Vampires today aren’t as bloodthirsty as they were centuries ago because the average modern human provides more nourishment than 5 sickly Victorian chimney sweepers combined. Woman who eats 3 square meals a day with dessert: are you okay? The vampire who bit her:
Some great tags lmao:
I drew a little something for the Hiveworks micro comic summer~
When I was 13 I spilled the juice of an ice pop into my laptops keyboard by accident and I tried to get it all out by flipping it upside down so it could drip out but I was dumb and didn’t know about taking keys off so I just let it fester and then in the summer the ants would live in the keyboard and I’d type really fast to kill them
this would be my worst nightmare i'd literally never touch my laptop again
This is so fucking funny
"Whenever somebody says ‘I'm going to break every bone in your body’ (I'm like) It'd be way too much work. But I could break half the bones in your body.”
- The Fix, Mentopolis, Episode 2
Also, I made something…
Figured that since Ozai looked so young in his portrait, that must mean it was made shortly after his coronation, or thereabouts, so applying that logic here, ZuZu stills looks young and handsome. The dragons, I know, that event was meant to be kept secret, but counter argument, this painting doesn’t necessarily say, “Hey, Dragons are still alive—here’s a map!” It’s just a bit of artsy-fartsy majestic embellishment. Also, I feel like Zuko might want to rebrand the Fire Nation, just a little, you know, after the 100 year war. So instead of just pure fire iconography, he brings things back to their roots, aka, the dragon. More dragon iconography!!! In this portrait, Zuko isn’t the one firebending, it’s the dragons, the first Firebenders. And in the meantime, he’s holding out a White Lotus. Now, I tried to use my Google Fu to find out if there was ever any symbol in Japan or Korea or China that meant “peace,” but my search results came up empty, so I figured that perhaps the lotus could become their version of, say, the olive branch. A discreet and tasteful way to include such a major part of the final battle while having a double meaning. Also, take note of the fact that he’s holding it with BOTH hands. In Japan, when one offers a gift, you always do so with both hands. And while I know it may look a little strange, Zuko towering over his friends—bro—this was always going to be Zuko’s Firelord portrait. He was always going to be the main focus. He just wanted to also include his friends and commemorate the day the war finally ended/his coronation. Anyway, that’s all for now… hope that wasn’t too much… and if anyone has any ideas for how to make it even better, pls let me know.
What [car] would you build a time machine out of?
an old VW Beetle because it wouldn't look out of place literally anywhere
Lancelot: Egad sire! Look at that. King Arthur: Hm, rare to see a VW Beetle this far north. Not impossible, mind.
Begging Staff to let me get a look at how the fuck does Tumblr's algorithm work
Look at my post boy
"If I’m being honest with myself, I’ve had less success with getting them to fall in love with writing. My students are brilliant in all kinds of different ways: They’re dancers and gamers, cooks and climbers, climate activists and fashion designers. There’s no reason to expect them all to be capable of exceptional fiction or poetry or essays. It’s disheartening to find a student so focused on the paper they will have to write when we finish a text, so consumed by anxiety at the prospect of how this essay will affect their chances of getting into college, that they miss out on the experience of reading some great work of art."
from
Hourglass.
#sundial has some noteworthy moving parts#like the sun#and the earth
this might be the oldest jpeg I can remember. had this bad boy saved to my computer when I was like 10
Well, time to call the expert
This thumbnail is everything
the court spymaster showing me a letter he intercepted from my least favorite vassal
no but the hilarious part is that you could easily use this on a fighting game stage and nobody would be the wiser
i show up to the set ready to shoot the scene wit my dick out like
FLAPPER FANNY SAYS, by American cartoonist, Ethel Hays (1892-1989).
The site is '12ft Ladder' found here:
Reblogging this on ALL my blogs because holy shit is it useful
if you insist that anyone making queer art must be openly, loudly queer, or else it is some form of faking/baiting/etc for clout, you are a bizarre individual and i do not like you
i am a trans woman but i do not believe that the experiences of being a trans woman is so fundamentally and intrinsically alien that, say, a straight cis person couldn't at least understand me on some level
the insistence that media written by an "outsider" cannot be beautifully understanding and profound just because they haven't lived a specific experience is absurd. people love toy story but absolutely no one is an actual toy. people love shit with wizards and dragons but no one can cast spells and no one lives in fantasy worlds. a fundamental aspect of fiction is learning to engage with the author's "what if?"s and insisting that every person to ever write a story must have been part of that story leads to a lot of boring fucking stories.
i guess for a personal example, Simon vs. the Homo-Sapien Agenda is a book written by a straight woman from my understanding. Apparently it gets a lot of flak online for some reason? In no way do I feel like that invalidates the comfort I got from reading a story about me, a closeted queer kid who's only expressions of my sexuality coming from online spaces at the time. The author may not have literally lived my experiences, but it was the first time I read a book and went "oh my god, that's me" on the level I felt when I read that book all in one night. Insisting that the queer experience is SO alien and different that there's no possibility someone unlike us could EVER understand us is just a way to prevent people from ever attempting to understand and empathize in the first place.
i believe the person who wrote that book was forced to come out of the closet as bisexual due to the harassment they got from people doing exactly what you described in the original post
Unrealistic polymath genius: has six PhDs.
Realistic polymath genius: just has the one set of degrees, but their bachelor’s, their master’s, and their doctorate are each in a different field, and they’d be happy to explain – at great length – how the three relate to one another.
@cellarspider It’s you.
OKAY SO
My undergraduate degree was in Medieval Studies.
My professional masters degree was in Bioinformatics.
My current PhD studies are in Mammalian Genetics, emphasizing the overall physical structure of the genome.
The PhD and masters are fairly easy to relate to each other: Bioinformatics is a field that develops software and computational methods for examining and understanding biological data. Modern genetics often relies on people with these skills–while many labs can still focus intently on the workings of a single gene, if you want to understand how that gene interacts with the world, you can start generating a lot of data. A LOT. More than it would ever be feasible to process manually.
So, having a background in bioinformatics allows me to focus my work not on single genes, but on how the physical structures formed by DNA affects how genes are used. There’s 3 billion letters of DNA in the human or mouse genome, with thousands of genes, with thousands of mutations my project has cataloged, and tens of thousands of structural components to analyze along side them. If you were to randomly test each and every one of those three types of data against each other to blindly search for interactions, I calculated you’d have to run 371 trillion comparisons. My job started by trying to figure out how the fuck to pare that down to something manageable with the computing power I have, and I’m hopefully about to publish something damn cool on what I found in the process.
So, that’s genetics and bioinformatics. Sure, those fit together logically.
Medieval Studies, tho
That’s where things get interesting. The professors at my university were very careful to teach you about the idea of the “historical lens”. When you read an old text or look at a painting, you’re viewing the subject matter through the lens of your own experiences and presuppositions about the world, and about the time period you’re studying. The person who wrote that text or painted that painting had their own lens, shaped by very different circumstances. Their natural focus is not going to align with your own, and you have to be aware of that. When you start forming ideas about your object of study, you have to ask yourself, “am I seeing what the creator of this piece intended to convey, or am I making assumptions based off of what I want to see?”
In essence, the core of what was taught in that Medieval Studies program was how to think about your own thinking.
And that is so fucking important for good science. “Am I drawing logical conclusions that are supported by the data, or am I just seeing this because I want to see it? Is there some test I can do to check if I’m wrong?”
It’s not easy. Sometimes it can be really uncomfortable, in fact. But it leads to more and better results in the long run, because those moments of self-reflection help uncover possibilities that you missed before.
…And that’s without getting into the seminar paper I wrote on the medieval understanding and treatment of head trauma, as a case study in the medieval period’s contributions to the development of science and technology. Because that was also a thing.
Hello, I’d like everyone to meet one of the most interesting people I know, also Spider please tell everyone about the Medieval Head Trauma paper because it’s fascinating and hilarious.
oh my gosh coming from gallus that’s saying something, I’m flattered
OKAY SO ABOUT THE MEDIEVAL HEAD TRAUMA
This post contains Thor’s migraines, Arthurian knights spinning in circles, and the medicinal use of egg whites on your brain. CW for mentions of medical gore and aggressive head bonks, obvs. Also, this is the result of undergraduate research, and should not be considered comprehensive. If you know more, throw it at me. If you have a correction, I will happily take it! And if you can remember the title of that one book I found once in my university library called something like “Head Trauma in World Myths and Legends”, TELL ME. I can’t fucking find the thing, but I swear it exists.
Also heck my life, Tumblr ate the first attempt at this post. Always write your long drafts on a more stable platform, guys
So. Depending on where and when you lived in western medieval Europe, you might have a very different relationship with the constellation of injuries falling under the category of head trauma. These injuries were either mysterious and beyond the realm of healing, a weird side effect of people not dying so often, or a comprehensible problem that sometimes could be treated by medical and surgical intervention.
A great example of head trauma as mysterious scourge comes from Norse mythology. To cruelly TL;DR a surprisingly hilarious little myth, Thor’s giant-smacking escapades result in a piece of flint getting stuck in his skull. Neither he, nor Sif, nor a witch they call up can remove it. The witch almost manages it, but Thor distracts her at a critical moment, so her magic fails. The myth ends with a moral to the audience: don’t throw your flint tools around, or you’ll give Thor a migraine. Yes, really.
(personal side note- somebody must be throwing hella flint around today, fuck)
In this story, head trauma is just something you have to live with. Magic might be able to help you, but it failed even Thor, so don’t expect better results yourself. And we do have skulls throughout European history that show evidence of lots of people living for years with untreated skull fractures, though with a higher risk of premature death. (One source here, from Denmark, which mixes in some early modern skeletons as well.)
Now, that myth fits the time and place it originated, which is true of stories in general. But one thing you can do in comparative literary analysis is look at the variations between tellings of common stories. And one great mine for this is Arthurian legend. King Arthur and His Circle Bros were popular subjects throughout the British Isles and France for centuries, which one can use to analyze the values, morals and world views of their storytellers.
And also, what happened when you got bonked on the head. See, each storyteller might have their own first-hand experiences with battle, or they’d have patrons who they wanted to flatter or entertain by incorporating Based-On-A-Shocking-True-Story details into the stories, or they were just paying attention to other storytellers at the time and seeing which action tropes were popular.
So, the early Arthurian treatment of head trauma can be summed up in three words: bonk means death.
But after the late 12th century (which admittedly is where we get a lot of our stories from), head trauma starts to become survivable. And sometimes, it’s weird.
Men’s brains swim like water, and they might fall off their horses. If they’re not mounted, they might run around in circles and then fall down. What changed?
The bonk protectors changed! the heaume or great helm style was developed, which is more likely to stay on and protect the head from any angle, though it’s vulnerable to transferring the force of downward blows into the head, neck and shoulders. With more people surviving blows to the head, that means more concussions and traumatic brain injury, and that’s reflected in the stories.
But what about medical textbooks? Well, it probably won’t surprise many to know that western European medical manuals sucked SO MUCH ASS for centuries. The reason why is a rant for another time (and I CAN AND I WILL RANT ABOUT IT), but there was light at the end of the tunnel.
While Western Europe lost almost all Greek medical scholarship and condensed the Latin texts down to near-gibberish, the Eastern Roman Empire had preserved those texts, and the Islamic world had expanded greatly upon that scholarship with their own research and experimentation. During the Islamic Golden Age, traders from Italy brought some Greek and Arabic texts back from the Muslim world, and translations were made into Latin. This gave Italian academics access to a more vibrant and systemic tradition of medical science.
Enter Rogerius, AKA Rogerius Salernitanus, AKA Roger Frugard, AKA Roger Frugardi, AKA Roggerio Frugardo, AKA Rüdiger Frutgard and AKA Roggerio dei Frugardi (jfc dude), a surgeon from Salerno (unknown-1195). While surgery would remain a low status profession for centuries, Rogerius produced a well-organized and clearly written surgical manual, the Practica Chirurgiae. This book, I want to stress, is not flawless, especially when it comes to pharmaceuticals. Digging into the German Commission E Monographs (started in the 1970s, which systematized scientifically proven effects of traditional herbal medicines), Rogerius’ poultices for wounds do fuck-all for healing, but would probably be fantastic for an upset stomach if you ate them.
HOWEVER, the surgical contents of the manual show that either he was working with fantastic written texts at the University of Salerno, and probably had some good first-hand experience with treating head trauma.
The text provides some practical information on diagnosing the kinds of head injuries a surgeon could actually treat–while concussion was still something you’d just have to deal with, a bonk on the head can have lots of other bad effects. You can develop a build-up of fluid within the skull (cerebral edema), or skull fracture that can press pieces of bone down onto the brain. Or you could have tears in the scalp, or worse, the protective layer of tissue around the brain itself (the dura mater).
Rogerius lists ways to diagnose edema and closed skull fractures (where the scalp isn’t broken but the skull is). He describes surgical techniques that are still the basis of many in use today, for incisions and suturing of the scalp, removal of bone fragments and foreign objects, and relieving pressure on the brain from edema. Yes, that last one involves trepanning, AKA drilling a hole in the skull, and yes, it can actually be life-saving in this particular case.
And there’s one bit he talks about which I find outrageously cool. See, wound healing has always been one of the biggest problems in medicine, and it was an absolute matter of life and death before the advent of sterile medical technique. Sure, you might be able to clean a wound with some alcohol-based mixture, but that would be disastrous for wounds that pierce through the skull. This probably goes without saying, but pouring alcohol on your brain is very, very bad.
So, what the fuck do you do when you have a patient with a gnarly head wound that exposes the dura mater, or the brain itself? Water isn’t clean, alcohol is potentially deadly. How do you wash the wound clean?
Get an egg.
Fresh eggs straight from the chicken are sterile capsules that protect the developing embryo. They’re full of liquid-y stuff you can use as a wash! BUT. Rogerius specifically lists egg whites for cleaning head injuries, not yolks. I don’t have any scholarship on why, beyond some interviews with a doctor in my family, but our best guess was that the cholesterol in the yolks could be harmful to the brain and dura mater. But the egg whites by themselves? They’re almost pure protein, including some anti-microbial factors that help defend the embryo in case germs sneak in.
Overall, it’s a brilliant solution to a thorny aspect of wound care, in a time before germ theory, and centuries before Europe would collectively remember you need to sterilize your medical tools. Fucking! Fresh egg whites! It’s fantastic.
So that’s the tl;dr on medieval understanding and treatment of head trauma. A mixture of mystery, medieval pop culture, and medical science. This is the kind of practical history that I found most engaging to study–not lists of kings, not court politics, not wars, but a small, strange little corner of medical history that tells you more about the life and times of people through the ages.
And that’s what a lot of modern historical research is actually like! Find a tiny little subject that sparks joy catches your interest, and dive in. I ended up jumping over entirely to biological sciences in my post-grad research, but I don’t regret a minute of my undergrad. History in all its crumbly little details is awesome.
It’s the medieval head injury paper! Summarized beautifully for those of us that don’t have the concentration to wade through original sources!
But yeah, it really clear how the skillset of “look at the data to see what it says, not what you hope it says” is extremely applicable across art, history, science and math and that’s why every real genius I’ve met is interested in a wide variety of topics- the thing you’re actually interested in is the act of learning.
I found this post again, so everyone please congratulate
Upon completion of their PhD and their descent into Baldur’s Gate 3 Madness so I’ve been learning a lot about videogames design and narrative construction im visual media from them too.
