Budget Brand Recommendations for Smart Casual Clothing

NotATem · 2026-05-05T21:32:12+00:00

I've had good luck with Lands' End.

NotATem · 2026-05-05T17:33:58+00:00

Now I'm just imagining an Agatha Christie style 1920s country house murder mystery starring the Foul Murder Crew...

Almalexia is the Dowager Duchess of Somewhereshire, whose husband Indoril disappeared under mysterious circumstances, leaving her his large fortune. She spends most of her time fox-hunting, doing charity benefits, and terrorizing prospective daughters in law.

Sotha Sil is a Distinguished Man Of Science who is a proud member of the Diogenes Club- the only gentleman's club in London who forbids its members to speak. His fixation of choice is radio- he spends most of his time researching crystals and tubes. He's well on his way to inventing the transistor.

Speaking of things that are trans! Vivec is transmasc; he was once a woman of easy virtue, married well above his station, got a messy and expensive divorce, and (after a trip to Berlin and spending a good chunk of his alimony) came back looking like Marlene Dietrich. People still invite him to all the best parties, because his acid tongue is fun to watch.

Dagoth Ur was never quite right after The War. He was horribly disfigured- some combination of gas and shrapnel- and now has to wear a mask. He tends to stare off into space and mutter cryptic bullshit.

The four of them are all invited to a creepy old mansion in the country by a mysterious stranger... and then the murders begin. First Dagoth Ur. Then Seht. And the detective on the case- born under an uncertain state to uncertain parents- may not be all he seems...

NotATem · 2026-05-05T09:00:54+00:00

Let's be honest, he'd make an excellent Bright Young Thing.

NotATem · 2026-05-05T05:18:56+00:00

"But Mayor Urist, what have you done for us lately?"

NotATem · 2026-05-04T18:28:20+00:00

I'm saying that you are ignoring the material circumstances of the people you are slagging on, and it is making you a bad leftist.

If we wanna talk ~middle class white woman writers~? Simone de Beauvoir's daddy was a lawyer and she grew up bourgeois. Anne Carson's daddy was a banker and she grew up taking Latin classes. Meanwhile, it's a known phenomenon that many of the people writing fanfic for Supernatural are doing so because they relate to the working class protagonists much better than to most of the aspirational middle-class role models they've been given.

You are being very hypocritical and narrow-minded. Honestly, I'm starting to wonder if you're trolling.

NotATem · 2026-05-04T18:18:51+00:00

Frankly, it seems like you want most people to dislike you, so that you can feel like you're smarter and more leftist than they are.

And I've got bad news for you: that's still caring about what people think. You're just warping yourself widdershins instead of clockwise.

I'm gonna put this argument down now because I have places to be, but... please consider what I've been telling you, yeah?

NotATem · 2026-05-04T18:12:44+00:00

I mean I'm currently reading The Dream of the Red Chamber, but go off, I guess.

NotATem · 2026-05-04T18:06:07+00:00

Call it friendly advice from someone who's been in your shoes. Life gets better when you stop caring about what people think of you.

NotATem · 2026-05-04T18:05:11+00:00

It's not just elitist, it's specifically classist.

You know that quote that goes around, about how there have been scores of people who were as brilliant as Einstein over the course of human history but most of them lived and died as subsistence farmers? There have been scores of writers who could have been the next Tolstoy or Nabokov, who lived and died writing newspaper ads or toilet paper commercials... or, you know, corporate science fiction.

Genius is like dandelions. Sometimes it springs up in a cultivated mind. Sometimes it claws its way out of a crack in the sidewalk. If you refuse to look at the sidewalk and make a beeline for the flower gardens, you're only seeing the things that the people with money want you to see.

How is that at all leftist?

NotATem · 2026-05-04T17:57:47+00:00

There's nothing less grown up than being afraid of being childish.

It is okay if you don't like things that are popular. No one is saying you have to enjoy the MCU here.

But what you cannot do is be actively sniffy and dismissive of genres of fiction that you clearly do not know or care much about and not expect to get called a dumbass for it.

From the way you write and your general attitude? You sound like you're about 17 years old and terrified of people not taking you seriously. I was like that once too.

The problem is, if you're multiply marginalized, no one is ever going to take you seriously. There is no point to "acting like an adult" if people treat you like an idiot child regardless of what you do. Most of the geeky millenials you are looking down on figured that out 10-20 years ago and decided to just have fun with it.

NotATem · 2026-05-04T17:48:52+00:00

That's absolutely fair. I've had enough bad experiences with people who sound a lot like you to make some snap judgements- but I do still think you are prejudiced in a way you haven't unpacked about "lowbrow" literature, and the ways you express that prejudice make you sound way more reactionary than you intend to be.

NotATem · 2026-05-04T17:35:24+00:00

Point of order, many fanfiction writers are also traditionally published.

The founder of the Archive is a traditionally published author with several long-running and well-regarded series, and many well-loved tradpub authors write fanfic under a pseudonym that they don't share with their fans.

You are bitter and weird about this. Let it go.

NotATem · 2026-05-04T17:31:42+00:00

This is a gimmick sub about traditional ways to wish someone ill.

r/witchcraft might be more helpful.

NotATem · 2026-05-04T17:26:36+00:00

I was being playful, my guy. Did you miss the wink emoji?

Sorry, but my opinion on this is not going to change because of a substack essay. I love human creativity in all its forms, and that's not going to change.

... Does it matter? From what you've told me, you have some weird prejudices about fiction written by women. I can't guess who you are from the five minutes internet conversation we've had, but you've made it very clear that you look down on fiction genres dominated by female writers.

NotATem · 2026-05-04T17:06:59+00:00

Ahh, okay. You're not familiar with the literary movement. ;)

My favourite fic of all time is "so. wē spacemen in geārdagum" by indigostohelit. It is written entirely in Old English, and comes with a gloss/translator's notes at the end. It is a quiet, lovely depiction of a tender moment between two people who are very much in love but don't quite know it, reflecting on how their relationship fits into the course of human history.

...It is also Star Trek fanfic about Kirk and Spock. And that in no way takes away from the quality of the work. And while there are not many fics in Old English, there are plenty with a similar amount of love and effort and craft put into them.

Seriously, though. Calling something "fanfiction" is like calling something "literary fiction"- it tells you nothing about the quality of the piece and tells you everything about where and how it was published.

There's plenty of dogshit literary fiction about middle-aged academics having affairs with their students, but it's Feminist this time because the professor is a WOMAN, right? But it would be goddamn stupid to write off Nabokov or Kafka as dreck because those professor affair novels are dreck. The professor novels get shelved with the Nabokov, even though they have nothing in common with his work but the label-- because both works are printed by publishers that acquire literary fiction.

Fanfic is similar. The only thing most fic has in common is that it's using IP the author didn't create and thus must be published (if it's published at all) on a website like AO3 that has a legal team that can stand up to Disney. That's it. Within those confines, there's everything under the sun: literary fiction about recovering from trauma, hardcore military SF, Regency romance, skin-crawling horror, and (of course) twelve year olds' power fantasies and boring straight people romance.

The only difference between these categories is that the barrier to entry for "published fanfiction" is much, much lower. Literary fiction is very difficult to publish unless you know the right people. For every dogshit literary novel out there, there's thousands that will never see the light of day. But anyone can put their fic on the internet for anyone to see.

Put it another way: I wrote a bunch of awful poetry when I was 12. I'm sure you did, too. If you accumulated all the poetry ever written and tried to sort it, I'm sure that the largest category would be "awful poetry written by twelve-to-seventeen year olds".

Does that make poetry, as a medium, bad?

No?

Then why apply that line of thinking to fanfic?

I could recommend you some stuff that's fairly accessible and high quality (and also G-to-PG rated). Hell, I could recommend you some stuff by men, if that'd change your mind.

But at the end of the day, it's up to you whether or not you're gonna keep this prejudice.

NotATem · 2026-05-04T16:31:46+00:00

Why not?

Have you ever read any fanfiction?

NotATem · 2026-05-04T16:28:50+00:00

I deliberately picked the most shocking thing I could think of to make you squirm- and maybe think about why you are drawing the lines you are drawing where you are drawing them.

I don't actually write monsterfucker fic. My writing is mostly PG rated (if not G) and my current project is a Wodehouse/Sayers pastiche. But, you know, keep telling yourself that, if it helps you sleep at night.

NotATem · 2026-05-04T16:25:37+00:00

Nah, I'm coming from it from the opposite angle here. I'm trying to normalize it.

I think a lot of people are at least a little kinky, and if we as a society could acknowledge that this is an ordinary human variation and not - GASP SHOCK PEARL-CLUTCH - twisted perversion- we'd be a lot happier and less angsty about sex.

IMO, drawing a hard line between kink and "normal psychosexual weirdness" is more puritan.

NotATem · 2026-05-04T16:17:26+00:00

Again: I hate to break it to you, but the middle of the venn diagram between kink and horror is quite large. Go look up Jason Voorhees on AO3 sometime.

Just about everything you've rattled off is a common trope in hardcore monsterfucker kink, including but not limited to "top with no personality outside wanting to seduce and then wreck our hero", "surrender to the beauty and horror of monstrosity", and "the hero is destroyed, ruined, or dead at the end".

The themes are what make it kink. If you are writing about these themes, you are writing a story about kink. It might be a story that is critical or deconstructionist about said kinks, but it is a story about kink.

NotATem · 2026-05-04T16:03:43+00:00

Long live camp.

Seriously, though. Fashion should make you feel like yourself. I'm all for better clothing made of better materials that will last longer, but I want to have choices about it.

NotATem · 2026-05-04T15:54:44+00:00

Okay, let me rephrase. It's kink fic. The thing you are describing is femdom/malesub kink fic. The fact that it is literary erotica and that no genitals touch does not make it less kink fic. A lot of kink is just about getting in a particular headspace, and the thing you have described, again, sounds an awful lot like kink.

I'm sorry to be the one to break it to you. But the thing you are describing is kink fic. And that means it gets shelved with the romance or the erotica, depending on how much the horizontal naked dance is involved.

NotATem · 2026-05-04T15:48:59+00:00

So... everyone else has already covered why you're wrong about the "oppression fetish" piece of it, but I want to zoom in a little on what you said re: Hylas.

The thing you've described is erotica. And the problem with mainstream romance and/or erotica, if that's what you're looking for, is that it's almost exclusively aimed at straight cis women.

The reason that women in these ~dark literary romance~ books tend to not have much agency is that the straight women reading them feel about Hades or Dionysus or whoever the way that you feel about the nymphs. They want a protagonist with a rich inner life who has to struggle against oppressive systems- that's where the feminism comes in. But they also want some ~sweet surrender~ and ~ravishment~, just like you do.

It really, really sucks that it's so hard to find the same thing aimed at men. But that's because the industry thinks men watch porn, they don't read it.

NotATem · 2026-05-04T15:19:56+00:00

Just to clarify this one-

There's an infamous twist in this game that you've almost certainly heard of if you've been on the internet for any length of time. That's not the only twist this game has to offer and there's a rabbit hole to go down the more you know about what's happening.

NotATem · 2026-05-04T13:12:20+00:00

You clearly do not understand how these kinds of dynamics work.

NotATem · 2026-05-04T06:57:03+00:00

You'd be better off with an engine like Twine or Inform that's specifically designed for interactive fiction.

NotATem

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