Some of you might be interested in this 27 minute video on how to read Egyptian Hieroglyphs. You're only reading a very small text, but it's broken down really well and everyone loves to be able to read a few hieroglyphs.
watching a video on brewing Mesopotamian beer and look at this orange man (his ass cannot guard the barley)
RAISIN POWERED FUCK MACHINE
my instagram explore page loves showing me those like erotic dark romance novel tiktoks and i really have to wonder: why do all these straight women desperately want to fuck a mafia boss
Okay, let's try and break this down.
Sexual fantasies are, by their very nature, transgressive. Yes, even the fluffy, romantic ones. As long as general culture remains negative about sex and sexuality in any form that isn't cishet procreative sex within the confines of matrimony with the woman not as an equal actor but an object sex is performed onto, this is going to remain true.
And the thing about fantasies is that our brains like to take the things we crave the most and mix them up with our fears, anxieties, pain, and trauma into a melange of, sometimes, truly epic levels of fuckery.
But here's the secret - things we fantasize about, from the most wholesome to the bizarre to seriously fucked up? They are very, very often NOT what we literally want.
Being into dubcon or noncon doesn't mean you actually want to be raped or rape. Being into monsters doesn't make you a zoophile. And fantasizing about violent, obsessive men doesn't mean you wouldn't run as far the fuck away from a man like that the second one of them set their sights on you.
If you're really interested in the subject, I recommend reading My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday, a compilation of anonymously submitted women's sexual fantasies. And, as it turns out, women fantasize about a lot of really violent, uncomfortable, and just plain screwed up stuff.
And, for most of them, even when they don't actively realize it, it's about reclamation. Of fear, of trauma, of loss of power. It's about THEMSELVES and how THEY feel. As weird as it's gonna sound, the men featured in those fantasies don't really matter, they're just a vessel, a manifestation of the extreme version of what you're dealing with and/or crave. A safe, cathartic way to experience something profoundly unsafe, unwise, and terrifying.
For women fantasizing about criminals, villains, monsters, and anti-heroes, it's very often about the idea that someone like that - intense, violent, with single-minded focus, and immense power - would love her, want her, always put her first, go against all his instincts/training for you without a second thought and be a clear and present danger to everyone but warmth and safety for her and only her, and burn the world itself down for hurting her in even the slightest of ways. It's a sexual version of the fantasy of having a pet tiger, one that would never, ever attack you or hurt you in any way.
And just like the people who want to boop the forbidden snoot, the women fantasizing about their fantasy Mafia Boss Lover are very well aware of the fact that 1) men like that don't actually exist, 2) the criminal world of their fantasy has all but nothing to do with reality, and 3) that the thing they're actually fantasizing about is being loved, wanted, and safe... just in a REALLY intense, exaggerated way. And, let's not mince words, there's also often a more or less strong D/s dynamics at play in the scenario, too.
Now, you can choose to be judgy bitches about it (goodness knows plenty of you in the replies, comments, and tags are), in which case I would suggest you examine why you're feeling such a profound need to shame women for enjoying themselves in their own little world, or you can apply the YKINMKATO mantra and understand that straight women, living in the constant state of preyhood, sometimes consciously or subconsciously reclaim power over that situation through transgressive sexual fantasies.
Also, fuck this idea that queer people only fantasize about healthy and wholesome relationships, romantic, sexual, or otherwise, as if at least half of Tumblr isn't simping for, oh, for example, Hannibal fucking Lecter. Do you have ANY idea how many Mafia and Thug BL content there is out there?! FFS, Tom of Finland, a WWII veteran who fought against Nazis, drew art of exaggeratedly masculine men in Nazi uniforms in pornographic situations as a way to dissociate himself from those traumas and fascists themselves as far back as the 1950s!
So yeah. Less judgement, and more taking some responsibility for curating your online experience if seeing someone's kink truly offends you this much.
"Booping the forbidden snoot" is a good way of putting it
prev tags, text ver. below the cut
I'm going to try to explain this without sounding completely deranged but like, okay: IMO, there are two kinds of fantasies. let's call them horses and unicorns.
a horse fantasy is something that is theoretically possible. I do not currently own a horse, and the reality of owning a horse would involve boring stuff like paying for its food and mucking out its stall, but it is something I could do in real life. like, horses exist and can be owned by humans. lots of fantasies can fall into this category: traveling to a foreign country, living in a cute house with just you and a cat, winning a marathon, basically anything that is technically achievable even if it would be difficult to do so in real life.
a unicorn fantasy is something that is definitely (or almost definitely) impossible. I do not currently own a unicorn, and there is no version of reality where I could own a unicorn, because unicorns are not real. the actual logistical issues that might arise from owning a unicorn, like paying for its food or mucking out its stall, are completely immaterial because it's not something that could ever actually happen. and like, it's in my brain! I control it! I can imagine a unicorn that only eats marshmallows and shits potpourri if I want to!
I think the disconnect comes in when people assume that a unicorn fantasy is actually a horse fantasy. to use the tiger example from upthread: you can own a tiger. you can't have a completely domesticated tiger that would never hurt you, not even by accident. so saying "I want a pet tiger" is a unicorn fantasy, because everything necessary for that fantasy to work (it being completely domesticated and incapable of harming you) are not things you can have in real life.
now, serial killers/war criminals/normal criminals/etc. are all things that exist. and there are definitely people in relationships with them in real life! so it's tempting to assume that something like "I want to fuck a serial killer" is a horse fantasy: something you would want to do, and could do, if given the opportunity.
but for the vast majority of people, that's not the fantasy. the rest of the fantasy ("he's a serial killer, BUT he only kills bad people and he's nice to me and is both able and willing to protect me from literally anything and has sex exactly the way I want to because he magically knows what I want because, again, this is happening in my brain") is what makes it a unicorn.
I’ll reblog it for the important message but you guys are making this really fucking difficult
Get out of the way gay boy, imma fuck the gigantic foxgirl
Late Medieval (1400-1464) heart-shaped gold brooch with twisted bands of blue and white enamelling.
Inscription on the back ‘Je suy vostre sans de partier’ (I am yours forever).
© The Trustees of the British Museum.
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.
Source: britishmuseum.org
“She began to understand why lovers baby talk to one another. There was no other socially acceptable circumstance in which the children inside her were permitted to come out. If the one-year-old, the five-year-old, the twelve-year-old, and the twenty-year-old all find compatible personalities in the beloved, there is a real chance to keep all of those sub-personas happy. Love ends their long loneliness. Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.”
–Carl Sagan, ”Contact”, 1985
Tumblr staff: ten options is enough for polls, right? No one needs more than that on a regular basis.
The average tumblr user: Hey guys which element of the periodic table do you think is the most fuckable?
to be fair this is the only thing protecting us from Do You Love The Colour Of The Poll
darth--nickels
LIghthouse keepers will never be memorialized like soldiers or cops because they didn’t kill anyone (as part of their job) but they’re like, heroes who saved untold lives through discipline and self-sacrifice doing an impossible lonely job and I’m worked up about it
darth–nickels
Clinging to a swaying tower in freezing, driving rain, risking death by everything from pneumonia to a fall to a fucking lightning strike to keep the lantern going when you don’t even KNOW if someone is out on the water!! Working! Class! Heroes!
Love very much the sentiment of this post and also love the specific wording of “didn’t kill anyone (as part of their job)” because what lighthouse keepers did off hours is their own business
Breaking the silent imageposting on this blog to nerd out on the sentiment of this post because my seasonal dayjob is at a lighthouse museum.
I see people talking about things in the notes so here are some Cool Lighthouse Facts™️:
-Yes, sailors do still use lighthouses. They aren’t as important as they once were with radar, GPS, AIS, etc., but those technologies aren’t perfect so important reference points for navigation and major hazards are still lit. Also lighthouses don’t just have lights nowadays, most are equipped with radio beacons or other transmitters that ships can pick up the signal from.
-While the US and many European countries have automated most if not all of their lighthouses, lighthouse keeping as a profession is still alive and well in the world. Canada still has many staffed stations, and in Mexico, the Caribbean, and the rest of the Americas employing lightkeepers is still the most cost effective way to manage and maintain these critical navigational aids.
-Lighthouses in the United States began to be automated in the early 20th century, but this began in earnest in 1968 with the Coast Guard’s Lighthouse Automation and Modernization Program (LAMP). By the 1990s, the Boston Light on Little Brewster Island was the only lighthouse left in the country with an official keeper and this remains the case today. This was the first light station in what would become the United States. (A light station is the geographical location of a light, whereas a lighthouse is the physical building that it is in. The lighthouse on Little Brewster Island was rebuilt in the 1780s and is therefore not the oldest lighthouse in the country, but there has been a light on that island in one way or another since 1716.) The keeper of the Boston Light is a largely ceremonial role, similar to how the US Navy still has the slightly younger USS Constitution in commission with an active crew.
-Lighthouses were the first federal publoc works program in the United States. The Lighthouse Establishment Act, which set up the system by which the federal government would build and maintain lighthouses, was the 9th law passed by the US Congress all the way back in 1789. Contrary to what people with stupid political opinions would have you believe, the founding fathers absolutely intended for the federal government to have an active role in building and maintaining systems and infrastructure to promote the greater good.
-Many women were lighthouse keepers, both officially and unofficially. Lighthouse keeping was a lot of work and assistant keepers weren’t commonly assigned until the second half of the 19th century, so wives and children of lighthouse keepers were often unofficial keepers. The Lighthouse Service was aware of this and in a time before civil service pensions it was not unheard of for widows or occasionally eldest daughters of lighthouse keepers to take on their deceased husband’s/ father’s job and get paid for it. Ida Lewis is probably the best known because she personally saved at least 18 people from drowning near the lighthouse that she knew as Lime Rock but has since been renamed after her. Elizabeth Whitney Williams and Harriet Colfax served as principal keepers at Lake Michigan lighthouses for 41 and 43 years respectively. Anna Carlson, who spent a similar portion or her life at lighthouses as her husband Robert’s both official and unofficial assistant, was the most qualified person available when one of the keepers of the remote Granite Island station drowned and an immediate replacement was needed.
-Technology that was initially invented to make lighthouses brighter is now used everywhere. One of if not the single greatest advancements in lighthouse technology was the development of the catadioptric lens by french physicist Augustine Fresnel, which both reflects and refracts light so that the light from a songle lamp can appear brighter than several lamps with reflectors, which had been the system used before. Fresnel was put in charge of French lighthouses in the 1820s, and Fresnel lenses are still used in lighthouses today. They can also be found in your car’s headlights, searchlights, flashlights, traffic lights, camera lenses, glasses for specific forms of visual impairment, overhead and digital projectors, telescopes, microscopes, and theatre lighting.
-Getting back to lighthouse keepers, one of their most important jobs was Making Sure the Building Doesn’t Fall Apart. When they weren’t up in the lantern room trimming wicks, keepers and their families were responsible for most of the maintenence at the lighthouse. If the roof started to leake, they had to fix it. Rigging a bosun’s chair (imagine a playground swing but hanging off of a pulley so you can move up and down like a window washer) to paint the lighthouse was part of the job. Being next to the sea, with high humidity, bad and unpredictable weather, and lots of salt if you’re on the ocean doesn’t help.
-Running a fog signal in the 19th century really really sucked. When visibility dropped below 5 miles, lightkeepers at stations equipped with such an aparatus had to turn it on and keep it going until this condition lifted. If you were fortunate to be at a station with a mechanical bell, you would only have to wind some clockwork every so often and deal with the noise. Many stations, however, had steam whistles or horns, for which the keeper had to fire up the boiler of a stationary steam engine and keep shovelling coal and oiling bearings for however long the fog lasted. These were also louder than fog bells and were sometimes located right next to the keeper’s house, which would be about as pleasant as you would expect. Sometimes, however, they were located several hundred yards away and simply walking there was a harrowing ordeal in bad weather. Lighthouse keepers at particularly foggy stations sometimes developed unusual speech patterns from having to pause every so often when the fog signal was sounding.
-I forget exactly where and when this was, but at a lighthouse in New England in the 50s (I think it was Hurricane Carol but I’m not sure) there were 2 keepers on a sparkplug light some distance offshore in a storm. A sparkplug lighthouse is basically a lighthouse built on top of a concrete piling not much bigger in diameter than the lighthouse itself and this one had recently been electrified by a cable along the seafloor from the mainland. During the storm this cable was damaged and the lighthouse lost power. As the waves battered the metal tower, the keepers made their way up to the lantern room with the incandescant oil lamp that had been left as a backup when the electric light was installed. They removed the dead electric light from inside the lens, and replaced it with the incandescant oil lamp, which they lit successfully. This they maintained until it also failed for resasons I can’t exactly remember. They were able to get another kerosene lamp working and maintain the light for some additional time until the storm intensified and wind and water broke the windows in the lantern, destroying any apparatus that would allow them to continue to exhibit a light, and only then did they evacuate to the mostly-watertight compartment at the base of the tower.
-Lighthouse keepers weren’t the only ones keeping mariners safe. Prior to the Coast Guard, the US Life Saving Service was a civil service rescue organization that operated on all of America’s coasts. Slightly less than a dozen surfmen crewed these stations, and would launch literal rowboats (the strongest and very best rowboats that were specially designed for this, but still rowboats) into the teeth of storms that had sunk or driven aground large commercial vessels. Wearing cork lifejackets and oilskins, and pulling on a oar through water that was often so cold that they would be frozen to their seats in ice, surfmen of the USLSS directly saved nearly 178,000 lives from the beginning of service records in 1871 to 1915 when the service was reorganized into the Coast Guard and became part of the military. Many other countries established similar organizations at the same time, with the all-volunteer Royal National Lifeboat Institution in the UK being the oldest (founded 1824 and still active), and innovations in lifesaving methods and technology being shared internationally as each country developed techniques based on the needs and experiences of their crews.
Where can I learn more about these interesting stories you ask? Why at your local lighthouse museum of course! The US Lighthouse Society (uslhs.org) is a great resource to find information about not just American but also some Canadian and UK lighthouses that you can visit and learn more cool things.
If you can’t travel, there are literally hundreds of books about lighthouses and lighthouse keepers, worldcat, your local library, and inter-library loan are your friends.
TL,DR: The sentiment of this post rocks, lighthouses are cool, and you should visit or read about them.
End post.
“Are we going to thrive? Are we going to thrive, Goosey, or are we going to wither? Are we going to thrive within the framework of the system or in spite of it? Ouch! That’s right, Goosey. I feel pain. I feel many types of pain.”
—My dad talking to our dog, Goose, first thing in the morning
watching the 2018 milwaukee ballet production of dracula and y'all the dracula/jonathan pas de deux is amazing
it's beautiful and creepy and sensual and horrifying all at the same time
crap, i don't know enough dance terminology to make this coherent, but the way they've been utilizing going en pointe in act 2 is fascinating. like, aside from when they're doing turns and stuff like that, all the women are walking around on the flat part like regular people. but then dracula bursts in and everyone is down in the dark except lucy, who is now on her tippy toes and basically floating across the floor to him in a trance and the contrast is so eerie
also i just realized it was mean of me to talk about this without telling anyone where to watch it. here's a link to the official video from the milwaukee ballet account's @ Home series https://vimeo.com/469873929/5ee47dee00
continuing the trend of being both sensual and beautiful and horrifying, the drac+lucy pas de deux is also fantastic.
also, repeated theme the way dracula just kind of flings them around at times, like they're not dance partners but just toys to be played with and literally tossed aside. in the jonathan one he just like yote him 15 feet or something crazy across the stage, and in this one he's just positioning her like a ragdoll, the choreo is so good
agh no no no i hate this! D: lucy! :(((
looking forward to and dreading the drac+mina one if they're all gonna be this good but also upsetting lol
oh good, an ensemble mourning scene, that's cool that's fine i'm handling this gracefully
oh damn, though, she does feral really well too. cool thanks this is a great place for an intermission because i'm feeling totally emotionally stable (:
WHAT I MUST PUT THIS IN MY EYEBALLS
