"Peaceweaver" is actually what the women in Beowulf are called (erm, the poem, not the CGI movie). It's actually a really interesting etymology. The Old English word for woman was related to the fact that women were society's weavers (of fabric), so calling women who were married off to various lords/warlords/kings…

Seriously though I recently watched youtube clips of the end of this episode, and started crying all over again. It's killer.

Urine does not come out of vaginas. It comes out of urethras. Women's urethras are not, like, located in (or synonymous with?) their vaginas. Vaginas are pretty much just for menstrual blood and babies.

I got a ten! Apparently there's the initial APGAR, then one around 5 minutes after the birth. I got a 10 on the first, then a 9 on the second. My father remembers this because neither he nor my mother had ever heard of this test before my brother was born, and he got a very, very low score (he was a blue baby, born…

As Alex pointed out, though, it may not have really been his grandmother. Maybe he got the person wrong, who knows.

I have some more questions about this, but I've seen some eps not aired in the US yet. It's frustrating—I want to be able to talk it out!

Right, but wouldn't religious discrimination at a graduation ceremony then be outside the bounds of the law?

But aren't high school diploma's (somehow) regulated by the government? Like, they're not just denying her the right to walk in graduation (which would probably have been legal, since it's a private school), but to deny her the right to a degree is different, right? Because high school degrees are (kinda?) legal…

For everyone excited about FelixClones—if Sarah and Helena are Helen and Clytemnestra, then they should have twin brothers, Castor and Pollux. This is especially true given the lexical similarities of Helen/Helena and Pollux/Felix (especially in old manuscripts).

And if Helena = Helen, then Sarah = Clytemnestra, who…

This is not news. Feminists have been talking about this for years. I hate it when nobody listens to feminists caterwauling and then like two decades later they're all, "OMG THIS IS TOTALLY A THING!" and the feminists are like, "YEAH NO SHIT" and then the other people are like, "This is a new phenomenon; usually it's…

Oh also Great Expectations is basically Sir Philip Sidney fanfic. It's true.

It depends on why you read, and what you expect to get out of literature. Maybe it's because I'm studying for my qualifying exam (in renaissance lit), but basically before the novel, everything was (a version of) facfiction. Paradise Lost is the most obvious, intense, hilarious example of early modern fanfiction.…

I've read some academic papers that talk about this phenomenon in gendered terms. Fanfiction is a decidedly 'feminine' genre—most of the fic is written by women, for women, and addresses women's desires—and that makes it easy to dismiss as silly, crazy, irrational, un-serious, or derivative.

Maybe it means people who were convicted of sex crimes that are no longer considered crimes, or who've been released from the requirement of having their information posted to those sites because their crimes are no longer considered sex crimes—like Romeo and Juliet cases, or streakers, or whatever. I mean, there is a…

I don't get why they would have to be convincing and reminding him, though. The mechanic guy forgot what happened to him after he got spit on, but his memory was fine up until then. He remembered the Lincoln hat. So why would Nick forget that he was a grimm? He might forget what his trip across the Atlantic was like,…

When Renard told the Musai to get out of Portland, the determination with which he walked to the interrogation room had me convinced that he was going to tell her to get out of Portland and go make out with his brother. That would have been awesome. Also, he'd never heard of a Musai before, either—they must be rare…

Ugh, I cannot handle Jenny Schecter or Darla. Why did they have to cast my least favorite actresses for two of the three main female characters? Bring back Awesome Teenage Sulky Alien Badass, and leave the breathy-speak and sassy-pants sisters out of it, please.

I think maybe that Black Americans experienced the death of Martin Luther King Jr. in ways that maybe weren't all about white people. So no, I don't think that "awkwardly attempting to elicit Very Special Episode-style moments is exactly how most black people would have experienced" the assassination. Black people…

I definitely thought that it was more about the fact that he considers the Tardis a woman, than the fact that Clara is a woman. Like, "Hah, you think I'm just talking about the Tardis as a "she" because that's how people talk about ships, but she's really a SHE, and so it's funny that you would think that I would…

Something similar happened to me. I'm blonde and moderately attractive, but very outgoing and kind of melodramatic in high school. Also I had a terrible, horrible case of ADHD which everyone ignored because I skated along in school with Bs and B+s and my parents don't believe in mental illnesses like that. The summer…

It wasn't the fact that he's attractive that left me surprised when I learned that Ashton Kutcher went to school for biochemical engineering. It's that I knew him from Punk'd and he seemed like a fucking idiot.