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@thiswasachoice

Three days ago our paper about the history and impact of paleo topics in comics come out! In this richly illustrated publication we try to show how this specific art form can be utilized in #scicom

Dinosaurs have a long history in comics and like paleoart was influenced by paleontology so were comincs by paleoart. Resulting in many cases of - what we would now call - plagiarism but also a popularization of paleontological subjects...

A big plus for comics is their ability to weave scientific content into a narrative. Without being specifically educational they can introduce people to new concept and looks of deep time...

We can only scratch the surface here but as people who listened to Iacovos Le Du's #paleostreamcon talk will know: narratives and emotions are important and we sense an untapped potential here that thankfully is slowly being explored. We show several old and also very new examples!

In the second part of our paper we look at how comics can do this, using our very own product, the Europasaurus graphic novel. We show what work influenced us, how we structured the book and how we balanced story and scientific content.

We also go into compositions and how we tell stories with relatively few panels, to guide the eye and inform the reader about what's going on

This also gives you a good look at our actual process that involved weekly Skype calls and lots of doodling but I think the composition of our team was also important. ;)

We end with thoughts and ideas on outreach, providing examples like our animated book chapters and exhibitions we organized or took part in.

Our paper is open access and can be found on Geoscience communications

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“failed state” is another term that gets thrown around casually to mean “government whose policies i think are bad,” and if anything that one bugs me more, because the central example of a failed state tends to be Somalia–you know, the country without a state apparatus for around twenty years. a “failed state” is when you can’t even issue passports and currency anymore, not when conservatives succeed in passing harsh spending cuts.

I think it’s fair to say that America is a “failing” state, in that we have had repeated times over the past few decades where the government could not issue passports or currency.

And one of the major political parties is doing this on purpose.

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i do not think it is fair to say that at all!

temporary government shutdowns over the debt ceiling are bad–obviously!–but they’re bad in the vein of normal-but-high political dysfunction in developed countries, like the time Belgium went without a new government for 541 days. when the US does pass debt ceiling bills, federal departments resume functioning from where they left off, and de facto control of the US state territory is not affected in any way. taxes are still collected, and essential functions are still carried out even while many federal employees are furloughed.

in somalia, the central government collapsed due to civil war, armed militias took over huge swathes of the country, and the northern part seceded and formed its own state, which is still de facto independent. yugoslavia collapsed into some of the worst ethnic and sectarian conflict since ww2, involving widespread atrocities and genocide, ultimately breaking up into seven new states. the central african republic has been experiencing war on and off since 2004, and about half the country by land area is not controlled by the central government.

these cases are not remotely the same.

From where I’m sitting, the USA almost started a civil war on 6 January 2021.

The USA is experiencing democratic backsliding.

We will not be surprised if the USA actually does have a monumental collapse in the next 10-15 years.

It’s not a failed state, but it is failing.

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the USA almost started a civil war on 6 January 2021 

hard to talk about counterfactuals, but given how embarrassing the showing was on january 6, i feel like “almost the start of a second civil war” is absurd. the u.s. has had far worse bouts of political violence that didn’t escalate anywhere near to civil war territory. “the political system is experiencing major shocks and problems” is not automatically equivalent to “the political system is on the brink of collapse.”

political division and political violence were way worse in the 1960s, for instance, but we don’t remember it as the time the US almost had a second civil war; we remember it as turbulent–which it was!–but not catastrophic. i think right now a lot of people who were not alive in the 1960s are freaked out by what seems like high levels of tension and political violence, but they’re high mostly by recent standards. they were much higher in major episodes of u.s. history like the labor movement in the 1910s and 1920s, the civil rights and anti-war movements in the 60s, or, certainly, the runup to the actual civil war in the 1850s.

when your best reference point is the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, which were periods of relatively strong political consensus and very little political violence, sure, i can see how january 6 might feel like the threshold of cataclysm. but objectively speaking, it’s nowhere close. it sucks! it’s bad! i’m not saying it couldn’t have been much worse, even! but i think saying it could have started a second civil war is frankly looney tunes banana pants, the kind of thing you can only think if you have genuinely read very little about, like. the harper’s ferry raid. or bleeding kansas. or the ludlow massacre. or the battle of matewan. or the 1965 watts riots.

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

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Might I add:

The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child

The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship

The adventures of a space roomba

Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)

I don’t know a snappy description but the my nemesis cynthia story certainly lives in my head

I am in love with you /p

WAIT REBLOG THIS VERSION INSTEAD

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CLADISTICS ruined my life

yall joke but this is actually a serious conundrun with cladistic-based classification

The choice is this: 

Birds are reptiles 

Or crocodilians (and probably turtles) ARENT 

That’s it, that’s the choice 

What if Bird and reptiles are two different things that came from the same thing

Nope 

Because you can’t group (lizards, snakes, tuatara, turtles, crocodilians) without also including (birds) 

So if you don’t want to include birds in reptiles then you have to leave out some things we’ve called reptiles 

birds are dinosaurs though, full stop. we’ve already defined what a dinosaur is and it includes birds. but reptiles isn’t really defined so much as thrown against a wall angrily. 

But don’t turtles and alligators have more in common with modern reptiles than modern birds have in common with modern reptiles? I’m not trying to contradict, I’m trying to understand. Mammals and reptiles have a common ancestor as well, but we do not make them the same group.

It’s not about having things in common. It’s about common ancestry, which is how we classify animals in light of extinct species, which defy trait-based classification. 

And, the common ancestor of [lizards, snakes, tuatara, turtles, crocodilians] by definition is also the common ancestor of birds. It is NOT the common ancestor of mammals. 

So, either we decide that Tuatara Lizards and Snakes are the only reptiles, or we include birds as reptiles. Or we just decide reptiles are no longer a thing. 

don’t throw reptiles against the wall? please? some of them are small and delicate. you could hurt them.

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Basically, unless we’re maybe talking massive horizontal gene transfer, everything is still part of the group that came before it. 

You are technically a fish.

IIRC the fish thing is so frustrating that scientists have decided fish is just not real cladistic grouping at all

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hey could we go back please to the bit where the closest relative of Birds is Crocodiles? bc I am alarmed

Well, technically they’re equally-closely related to crocodiles, alligators, gharials and tomistomas. As archosaurs, they’re all descended from small reptiles that looked something like this 

The two main groups of archosaurs are the Pseudosuchia, or crocodile-line archosaurs, and the Ornithodira, or bird-line archosaurs. Both groups were massively diverse in prehistory, with the Pseudosuchia dominating most land-based niches in the Triassic, and the Ornithodira, especially the dinosaurs, doing the same during the Jurassic and Cretaceous. However, most of them have been wiped out due to the Triassic and Cretaceous mass extinctions, leaving them each with only one surviving clade: Aves, the true birds, and Crocodylia, the semiaquatic, ambush predators like crocs and gators. 

This entire post sums up everything we’re not allowed to mention in our Vertebrata classes because the last time someone started that argument they had to break up a fistfight.

I’m just hung up on the humans evolving from fish comment.

Like, we evolved from tiny tree-climbing squirrels. To the best of our knowledge.

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theclockworkjules

…which evolved from tiny tree-climbing reptiles

…which evolved from amphibians

…which evolved from fish.

*runs in ten minutes late with a plucked chicken* BEHOLD A LIZARD

you could have left the feathers on this time tbh

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winneganfake

It was already plucked. They just STOLE IT from philosophy 101.

Every turn on this post has been a left, but somehow it hasn’t hit itself, and instead just spiralled outwards like some Ancient Greco-Roman floor design, enveloping taxonomy Tumblr in chaos.

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May I recommend the book “why fish don’t exist” by Lulu Miller

May I recommend

the book “why fish don’t exist”

by Lulu Miller

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

reminder that even if the world health organization says covid is over, it isnt.

Turns out it was just a bunch of news organizations completely misrepresenting what the WHO said. COVID isn't over. They're shifting from "world health emergency" to long term strategies because major countries failed to even contain it because they were so adamant to send everybody back to work as fast as possible. WHO's announcement that COVID is no longer a global health emergency isnt something to celebrate. It shows that everyone (governments and anti-maskers/vaxxers, mostly) collectively failed to care enough.

of course. news organizations took this and rolled with it, misleading everyone into believing COVID is no longer anything to worry about. exactly what they said Not To Fucking Do

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no fucking way

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I thought crocs were so dumb, they simply tried to eat anything that caught their eye. Now they're learning?

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What's next?!?

Nah Crocodilians (the group containing all 23 extant species of crocodile, aligator, caiman etc) are actually really smart, they're just a PAIN IN THE ASS to study in the wild because they're stealthy, don't eat or move that often relative to mammals, and are largely nocturnal. That said, we've found evidence of:

  • Coordinated Group Hunting across many species of crocodilian- AKA, hunting like a pack of wolves.
  • Advanced Parental Care- we knew for a long time that American alligators and Gharials built nests and mothers kept their young close, but GPS tracking has shown that the father(s) also typically stuck around and brought mom kills, but the young stay inside the territory of their parents for 3-5 years, until they reach sexual maturity.
  • Nile crocodiles dig enormous and surprisingly complex burrows up to 40 feet deep that they share with other crocodiles- parents and children, but also adult siblings and Unrelated "Friends"- crocs that are frequently seen close together outside as well, but do not appear to be mates. many of these burrows are decades, if not centuries old, are actively maintained, and passed down through generations.
  • Amazon Caiman (a type of alligator) recognize individual humans (possibly by voice), and alter their behavior around them based on past interactions. Some of them become quite playful with humans they've had positive interactions with in the past, and others hold "grudges" against specific humans for decades.
  • All Crocodilians engage in all major types of play behavior- Locomotor play (engaging in a behavior because it brings positive stimulation), playing with toys (Sticks, leaves, carcass, and in one paper, a floating squeaky toy that had gotten into the Bayou) and social play (Playing with other individuals). Several species, but notable Caiman and Alligators also Play with animals outside their species- young caiman have been observed playing with Amazon Giant River Otters, and Alligators playing with sharks and dolphings off the US Gulf coast. Play behavior is associated with a high degree of intelligence in animals.
  • Male Saltwater crocodiles in Australia employ a variety of complex mating strategies, including offering courtship gifts (tailored to the preferences of individual females), sucking up to larger males to get better introductions to females (A Long-Term strategy that pays dividends- while the beta males don't typically mate the first two or three years they try it, the ones that stick with the strategy mate with more females as they age), and doing "Off years" where they pass on the fighting and displaying and just nap and get fat instead- another strategy that pays off long-term: Big Males that engage in Off-Years mated more in On years, and lived longer overall, for a larger lifetime genetic impact.
  • Many zoos have had success in training captive crocodilians to do "tricks"- mostly pose behaviors that let keepers examine, vaccinate or medically treat the animal with minimal stress on all sides. But they're also apparently good at "Sit up" and "Roll over".
  • And as far as "Trying to eat anything that caught their eye"- pretty much all carnivores, but especially crocodilians, make pretty complex calculations on whether or not to pursue something as prey based on, but not limited to: How hungry they are, what the future prospects for food are based on the weather/season/behavior of their prey/how many other carnivores are competing with them, the likelihood of injury (either in the process of hunting, or from the prey itself), and whether the effort expended is going to be worth the reward (based on projected strategies, how full eating something like that made them last time, and if they're going to suffer weird consequences for it).

,

What was the point in animal planet airing those incredibly convincing fake documentaries about dragons and mermaids

If the aim was to convince incredibly gullible children that they were real it worked on me

I distinctly remember watching these and being like why is no one talking about this this is INSANE and then my mom had to explain that it’s fake

Sorry for believing animal planet. The channel that tells me facts about animals 99.9% of the time

One of my favorite tricks for designing alien species/cultures is to take a real animal with an interesting lifecycle and think about what that biology would translate to if they had human intelligence

Example: silk moths as a base species

Because the moths themselves don’t eat and only live long enough to mate and then starve to death, the entire culture is made up of children and adolescents. The older children raise the younger ones, with families being made up of hatchmates from different years.

Because molts and eventual transformation into a short lived adult happen on a set schedule, families have a cycle— when your oldest set of siblings cocoon to become adults, you wait at the mating grounds and try to adopt their newborns after they pass. If that fails, you take any ‘orphans’ you can find.

Because death and birth are nearly simultaneous, they have a religion based around reincarnation, and infants with markings similar to a parent are often given their name. Claiming the offspring of a beloved family member is vitally important, because you want to be able to protect their soul and keep them close.

Because it’s hard to track the offspring of your male family members, there are sometimes major fights when a family sees an infant with familiar markings in another family’s clutch.

Between mating seasons, their culture is extremely food-oriented, because everyone is growing and silkworms eat nigh constantly. They spend most of their lives outdoors but sleep and shelter from bad weather in large family dwellings made from wood and the remains of the silk cocoons of prior generations.

everyone is really vibing with the silkworm aliens I see

On an intellectual level i know that early 20th century megacity concepts are deeply impractical and would cause triple the harm they purported to solve, but damn if the art doesn’t make me yearn to visit.

Hugh Harriss made some of my favorites.

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It’s Hugh Ferriss, check out The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929). Some of his work is speculative, some of it is just artistic renderings of existing (or proposed) buildings for advertising purposes, some of it is educational, and a lot of it is New York. All of it is dope.

I love Hugh Ferriss cityscapes so much. I grew up with Batman: The Animated Series, and it’s responsible for a lot, and this whole vibe, the massive, monolithic, Art Deco cityscape, Hugh Ferriss is the epitome of it. Gotham, Metropolis, Rapture, New Capenna. Any fantasy dieselpunk art deco city you’ve ever seen. This guy, along with the original Metropolis, was one of the first. 

I especially love that last image from the first post:

I have it saved to most of my computers so I can use it as a desktop occasionally. This tiny human figure standing back in awe of this cityscape view that absolutely dwarfs them, this mass of concrete and light that looks like a dawn beyond them. 

And, yes, this is from an early 20th century dream of a future that would have been incredibly bad for us, but the imagery. This is the city as a mass, as an entity, as a pillar to the heavens, as a radiance, as a dawn. The solidity of it. These are cities as the epitome of humanity’s ability to say ‘I built this’. I made this mountain, and I made it radiant. I put this thing here and it is so solid that no wrath of any god could strike this babel down.

(They wouldn’t have needed to. We’d never have gotten them up, and if we had they’d have slowly killed us in and of themselves. But damn they look good)

I really love his stuff …

with thread and fabric being very very labour-intensive in pre-industrial times I wonder how much of the cost of a ship was in its rigging. even a small sail is a lot of fabric compared to clothes, and it has to be quite high-quality. and even a small boat needs a decent amount of good rope.

from what little I've read, it seems like it, I read an article ages ago estimating the cost of manufacturing textiles (helping a friend write a Viking romance novel) that stated that time spent on sailcloth spinning, weaving and sewing was the primary limit on Viking ship production. Can't find it now and I was not the most rigorous researcher back then, but I can find this, which estimates a single sail worth of fabric costing 270g of silver before sewing even begins.

Some very good information in there! Here's a more or less direct answer to my question in the op:

According to Anna Nørgård, from the Viking Ship museum in Roskilde, a wool 61 square metre sail, woven in a twill with 8 threads in warp and 5 threads in weft, would take c. 4,148 hours to spin and weave. The preparation of the yarn, warping, and set-up would add another 830 hours. Altogether, it would take her c. 5,000 hours, or 416 days to make such a sail if she would work twelve hours a day (Nørgård 2016). However, if weaving in a tabby the spinning and weaving would only take c. 3,477 hours, excluding the 830 hours needed for preparation of the fibres, warping and set-up.

But this is only a small fraction of the textiles needed, because the 33 Vikings crewing the ship need clothes, and in the North Sea, quite a lot of them:

Apart from the clothes they wore, it is likely that each crewmember brought at least one extra set of clothes on a journey. Based on archaeological analyses of textiles in combination with experimental archaeology, it has been estimated that each crewmember had a minimum of clothes representing more than 6.5 kg of raw materials, or 30.5 square metres of fabric, which would have taken 3,343 hours to spin and weave (Table 2). Furthermore, well-made nautical clothing, possible of leather, and sleeping covers would have been necessary for survival. If all crewmembers would have brought the same amount of clothes and outfits, this equated to 215 kg of raw material, requiring more than 11,000 [sic] spinning and weaving hours (Table 3).

(There's a 0 missing in the last sentence of this paragraph, it should be 33*3343 ≈ 110,000 spinning and weaving hours; Table 3 has the correct number.)

This was also striking:

The need for raw material was still substantial; c. 331 kg of raw material equates to wool from 331 sheep. According to modern calculations these sheep would need 33.1 hectares of well-fertilised pasture (10 sheep/hectare (Bender Jørgensen 2012; Fag undated). Even if the Viking Age sheep were half the size of modern sheep, and only used half the pasture, more than 16.5 hectares were needed (20 sheep/hectare).

This fits kinda nicely with one of the conclusions from Bret Devereaux's series on textiles, which led me to this question. With minimum comfort meaning one new full set of (Roman) clothes per year, Devereaux concludes (emphasis his):

Using the average of Aldrete and Fischer’s figures (erring a little high to account for Fischer’s lack of preparation time) we might figure something like 2,683 hours to produce our 220,000cm² minimum requirements. Our upper ‘comfort’ level might be three times this or 8,049 hours. [...] Put into working terms, the basic clothing of our six person farming family requires 7.35 labor hours per day, every day of the year. Our ‘comfort’ level requires 22.05 hours (obviously not done by one person). [...] A lone woman could, if she spun in almost every spare minute of her day, on her own keep a small family clothed in minimum comfort

Another way to put this, I guess, is that one woman working her hardest can keep herself and one other person comfortably clothed. Or, it takes half a year for one woman to comfortably clothe one person for a whole year. That makes a lot of sense, if you think about it: fibre and textile work is overwhelmingly done by women and overwhelmingly what women do in these societies, and women are half of all people.

With 7.35 hour working days it takes ≈ 680 working days to make the sail from before. So even at half a woman-year of labour per sailor, clothing the crew of 33 is substantially more work than making the sail. But actually these Vikings are bringing ≈ 450 woman-days of clothes each, so it's an even bigger difference. That's almost 2.5 times more than the comfortably clothed Roman; Devereaux's estimate is 66 m² for comfort for a Roman family of six, so 11 m² per person, less than the 30 m² per Viking in Andersson Strand by the same factor.

I mean, obviously the Vikings need to be dressed much more heavily travelling the North Sea than someone farming near the Mediterranean does. But with the estimates in the previous paragraph, if Mediterranean sailors dress roughly like people on land, clothing the crew dominates rigging the ship in terms of textile work.

This does make me wonder what minimum/comfortable standards of clothing looked like in Scandinavia compared to in the Mediterranean... in the colder climate it's going to take more to stay warm, it's as simple as that.

I think someone commented on Devereaux series on making iron that behind every Roman legionary there were a dozen woodcutters fuelling the furnaces and forges that make his sword. I guess the upshot of all this is that behind every Viking raider there are three women keeping him warm and dry.

(Hmm. I'd still want to know how much woodworking labour goes into the ship. Andersson Strand doesn't say anything about ropes for rigging either. But man, pre-industrial textile production SUCKS, the crew's clothes probably come out the vast majority anyway.)

Ah, this NYT article makes references to the idea I mentioned earlier, that time to make sails is the main limit on manufacturing

In reality, from start to finish, it took longer to make a Viking sail than to build a Viking ship. So precious was a sail that one of the Icelandic sagas records how a hero wept when his was stolen. Simply spinning wool into enough thread to weave a single sail required more than a year’s work, the equivalent of about 385 eight-hour days. King Canute, who ruled a North Sea empire in the 11th century, had a fleet comprising about a million square meters of sailcloth. For the spinning alone, those sails represented the equivalent of 10,000 work years.

Tracking down that claim leads me to this 2012 article on the introduction of sails to Scandinavia, which I think must be the thing I read way back then (it's behind a login wall so I've rehosted it here)

Their number includes the time spent to weave the cloth as well, they estimate 20 hours to weave one square meter of sailcloth putting the number at 50 000 work years to spin and weave all 1 million square meters of the 11th century fleet.

Experiments indicate that a good spinner can produce 30- 50 m yarn per hour using spindle and distaff. For a wool sail of 90 square metres, that would mean 4.800 hours of spinning – two and a half modern working years.2 As regards weaving on the warp-weighted loom commonly used in the Viking Age, weaver Anna Nørgaard inserts on average 25 wefts per hour. It takes 20 hours to weave one metre of sailcloth, and she estimates that it would take almost 3.200 hours to make the 157 metres needed for such as sail. The total consumption of time for spinning and weaving is 8.000 hours or four and a half modern working years. This does not include the time needed for harvesting the wool, or finishing processes such as fulling (Nørgård 1999, 8). Still, it would make the one million square metres of the Viking fleet represent some 50.000 years of presumably women’s labour.

This one is really good, detailed tables on resource estimates including land usage, time, and materials for sails as well as bedding and clothing.

This one is pissing me off because there’s cheese in it. I’m not sure there’s a period of Chinese dynastic history wherein the type of dudes likely to be having rap battles would also have been familiar with hard cheese. There’d be political fucking implications to that. Fermented dairy products were often seen as uncivilized foods, and were associated in particular with northern “barbarian” cuisine (see: <lactose intolerance in Eurasia>), whereas competitive poetry was viewed as a civilized and scholarly pastime appropriate to civil servants and courtiers. Mentioning cheese in a verse which also references the heavens could be seen as an effort to legitimize the presence of these dangerous foreign elements within Chinese society, and, thus, as seditious. If dairy were to become a common theme in rap battles, it might be viewed as a dangerous sign of poor morale and defeatist thinking among the literati. “Emperor, we have got to move the capital to the south. The scholars are rapping about cheese. It’s all falling apart.”

Now this is a fucking post

Oh this! 

I learned to speak Chinese with a Dongbei accent because I used to live not far from the OP (which definitely gets me weird looks as a white lady originally from Kansas.) Native Mandarin speakers are often SO confused by my accent. But yes...Taiwanese speakers do sound really melodic and beautiful. And I sound like I’m angry shouting all the time. 

In Germany and Austria, the Swiss are well-known for speaking Scweizerdeutsch. For reasons unknown, they use diminutive forms of a ton of nouns. The result is that Swiss people speaking German sound like if you found a city in Appalachia where it was 100% normal to baby-talk to everyone, all the time.

On the flip side, no one can understand a goddamn thing coming out of a Viennese person's mouth.

The dialect variance within the German language is insane at times

This is not exactly a new thing tho - here have a video from 1973 about it:

Beautiful addition, thank you so much!!

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The Swedes came up with the expression first and I assume the Danes thought that sounded really scary and decided to name the most stressful time of day after it.

In all of Scandinavia twilight is seen as the most magical time of day. That's why Scandinavian horror and fantasy is sometimes called Scandinavian Twilight. It's not named after the Twilight books/movies but rather Scandinavian folklore.

Support this comic on Patreon.

that's cool every hour of day should have its own animal

*Sees SpIns*

I have some news for you about the Japanese method of timekeeping

Fun hair stuff bc I’m sad ab what ASOIAF could have given us:

Is this not a fancy Baratheon woman who can’t wear her hair down bc the wind at storms end won’t allow it

Give the Dothraki cool beads and headwear to denote status!! Give them little additions to their culture!!

Let the northern women cover their heads their ears are COLD George

The Braavosi should wear shells and pearls bc they live by the sea god damnit

Targ girl coded and Lannister maiden pilled

Fun hair stuff continued!

The Dornish are absolutely gagged over intricate golden headdresses

The ironborn lace their hair with metal rings, sometimes bc they paid the iron price for the metal and want to show it off (Asha) sometimes bc they’re metrosexuals who think it looks swag (Theon)

I think slick bumps and loops are all the rage in Yi Ti. The higher the loop or bump, the higher the status. Also delicate pins and hair accessories made of precious stones and metals

The Qartheen obviously like to show off their wealth, but I also think they took a page from Yi Ti’s book and kept the styles fancy but still sleek

And the Tyroshi not only enjoy their crazy colors but also LIVE for extreme opulent wild hairstyles no I will not take any criticism

MORE!!!

I think the Riverlanders love a braid crown bc they need to keep it clean in all the rain and mud. But they make it pretty with ribbons and the flowers that grow on the Trident, especially on their weddings

The Summer Islanders def love color and adorning their hair, especially in all their ceremonies and celebrations. Feathers, flowers, ribbons, and especially wooden beads made from the Goldenheart trees

Ladies in the vale love being extra so they def wear big headpieces and hats with long flowing veils. They also cover their hair bc the wind is not kind in the Eyrie.

Okay so I think the westerlands and the reach have really similar styles bc women want to show off their pretty hair and their wealth so they do this half up half down business and decorate with pearls and fine fabrics. This is also what king’s landing looks like bc Margaery and Cersei are trendsetters

The free folk don’t have many options, so they essentially always wear a fur hood of some kind bc live in permanent ice lands. But I do think they add ornamentation with bone beads and antlers and stuff like that

A 1,000-Year-Old Viking Iron Hoard Discovered In Norway

A woman in Norway cleaned her parents’ home, she found 32 iron ingots dating to the Viking or early Middle Ages.

Grete Margot Sørum was cleaning her parents’ Valdres home. She discovered dozens of Viking-age artifacts while sorting through items in the basement, according to an April 19 news release from the Innlandet County Municipality.

This is the first find of such iron ingots in a hundred years in Valdres. According to the press release, archaeologists determined that the artifacts were iron ingots from the Viking or early Middle Ages. The objects have a hole in one end and resemble long-handled spatulas in shape.

The metal objects all had roughly the same size and weight (about 50 grams), leading experts to believe they might have been a form of payment.

Archaeologists say the hole at the end of the artifacts shows they were tied together in a bundle.

A woman cleaning her parents’ basement in Valdres stumbled on 32 millennium-old iron ingots, likely used as a payment system, experts said. 

The release said the artifacts had been around the house since the 1980s. Experts think someone might have buried the thousand years of artifacts to hide them for later but never returned, the release said.

The Bergen royal road (the old royal road between Oslo and Bergen) runs just below where Grete Margot Sørum’s father found the iron bars in Aurdal in Valdres.

Iron was a very important commodity in the Viking Age, used for weapons and for travel caps and rivets for boat building. In all the large valleys in southern Norway and in areas in Trøndelag, people took iron from the bogs in the Iron Age and the Middle Ages.

There are few written sources about iron mining in Valdres. But it was probably a specialized job, which perhaps the farmers and the “little kings” owned. Later, in the middle ages, it was governed to a greater extent by the state and the church.

By Oğuz Büyükyıldırım.

A 50-kilogram anvil floats perfectly on the surface of mercury, because the density of the steel from which it is made is almost half the density of mercury.

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damn that shit is light lmfao

Fun fact! Many lighthouses with especially large fresnel lenses would have huge fucking tubs of liquid mercury in the lantern room because it’s a super easy way to make these giant lenses rotate quickly!

Shockingly, however, spending most of your time in close proximity to 500 pounds of liquid mercury is Not Great For One’s Health and tons of lighthouse keepers started to go crazy from the whole. Mercury poisoning thing. Hence why there are a lot of “haunted” lighthouses or wickies that lose it and maybe do a bit of manslaughter.

Anyway, people saw a bunch of lighthouse keepers go crazy and get sick and got empirical evidence that it was in fact related to the 500 pound mercury bath they have to visit every day and then they decided nah it’s fine actually. So we’ve kept the liquid mercury thing and I think that’s beautiful

I love how it is so dense it does not "wet" the anvil, the drops all run and leave with nothing behind them unlike water, oil, sauce... it's super satisfying it's like in cartoons

After seeing this post I am no longer taking criticism for my mercury storage practices.

This is the hot coffee case all over again isn’t it

No it isn't. The hot coffee case involved an elderly woman getting 3rd degree burns (where your skin is cooked off of your body) because a McDonalds served coffee at just about boiling, despite having many complaints about burns in the past. Also, the woman suing only asked for medical costs, the jury slapped a huge punitive judgement on top of that.

Yeah that’s what I mean. Like is this case really what’s happening in this headline or a corporate smear campaign

The TL;DR (i read the the thing on classaction.org)

  • Kraft says their single serve cups are ready in 3.5 minutes total. True, it take 3.5 minutes to microwave the cup, but there's more prep time and the instructions call for more ingredients, such as water. There's also the additional time it take to stir in the cheese powder. So in actuality, it could take closer to 5-6 minutes (estimating here).
  • Because Kraft is selling the speed and convenience of the single serve, it's sold at a premium (11 bucks for an 8 pack, excluding tax, which yowza!), which is much higher than similar products that, in reality, would take as much time to prepare as the Velveeta.
  • Like I can't speak for everyone but I see those Velveeta cups at the grocery store and they're more expensive than even the other Kraft single serves, and you just know it's not because of the Velveeta powder.
  • This is a class action lawsuit. The plaintiff isn't getting all 5 million, it'll go to everyone who is *COPD with chronic bronchitis ad voice* entitled to financial compensation.
  • The firm representing the plaintiff specializes in cases like this, which also includes cases such as Frito-Lay lying about not using real lime in their "hint of lime" Tostito chips (so they can charge more), Kellogg lying about how much fruit they (don't) put in their fruit pop-tarts in spite of the advertising (so they can charge more), the use of synthetic vanilla in premium goods claiming to have real vanilla (so they can charge more), and, oh yeah, arsenic in baby food.
  • If you're wondering why this matters, consider that this isn't a MRE. It needs prep, not just in time but in additional ingredients, which would be damned inconvenient at best if, say, you didn't have access to water. This, and the time issue, is, in a very real sense, false advertising. It stands to reason that Kraft made a decent profit off this false advertising.
  • In a similar vein (see: "hint of lime" chips not having lime but a vaguely defined "natural flavoring"), it's about truth in the advertised product, and that the company knew it was lying to its customers. Like if Special K isn't putting real blueberries in its cereal (just pineapple and blue dye), but advertising the cereal as having those blueberries, what happens if a kid allergic to pineapple, or allergic to the dye used, eats the cereal and has a reaction? What if there's no water to make the damn macaroni and cheese?
  • Cases like this give the more serious cases (ARSENIC. BABY FOOD.) more of a legal foothold.
  • You can't really say "burn corporations to the ground" or "lol kill jeff bezos" and in that same breath call the plaintiff a stupid Karen or whatever for calling out the obvious bullshit Kraft is pulling here. Those single serve cups are freaking expensive for what you get and are sold at a markup because they promise a convenience that they don't actually deliver on.