People on this website will really mock anti-vaxxers and flat earthers for ignoring scientists and getting their alternative facts from facebook, and then turn around and insist they know more history than historians and more archaeology than archaeologists because they read an unsourced tumblr post once

Is there a real life example of this?

It happens a lot.

I know it's bad but I kind of want to know more about the woman who thinks the Roman Empire never existed

Oh shit i believed the Leonardo Da Vinci one

Also why do people make these

What do you hope to gain

There are a lot of different misinformation dynamics at play here.  Only some are innocent, only some are malicious.  But that’s why it pays to fact-check things, because the innocent misunderstandings, the arrogant personal hypotheses stated as fact, and the malicious lies are all jumbled together.

It’s a combination of things, but it’s why you shouldn’t assume that historians are all old homophobic clueless idiots and only you, tumblr user persephonesmassivebadonkers or whatever, know the REAL truth.  Because that’s how you get Flat Earthers, but more pressingly, it’s how you get antisemitic conspiracy theories and transphobic radfem proclamations of We Need To Return To The Ancient Feminist Utopia (By Destroying All Trans People)(And, Usually, Abrahamic Religions). 

But also by believing easily-debunked falsehoods it makes genuinely well-meaning people easier to dismiss by bigots as Brainwashed By Those El Gee Bee Tees Who Will Lie Because They Want To Destroy Academia/Biological Sex/The Church.

Spreading misinformation on tumblr is an understandable consequence of the existence of the internet, but it’s not harmless and really ought to be challenged when it’s seen.

And it’s not remotely helped by the fact there’s plenty of similar true stories that can be pointed to. Like, here’s a list of things: Brits in the 1800s used to eat Egyptian mummies, numerous gay relationships in history were called “friendships” by Christian historians, the Vatican is hoarding almost all history ever written and refuses to let anyone access it, the original biographies of the Sons of Liberty were all works of fiction (like Washington and the apple tree), Greek and Roman statues were painted but the people who discovered them found it garish so they stripped the paint off, DaVinci invented a tank, Lancelot is a fanfiction OC, and the Catholic Church was founded after numerous other Christian churches and proceeded to burn the holy books that didn’t support their version (like the Gospel of Judas, which establishes that the “betrayal” was Jesus’s plan because how was he supposed to die as planned, and they plotted it together). It’s easy to believe bullshit when the truth is just as rank.

This is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about: confidently firing off a mix of half-remembered and out-of-context factoids with “lies and coverups in history!!!” to make them seem like they’re correcting the record rather than reducing a mix of truth, common misconceptions, conspiracy theories, misunderstandings, and poor reporting to pithy one-liners. Let’s go through them.

It's complicated. There's definitely a grain of truth to this, but it's not quite what the common narratives suggest. For example, eating mummies was a Medieval thing more than it was a Victorian thing; Victorians did "Scientific" mummy-unwrapping parties, but they didn't then eat them - they were collectible antiquities. For another, the mummies used by Victorians for paint were rarely ancient Egyptian humans. I'll let @thatlittleegyptologist take this one because they've talked about it. A lot. Like a lot. So often.

It's complicated. Have historians in the past denied that their favorite historical figures could possibly be gay? Absolutely. But people who were romantically and sexually involved with each other in the past very often did call each other "friend." (Or, in ancient Egypt, "brother"). Even husbands and wives would call each other "friend." (it's midnight and I am blanking on how to search for sources that show this but I have transcribed 18th century letters and diaries, I have seen this.) Like, while historical squeamishness and denial of gay relationships has been a thing... the modern assumption that friendship cannot possibly ever include any gay stuff is also not helping. And heteronormatively taking words at face value is somewhere in between. It's sometimes malicious, but you have to give space for simple hetero brain too. And give space for all the queer and queer-affirming historians working in the field. And for people like Oscar Wilde who were arrested for sodomy and the Ancient Greeks who were Ancient Greek so it's hardly like anyone's denying that, even if their interpretation was that it was Bad. It's not cut and dry.

This one isn't actually complicated, it's just a bizarre misunderstanding (generous interpretation) or an Evangelical conspiracy theory (less generous interpretation) of what the Vatican Apostolic Archive, formerly known as the Vatican Secret Archive, is. They're not "hoarding almost all history ever written" (how would that work?). It's an archive of the Church's and the Vatican's records, accounting, correspondence, declarations, decisions, and other various affairs. Over the past several hundred years of dutiful documentary-keeping, that does add up to a lot of history about the development of European politics, culture, and colonization! There are in fact two archives; one which has been accessible to scholars since 1881, and one which is owned unilaterally by the Pope and only extremely rarely opened for any sort of access to outsiders. John Paul II actually made it easier for researchers to access those archives, though "easier" does not mean "easy" and is still very much at the Pope's discretion. However, they are archives pertaining to the Pope's and Church's affairs, not all of human history.

True! But also a little complicated. The story about Washington and the cherry tree is complete fiction, and we know who to blame for it: Mason Locke "Parson" Weems, who wrote his famous biography of Washington right after Washington died and the nation was clamoring for tributes to him. He was kind of shameless about writing for the masses things that would sell. But at the same time, it was part of the myth-making of the new nation, part of a very common process at the time of nearly deifying Washington. But it is also true that we do in fact have a lot of letters and diaries written directly by these guys. We don't need to rely on Weems for fanciful stories about them, even if they have entered into the mythology-building of the US as a nation.

Have you ever seen what happens to painted stone when left out in the elements over time? The paint chips off. Being exposed to the elements or buried in the dirt for hundreds or thousands of years does a number on the painted exterior of a statue. Here's a Jesuit scholar from 1913 lamenting this: "It is a notorious fact that the remains of colour fade very fast from marbles that are exposed to the light after centuries of burial and concealment. It is the universal experience of classical archaeologists. A French explorer describes some colours vanishing from sarcophagi found at Carthage "comme de la fumée" [like smoke]. Add to this the perfectly intelligible cleaning consequent on first discovery in the earth, and the still more disastrous and less pardonable washings with acid that, until recent years, were the fate of all classical statues. Even still another risk has to be remembered, the taking of casts […] Add these fates together, and say whether their total does not offer an explanation for a prejudiced view." Honestly, as Gisela M. A. Richter (1944) says, "The fact that any color at all remains is really more remarkable than that it has disappeared in the majority of cases." Greek and Roman statues, probably even marble statues, were painted! Yes! But there was probably little paint remaining even when the Renaissance sculptors and art collectors got ahold of them. And while the discoverers deliberately stripping off the paint because they decided it should not have been there is one potential reason (note the reference to acid-washing), and the pure white marble was a very ideologically-loaded Enlightment-era aesthetic highlighting the purity of the form, and 1700s-1800s English archaeologists and antiquarians had vicious debates over whether the marble statues were painted like the fate of their cultural hegemony rested on it, "removing the paint for its garishness" was not even close to the primary reason the colored paint does not remain. These are some resources about the Gods in Color exhibition that did experimental reconstructions of the colors of some statues.

Leonardo da Vinci drew designs for many devices, including a war machine that does resemble a modern tank! It's frequently described (with hedging descriptions) like "has been seen as a prototype of a tank." But there's no evidence that it was ever built, and it's unclear if the wheels and gear system would have worked. Can he be said to have "invented a tank"? I guess it depends on your definition of "invented."

This is either a flippant or deeply disingenuous way to describe the origins, evolution, and recording of King Arthur mythology, its use in literature and nationalist propaganda, and the way this is different from the way fanfiction interacts with a canon. @chimaerakitten knows much more about this than I do.

Ohhhh boy it's complicated. I am out of energy and by god it is late but there is a reason that books and books and books have been written about the history of Christianity, the early schisms, the creation of the canon, Gnosticism, and the origins of the Catholic Church.

Basically: if it can be summed up in one sentence as a "gotcha!" it is probably More Complicated Than That.

I do love a good deep dive on King Arthur but I'm just gonna comment on this one from the other angle, because I am NOT an expert on the historical and political climate of the time but I think we need to address a truth about fanfiction that a lot of people don't understand.

I've made that Lancelot joke too. But this is something behind the statements that such and such is Biblical fanfiction, or all of Greek myth is fanfiction etc...etc.. which are all funny statements that some people seem to seriously believe.

We don't classify them as something different from fanfiction because they are old. We classify them as something different from fanfiction because these stories come from BEFORE the time that cultural icons were considered the intellectual property of their creators and corporations that had a detailed accepted list of approved stories.

When The Knight of the Cart was written, nobody knew who created Arthur or if he was an actual person. The relationship between fan and intellectual property owner did not exist at the time. There was no corporate interest serving to delegitimize the work, and there was also nothing to stop other authors from just up and using Lancelot for their own purposes.

It's not that age lends legitimacy to fanfic, it's that fanfic is a concept that exists as a result of how money and creative endeavours are intertwined in our legal and economic systems.

In cases of cultural legend like King Arthur and the Greek Myths no one OWNS the official canon, the term "fanfiction" is meaningless. It's just fiction of whatever the genre is. This is not because fanfiction is "bad writing" or "amateur" or "trash" or "lowbrow." It is because it is YOUR intellectual property and not someone else's.

It's a matter of law and modern creative works, which I am not an expert on but I do know this one thing.

The aforementioned daughter of Persephone, Mespyrean (sp?) was not "someone's OC" because she wasn't writing fanfiction. She was writing her own story, and that goddess is a modern invention that SPECIFICALLY belongs to that writer. This makes a difference if you publish a story using her, because that teenaged girl can get a lawyer and sue you. Now, in fandom circles they usually don't because people usually don't publish and make money, but unlike with a Percy Jackson fanfic, she COULD.

However, if you wrote a story where you made up your own daughter of Hades and Persephone, or just used the Furies or Mellinoe who are listed in the Orphic Hymns, then you are public domain.

The historical aspect that comes into this, though, is that there is no historical religious tradition that recognizes Mespyrean while the others are in the Orphic Hymns. The story is not something you can use to learn anything about antiquity, though the speed at which it caught on in the tumblr community could probably tell us a lot about this culture.

When it comes to your own personal religious and spiritual practices, your mileage may vary. Though there may be grounds for a lawsuit if you establish a religious organization that features Mespyrean as a key goddess, if you are raising funds. Consult a lawyer if you plan to do so.

Addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. A good life is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure. Btw

This year I thought I'd focus on all those who can't celebrate openly for whatever reason. Stay safe, everyone.

One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) dir. Hamilton Luske, Clyde Geronimi and Wolfgang Reitherman

buried with him since the beginning//does the poison drip through?

i know it's been said many times before but i will never get over how jacob anderson, a british man with a british accent, not only nailed a louisiana creole accent but also developed a studiously (almost eerily) generic accent that louis uses in the present AND showed the first accent bleeding into the second accent at key moments as a way of aurally externalizing his character's inner journey. what did god put in this man when she created him.

@dedalvs anything to add about jacob anderson's accent/valyrian pronunciation work?

Pardon me, but is someone praising Jacob Anderson without letting me praise him first?!

Backing up. It's October 2009, and my Dothraki is chosen as the official version for HBO's Game of Thrones. Absolutely the job of a lifetime. Conlangers were never hired to create languages for big budget productions, and language was central to A Song of Ice and Fire. The fact that this was on HBO guaranteed that it was going to be huge, and now I was going to get to be on the set of a TV show, work with actors, go to Hollywood parties, and create a language that would be as popular as Klingon.

June 2011, only one of those four things had happened, and of all things, it was going to a Hollywood party—the season 1 premiere event for Game of Thrones. It was very cool! None of the cast attended, but it was cool! But as for the rest, the idea that I would ever actually talk to any of the actors or be on the actual set was, apparently, laughable. And as for Dothraki, it had a very loyal following of about 6 or 7 people, all of whom I came to know personally. Dothraki was discussed in the press, sure, but nobody was going to learn it; there were never going to be any Dothraki conventions. It wasn't the next Klingon.

June 2012, and by this point I'd gotten used to seeing my work on screen—and by that I mean I'd gotten used to seeing it performed…so-so. Every so often it was really good, but for the most part, I got used to hearing jumbled consonants, dropped syllables, missed words… I've always been a perfectionist, so this was difficult, but I didn't have much choice. I had absolutely no control over it. I never got to work with any of the actors, so all they had were my recordings, and a series of dialect coaches who had absolutely no idea what they were doing with my stuff. (And, as I would learn later, just because an actor nails 9 out of 10 takes doesn't mean the editor won't like the one take they screwed up. Sometimes that's the take that makes it to the screen.) Basically, if someone has an English line on a TV show that goes "It looks like the mechanism got screwed up somehow", and what they say is "It locks like a manism got scroot up someho", they're going to reshoot the scene until the actor says it right. If that happens with a conlang, no one will notice or care. This was now my life.

July 2012, I get the opportunity to create High Valyrian (yay!), and then a "dialect" of High Valyrian to be spoken in Slaver's Bay. Knowing the history from GRRM's books, I knew this "dialect" was actually a full daughter language with lexical/phonological material from an extinct language (Ghiscari) that I wasn't being asked to create, so I was going to have to create two languages at once, and at least have an idea for a third one—and, in fact, there was going to be a lot of dialogue in this new daughter language. Consequently my focus was split. I can honestly barely remember creating Astapori Valyrian, because I wanted to be sure that High Valyrian was right (I knew book fans didn't care about Dothraki, but did care about HV). Despite the lack of attention, I did realize that Astapori Valyrian had a cool sound and a great flow (it really does!). I wish I'd had more time to appreciate creating it as a daughter language (I wish High Valyrian had been as complete as Dothraki was at that point), but I was pleased with the result. I was curious to see how the actors would handle it.

April 21, 2013. I am absolutely over the moon. I'd just for the first time saw a scene that I loved in the books because, for once, I predicted what was going to happen (as a reader, I'm sitting here thinking, "How do you trade your entire army to someone and not wonder if they're going to use it on you after they get it?!"), and it actually plays better in the show than the books, and it all hinges on a language I created. I still get chills watching that scene: Episode 304, Daenerys revealing she speaks Valyrian. To this day that's still the best thing I've done. The same issues I mentioned above were present, as always (watching thinking, "Did she say mebatas instead of memēbātās…?"), but they're minor. The scene is outstanding. I realized that whatever was going to happen after this, I would always have this scene. That was a good night.

April 28, 2013. After last week's episode, I wasn't really waiting for anything. In episode 305 there's only one scene with any conlang work in it—nothing really major. Introducing Grey Worm, characterization, etc. Everything in this episode is about what's going on in Westeros. At this point I'd heard a fair amount of Astapori Valyrian in Slaver's Bay. It was good! Definitely good enough. Did the trick. The prosody wasn't quite what I did with it, but it was good. I was somewhat interested in this introduction in 305. Grey Worm only speaks Astapori Valyrian at this point, so this actor wouldn't have had had any other speaking lines, and aside from one short line and saying his name at the beginning, his next line is a huuuuuge speech, comparatively speaking. I was curious to see how he would do.

Critters and gentlefolk, that night I witnessed a miracle.

NEVER had I heard ANYONE speak one of my languages better than me until that night.

Every word, every syllable, EVERY SOUND OF EVERY CLAUSE Jacob "You Heard My Name" Anderson uttered was ABSOLUTELY FLAWLESS.

I was stunned. My mouth literally hung open—probably for the rest of the damn episode, at which point I went back and watched that scene—again, and again, and again.

And so you don't have to go searching, this is Grey Worm's line (not the first two short ones—the big one [note: j is [ʒ], except in Daenery's High Valyrian name, where it's [dʒ], dh is [ð], q is [q], r is [ɾ] and y is [y], in IPA]):

That was my translation of this English line:

That is a LOOOOOOOOOONG ass line. And go watch that scene. There is nothing on the screen but his face. It's a closeup the entire time. Any slight deviation would be visible as well as audible. Take a look:

This...KING just casually dropped the greatest performance I have ever witnessed on screen at a time when I had already given up on ever seeing a truly great conlang performance on screen.

And then he proceeded to do it again and again and again and again and again for the rest of the entire show. I don't think it's a coincidence that the very last conlang line of Game of Thrones is his. They knew how much I loved him—I told them. I told anyone who would listen and twelve people who wouldn't, along with their next of kin. He didn't take my language and make it his own—no, no. He is graciously allowing me to claim that I created his native tongue—the one he's been speaking since birth. THAT'S how good he is.

So yeah, accent work? In English? I guess I'm not surprised he's pretty good at that. Something like that to this…adonis, this living, breathing Master Class™ in perfection is like yawning to an ordinary human. Jacob Anderson can walk into my house in the dead of night, take anything out of my refrigerator, and then leave the door to the fridge and the house open when he leaves. He has earned no less.

To sum up:

Ethan, you wanna see some shit?

me dming a mutual i have only talked with in asks and comments: fuck fuck they'll hate me fuckkkk they'll think i'm so annoying shit

user @asimovsideburns you tags have passed peer review

okay Jaques 😭😭 why is this so funny

it’s tragic because i didn’t include Orlando’s response, it’s even funnier. get him Orlando. you tell him.

I'm a "multiple interpretations of a character are valid" person until I see an interpretation that explicitly contradicts canon and then I start chewing on the drywall.

Me: "they are fictional characters and you can have whatever thoughts or interpretations you like! You may be close to the creators intent, you may not! What does it matter! There is joy in the exploration alone"

Also me: blorbo would not fucking say that

“This character is multi-faceted and has many valid interpretations of them, but there are also aspects of them that are so set in stone that if you take them away, you’re basically talking about a totally different character.”

[ID: A screenshot of tags reading: our blessed headcanons vs their barbarous flanderization. End ID]

fyi: "Flanderization" is when a single aspect of a character's personality becomes primary or they lose other aspects over the course of a work or in derivative / fan material

This is for asexuals only so everyone else leave

The Nick Mohammed Making Us Feel Things Revenge Tour continues

QUEEN CHARLOTTE: A BRIDGERTON STORY (2023) 1.05 "Gardens in Bloom"

This guy knows what he’s talking about. He’s one of the lead writers for Leverage and if you ever watch the series on DVD, do yourself a favor and listen to him talk about how the scripts got written. Some of the advice he has is stuff I use all the time: 1. Don’t introduce an important plot person or thing after the first half of the story. 2. Always tie up loose ends. 3. Introduce important things in the middle of unimportant things. 4. If you have to infodump, find an emotion to tie it to and it will seem less like infodump and more like a motive rant. Seriously this guy knows how to write.

Good Omens season 2 + text posts