#fascinating

doubleca5t:

nnausicaaa:

cisphobiccommunistopinions:

jakemorph:

This is the best AITA because on the actual matter at hand I’d say he’s kinda right (ish), $4900 for a week of work is really good money and they can always celebrate later. He should have obviously talked it over with her first but still. What makes him an asshole (or just like, a really really weird person) is every other detail that is tangentially mentioned.

This man is not necessarily THE asshole, but he is definitely AN asshole

crithir:

obsessed with these gay little douyin skits

pleasesmenoend:

i never post these here and that’s a mistake

joshsundquist:

Why there are more left amputees than right

I wonder if it’s the opposite in the UK?

nyctalaea:

sherlock-overflow-error:

featuresofinterest:

fun fact for you all: bram stoker started writing dracula just weeks after oscar wilde’s conviction…….we really are in it now

Dracula! And Oscar Wilde! YES! *drops papers everywhere*

I’ll just casually drop this here–it’s a long (and good) read, but essentially, the author argues that:

• Stoker wrote Dracula as a direct reaction to the Wilde trials
• Many of Dracula’s characteristics actually echo Wilde as described to the trials, and Dracula’s lifestyle resembles an exaggerated version of precautions to hide homosexuality
• Stoker is basically the pro-closeted 1890s alternative to Wilde’s flamboyancy, and that comes out in how he portrays Dracula and Jonathan Harker
• Like if you look deeper into Stoker’s letters to Whitman, he’s practically obsessed with feeling “naturally secretive” and “reticent”
  
• (Also he and Wilde had some weird personal rivalry going on, since Stoker married Wilde’s definitely-not-straight ex-fiancee, though later they were friendly…there’s a lot to unpack here)
• So, arguably, Dracula was Stoker’s way of apologizing for his silence during Wilde’s trials.

Some highlights:

Wilde’s trial had such a profound effect on Stoker precisely because it fed Stoker’s pre-existing obsession with secrecy, making Stoker retrospectively exaggerate the secrecy in his own writings on male love.

It is difficult, Stoker admits, to speak openly about “so private a matter” as desire. In carefully calibrated language, Stoker asks forgiveness from those who might see that his silence is a sin-to those few nameless souls who know his secret affinity with Wilde.

Since Dracula is a dreamlike projection of Wilde’s traumatic trial, Stoker elaborated and distorted the evidence that the prosecutor used to convict Wilde. In particular, the conditions of secrecy necessary for nineteenth-century homosexual life–nocturnal visits, shrouded windows, no servants–become ominous emblems of Count Dracula’s evil.

Dracula…represents not so much Oscar Wilde as the complex of fears, desires, secrecies, repressions, and punishments that Wilde’s name evoked in 1895. Dracula is Wilde-as-threat, a complex cultural construction not to be confused with the historical individual Oscar Wilde.

tl;dr:

• Stoker is actually too repressed to function
• Oscar Wilde (especially his trials) absolutely influenced Stoker
• Dracula gay

If anyone wants to read a very well-written and surprisingly entertaining account on pretty much everything and everyone Stoker was influenced by, ESPECIALLY his connection with Wilde and Whitman, do yourself a favour and read “Something in the Blood” by David J. Skal. It’s the most thorough recent account on everything that made Dracula and the onlly one that doesn’t shy away from all the points in the above post (Also, it won the Stoker award, which is basically the Pulitzer for horror(-related) literature - There’s a joke in there somewhere, but my brain’s too tired to craft it rn

bisexualbaker:

capricorn-0mnikorn:

earlgraytay:

santaclausdeadindian:

mechafauna:

Images that make you enter a fugue state

Surrender to cars?

Jesus Christ, when was the last time a swede did anything useful?

What the fuck those streets were before cars, fucking playgrounds and parks with waterslides?

Or did people commute on them, on the level of whatever technology they were on, the vere purpose they were built for since the first city?

I’m trying my best not to automatically dislike artists, I really do, but sometimes I just wish I could send them milking cows or shoveling gravel.

@santaclausdeadindian “What the fuck were those streets before cars, fucking playgrounds?”

Yes, actually.

[description: a black-and-white photo from the 1900s of a group of girls in pinafores standing in the middle of the street; according to the website I found it on, this is a ‘street dance’. The girls are talking to each other in small groups. end description.]

Children used to play in the street all the time. And for most of recorded history, that was relatively safe. Running into someone on foot is not going to kill a child, and horses - let alone carriages- were relatively rare.

Streets used to be public spaces. People would hang out and talk in the middle of the road, or set up shop with a little cart at the side of the road. “Right of way” used to mean “your right to take up space on the street, because you are a free citizen and free citizens get to use the road.”

[description: a black-and-white historical photo of two children in the middle of a mostly empty street. One child is sitting in a wagon, and the other child is standing, ready to pull it. End description.]

It wasn’t until the 19th century that it became common enough for your average joe to own horses that it was unsafe for kids to play in the street (and they still did anyway!). And it wasn’t until the early 20th century that people got cleared off of the street in favour of cars- before then, people and horses and carriages had to share the road, and carriages had to go at the same pace as whatever was around them.

We laugh at the insanely low speed limits of the 1910s and 1920s - really, cars can only go at 3 mph?- but they were there for a reason, and that reason was “to keep the roads safe for horses and pedestrians”. If cars could go at top speeds on city roads, they’d only be safe for cars, and people couldn’t use their public spaces anymore. But thanks to lobbying by the auto industry and a whoooole lot of PR spin, that’s exactly what happened.

I’m going to leave you with two pictures. The first is Mulberry Street in NYC, according to wikipedia, in 1900. The second is Mulberry Street today.

[Description: two photos of city streets. The first photo is sepia-toned, from the 1900s. It shows a city street full of people and carriages. The foreground of the photo is taken up by a group of vegetable sellers, and a group of men and young children standing beside them looking at the camera. The second photo is a modern photo of the same street. It is a heavily decorated tourist district, but most of the street is taken up by cars. The sidewalks are crowded with pedestrians, but they’re shoved off to the side. End description.]

Little Italy is a touristdistrict. It is meantto be walkable so that tourists can browse and look at all the little restaurants and window-shop. And yet 75% of this picture is taken up by a fucking car canal, and people- the people this street was built for - are shoved off to the side, so as not to get in the way.

People got forced off the road in favour of cars. People got forced out of public space in favour of cars.

And if that doesn’t piss you off…

Here’s a video I watched last year that goes into the history of laws against jaywalking: “Should Jaywalking be legal?”

 (Uploaded to YouTube 12 November, 2020. Auto-generated captions. The last 80 seconds is dedicated to a sponsorship ad).

Here’s an excerpt from the caption transcript (lightly edited for readability):

“jaywalking” was a term in law invented by automobile
interests 100 years ago to clear the
streets of pedestrians
and cement the dominance of the
automobile on our roadways.
Today jaywalking is sometimes used as a
pretense for racial profiling
and unjust policing. Each of these is
reason enough to get rid of jaywalking
entirely

Also: this is an environmental issue. Remember, getting rid of automobile supremacy in cities would make those cities more walkable. Making cities more walkable would also make them more sustainable

One of the problems with ADHD is that sometimes you get to the end of a long post, remember that there are described images in the middle, and completely forget that the very first post that the rest are responding to is an undescribed image. (That, or the description is in alt text and invisible to you now.)

Anyway:

[Image: In this colored pencil drawing, the streets of a city have been replaced with yawning chasms; narrow planks of wood replace pedestrian crosswalks. Text reads, “This illustration shows how much public space we’ve surrendered to cars (made by Swedish artist Karl Jilg.” End ID.]

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys:

invisible-goats:

jezebelgoldstone:

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys:

invisible-goats:

Youtube recommended video: can my hair handle a month without shampoo?

Me, who hasn’t used shampoo for 6 years: well golly gee, I dunno

IKR

What irritates me about these things - and those journalists who write articles on it going ‘Can I not wash my hair for a month?’ - is that almost all of them miss the point and none of them transition it properly, so they end up with a dirty and horrendously matted fleece and conclude that it’s just not possible, and like

I am now three years without shampoo. My hair, which I always wanted to grow super long my whole life but could never get past bra strap length without it snapping off, is now to my tail bone and thick and glossy. I no longer get scalp issues like dandruff. It curls almost without frizz. It’s great.

But I did have to transition it??! I didn’t just stop washing it Jesus Christ

Would either of you mind explaining how? I’ve tried before and I’ve tried looking it up, but the most useful things I’ve ever been able to find are along the lines of “replace your shampoo with this super awesome super expensive non-shampoo-thing” or something

Couple of reblogs/replies have asked, so I hope Elanor doesn’t mind me replying on this version!

Firstly, the following applies only to hair types 1-3. If you have coily/kinky hair, get advice from someone who knows type 4 hair, which I do not know that the same methods would work for (I have 2b, though it looks a little straighter as it’s weighed down by the thickness/length)

Secondly, I’m afraid you will need to buy something. Specifically a boar bristle/synthetic equivalent hairbrush (these can range from Very Expensive for all natural recognised brand to a tenner nylon version from Boots. I just bought a new one for £20 which is boar bristle and bamboo with some longer, stiffer nylon bristles. I recommend getting one with both kinds of bristles if your hair is thick). If you have type 2-3 hair, you will also need a means of detangling. A wide-toothed comb is ideal, preferably wood to reduce static

Brush your hair morning and evening with the bristle brush. This cleans out grime and redistributes oils along the length of your hair, and gradually reduce how often you wash your hair, going from (idr how often people shampoo? biweekly?) to weekly to every other week, a couple of months at a time. Your hair needs to learn it doesn’t have to produce as much sebum as it has been doing. You may find you still need to condition. You can do this with normal conditioner, hair masks, or coconut oil. There will be a bit of a process finding out what works best for your hair. Use the detangler before brushing

Honestly at this point the only time I deliberately get my hair wet is when I dye it, and I think it’s looking pretty good, don’t you? (And I’ve stopped getting split ends)

(ignore the frizz, we’re at 80% humidity here. If you still want it to smell nice rather than just of hair you can add in some non-alcohol-based perfume. Hair perfume is great and lasts ages because it evaporates slower that when on your skin. I like to just put a touch on my ends every few days)

I shall add to this to provide an Alternative Method!

I use a method known as CGM (Curly Girl Method - it’s a deeply stupid name). The bare bones of it is that you cut out shampoo entirely, and stop using any conditioners that contain either silicones or drying substances (those can include certain alcohols, for example). Hilariously, this often means you actually use much cheaper conditioners, because the lack of fancy substances brings the price down. In the UK, Sainsbury’s own brand apple conditioner works, for example, and costs less than £1 a bottle. You can find lists of CGM friendly products wherever you live online, though.

Anyway, yeah, let’s say your normal routine would be to wash with shampoo, condition, and brush every day.

With CGM, you wash with a combination of Increased Elbow Grease and conditioner. It’s called cowashing. You put the conditioner exclusively on your roots, and then scrub with your fingertips for a bit. Basically, it’s mechanical cleaning instead of chemical - like scrubbing food off a plate, using a bit of washing up liquid to lubricate, rather than dunking the plate into a vat of acid to burn off the food. Your scrubbing removes the oil and dirt from your hair, and the conditioner both reduces damage by making it slippery and also collects all that dirt. Then you completely rinse it clear.

After that, depending on your hair type, you do a conditioning round. My husband has straight hair so doesn’t bother. I have curly hair, so at this point I switch to something more nourishing like Faith In Nature and whack that in.

Crucially, this is literally the only point I brush it. Soaking wet, full of conditioner. And I very gently detangle with a wide toothed comb, or even my fingers.

(Then I scrunch it to start the curls forming, rinse it all out while still scrunching, and then scrunch in a gel; but that’s not relevant to the question, it’s just how my routine goes.)

Anyway, the lack of sulphides and other harsh cleansers means your scalp stops panicking that it’s being dried out, and it ‘transitions’ to a state where it no longer over-produces sebum (this is also why it helps with dandruff for most people - no more cycle of harsh drying followed by clogged pores). For me, this transition phase lasted a week. It felt a bit greasy during this time, but after that week, it was fine. That’s fairly normal. Some people can rarely take up to six weeks, but most are like me. My husband had a delayed transition during his third week, but again, it lasted… I think maybe 10 days?

There was also a second, longer transition phase where the silicones that had coated my hair for years slowly fucked off, which meant the strands could slowly start taking in water again. Once that happened I got really good hair, here’s a pic from a year ago for reference:

It’s longer again now, as I say. ‘Tis a mane.

In any case, a friend of mine followed this method for a year, and then transitioned to using water only, no products. She now uses a bristle brush as described above. Nothing more.

That’s the bare basics! There is more to it, especially if you’re specifically doing it for curls, which are an art and a science. But that’s how you transition your hair to no shampoo.

wrote-my-own-deliverance:

hotmolasses:

mauve-moth:

stomatium:

just-shower-thoughts:

Blind people must save a lot on electricity.

They do actually!

I had a blind professor, last semester, and I swung through his office to make up an exam. It was a while before I knew he was in there because he was sitting with the lights off. I finally went in, apologized, and took the exam by the light of a nearby window (which was fine). Forty-five minutes into dead silence he panicked and yelled in this booming voiced, “WAIT, YOU CAN SEE!!!” before diving across his desk to turn on the lights. I’m sure he was embarrassed but I thought it was endearing and it highlighted a large aspect of disabled life that I hadn’t previously considered.

Sort of relatedly I once had professor who was deaf, but she had learned to read lips and speak so she could communicate easily with hearing people who didn’t know sign language. One day she had gotten off topic and was talking a little about her personal life, so that one of the students said “Oh, I know, I grew up in Brooklyn too.” 

She stared at him for a long time and then said “How do you know I’m from Brooklyn?”

And he said “You have a Brooklyn accent.”

She said “I do?” and the whole class nodded, and then she burst out laughing and said “I had no idea!  The school where I learned to speak was in Brooklyn.  I learned by moving my mouth and tongue the way my teachers did.  So I guess it makes sense that I have their accent, I just never thought about it.”

My moms a sign language interpreter, and she’s signed with people from all over the US. According to her, when she signs with people from the south they sign with a “drawl.” They have slower hand movements and exaggerate certain parts of the sign. People from the Midwest sign very fast and people from the south sign very slow.

So we were at a restaurant once and my mom started interpreting for someone who was trying to order and she was like “oh you’re from the south!”

And they were like “how did you know that?”

And she said “you sign with a drawl.” And they were really surprised that it came through that much.

It’s really interesting that even when not speaking verbally accents and heritage come through.

dogdayafternoon1975:

“The ending resists closure in yet another way. It extends beyond the text, beyond the frame of the screen within the consciousness of the spectator and beyond that, within the cultural consciousness of the nation, so that it enjoys a mythic life of its own.

Audience reaction to the ending embedded the image of a flying car forever suspended in the popular imagination. The filmic apparatus participates in the creation of this myth through its freeze frame and fade to white; it eschews the fade to black signifying death and closure.”

“Gender, Genre, and Myth in ‘Thelma and Louise’”by Glenn Man

Film Criticism, Fall 1993, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Fall 1993), pp. 36-53

(Film Analysis Hours)

(x)

dzamie:

maid-of-timey-wimey:

keynes-fetlife-mutual:

toasthaste:

ghostpalmtechnique:

ghostpalmtechnique:

This morning I watched a blue heron fly majestically into the pond across the street, only to be immediately shown by an irate goose that pecking order is not necessarily proportional to wingspan.

This is an interesting article, btw:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/11/28/bird-feeder-pecking-order/

Miller, Greig and their collaborators fed the first wave of that data into algorithms to condense a web of relationships into a simple rank. That rank not only reflects the relationship of frequent combatant pairs such as the house sparrow and the blue jay, but also accurately predicts which bird will dominate when two distant species meet for the first time.

oh my god yes this is good. get a bunch of little old ladies who love to sit and watch the bird feeder to send in their observations any time the birds scuffle and use those absolute REAMS of data to literally make a Bird Tier List. this rules. they even found some rock-paper-scissors setups between specific bird species…

also the very last line knocked the wind outta me

@birdblogwhichisforbirds

Is there any plan to do this for mammals? This morning in our yard we saw a woodchuck retreat from a rabbit, who was then in turn chased off by an angry chipmunk.

Here’s the bird tier list, by the way:

with an image ID, too, because I like typing bird names

steelphoto:

einarshadow:

imsobadatnicknames:

prismatic-bell:

anthropology-corner:

aleclikescake:

pomrania:

xlr82h8:

lustingforyoursouls:

petermorwood:

rowantheexplorer:

thefloatingstone:

thefloatingstone:

cheeseanonioncrisps:

meganwest:

forumgamer:

madamehearthwitch:

ayellowbirds:

dr-archeville:

wetwareproblem:

melusineloriginale:

brunhiddensmusings:

jeneelestrange:

incorrectdiscworldquotes:

tilthat:

TIL of the “Tiffany Problem”. Tiffany is a medieval name—short for Theophania—from the 12th century. Authors can’t use it in historical or fantasy fiction, however, because the name looks too modern. This is an example of how reality is sometimes too unrealistic.

viareddit.com

“Authors can’t use it in fantasy fiction, eh? We’ll see about that…”

–Terry Pratchett, probably

Try to implement anything but a conservative’s sixth grade education level of medieval or Victorian times and you will butt into this. all. the. time. 

There was a literaly fad in the 1890′s for nipple rings for all genders(and NO, it was NOT under the mistaken belief that it would help breastfeeding–there’s LOTS of doctors’ writing at the time telling people to STOP and that they thought it would ruin the breast’s ability to breastfeed well, etc). It was straight up because the Victorians were freaks, okay
Imagine trying to make a Victorian character with nipple rings. IMAGINE THE ACCUSATIONS OF GROSS HISTORICAL INACCURACY

people just really, REALLY have entrenched ideas of what people in the past were like

tell them the vikings were clean, had a complex democratic legal system, respected women, had freeform rap battles, and had child support payments? theyd call you a liar

tell them that chopsticks became popular in china during the bronze age because street food vendors were all the rage and they wanted to have disposable eating utensils? theyll say youre making that up

tell them native americans had a trade network stretching from canada to peru and built sacred mounds bigger then the pyramids of giza? you are some SJW twisting facts

ancient egypt had circular saws, debt cards, and eye surgery? are you high?

our misconception of medieval peasants being illiterate and living in poverty in one room mud huts being their own creation as part of a century long tax aversion scam? you stole that from the game of thrones reject bin

iron age india had stone telescopes, air conditioning, and the number 0 along with all ‘arabic’ numbers including algebra and calculus? i understand some of those words.

romans had accurate maps detailing vacation travel times along with a star rating for hotels along the way, fast food restaurants, swiss army knives, black soldiers in brittany, traded with china, and that soldiers wrote thank-you notes when their parents sent them underwear in the mail? but they thought the earth was flat!

ancient bronze age mesopotamia had pedantic complaints sent to merchants about crappy goods, comedic performances, and transgender/nobinary representation? what are you smoking?

Adding my personal favorite: people in medieval Europe took baths.

India had ways of processing iron for weatherproofing that we still can’t match 1600 years later.

Truth is stranger than fiction, and history is weirder than you think.

this post gets better every time it comes across my dash. To provide some more: those Romans also had vending machines, automated puppet plays, doors that opened to the sound of horns when you lit a fire in front of them, and working steam engines. All invented by one dude, Hero of Alexandria.

People generally want to think that the Dark Ages is the sum of the entire history of the world.

Charlemagne had a frigging PET ELEPHANT, sent as a present by the Caliph over in Bahgdad.

Emperor Frederick II. (around 1200) crossed the Alps with his own private zoo, including giraffes, in order to impress and dazzle his Germanic subjects, and it frigging worked. He also introduced legislation that a doctor was not allowed to also sell medicine (to prevent obvious charlatanery), but had to write a recipe for an apothecary to then redeem, which is a system STILL IN USE in Germany and other countries. He spoke several language, was tolerant towards his Muslim subjects in southern Italy (you read that correctly) and was opposed to trial by combat on reasons of it being unfair and irrational. Oh, and he wrote a book on ornithology. 

Ancient Persians knew how to make frozen desserts even in summer, thus basically being the inventors of ice cream.

Medieval monks had an efficient way of testing for pregnacy (by pouring the urine of a woman on a toad, which, if the woman was pregnant, would change colour…).

One of my favorite things to do is to send posts like this to my brother, a historian. He had MANY potential additions to this thread, but my favorite:

My pet peeve is that everyone thinks that nobody traveled in the middle ages.

I have a letter from a monk at Ripoll, near Barcelona, sent to a monk in Fleury (Central France) asking that they return a book they had lent. The book was first obtained in Pavia (Italy). The monk wanted it back really fast because he hadn’t asked for permission from the librarian to loan it.

This was from around 1020. The more things change … 

The Ancient Egyptians had an efficient pregnancy test as well. They’d get a woman to wee on some barley and wheat seeds, and if they sprouted it would mean that she was pregnant.

There was a study done on this in 1936 and apparently it had a 70% accuracy rate, which isn’t a patch on modern pregnancy tests but is very impressive for a civillisation that hadn’t invented the wheel.

Stone age people took surprisingly good care of each other. There have been skeletons found of people (homo sapiens and neanderthal) with physical disabilities that would have prevented them from providing for themselves who still lived fairly long lives and were buried nicely. Because it turns out even prehistoric humans thought that people had a right to life whether or not they were ‘useful’.

They also had a primitive form of surgery that involved drilling holes in people’s skulls, we think to prevent migraines or something. Whatever it was, it must have worked at least slightly, because we’ve found skulls with multiple healed over patches, meaning that people survived this and then kept coming back.

Not to mention language. I don’t know why this in particular is so hard for people to grasp, but if you’re talking about homo sapiens then there is literally no reason to assume that their language wasn’t as complex and fluent as ours. For that matter, a lot of what we in Europe think of as ‘the stone age’ was happening at the same time as the Ancient Egyptians were building pyramids and having a whole civilisation and shit.

You might as well present them as speaking only in grunts.

There was a long held belief that most peasants were illiterate in the 1500s until literally schoolbooks from the 1500s were excavated in Russia of a 7 year old boy’s learning to read and write.

The the point where we actually have pieces of his writing where he GOT BORED and started drawing pictures about how big and brave he was and drew a picture of himself as a warrior AND wrote his friend (presumably also a 7 year old boy)’s name on it to show him “Hey look at this cool thing I wrote about me fighting a bear”

hold on. *gets up to pull my book from my shelf*

OK! The boy’s name was Onfim because he had to write his name on his spelling exercises. The city was called Novgorod and is the most ancient recorded Slavic city in Russian history. The message to his friend was “Greetings from Onfim to Danilo” and just because he was unsure if the pictures he drew on his spelling homework made sense, he labeled the creature he was fighting with “I am a wild beast!”

Before these types of writing were discovered it was thought that the peasant class was illiterate and that writing was ONLY for the church and the ruling class. But after finding these as well as THOUSANDS of other letters, it became clear even the lowest peasant class in this time period were not only litirate but taught writing and spelling as serious subjects to the point where 7 year old peasant children could read and write.

Oh and in a completely different time period in a completely different country there’s also this fucker.

It’s rusted and its box has rotted away because it was made around 86 BC. So here’s a replica that’s been made of what it use to look like

And here’s a cross section

It’s from Greece and like I said, it’s from roughly 86BC.

It’s a computer.

On the front it calculates with extraordinary accuracy the movement of planets, constellations, moons etc etc and can be used for everything from religious holidays and rites to navigation by ship. The back is used for keeping score in the Olympic games of the various competitors, their athletes and nations etc etc.

Another fun one is the fact that the Steam Engine was first invented in the first century AD, however since it was fueled by wood because it had not been discovered that coal could be used as fuel, it was more a parlor trick to show people because it would cost more to employ a slave to fuel the machine with wood than what power the machine gave.

But that doesn’t change the fact that the steam engine is over 2000 years old.

Oh and the 13th century Syrians had swords made of Damascus Steel and we have no idea how the steel was forged. There have been numerous attempts to replicate it and some have gotten close but still fail to match the durability and ability to stay sharp of the originals. Some individuals have claimed to have replicated the steel perfectly but none of them have been recognised by officials. So we still don’t know how to make these even with all our modern technology.

AND ANOTHER THING!!

The “People believed that the Earth is flat in the past” myth only became a “fact” that people believed in the 1800s. Every scientist since the ancient Greeks knew the world was round and there are even Bible passages referring to the Earth as round.

Quote from Historian Jeffrey Burton Russel:

“With Extraordinarily few exceptions, no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the 3rd century BC onward believed that the Earth was flat. The myth that people in the middle ages thought the Earth was flat appears to date from the 17th century as part of a campaign by Protestants against Catholic teachings. But it gained currency in the 19th century, thanks to inaccurate histories such as John William Draper’s “History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science” (1874)and Andrew Dickson White’s “History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom” (1896).

Atheists and agnostics championed the conflict thesis for their own purposes, but historical research gradually demonstrated that Draper and White had propagated more fantasy than fact in their efforts to prove that science and religion are locked in eternal conflict.”

end quote.

Also here’s a illustration from the 15th century from the book “On the Properties of Things” by Bartholomeus Anglicus, showing the Earth covered in buildings and spires

Here’s one from the 13th century, showing the 4 seasons on a spherical Earth

The comment about “we can’t do Damascus steel anymore” feels incorrect to me, but I don’t feel qualified to say why it feels incorrect. @petermorwood, this seems like a discussion in your wheelhouse?

IMO “We can’t do “real” Damascus steel any more” is correct.

There was a report some years ago that “the secret of Damascus Steel has been rediscovered”, but IIRC that was based more on analysis of historical examples to learn what made it special (carbon nanotubes etc.) rather than how to remake it.

There’s even a theory that “real” Damascus steel can neverbe made again because the source of its raw material - the particular iron ore, iron-bearing sand or whatever - has been exhausted or lost. You can’t make something properly if you can’t get the ingredients.

                                                  ————–

Writer note: “watered steel” is a term you sometimes see because of the way light reflects in swirls and ripples from the layers of the metal…

…though it can also be patterning like the grain in wood.

It’s good for fantasy writing because it doesn’t include the real-world name “Damascus”. Google searches also turn up layered steel, folded steel, wootz steel and pattern-welded steel, which aren’t different names for the same thing, nor synonyms for Damascus steel.

Watered silk is called that for the same reason…

…and it’s why Kipling wrote…

“It was Bagheera the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk.”

                                                 —————-

The term “Damascus steel” nowadays most often refers to knives, swords and jewellery (I’ve seen some very nice rings) that look like this…

…while “damask” is fabric with a pattern woven into it, like the lustre-on-matte finish of Irish damask linen.

…and “damascene” is a decorative gold or silver inlay treatment for metalwork, though I think it’s often used as a catch-all term for similar-but-different techniques like koftgari (Indo-Persian)…

…Niello (European / Asian)…

…and zogan (Japanese).

Get educated fools

Mega Post TL;DR

Humans we’rent idiots in the past you chronological snobs.

I mean, humans were TOTALLY idiots in the past, but they’re idiots in the present and they’ll be idiots in the future; “humans being idiots” doesn’t prevent them from coming up with useful and functional and cool things, it just means that they’ll use those things in stupid ways.

Imagine if we had compounded and collected our knowledge over the millennia, instead of two steps forward one step back, if we could hold onto out achievements and build on them, what world could we be living in.

Minor addition, Neanderthals buried their dead with care and love, we’ve found graves filled with flowers and seeds and gifts

Someone already covered that, but yes.

Not really. Someone mentioned stone-age humans burying their dead, but Neanderthals weren’t stone-age humans, they were an entirely separate species of hominid that briefly coexisted with stone-age humans before going extinct.

@deadcatwithaflamethrower

Re: Neaderthals maybe someone already said this—if so I didn’t check—but current research indicates the Neanderthals didn’t go extinct because of humans, and, more importantly, may never have been a separate species at all. Rather they may have been more of a subspecies, and instead of being “outcompeted” by humans in traditional evolutionary theory, they just interbred fairly widely together and their genetics live on in H. sapiens across the world today.