Happy Moon Landing Eve! Remember to leave out milk and cookies for Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, and don’t let Michael Collins convince you to prank NASA!
Y'know what's striking about the Demeter section? The first mate.
Specifically, that his first and foremost reaction to the crew's fear is violence. He wants the crew to stop acting afraid, stop bringing up their fears, he assures the captain nothing is wrong and through out it all he threatens the crew with physical assault in effort to basically get them to shut up.
He threatens them with a handpike AFTER a crew member has disappeared, and the captain has shown he is willing to conduct a search for a stowaway.
Idk, it just gets me that we have someone who, when faced with mounting evidence that something is going very, very wrong, to the point of danger to the rest of the crew and himself, threatens disproportionate bodily harm for the mere mention that something is frightening people, and whose ultimate goal is to get everyone to ignore the problem and stop talking about it.
Anyway....bit of plague metaphor this ship...but of course, it's just a metaphor....
i know its the mets, but this is the coolest shit i’ve ever seen a human being do
futureblackpolitician
Wtf????
Smoove with it too
meqabitch
This is the kind of shit you see in anime that shows that a certain character is stronger than other characters.
“Pathetic. You can’t even hold the bat you dare step to the plate? Have you no respect for the sport?”
reminds me of this gif
Baseball players are to be feared
thenamesdiondra
Reblogging for the last one
^Same for me
They just kept getting progressively more “woah”
much woah
lord-blongus
Oh my god this is a lucky universe
every time this post comes around, my favorite part is the “I know it’s the Mets” qualifier at the beginning lmao like how baseball that this zillion note posts starts with “sorry for putting this hellteam on your dash, bUT”
Y’all have no idea how hard I was trying not to laugh in class at that poor bird
funnierabbit75
They…they just blew up a fucking bird…
Ball’s dead. Bird’s dead. I’m dead
World Heritage Post
personally my favorite thing about Mr. Bird Evaporator is this imagine being the poor fool tryna rob this man’s house only to be instantly transported to the same dimension as that bird
He does photography now, and I guess just in case you’re booking him wondering “is it that Randy Johnson?” … here’s his logo:
i haven’t seen a marvel movie in ten years at this point so you could pretty much tell me that anything happens in any of them and i’d probably believe you
the sun is like a guy riding a chariot. to me
that is such a great idea. and i have other guys too
yayyyy!!!!!! i can't wait to believe in all them
This might have been just the most stupidest thing I’ve ever done
theyer old enough that they used to connect
They're older than Florida. The Floridian peninsula is the solidified runoff of the Appalachians that got caught on some coral. It's why we're like this, I think. You don't stand a chance of being normal when you were created by the shed skin of an elder god draping itself over a hollow skeleton. You're always going to be a little Off.
Mad because you don't have bird vision?
Seethe . You will never b them
I love when you give a cat a treat and they purr the whole time they're eating it like nyarm nyarm nyarm nyarm nyarm nyarm nyarm
I feel like.. when discussing how a lot of adaptations have leaned too far into Holmes' flaws to the point of being mischaracterization, people have this tendency to deny those traits having ever been there in acd canon, and I find this to Also be a disservice to the character
When you really look at Sherlock Holmes you will find a character that is so rich and complex & removing that nuance to portray him more one way or another (I.e. asshole genius vs never did anything wrong in his life) is a peeve of mine. Personally
He's incredibly smart. He Knows he's incredibly smart. In the stories where he Doesn't catch whoever (and that's another thing, he Doesn't Always Win) it's usually because he underestimated them out of his own arrogance. He's a deeply kindhearted person with a very strong sense of justice. He can occasionally come across as rude. Sometimes he doesn't mean to, and sometimes it's just his general contempt for authority and class. Etc etc... in MY opinion it's much more interesting to take him as he canonically is
Adaptations always get this wrong, and I think it's because Holmes is Our Blorbo, and he was never Conan Doyle's. So ACD was fine with Holmes making mistakes (it makes a more interesting and dynamic narrative) but we're Not Okay with Holmes making mistakes bc he's our special little guy.
Hi I’m a fantasy writer and now I need to know what potatoes do to a society
They drastically increase peasant food security and social autonomy.
The main staple of medieval agriculture was grain–wheat, barley, oats, or rye. All that grain has to be harvested in a relatively short window, about a week or two. It has to be cut down (scythed), and stored in the field in a safe and effective way (stooked); then it has to be brought to a barn and vigorously beaten (threshed) to separate the grain from the stalks and the seed husks. It can be stored for a few weeks or months in this form before it spoils or loses nutritional value.
Then it has to be ground into flour. In the earlier middle ages, peasants could grind their own flour by hand using small querns, but landlords had realized that if they wanted to get more money out of their peasants, it was more effective for the entire village to have one large mill that everyone used. Peasants had to pay a fee to have their flour ground–and it might say something that there are practically no depictions of millers in medieval English literature in which the miller is not a corrupt thief.
Then the flour has to be processed to make most of its nutrients edible to humans, which ideally involves yeast–either it’s made into bread which takes hours to make every time (and often involves paying to use the village’s communal bread oven) and spoils within a few days, or it’s made into weak ale, which takes several weeks to make, but can keep for several months.
Potatoes, in comparison…
Potatoes have considerably more nutrients and calories than any similar crop available in medieval Europe–they beat turnips, carrots, parsnips, beets, or anything else all to heck. I don’t know if they beat wheat out for calories per acre, but practically…
When you dig a potato out of the ground (which you can do at any time within a span of several months), you can bury it in the ashes of a fire for an hour, or you can boil it in water for 20 minutes.
Then you eat it. Boom. Done. (I mean, if you’re not fussy, you could even eat them raw.)
You store the ones you don’t want right now in a root cellar and plant some of them in the spring to get between a fivefold and tenfold return on your crop.
Potatoes don’t just feed you–they free you. Grain-based agriculture relies on lots of people working together to get the work done in a very short length of time. It relies on common infrastructure that is outside the individual peasant’s control. The grain has to be brought to several different locations to be processed, and it can be seized or taxed at any of those points. It’s very open to exploitation.
TW: Genocide The Irish Potato Famine happened because the English colonizers of Ireland demanded rents and taxes that were paid in grain, and it ended up that you didn’t really get to keep much of the grain you grew. So the Irish farmed wheat in fields to pay the English, and then went home and ate potatoes from their gardens. And then, because they were eating only one specific breed of potatoes, a blight came through and wiped all their potatoes out, and then they starved. So English narratives about the potato famine tended to say “Oh yes, potato blight, very tragic,” and ignore the whole “The English were taking all the grain” aspect, but the subtext here is: Potatoes are much harder to tax or steal than grain.
So… yeah. I realize it’s very counterproductive to explain to everybody why I’m always like “OMG POTATO NO” when I wish I could just chill out and not care about this. But the social implications of the humble potato are rather dramatic.
#very cool! #reference #this is why taxes on china were collected in rice too #for the same grain reasons #bc the peasants just ate yams which were quick and easy to grow #but rice is backbreaking excruciating work that keeps the peasant population under control #and requires a collectivity and organization that the bureaucratic state can provide #ESPECIALLY since you need irrigation for rice even more than you do for wheat and stuff #and irrigation planning and upkeep is a huge part of a local bureaucratic official’s duties in ancient china #i had no idea about the miller stuff in medieval times that’s very fascinating #there’s a lot to be said for how monks were healthier #bc they got to grow vegetables #and they were allowed economic autonomy as a result #but there’s another essay for that (x)
I’m a little curious tho, how does just seeds from the grain go bad?
Like if they lose their nutritional value so quickly how do they get planted the next year?
Part of how medieval farmers avoided the problem of grain spoilage over the winter was to plant their grain crop in the late autumn, and let it start growing over the winter. Then they’d sow again in early spring. The winter crop might get blighted by the cold, or it might come up early; the spring crop might not sprout as much and would take longer, but it might help you out if your winter crop failed. They were kind of hedging their bets in an imperfect system.
Faster causes of of grain spoilage are visibly “something has ruined this grain”–insects, molds, or vermin get in at the grain, so your grain is much more likely to be eaten, pooped on, or rotten when you take it out of storage.
If you can get grain to survive those quicker methods, eventually grain can spoil simply by being exposed to air. After a few months the oil inside it oxidizes, which destroys a lot of its nutrients. You might get it to sprout six months later, but it’s a lot less nutritious if you eat it, and if you grow it the plants will get less of a head start before they have to rely on their root system to bring in nutrients from the soil.
Very occasionally, archeologists turn up ancient seeds that still sprout, but those seeds are usually exceptionally well preserved–for example, sealed in a jar in a tomb that was undisturbed for thousands of years and magically it never got hot or wet enough to spoil. But you can’t store large amounts of grain like that, partly because the simple existence of large amounts of grain will attract pests that will spoil it. The ones that survive are the one-in-a-million cases.
My absolute favourite under-acknowledged agricultural hazard is self-heating and thermal runaways.
If a plant isn’t actively growing it is, in fact, decomposing - the speed at which it’s doing that depends on things like external temperature, moisture, etc and can be anywhere from very slow to very fast.
Stuff that is decomposing produces heat.
Grain is an amazing insulator, so all of that heat gets trapped in the middle of the bin.
High heat encourages more decomp. Which produces more heat. Which produces more decomp. Which, eventually, can lead to a thermal runaway, in which the grain passes its ignition point and begins to smolder. (And if you’re really unlucky, that can spark a dust explosion.)
This is one of the reasons that grain farmers are Very Concerned about moisture content - high moisture content means faster decomposition, and thus faster spoilage but also the risk of your grain bin blowing up. Modern farmers carefully control the moisture content and air circulation of their stored grain to maximize quality and shelf life, while avoiding inconvenient explosions.
I don’t know that medieval farmers ever would have produced enough grain to be at risk of thermal runaway - but there are hazards to storing large amounts of grain even aside from pests and loss of nutritional value.
I feel almost certain I’ve read of medieval city fires that started in moldy haylofts and silos.
Thermal runaway can happen to hay as well. Hay stored indoors under a roof will last well as usable animal fodder for a long time, but only if it is VERY dry when put in, and a leak in the barn roof can cause a fire by this method– if the hay gets wet and starts to decompose, then it’ll catch itself on fire. This is still a problem in the modern day, and causes barn fires to this day.
But yes the importance of the potato cannot be overstated. Potatoes can become dangerous in storage too but this is much rarer.
A grain silo fire and subsequent explosion in my town killed two firefighters just two years ago. That shit still happens.
man the site that used to be full of people horny for the onceler now getting really hyped about tree law is some serious poetic irony
I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees!
And for some fucking reason, they speak legalese!!!
Imagine being the only person alive who can say this
zachsanomaiy
buzz aldrin and neil armstrong liked to do a thing where they’d tell unfunny jokes at parties about being on the moon and when people were confused they’d go “guess you had to have been there”
not enough secret gardens and hidden passageways and bookshelves that open to a mysterious library these days. get working on that girls.