Rapier, Solingen, Germany, 1590-1610. Work swordsmith Clemens Meigenn.
Overall length 1205 mm, weight: 985 grams. Garda rapier of blackened and gilded. Protective flap decorated with a medallion with the portrait of the devil. On the blade, at a fraction of the signature of the master "Clemens Meigenn". A weapon from the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Vylet Pony - can opener’s notebook: fish whisperer
Uplifting, heartfelt and absolutely gorgeous, Vylet Pony’s latest concept album turns out a beautiful and personal exploration of art block and learning to love yourself and center your world with the things and people that support you most. Though it’s a bit overlong, the magic and incredible production across can opener’s notebook: fish whisperer’s 16 tracks makes for one deeply moving listen.
☆☆☆☆
sisters, i'll never stop crying abt the Voyager space probe being a summonable entity in F/GO. it's launched in 1977, US pulled their troops out of the Vietnam War in '75, MLK was assassinated in the same year, the Cold War is called cold because they're not outright bringing out tanks and missiles but there's still tension present that anytime nuclear annihilation is a possibility (or else we don't get hit 1984 single "forever young" by alphaville). some places are still experiencing societal unrest. i can imagine that people were very weary. if you think about it, most of human history has never known universal or global peace, there's always a war or conflict somewhere.
but! but! but!!! very smart people purposefully decided that no record of war would be put in the Golden Record they put in a lonesome, spacefaring object. even if the Space Race was born of the tensions of the post-war world and into the Cold War, ultimately its legacy like the International Space Station (ISS) overtakes its period. they put music in it's vinyl code, they sampled "hello"'s from 6000 years ago up to the "now" then, a child's voice saying hi, they put different sounds from nature, they put SONGS!!! in there. voyager is never lonely when he has all these melodies and lullabies within itself. carl sagan put brain waves and heartbeats of his wife ann druyan into the golden record. quite literally, LOVE IS STORED IN THE VOYAGER.
is humanity so curious, so lonely for their collective puny hands to grasp into the darkness of the sea of stars? humans are social creatures and all that but people made an object specifically to be found by another intelligent life-forms. will someone somewhere, in the vastness of space find this space probe with a shining disc and they'll have a glimpse of humanity's ideals? or is voyager fated to be floating in the void for millions, billions of years to serve as our eyes and ears but never finding a destination and having an invincible object to carry before it crumbles, possibly, after humanity had perished? humanity's hopes and dreams are put into an object, a crystallization of scientific progress and cultural memory. voyager is never lonely, it always calls home and even if time will come that nobody home would answer, voyager could sing itself to sleep.
I reblog this every time I see it, because the part that makes this so horrific to me, is that the room is a direct callback to Goodnight Moon. It takes this memory of safety and security and turns it directly upside down and I love it.
hey so Emily Carroll is my absolute favorite horror artist and her stories are some of the greatest things i’ve ever had the ghastly pleasure to read. many of her comics are free online, such as the classic His Face All Red
In the games, Maya would sometimes say, “We’re lawyers” and I always would go “no one in this game should be able to call themself a lawyer, especially you Maya.” Anyone who sees these videos probably thinks I don’t like Nick because I only exist to bully him. I love Nick. He’s great. He’s just so easy to bully.
Thank you to @themornal and @8edhead for doing the voice work again!
Don’t spoil your girlfriend 🍃
Every single cop show is like oh look how these cool badass protags just wanna do their job but the obnoxious pencil-pushers back at the office keep getting in the way by trying to make them follow due conduct and the very obvious criminal keeps maliciously obstructing them by invoking their legal rights and wouldn't they be able to do their job so much better and faster if they were allowed to just follow their gut and do whatever it takes to arrest the person they already pinned down as the dangerous criminal? And then people eat it up and go on the internet to make youtube comments about how refusing to speak with the cops without a lawyer is extremely suspicious behavior.
Just a legend spouting truths
✨ Night Mae is ready to FIGHT! 💥
roman and neo discover wanted posters
Baby lyctors discover classical music ;D
free locked tomb doodle request for the first person who can name all 3 poorly drawn albums
really wanted to make it Dirude - Sandstorm, but that doesn’t really transfer well to a comic lol
mako & ryuko i drew for roman 😊❤️❤️❤️
im not joking when i say that this meme single handedly got me invested in learning how the fuck electrical production works small scale so that i could explain it to somebody from a millennium ago
If that's a thing that bothers you for more subjects then just electricity there's actually a book for this! That I own! That is both very stupid and fairly useful! And entertaining!
How to invent everything: a survival guide for the stranded time traveler is the book for you, complete with flowchart about how to identify what time you've landed yourself in! It's very funny and very fun and informative and starts with the production of written language and works it's way forward through inventions of varying complexity, all framed in the way of "so you got into this time machine from our company and it's broken, huh? Well tough fucking shit! Welcome to your new home!"
Man I keep seeing this post with all sorts of different resources/things about how to explain modern technology to ancient people, and every time I see it I want to write a long essay about exactly why and how none of this would work At All
There are some things where a modern person could conceivably get ancient people over a technological knowledge barrier (medical knowledge in particular), but in most cases? Knowing about electricity isn't gonna do a damn thing, my guy.
The average person's grasp of how technological advancement happens is completely wrong, okay, and some of it has to do with this thing called Colonialism
So there's this concept called the "Great Man Theory," right? It's the idea that events in history are caused or driven mainly by the actions of a few "great men" who are the movers and shakers of history
And this idea isn't taken very seriously by historians any more, but it still is pretty much how lots of regular everyday people think about history. And that's how people think about technology. They think technology comes about because of "inventors," who Figure Out the knowledge barrier stopping technology from happening.
But that's not actually how it happens
For a type of technology to become a part of a society, several different conditions have to be met, and they're all related:
Keep in mind that ALL of these things are a pyramid of conditions that have to be met before the technology can Become A Thing. Like, to collect resources in large amounts, you have to be able to mobilize large amounts of labor. To mobilize large amounts of labor you generally have to have centralized hubs of people and hierarchical societies where people can command other people, and so on.
Historians don't just try to find explanations for "Why did X event happen?" They also try to answer "Why did X event happen at the time it did, and why didn't it happen sooner?"
One major thing where people get this wrong is agriculture. People portray it like agriculture happened when people "figured out" how to cultivate plants and settle down.
But that's wrong! Because hunter-gatherers KNEW everything that a farmer would need to know to farm. (They used the exact same tools to harvest wild plants as farmers did when they settled down.) It's just that in prehistory, hunting and gathering was, for most groups of people, an objectively better way to live. In fact, a big archaeological sign that a people group were settled farmers is...malnutrition.
Why do you think writing emerged where and when it did? It's not because the groups that developed it were the first to "figure it out." It's because writing things down was genuinely pointless or impractical for everyone else. People in supposedly "pre-literate" societies have hardcore systems of mnemonics and oral tradition to pass on knowledge.
If you're a horseback-riding nomad, are you going to lug around clay tablets with you? If you live in a humid tropical forest, how long is anything that passes for "paper" going to last? If the utility of a writing system is very limited for your people, are y'all going to keep teaching your children how to write?
How does this connect to colonialism? Well...there's this idea that societies "progress" through a linear series of "stages" of development, socially and technologically. And it's still ubiquitous, even though it's completely, laughably wrong.
When the Americas were first colonized, Europeans in some cases admired the Native Americans, but saw them as societies in an earlier "stage" of development, that had yet to "advance." British colonizers compared them to the early ancestors of British people, and thought that Native Americans would happily accept speedrunning the next "phase" of their development, becoming just like Europeans.
But that's not what happened.
Because American societies weren't actually "less advanced," they were just...different. The stressors, politics, and resources of their continent were different. And it created a very different type of society. Now, they were happy to borrow aspects of the Europeans' culture and practices that were useful or just neat to them. But the colonizers were in for a rude awakening when they realized that the Americans weren't falling over themselves to become European, and in fact thought that a lot of things about the European way of living...sucked.
Terms like "Stone Age" are useful for when you are in an area that had a clear progression from using stone tools to using metals, but describing a society that just...doesn't use certain metals as "stone age" is bull-fucking-shit. Anyone who claims a modern society of indigenous people is "Stone Age" is being more than a little racist whether they like it or not. It's a term that implies that all societies pass through these "ages," and the people you're talking about are still relatively in their infancy, when...maybe they just don't live in a place where you can get at metal resources.
But that's a little bit of a digression. The point is, it's all well and good to know what steel is, but say your time machine drops you in, I dunno, southern Alaska, 6,000 BCE. You're with a group of people that moves around hunting mammoths and stuff.
You don't just have to know about steel, you have to find iron, and you have to be able to mine it and smelt it. And, crucially, you have to be able to convince the people around you that doing all that is worth it.
You know the ins and outs of how to make and run a steam engine. Great. You explain this to a nomad dude in western Asia sometime around 1,000 BCE. Your problem isn't explaining the steam engine, it's explaining why a steam engine is better than a horse.
Here's a relevant Wikipedia page: the list of multiple discoveries. It's common throughout history for multiple scientists to independently "discover" things about the world at the same time. It seems like a wild coincidence...but it's not.
It's just that suddenly the conditions were met for those discoveries to happen.
You let Nazis and TERFs call for our extermination, but when a queer person writes an essay that's a direct call for unity and solidarity, it's fucking HATE SPEECH?
Do you not understand context and nuance at all, or is it just easier to say THE FAG SAID FAG TO PROTEST THE PEOPLE WHO CALL HIM FAG AND THAT'S AS BAD AS WHEN THE FAG GETS CALLED FAG BY THE PEOPLE WHO WANT TO KILL HIM, SO WE BETTER TAKE IT DOWN?
... Bet you anything its because a bunch of TERFS worked together to mass report the post.
Probably.
Good news, though, it's on the Wayback Machine, and I do have it physically printed out and in my papers, so it isn't gone.
I'm way, way too paranoid to trust important writing to the caprice of a company that hasn't meaningfully addressed years of harassment based on my gender, my Jewishness, and my sexuality, but takes down posts bc someone said something mean about a staff member liking Harry Potter.
If it’s any additional consolation… it’s also been spread to other locations via screenshot with your username fully visible as well.
I saw it again yesterday over twitter side.
So hopefully, it will continue to be heard. And understood.
The post has since been restored, and yes, it is on Twitter as well. I also have a physical copy in my papers.
Which brings me to another point, actually:
If you're like me, you have a lot of things on The Internet which may not be physically backed up. Writing, memories, things like that.
Lou Sullivan's personal papers are a treasure trove for queer historians, and a reason that we know about a lot of things during the 80s and 90s which might otherwise be lost. Many other queer people from that time also created repositories of knowledge, from zines to journals to personal papers.
We are headed for a dark, scary, trying time, a time in which we know we cannot depend on the infrastructure of the internet to keep things alive, because there are attempts right now to wipe us from the internet, to "cleanse" us and mark our very existence "obscene."
Keep a physical journal. Print out things which are important to you. Make a box full of buttons and zines and writings. Build a physical library of books if you can. Keep flyers for events.
These things are invaluable for future historians. If servers are purged, if the Wayback Machine somehow dies or things aren't on it, or heck... just because what you're willing to admit to in your private journal while you're alive is different from what you'll say online... the things you gather as your personal papers may really, really matter, more so as environments become more and more hostile to us.
Create your personal papers. Help us create our own legacy. Be the shoulders that another generation can stand on. The paroxysms of hatred are terrifying to live through, but they don't last forever.
I love you all. This is punk rock time.
