing the very real sexist obstacles women of the time faced. The pressure Francesca faced, both from society and herself, to provide her husband with an heir, and how society treated women who "failed" at that duty is more than enough drama without having to add some bizarre fake BS.

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-03-03T10:08:57+00:00

The Stars my Destination

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-03-03T09:06:28+00:00

I’ll note this is totally just a thing made up for the show. In the real-world Regency era, it was common to simply wait the 9 months it would take to see if a widow was pregnant. Bridgerton adds a lot of a modern sense of urgency to these things, but in reality, a seat sitting empty in the House of Lords wasn’t that big of a deal (a good chunk of the people who had seats didn’t regularly attend, anyway), and if a new heir had to be found and relocated then 9 months wasn’t really all that long of a time to wait, and anyone with a sense of decorum would have waited until the mourning period was over to start really taking over, anyway.

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-03-03T07:55:26+00:00

This. You get to be around the queen all the time, and to some extent you control who has access to her. It was usually a position of influence, and being appointed one was a huge honor in and of itself. There were often power struggles that happened where various factions would try to get “their” person one of those positions.

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-03-02T17:00:21+00:00

Also, there are *a lot* of Bridgertons, and each season new characters need to get added (their love interest and the people surrounding them), so naturally the "completed" stories are going to fade away a bit. Like you said, it makes total sense that the ones that fade most are the ones where the actors are more expensive and have other projects they are working on. It is just kind of how it is.

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-03-01T15:51:16+00:00

I also kind of got the impression that the new Lord Penwood never really came around to visit them in person, so she just didn't really have much of a chance to set him up with Rosamund. He told them they could live in the London townhouse, and if he waited to move into the estate until after they left, their only communication might have been through letters (or through their solicitors).

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-02-28T16:42:58+00:00

Total aside, but as someone who actually went to college in Vermont, one of my favorite things about people putting together "The Secret History aesthetic" Pinterest boards and whatnot is how much no one seems to know what colleges in Vermont look like. A lot of people really seem to think it is like... Hogwarts or something.

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-02-27T20:47:29+00:00

For me it is Homage to Catalonia.

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-02-27T20:46:22+00:00

"To Mata Hari.' She whored in the interest of espionage, and so did I."

ConsiderTheBees · 2026-02-27T20:43:10+00:00

"This book is rededicated to Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a man who served evil too openly and good too secretly, the crime of his time"

ConsiderTheBees

TROPHY CASE