You ever make an edit just- Of a photo of a historical person because of an Alternate History video? Yea, I did that, but don’t expect me to share it! Haha-
really love reading about the meanings of greek and roman names especially when you put them next to each other because ancient greek names are like “this is War-wounded, son of Griefbringer and grandson of The Hated One and Plague-Upon-His-People” while roman names are like “this is Onion McDrinksalot and he belongs to one of the most important families to ever live in rome”
Actually, ancient glass, having been rather neglected by archaeology for decades, is a pretty exciting topic in scholarship right now. The main thing is that glass persists–it’s very stable. After fabric rots and metal turns to a scrap of rust, there will lie a necklace, still scattered across a chest that itself has turned mostly to earth.
Bead typologies, for example (that is, the classification of different styles/shapes/decorative motifs/colors) can allow scholars to trace trade routes, as they study the distributions of different bead types over time and geography. Glass production is kinda industrial in nature, not like spinning or beer that make good cottage industries. It was often produced in one place, and then sold on to artisans elsewhere, and then the beads themselves were traded across entire continents.
Chemical analysis of the glass can do even more to trace routes, since different compositions and incidence of different mineral contaminants can allow archaeologists to trace glass production to individual sites, thousands of years after the fact. It’s dizzying, really.
The downside is that for a long time, archaeologists regarded beads as unimportant trinkets, and antiquities dealers understood that they were easy to take and easy to move. So an awful lot of the most exceptional beads we have from the distant past spent time in private collections or uncategorized drawers somewhere in a museum back room, so they’ve lost much of what we could have learned from their original provenance. Maybe we’ll be able to turn new analytical tools on some of these to reconstruct more of their past.
I like thinking about beautiful glass beads traveling around. I don’t know why, but they feel more “alive” to me when compared to spices, silk…. And I keep imagining they look like Murano glass.
And they traveled through generations, through continents, through cultures. From Rome to Scandinavia. From Saxony to China. They decorated emperors and sorceresses and little girls with little graves. And they are FULL of all those lives.
I think it’s extremely funny that protestants call themselves “Christians” as opposed to “Catholics” as to imply that Catholics aren’t “Real Christians.”
Like not to defend the Catholic Church but hearing protestants say that smug nerd shit makes me want to bully them.
me, a Jew, looking at two photos of Catholics and Protestants respectively: “they’re the same picture.”
Heres how I keep track:
Catholics: robes and pointy churches
Protestants: ones that want to build a third temple for apocalypse reasons
What the everloving FUCK are you talking about? Third temple?? Apocalypse???
Look, if you’re not american you might not know how protestantism works over here. For most of our nations history, upwards of 70% of us have been Protestant. That’s recently plummeted down to around 35% but it’s a whole thing.
The overwhelming majority of American protestants are whats called Evangelical. To oversimplify, the goal of evangelism is to convert as many people as they can to Christianity before the apocalypse comes. One of the triggers for the apocalypse as detailed in the book of revelations is the construction of the third temple in Jerusalem. This is a significant concern among parts of our government, and effects our foreign policy in the middle east.
I’m sorry your evangelicals are PROTESTANTS??? Aren’t they surely really their own thing by now??? I’m just comparing like, a country Vicar to some massive televised congregation singing nonsense and speaking in tongues like how
That’s what happens when you take all of the worst, most puritan, most conservative country vicars, put them on a boat, and you ship them across the Atlantic to a prison colony called New England.
If you ever need to wonder why America is like that ™️, remember that the spiritual underpinning of the country is an anti-intellectual cult that considered misery a sign of devotion, abhorred both natural and scientific medicine, and reinforced the authority of group patriarchs by decreeing that everything that wasn’t for their personal profit was an ultimate evil worthy of torture or death.
Is it any wonder then that a significant portion of their electorate now vehemently denies so much about reality, and circles the wagons around an ever expanding cast of madmen and grifters who sell them a version of events where they are always right? Anyone who disagrees with them is not simply expressing a different, perhaps more reasoned point of view, and is instead a communist/globalist/degenerate/working for the literal devil
The cultural mechanisms that caused the Salem witch trials never went away, they just propagated through the population to the point where antisemitic propaganda from the dark ages is now a deciding factor in who gets to control the world’s largest stockpile if nukes
when two musicians sing into the same microphone and lean in very close to each other… like omg are you guys gonna kiss now to relieve the homoerotic tension?
THIS IS NOT ABOUT ONE DIRECTION I DON’T KNOW WHO THIS “HARRY” PERSON IS GO WATCH BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND CLARENCE CLEMONS KISS ON STAGE RIGHT NOW
op is the only valid person i’ve ever met. everyone else needs to come to the light
Okay, but this is really important: Bruce Springsteen occupied this really weird place in music history. His songs were all from this pessimistic, nihilistic view of an America that had let him down:
Just like the anti-Vietnam War protest songs that we associate with the 1960s, or the early nihilism that spawned punk music in the 1970s. But he didn’t *sound* like a punk anarchist; he sounded like a country rock singer. When he released Born in the U.S.A. people completely misinterpreted (or possibly ignored) the lyrics in favor of the tone of the music.
Politicians used his music to promote their ‘Murica Yes! brand, and he had to literally explain that that was not what he was about. He’s over here asking when we’re going to have jobs and heathcare, not stanning the politicians who weren’t helping the people.
It was also kind of a big deal that he had an integrated band, because even as late as the 1980s music was still kind of segregated and MTV was straight up racist. They refused to play and promote black artists and then claimed that were no black artists in the first place. Michael Jackson’s record company had to threaten a boycott of their white artists to get MTV to play his Thrillervideo.
Plus, the first black/white interracial kiss on TV was in 1968 (OG Star Trek). Also it took us until the 70s to get sympathetic gay characters on screen, and the 90s to get gay characters to kiss onscreen. And all of those firsts were met with outrage.
So keep that in mind when you see Bruce Springsteen not just playing with an interracial band, but engaging in an interracial, gay kiss on stage repeatedly.
Passages from American Popular Music by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman
I used to think that Bruce and Clarence kissing onstage was exuberance, showmanship, and telling racist homophobes to fuck off. Like, they picked up a certain kind of audience and went “Racist homophobes? Not in our house!” And started the kissing then but then I actually looked it up and
It was a story where… we remade the city. We remade the city, shaping it into the kind of place where our friendship and our love for one another wouldn’t have been such an exceptional thing. - Bruce Springsteen
It wasn’t about showmanship or rejecting bigots or anything it was just. Damn right that was one of the loves of his life and damn right he was going to kiss him onstage
It gets me a little that Bruce has had a divorce, that he’s been married twice, but he loved Clarence for the rest of Clarence’s life and will presumably love him the rest of his own
Clemons said in one interview. “Bruce and I looked at each other and didn’t say anything, we just knew. We knew we were the missing links in each other’s lives. He was what I’d been searching for.” In another version of the story, Clemons says “He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love.”
I’m having some emotions about it!
“He was elemental in my life,“ Springsteen adds, “and losing him was like losing the rain.”
Not just! I love you pure and deep and true but! I am going to love you like that in front of the whole damn world!
We have fewer narratives about taking risks and making statements for platonic love rather than romantic and supposedly it would be easier to downplay this onstage than romance and! They refused! They fucking refused! In front of hundreds of thousands of people, over the course of years! In the spotlight, in word and deed, I love you!
might have made this post a couple years ago but how far back along the evolutionary tree do you have to go before it’s bestiality to have sex with early hominids? I think australopithecus is too far but that’s just an upper bound
actually wait since humans are largely differentiated from our ancestors by neotenous traits maybe it would be pedophilia for an australopithecus to have sex with a human. and bestiality the other way. might have just discovered a new kind of crime
i think everyone in the homo erectus group is close enough to not be bestiality, so australopithecus is exactly the most human-like being for whcih it would still be bestiality. i googled some pictures of homo ergaster and like…yeah thats a dude
Yeah, fucking lucy is definitely bestiality. Australopithecines are just upright apes and don’t share many traits with anatomically modern humans. It’s still a point of contention if we really know that Lucy and her kind were actually our ancestors. Additionally, I HAVE to ask my professors this question now and i can already feel their brain doing backflips to answer
My prof finally got back to me, a pretty non answer imo
only on tumblr to people ask questions like “would it be ethical to fuck my primate ancestor from 400,000 years ago?”
The answer is no, mainly because you’re almost defiantly related
the unexpected answer we all ignored: it’s not bestiality, but it isincest
So this post travelled from “is sex with homo habilis bestiality” to “sex with homo heidlebergensis is incest” and I’m now curious as to where it can go next. Presumably “sex with homo sapiens is SIN” which… does seem to be where a lot of tumblr posts go, come to think of it.
I’m not sure if fucking an australopithicus would necessarily be bestiality. I feel like it might be monsterfucking.
Great post everyone
I have some real bad news for anybody here whose criteria for “is it incest if I fuck them” is like “we share any genetic material” because oh boy, well
I heard that modern humans are all, at most, 50th cousins- there was a genetic bottleneck in human history because they think there was a mass extinction event which left only 10,000 of us alive. So, good job, humans.
So what you’re saying is it’s LESS incestuous to fuck an australopithicus than a homo sapiens
Guys, the important consideration is the one we cannot know without a time machine. if you ask an australopithecine if they want to fuck, do they say “Yes” in a language that some kind of universal translator can comprehend? Or do they say “EEEE eee eeee ooo eee?”
If they have language and can and do say yes, it’s monsterfucking. If they don’t, it’s bestiality.
Tumblr: As usual, tackling the important ethical issues of the day.
Can we just at least agree that, in this day and age, fucking most of them would be necrophilia?
when you think about it tho pliny the elder is kind of the funniest guy in the world like. he wrote all these books about natural history that he was wrong about where he confidently claims things like “some animals only have blood during certain parts of the year” and then when mt. vesuvius erupted and destroyed pompeii and herculaneum he said “oh mt vesuvius is exploding? let me go check it out” and then he died
the man was committed to science. he wasn’t very good at it. but he was committed
Hazel Scott playing two pianos at the same damn time with ease
Hazel Scott was a musical sorcerer and a civil rights hero. She:
was admitted to Julliard at 8.
was performing in top venues by 16.
pioneered “swinging the classics” and made the equivalent of a million dollars a year doing it.
was the first person of color to have their own national TV show.
went to Hollywood but refused to be cast as a “singing maid.” Demanded and got control over her casting, her wardrobe, and how footage featuring her was cut.
refused to perform in segregated venues and led charges for integration in several northern cities, notably Spokane.
She was brought down by the House Committee on Unamerican Activities, and has been largely forgotten. But she was a sorcerer, and a hero.
The amount of time black people have just flourished and been the absolute best at their skill, despite the suffocating oppression, abuse and murder of a racist rigged system, is astounding.
I’m reminded of Surya Bonaly, a black figure skater who was the first to include a BACK FLIP in her routine. The racist ass white judges, mad that a white person had not done this first, said her new move was illegal because she landed on both feet.
So Surya learned to land it with one foot.
You want some more black magic? Check out Katelyn Ohashi’s unbelievable 10/10 floor routine.
Fuck racists, fuck debbie-downers, fuck hope-swindlers. Believe in yourself.
A Queen
Hazel Scott is an astounding Queen and master musician all the while that white piano has color-reversed ivories
I’m watching that documentary “Before Stonewall” about gay history pre-1969, and uncovered something which I think is interesting.
The documentary includes a brief clip of a 1954 televised newscast about the rise of homosexuality. The host of the program interviewed psychologists, a police officer, and one “known homosexual”. The “known homosexual” is 22 years old. He identifies himself as Curtis White, which is a pseudonym; his name is actually Dale Olson.
So I tracked down the newscast. According to what I can find, Dale Olson may have been the first gay man to appear openly on television and defend his sexual orientation. He explains that there’s nothing wrong with him mentally and he’s never been arrested. When asked whether he’d take a cure if it existed, he says no. When asked whether his family knows he’s gay, he says that they didn’t up until tonight, but he guesses they’re going to find out, and he’ll probably be fired from his job as well. So of course the host is like …why are you doing this interview then? and Dale Olson, cool as cucumber pie, says “I think that this way I can be a little useful to someone besides myself.”
1954. 22 years old. Balls of pure titanium.
Despite the pseudonym, Dale’s boss did indeed recognize him from the TV program, and he was promptly fired the next day. He wrote into ONE magazine six months later to reassure readers that he had gotten a new job at a higher salary.
Curious about what became of him, I looked into his life a little further. It turns out that he ultimately became a very successful publicity agent. He promoted the Rocky movies and Superman.Not only that, but get this: Dale represented Rock Hudson, and he was the person who convinced him to disclose that he had AIDS! Hewrote the statement Rock read. And as we know, Rock Hudson’s disclosure had a very significant effect on the national conversation about AIDS in the U.S.
It appears that no one has made the connection between Dale Olson the publicity agent instrumental in the AIDS debate and Dale Olson the 22-year-old first openly gay man on TV. So I thought I’d make it. For Pride month, an unsung gay hero.
