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AllieMuffins33

@alliemuffins33

"When I used to read fairy tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one!” — Alice in wonderland cali/23/♉️

a comprehensive list of everything Pliny the Elder had to say about periods

Pliny's first century encyclopaedia, Natural History, had an entire section on periods. and literally everything he had to say about menstruation was incorrect.

  • if you take off your clothes while menstruating , it can stop whirlwinds, lightning and storms at sea
  • but it will also kill young plants and vines such as ivy and rue
  • on the plus side, if you walk barefoot through a field while menstruating, it will cause all the bugs to fall off the crops
  • don't do this too early in the morning or it'll kill all the crops too
  • don't touch beehives when menstruating, or the bees will leave
  • avoid period sex with during an eclipse because that'll straight up kill the guy
  • "matters of a most dreadful and unutterable nature" (worse than the above)
  • laundry will turn black while you're boiling it
  • cooking or doing the dishes will make the pans greasy and smelly
  • touching a razor will blunt it
  • looking in the mirror will tarnish it
  • but dw if you stare at the back of the mirror for a bit it will go back to normal
  • being near a dog while menstruating will drive it mad
  • touching pregnant horses will cause them to immediately miscarry
  • if it's your first period, even *looking* at the horse will make it miscarry
  • on the plus side, this property of period blood means you can mix it into contraceptives to make them more powerful
  • anything purple that you touch will immediately become dull
  • literally
  • even the ash from burned fabric which touched menstrual blood will make your purples fade
  • in Judea, specifically Judea, menstrual blood can cut the flow of bitumen
  • even swords made of steel can't do that
  • relieves gout when spread on it
  • mix with rosewater and apply to the temples to soothe a headache
  • mix with wool of a black sheep to cure malaria
  • put on a cloth and wear in your clothes to cure rabies
  • yes that directly contradicts the mad dogs thing
  • he wasn't consistent at all
  • smear on someone after an epileptic seizure to revive them
  • touch facial sores or boils to cure them
  • neutralise spells by evil wizards
  • simply smear menstrual blood on the doorframe and the curse is gone

luckily all of this can be averted with one weird trick: carry a red mullet fish with you, always

you can read Pliny's menstruation chapter in its entirety here.

Some of these are a shame because period sex during an eclipse sounds like a cool ritual

I think people on EBT should be allowed to eat at a five star restaurant for completely free once a month minimum and I'm not joking. It should be a human right to have the roses not just the bread.

"It should be a human right to have the roses not just the bread"

Etch this in marble and put it on my grave

"If you have two loaves of bread, sell one and buy a hyacinth." -Iranian proverb, I think, maybe

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weaver-z

I love folklore so much because depending on the location and era it comes from it's either the most terrifying concept or the dumbest thing you've ever heard

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weaver-z

Mexican Folklore: You think this place is a Normal Location? Tch. You fool. Everyone knows this place is the SCARY Location.

British Folklore: There's a little Beast in your house... make sure you give it the necessary porridge....... otherwise it might turn to mischief.......

German Folklore: For the love of God, do NOT trust hot people and do NOT trust babies and do NOT trust short men and do NOT trust Christmas and do NOT trust sausage and do NOT trust the elderly and

US Folklore: This Giant Boy From Texas Is God's Favorite

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tunisian

loving a place means leaving a piece of your heart there. loving someone means leaving a piece of your heart with them. loving an object means your love is imbued with it. hope this helps

A post about romantic relationships

so I’ve been in a relationship for 5 years now. And I see a lot of posts about how people think relationships mean having butterflies forever, your heart beating faster when they walk into a room, about cuddling together every night, legs intertwined, that you’d be so happy to live together you’d sleep on a double bed with each other every night.

And its not really like that, at least not to me.

You stop getting the butterflies when you live together. Your heart no longer speeds up when you see them, but instead, everything calms down. When youre in the room with them, you feel calm, and secure. When you cuddle them you feel your heart beat slow, and the sound of their breathing carry you towards comfort. It doesnt feel like a roller coaster anymore, it feels like home.

You don’t sleep curled up with each other every night, legs twisted between theirs so tight its hard to tell where yours begin and theirs end.

Instead, you sleep comfortably, side by side, sometimes facing different directions. But every night, you find yourself scooting backwards on the bed so you bump into them. You snuggle against their arm, or stroke their hair as they fall asleep. There are nights when my boyfriend, in his sleep, reaches around me and pulls me to him, like a child with his teddybear, like I am his comfort.

 In the wee hours of the morning before the dawn breaks, when the world is blue and you see through cracked eyes, you curl into their chest and inhale their scent before drifting back to sleep. 

Kisses aren’t always romantic and firey anymore. But there are so much more of them now. There are cold kisses when you’re eating ice cream in the summer, and sticky kisses over breakfast pancakes. There’s “im leaving now” kisses, and “one more kiss before you go” kisses. There’s sleepy morning kisses before work, when you don’t remember the alarm going off but instead the press of their lips against yours is what brings you into the day.

There’s kisses before sleep, and, you are so sweet with the things you do kisses. There’s kisses because you treat animals so tenderly, and I’m so glad i’m with you and not someone else kisses. There’s quick kisses in the aisles of the grocery store, when its loud and you gravitate together, when instead of having your own personal space and their own personal space, its both of yours together, and you step into their chest to take up less area together. 

You don’t always text each other with confessions of love and care like you used to, because that’s a given now, and you’ve moved on to quirky inside jokes about the life youve built together. You share looks of exasperation and amusement in public, your own little world against the outside one. 

Relationships aren’t always a fairy tale. They’re not always fireworks and sparks, at least, after the start.

But they are a quiet rhythm and hum of love and care. It’s not a fire in your soul, but one in your hearth, keeping you warm and comfortable, comforting you as you drowsily drift into sleep.

And I love that.

I cried reading this.

This is the scene where M’Baku calls out Shuri during the challenge. I love that everyone surrounding her snaps to action, but please check out Shuri’s body-language here.  Look at her face. She is looking M’Baku dead in the eye.  Her stance is open and relaxed.  She’s not the least bit intimidated. Also notice that Shuri’s mom and most of the Dora aren’t pointing those vibranium spears at M’Baku.   They are effectively holding Shuri back. ….Just something to think about.

Something else to think about?  How she met what she thought was her certain death.

Image

Shuri is made to take the Black Panther mantle

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creekfiend

I love to be a homeowner. I’m responsible for so many extremely stupid things now

i was the exact opposite bc I grew up in an old old house that always needed work and when I moved into my first apartment the landlord told me the bathroom still needed caulked and I didnt understand that meant she was sending someone to DO that so I caulked the entire bathroom and when the guy got there he went “did you……..Do This” and I was like “yes, and why, and who are you”

This is great he must have been so unnerved

caligula had anime eyes

wait romans painted their marble sculptures

it looks like a cheap theme park ride mascot

yep

here’s a statue of Augustus

and here’s a reproduction of the statue with the colors restored 

i honestly think that what we consider the height of sculpture in all of Western civilization being essentially the leftover templates of gaudy pieces of theme park shit to be evidence of the potential merit of found art

“I tried coloring it and then I ruined it”

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prokopetz

And you know what the funniest part is? The paint didn’t just wear off over time. A bunch of asshole British historians back in the Victorian era actually went around scrubbing the remaining paint off of Greek and Roman statues - often destroying the fine details of the carving in the process - because the bright colours didn’t fit the dignified image they wished to present of the the cultures they claimed to be heirs to. This process also removed visible evidence of the fact that at least some of the statues thus stripped of paint had originally depicted non-white individuals.

Whenever you look at a Roman statue with a bare marble face, you’re looking at the face of imperialist historical revisionism.

(The missing noses on a lot of Egyptian statues are a similar deal. It’s not that the ancient Egyptians made statues with strangely fragile noses. Many Victorian archaeologists had a habit of chipping the noses off of the statues they brought back, then claiming that they’d found them that way - because with the noses intact, it was too obvious that the statues were meant to depict individuals of black African descent.)

There’s a lot of good academic discussion about chromophobia in modern Western aesthetics and how it links to colonialism.

a couple of general points:

1) the reason the reconstructions here look like “the leftover templates of gaudy pieces of theme park shit” is because they’re reconstructions. this is not actually what these statues looked like, and in my opinion they do roman art a massive disservice. the reason they look so “gaudy” (which is actually the exact same colonial attitude that led directly to the literal whitewashing of graeco-roman art, nice, very nice) is because the colours have been applied flat, with no shading or blending to give the impression of shadow. looking at contemporary roman portraiture, it’s clear that they did actually have quite a sophisticated grasp of shading and colouring, and to imagine that they would just suddenly forget how to do the dark bits when they were painting on stone is ludicrous. for context, this is a portrait of paquius proculo, a fresco from pompeii, dating from around 20-30AD, ten years earlier than that bust of caligula:

(also of interest in this regard are the fayum mummy portraits, dating from the second century AD; again, although they are of varying quality, the best of them demonstrate a clear understanding of shading. for example: 

and, to be honest: do you really think a civilisation that produced this

just, what, didn’t get paint? these reconstructions are laughable, not because they’re colourful but because they’re presenting an incredibly sophisticated culture as unable to understand simple artistic concepts; something that i think itself contributes to the idea of colourfully painted statues being ‘silly’ and ‘gaudy’, which again is an incredibly colonially-influenced idea. 

2) the reason graeco-roman statues are often missing the noses is because most excavated statues are generally missing the noses. they are fragile. the head of a statue is basically a football with details; the nose is the only protruding part and is comparatively narrow and thin (as opposed to, say, an arm or leg, which takes more force to break off but is still very much detachable, c.f the venus di milo) and is very, very easy to break off. although i am absolutely the last person to deny the racism that has been present in classics, the noses thing is really not a great example.

Many sculptures from antiquity were defaced during the early Christian period. During riots, Christian mobs would smash the noses off of ‘pagan’ sculptures, as they usually depicted pagan gods, or emperors, and depending on the sect, any depiction of a person could be considered ‘graven’.

The hotbed of Christian zealotry was Egypt. Throughout its time as a Roman, and then ‘Byzantine’ province during its early Christian history, the province proved practically unmanageable due to its Christian theological riots, with the majority of the population not following Constantinople’s doctrine and theological orders.

This Roman bust of Germanicus at the British Museum was defaced - nose smashed off - during a riot that would have taken place in late antiquity in Egypt, so, 400-500AD [also, note the cross etched into forehead]

Probably the most known example of this is the destruction of the Alexandrian Serapeum, a vast temple complex in Alexandria, Christian mobs tore the temple apart, destroying and looting, tearing it down brick by brick.

Another example, outside of Egypt, is the Nika Revolts in Constantinople. On its creation as a co-capital of the Roman Empire, an unfathomable amount of art and sculpture was brought to adorn the New Rome, and during the revolt, for the most part this cream of the classical crop was destroyed, again, by theological mobs.

After Egypt’s conquest during the Arab-Islamic conquests, this practice would have continued. In fact, theologically, many of Egypt’s Christian sects were more in line with Islamic theology than what became mainstream Christianity in both ‘Orthodox’ and ‘Catholic’ doctrine.

Basically, if you want to know what happened to sculptures from antiquity, Abrahamic faiths happened to them. We divorce classical and ancient sculptures from their meaning - we see them as history or art, but to the new faiths, they were graven images, they were pagan, and they were destroyed or defaced.

I like this version of the thread. It has actual history in it not just “Victorian assholes” did it (which this thread also seems to be the only thing I ever see about Victorians removing paint from statues).