Little Ginkgo studies: Embroidered artwork by Meredith Woolnough

Y’all… what do you guys do for a living… but describe it in the worst way possible.

MIRROR, MIRROR PART 2 - The Daddening Continues.

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hey guys what's the mares of diomedes' favorite fast food restaurant

five guys

being a pepper plant has to be so weird.

Imagine evolving capsaicin specifically to stop mammals from eating your fruits, and then a mammal comes along that not only will eat your fruits, but likes them specifically because of the capsaicin, so much that it starts using its weird paws to distribute and care for your seeds, which turns into a strong selective force that literally starts evolving you into producing MORE capsaicin and makes you a WAY more successful and wider ranged species than you ever were before

simply because this mammal LOVES Pain Chemical. that evolved specifically to produce pain in mammals. It's not that the capsaicin isn't WORKING. It's just that these freaks like it.

This is the same mammal with social instincts so goddamn strong that they literally try to form social bonds with their predators, and end up evolving the predators into a new species that fits into their social communities as a form of mutualistic symbiosis, and exists in several different forms with unique morphology and behaviors based on the function they perform.

Instead of, I don't know, EVOLVING TO BE FASTER, this animal finds a faster animal and sits on it. Which shouldn't even work because the faster animal is a prey animal and this animal is a predator, but SOMEHOW they FORM A SOCIAL BOND WITH THE PREY. So they can sit on it while it runs fast. And somehow the prey animal?? is cool with this?? and benefits from this relationship???

Literally how can you hate humans. Humans are possibly the most hilarious thing evolution has ever done.

other things humans have done

humans worldwide looking up into the celestial vault of stars a million light years away, separated from Earth by the deadly cold and emptiness of space: I bet there are guys up there to form social bonds with

Morphological differences between thorns, spines, and prickles

rabbits know and resent their place on the food chain

mice and rats also know they're prey animals, they just have such joy of living that it cancels out

guinea pigs have no concept of death but understand contextless fear

hamsters however do know the food chain, but they also know that attachment to the earth is the root of suffering and they wisely deny the faults of the ego.

Insects got too much to shit to do and too little time for them to worry about that

Types of knights, historically:

Like I do very much get the appeal of the whole aesthetic but 'knight=champion of the subaltern/defender of the community' makes me wanna go set some heraldic crests on fire.

I love how succinct you are, I wish I could do that! Anyway, here's my take (I just wrote it for another post, but I thought I'd contribute it here.)

Knights were

comprised of

who

and

"Allegiance" is the key word here. That's what separates knights from generic warriors and mercenaries. It's not an inherent trait of the class, it's part of an ideological superstructure which evolved gradually over time. And to a significant degree, it evolved precisely to separate knights from mercenaries, and to offer to mounted well-equipped warlords some tempting privileges (land, tax exemptions, social status, honours and glory) in exchange for becoming a reliable war asset. Which mercenaries were certainly not. Hence the enormous emphasis on loyalty and fealty and oath-keeping.

This is the purpose of chivalry. To take a horse-rider with a sword, who would be a wild card if left to his own devices, and turn him into a reliable war asset. A good little tool of death. The rest is pretty ribbons tied around the sword.

Now obviously, if the ideal was "the loyal knight", in practice knights were not necessarily loyal. It was a process to establish it, and an effort to maintain it, and then at times it broke completely, and the place got swarmed by robber knights. (Usually when the ruling class was no longer willing or able to give away lands, and found out that titles alone are not enough to control heavily armed warlords). So the war asset was not, in fact, always reliable, and the little tool of death was not always pointed at the desired direction.

But remember that the robber knights, who operated in their immediate vicinity instead of marching wherever their liege lord or order sent them, were in the exact same business with the loyal ones. They killed and plundered and enslaved. We often read complaints about their brutality, and how they forsake their vows and shit on chivalry, but you know what's the main complaint, the real one? "They're doing it to US! They should be doing it to other people far away!"

P.S. To keep things fair, I've also written a quick and dirty deconstruction of the outlaw / noble bandit. It includes a quicker and dirtier deconstruction of the noble knight, which just reads: The word chivalry is derived from the French cheval, for horse. By a staggering coincidence, so is the word chevauchée.

Marigold

Some old art of one of my favourite games

If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading

Devastating! Art museum gift shop doesn’t sell prints of specific and unpopular painting that struck a cord with you!

Who the hell spilled their frog all over the hardwood floor???

oh world wide web we're really in it now

Kylix, a wine cup, discovered in the tomb of Thracian king Seuthes III (IV century BC) - Golyamata Kosmatka, Kazanlak, Bulgaria

from the Kitāb al-Ṭabīkh (Book of Cookery) written by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq in the 10th century

i loved this so much i did go find the book in question (Annals of the Caliphs' Kitchens: Ibn Sayyār Al-Warrāq's Tenth-Century Baghdadi Cookbook, trans. Nawal Nasrallah.) it is 900 pages long, which is absolutely a delight for me.

mostly i wanted to find out what binn al-sakārij is– apparently a spread made with fermented bread, which sounds, frankly, delicious. right after this sandwich recipe is a chapter on the humoral properties of various fermented foods (binn is hot and dry.)

also i have delightful news for everyone about the number of poems in this book. medieval baghdad was Real big on poetry, particularly court poetry, and there was a lot of extemporaneous composing of odes on various subjects. here are a few of my favorites

this is just in the first 200 pages of the book. oh to be on a pleasure boat eating fava beans and listening to music!!!

The first few pages of the translation can be read on Google Books! Complete with the translator's own 70 pages or so, which contains jokes about the version of the manuscript that leaves out the chapter on naps after a meal (highly recommended in the original,) pages and pages of stories about the era's attitude towards cooking and cookbooks and food in general (including thoughts on fast food from the market), and all sorts of other cultural context. Worth reading for the consideration of Abbasid celebrity chefs, medieval thoughts towards inheritance of Mesopotamian culture, and even a cute few illustrations.

It was interesting enough that I looked up the translator herself, and she also has a cookbook of her own: Delights from the Garden of Eden: A Cookbook and a History of the Iraqi Cuisine, and a blog going back to 2012. Both the cookbook and her 900 page translation won several awards as well.