I’m getting really tired of the wise serene pacifist trope in fiction. Every committed pacifist, prison abolitionist, antiwar activist, etc I’ve ever met in real life has been vibrating with compressed rage at all times. Do you know what it’s like to believe deeply in your heart that doing harm to others is wrong and the goal of society should be to alleviate suffering for all people and live in the United States of America? IT’S NOT FUN. Show Us The Pissed-Off Pacifists. 

Dude there might be a word for the emotion that is forged when someone’s deep abiding love and compassion for all people and living things welds itself into decades of built-up foaming fury at how those people been treated their whole life by those in power to create a sort of alloyed super-commitment to a set of ethical principles but i promise you “tranquility” is not that fucking word

LOVE AS VIOLENCE VS LOVE AS SOFTNESS

Ada Limon, The Good Fight // Mary Oliver, West Wind // Danez Smith, Bare // Sappho, Fragment 58.25-26 // Mitski, I Don’t Smoke // Ashe Vernon // Hozier, Cherry Wine // Shauna Barbosa, GPS // Richard Siken, Little Beast // Chen Chen, Summer [The sunflowers fall…] // Warsan Shire // Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

The water in your body is just visiting. It was a thunderstorm a week ago. It will be the ocean soon enough. Most of your cells come and go like morning dew. We are more weather pattern than stone monument. Sunlight on mist. Summer lightning. Your choices outweigh your substance.

(Poem from my first poetry collection: Field Guide to the Haunted Forest by Jarod K Anderson)

Hey did you know I keep a google drive folder with linguistics and language books  that I try to update regularly 

**UPDATE**

I have restructured the folders to make them easier to use and managed to add almost all languages requested and then some

Please let me know any further suggestions

….holy shit. You found the holy grail.

….. is this a DIFFERENT person keeping gigabytes worth of language books on google drive? Holy crap.

This. This here. Is why I love Tumblr.❤️❤️❤️

Update from OP:

UPDATE because apparently not everyone has seen this yet the new and improved version of this is a MEGA folder: https://mega.nz/folder/kQBXHKwA#-osWRLNCXAsd62ln8wKa8w

Holy shit. OP you are a wonderful human being.

O.O Linguistic Holy Grail…

Holy shit man

@hungwy sorry for tagging you in the wrong post the first time.

@scarlet-being @eastern-lights it’s back!!

Vultures are holy creatures.

Tending the dead.

Bowing low.

Bared head.

Whispers to cold flesh,

“Your old name is not your king.

I rename you ‘Everything.’”

fun fact!

Vultures are also responsible for keeping diseases at bay.

Vulture stomach acid is so powerful that it can kill anthrax and many other deadly diseases.

So when they consume the carcass of a creature that has died of disease, they actually destroy the disease within it too!

So yes vultures are 100% holy creatures because they not only eat the dead, but protect the living from death.

@a-witch-in-endor

@spiritspodcast

some fucking resources for all ur writing fuckin needs

* body language masterlist

* a translator that doesn’t eat ass like google translate does

* a reverse dictionary for when ur brain freezes

* 550 words to say instead of fuckin said

* 638 character traits for when ur brain freezes again

* some more body language help

(hope this helps some ppl)

i'm thinking about charlotte brontë spending her last years editing and publishing her sisters' writings and about christopher tolkien dedicating his life to the protection and meticulous reconstruction his father's life's work and about johanna van gogh publishing the letters between vincent and theo that would propel vincent van gogh into fame because she knew how much her husband had loved his brother, and about how so often art isn't just a reflection of the artist's mind and skills but a testament to the fact that they were loved

no thoughts head empty only gay pirates

This is a beautiful graphic but it doesn’t explain the pros and cons of each fire type.

The Swedish torch is good for an efficient and contained fire, it’s controlled and good for cooking over and produces less light and heat than other fires. It can be difficult to keep going once you burn through the original log

The teepee is your traditional campfire. Good for heat and light not great for cooking, burns through fuel fairly quickly

The star fire is one of the slowest burning and not well protected but provides an even heat good for slow cooking and is excellent if you have limited fuel and need the protection a fire can provide

The lean to is a compact and efficient fire that evolves into a dense and hot bed of coals. The structure creates a good source of air flow which can help damp wood burn. A slightly better cooking fire that isn’t as bright. It also provides protection from wind on one side

The platform fire is incredibly hot and will create a very thick bed of coals but it doesn’t have a lot of air flow and is a little harder to get started.

The log cabin is big and bright and has lots of air flow which again is good for damp logs. You can also use this structure to start a smaller fire in the middle while drying out bigger logs. This fire will crumble into a messier bed of coals that don’t produce particularly even heat for cooking.

The modified leanto is excellent if you need it to perform multiple functions. The side with more fuel will burn bright and hot and the side with less fuel will burn less hot but more evenly and controlled, this gives you different cooking options.

reblogging for writing purposes. the exact reason will come soon enough.

[Images: Infographics for seven ways to build a good campfire, made by Rolling Fox. End ID.]

I’ve taken the liberty of turning @bear–hearted’s descriptions of the uses for these various campfire types into its own infographic, so it’d be easier for me to keep all the information in one place on my computer. Here it is for anyone else who likes to save infographics! The text is almost 100% copied word-for-word from above, with only minor tweaks, such as capitalizing and underlining the campfire setup names for ease of finding them.

king stuff

Pigeon steals poppies from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, Australia in order to build a nest beside a stained glass window.

@birdblogwhichisforbirds

@snitling EXACTLY

This is two pigeons, pigeons nest in bonded pairs (notice the first one is checked and its mate on the nest is barred). Usually they don’t make nests nearly so big but I guess if you have the materials, go for it.

The nest is so unusually big because the vast majority is a platform to keep the actual nest (just that tiny ring in the corner around the bird sitting in it) cushioned from the anti bird spikes.

This is a work of beautiful defiance.

Using the very thing installed to make just a moment’s rest impossible as structural supports for an immovably stable nursery.

The symbolism achieved by these pigeons is better than some writers can hope for and I love it!

From the nest on the bird repellent spikes to the fact that those spikes are along the stained glass windows of a church, a place associated with sanctuary and compassion. The fact that the nest is made of stolen poppies for remembrance day hits the hardest though. Of the 54 animals to be awarded the Dickin Medal for acts of gallantry during WW2, 32 of them were pigeons. These were messengers who flew through battlefields and across borders, many of whom were killed or severely injured by enemy forces including gunfire and trained falcons. Many of their achievements saved the lives of hundreds of soldiers, and yet now their descendants are faces with anti-bird spikes, shooting and poisoning in an attempt to rid the cities from the rats with wings. I love this picture because it feels like they’re taking back just a little bit of that credit owed to them. 

Reblogging for this beautiful addition.

Midnight Mass - soundtrack and hymns

Conversation with a Native Son: Maya Angelou and James Baldwin

This is what Rasputin would've wanted.

I feel like I'm being seduced like one of those fancy rainforest birds

is it working

Yes

Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them. 

Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.” 

“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”

“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”

It’s just. 

50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job. 

i also like that this is a “ask craftspeople” thing, it reminds me of when art historians were all “the fuck” about someone’s ear “deformity” in a portrait and couldn’t work out what the symbolism was until someone who’d also worked as a piercer was like “uhm, he’s fucked up a piercing there”. interdisciplinary shit also needs to include non-academic approaches because crafts & trades people know shit ok

One of my professors often tells us about a time he, as and Egyptian Archaeologist, came down upon a ring of bricks one brick high. In the middle of a house. He and his fellow researchers could not fpr the life of them figure out what tf it could possibly have been for. Until he decided to as a laborer, who doesnt even speak English, what it was. The guy gestures for my prof to follow him, and shows him the same ring of bricks in a nearby modern house. Said ring is filled with baby chicks, while momma hen is out in the yard having a snack. The chicks can’t get over the single brick, but mom can step right over. Over 2000 years and their still corraling chicks with brick circles. If it aint broke, dont fix it and always ask the locals.

I read something a while back about how pre-columbian Americans had obsidian blades they stored in the rafters of their houses. The archaeologists who discovered them came to the conclusion that the primitive civilizations believed keeping them closer to the sun would keep the blades sharper.

Then a mother looked at their findings and said “yeah, they stored their knives in the rafters to keep them out of reach of the children.”

Omg the ancient child proofing add on tho lol

I remember years ago on a forum (email list, that’s how old) a woman talking about going to a museum, and seeing among the women’s household objects a number of fired clay items referred to as “prayer objects”.  (Apparently this sort of labeling is not uncommon when you have something that every house has and appears to be important, but no-one knows what it is.)  She found a docent and said, “Excuse me, but I think those are drop spindles.”  “Why would you think that, ma’am?”  “Because they look just like the ones my husband makes for me.  See?”  They got all excited, took tons of pictures and video of her spinning with her spindle.  When she was back in the area a few years later, they were still on display, but labeled as drop spindles.

So ancient Roman statues have some really weird hairstyles. Archaeologists just couldn’t figure them out. They didn’t have hairspray or modern hair bands, or elastic at all, but some of these things defied gravity better than Marge Simpson’s beehive.

Eventually they decided, wigs. Must be wigs. Or maybe hats. Definitely not real hair.

A hairdresser comes a long, looks at a few and is like, “Yeah, they’re sewn.”

“Don’t be silly!” the archaeologists cry. “How foolish, sewn hair indeed! LOL!”

So she went away and recreated them on real people using a needle and thread and the mystery of Roman hairstyles was solved.

She now works as a hair archaeologist and I believe she has a YouTube channel now where she recreates forgotten hairstyles, using only what they had available at the time.

Always question anything labelled as for a ritual or religious purpose without explanation because it’s very often shorthand for ‘we don’t know’ as if humans have not been the same since forever and have either made things for specific purposes or simply because they like making them (aka ART. Some things are simply art yet heaps of old research refuses to recognize this possibility.)

This is changing, but change is slow!

So I went to the Josh Fight

a summary:

- Two Josh Swains were in attendance. OG Josh, hailing from Arizona

- And Nebraska's own Josh Swain, from Omaha.

(feat. An Audio Engineer doing THE MOST for that sound quality)

-All the local news stations were there

- The majority of attendees were from out of state

- The two Josh Swains battled for supremacy by Rock Paper Scissors duel.

- The victor? Josh Swain, from Arizona. A crushing defeat for Josh Swain, who despite having none of Josh Swain's newfound Twitter Clout, DID have the home team advantage, as well as a Great Look.

- Following the Josh Swain Duel and coronation of the One True Josh Swain, there was an All-Josh pool noodle battle royale

- A brief list of notable Josh Variants I saw in this battle:

The rules were simple. Enter the ring and fight honorably (no headshots, no hits below the belt.) If you are hit with a pool noodle, you are dead, having fallen in glorious battle. The last Josh standing would be the winner.

The battle lasted a little over sixty seconds in total. The final victor was....

LITTLE JOSH, THE SMALLEST COMBATANT.

The crowd was going wild. The chanting for Little Josh was deafening. Truly there could have been no better outcome.

pool noodle combat was then opened to the general public, for fun rather than glory.

As for Josh Prime, he was like a very cool dude! As of last reporting, he raised $6600 dollars for the Children's Hospital and a truckload of nonperishables for the local food bank alongside the other Josh Fight attendees! He offered masks to any maskless people he met, and did his best to keep things as safe and socially distanced as he could, despite the ungodly amount of people who showed up to this random fucking field outside of Lincoln, Nebraska.

(Also for the Nebraskans: Yes he tried a Runza, and yes he says he enjoyed it.)

So anyway. Shoutout to the one and only Josh Swain.

OH ALSO here is just the raw footage I got of the Josh Swain Duel and the All-Josh Pool Noodle Battle Royale

Pleasee