Adrastos

24 | Bi | தமிழ் | Academia | I don't know what this blog is anymore ✌️🤧

[astrangergivingthestrangewelcome]

I will never understand how normalized it is to put cameras in your home now. I can recognize some scenarios where it makes sense- if I had a stalker for example, but like. It would have to be That Big for me to consider it. People today use it to tell their kids it's time to stop playing video games and do homework like. Like?? I do not understand how you don't understand how harmful it is to raise kids with the sense they're always being watched like why does anyone under normal circumstances invite this into their home

[vnapologeticapathy]

it sickens me that there are so many men that simply never engage with anything made by women and they don't question it and they aren't questioned about it. they don't listen to music by women or read books written by women or watch movies written and directed by women or stop to look at paintings by women at museums and they're just allowed to go thru life never considering women as artists with no challenge or criticism whatsoever. meanwhile as a woman it's impossible to escape the male artistic point of view

[acheliosadrastos]

Is a World Without Suffering Just Eugenics?

[universalequalityisinevitable]

Robert Sapolsky about his study of the Keekorok baboon troop from National Geographic’s Stress: Portrait of a Killer.

[explorerrowan]

I deeply appreciate that this man looks exactly what I expect a man who has spent the last 30 years of his life observing troops of baboons to look like.

Also, the point of his commentary is not “we should kill off the violent ‘alpha’ assholes in human society.” That conclusion is reductive, eugenicist, and isn’t paying attention to his words.

The point is “a thing we thought was universally true of baboon society, that baboon troops were constant, violent competitions for dominance, is not as universally true as we thought, and maybe things we think are immutable about our own society aren’t as immutable as we think, either.”

[nando161mando]

oops! it seems i tripped and dropped several million free books, papers, and other resources

https://annas-archive.org

https://sci-hub.se

https://z-lib.is

https://libgen.is

https://libgen.rs

https://www.pdfdrive.com

https://library.memoryoftheworld.org

https://monoskop.org/Monoskop

https://libcom.org

https://libretexts.org

http://classics.mit.edu

https://librivox.org

https://standardebooks.org

https://www.gutenberg.org

https://core.ac.uk

[flamingwitchery-inactive-deacti]

oh no! Whatever shall we do! i guess we'll just have to use them to read interesting stuff!

[animentality]

[acheliosadrastos]

A Post-colonial Analysis of Sinners: The Oppressed as the Oppressor, Hybridity and Appropriation

[dragonomatopoeia]

i'm always a bit unsettled by disdain for intellectual or creative labor in leftist spaces. there's this commonly held belief that academics are a bunch of rich old white men, rather than a wide variety of people who are barely getting by. most lecturers in universities are adjuncts living paycheck to paycheck. authors make very little money as a general rule. most researchers are overworked and underpaid. and yet there's still this idea that academics are overcompensated to sit around and smoke cigars together while making shit up

[jeannereames]

This. And as much as a mostly enjoy it, TV shows like "The Irrational" don't help. The main character/professor is very much the exception. Most of us, even when we reach full professor, are not making 6-figure incomes. The vast bulk of those teaching classes are non-tenure track and need to teach 4-8 classes just to make ends meet. Some teach more than that. Staff don't do any better. Admin does, but mostly the upper tier. The assistant to the sixth assistant vice-chancellor makes squat. And coaching has the same bifurcation. College football coaches (in America) make obscene salaries, even some of the assistants. But (if you're not in Nebraska) the volleyball coach doesn't, or track-and-field.

We're not the enemies of the working class. (Or of students either.) But CEOs want you to think we are so they can turn you against us and shut us down...to keep you ignorant. Which is how they want you.

[coff-y]

I just learned this fact and I can't help but share it with you!!!

In 13th-century European castles, separate fortresses were rarely built. Instead, one of the towers was significantly larger than the others and served as sleeping quarters for the lord or the king and his family.

Medieval life was full of changes and conflicts. Periods of peace were often interrupted by wars and sieges. To protect the ruler and his family, spiral staircases were built in the towers, winding clockwise. This design made it harder for attackers, as defenders could strike while using the wall as a shield, whereas attackers, especially right-handed ones, faced difficulties.

Additionally, the steps were uneven in height and length, making it easier for defenders, familiar with the layout, to move quickly. Attackers, in heavy armor and unfamiliar with the stairs, risked losing balance. This design significantly complicated sieges, particularly when climbing upward, giving defenders an advantage.

Thus, clockwise spiral staircases were not only convenient but also a crucial part of defensive strategy.

[victusinveritas]

Dogs have had many jobs throughout history, in this case: Revenge.

[tonysaintborgi]

love how the king was just like nah let's see where the dog is going with this

[ebrithilbowser]

After all of the talk about animal trials, it's good to know that they could also accuse humans of a crime.

[nitrosplicer]

Taking away the word “liminal” from nostalgia-bait accounts and so-called “aesthetic” webpages. Liminal is for rest stops. It’s for non-places, like parking garages or paths or BETWEEN PLACES. Your computer room in 2007 is NOT liminal, it’s an extremely specific place and time. The word you’re looking for is “nostalgia bait.”

You could also use the word “non-place” for some of these pictures- it is by definition subjective. But again, your family’s living room in 2002 is not it.

[chaotic-archaeologist]

Oh! Oh! I'd like to add to this with Shannon Dawdy's notion of heterogeneous time as a good contrast. The idea is that some places have a sense of pastness, meaning a sensed quality of belonging to/being of more time periods than just the present. This is inherently tied to the places' identity, as opposed to non-places which have been deliberately constructed to have no particular identity of their own.

Dawdy also talks about bubble time, which is similar to Proust’s mémoire involuntaire: a moment in which “the past suddenly lives again, like a haunting.” THIS is part of what you are experiencing when you encounter an image, or an object, or a place that throws you back into a certain moment in time, a visceral memory evoked by some sort of stimuli.

See also lieu de mémoire, a term which is generally used to describe places where the past is held intentionally close to the present through a process of collective memory-making, but I would also argue that a computer room from 2007 can also fit the definition of "a physical place or object which acts as container of memory."

Liminal does not mean a place (or object) that feels like it belongs to multiple temporalities at once. Liminality is a sense of in-between-ness or not-belonging, whereas nostalgia relies on associations with other times and imbued pastness.

For further reading on this, I would highly recommend Dawdy's Patina: A Profane Archaeology, particularly chapters 2 and 5.

[lefresne]

Dog keeps stealing my ball of yarn and all I can think of is this manuscript illustration 🥺

[ashstfu]

[littlewhispersmokesigns]

this Angela Carter quote is driving me wild

[aboutmercy]

the full quote is even better

[thydungeongal]

As someone who has actually studied the English language there's a common phrase about English that kinda annoys me because while it makes for a funny haha line it's such a gross oversimplification that it actually ceases to be funny. It's the one that goes "The English language is just three languages stacked on top of each other wearing a trenchcoat" or something to that effect.

I'm not going to go into detail as to why that sentence is inaccurate, just take my word for it as a person with a master's in English. I suggest we withdraw this expression from usage and replace it with the much more accurate "The English language is a dirty little slut that loves it when other languages cum big loads in it"

[thydungeongal]

You know what Tumblr, I don't think this one deserves to be found

[kira-serialfaggot]

I found it

[spacehawk420]

Fill the holes in my lexicon you dirty French

[maniculum]

I had a linguistics professor several years ago who described English as “the good-time girl of languages”. I’m pretty sure that was her somewhat more polite, slightly old-fashioned way of expressing the same thought as OP.

[cuties-in-codices]

queer sex and more!

in an illustrated medieval travelogue (a german translation of "mandeville's travels"), bavaria/swabia, ca. 1476

source: Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. 2838, fol. 102v

[maniculum]

I would bet the reason there's no mention of these things is that this isn't just unrelated marginalia -- it's a direct illustration of the text. I can't read the German, so I can't confirm this is the right page, but Mandeville does contain the following passage:

And in another isle be folk that be both man and woman, and they have kind; of that one and of that other. And they have but one pap on the one side, and on that other none. And they have members of generation of man and woman, and they use both when they list, once that one, and another time that other. And they get children, when they use the member of man; and they bear children, when they use the member of woman.

That's pretty clearly what's being shown above. If you look at the standing figures next to the pair having sex, you can see that they do have one breast each, and are equipped with both a penis and a vagina. We are probably meant to assume that the figures on the ground are similarly built, but we can't really tell because our view is obstructed by the one on top.

And there is scholarly writing about that passage and its relation to medieval conceptions of sex & gender. (A quick look through my university library's catalog turns up, e.g., M. W. Bychowski's "The Isle of Hermaphrodites: Disorienting the place of intersex in the Middle Ages".) There's no reason for there to be separate scholarship on this particular imagery, since it's just illustrating the literal text of the passage -- people might include it in an article about this passage, but they wouldn't discuss it separately from the text.

There is probably some commentary to be made about how this particular illustration chose to show the people actually having sex on the page. That is definitely a Choice. But if I were to write about that, I would do it in the context of an article about the text itself and different ways it has been illustrated in various manuscripts, rather than a deep dive on a single image.

[cuties-in-codices]

that's such a helpful & interesting addition, thank you so much!

it inspired me to have a stab at transcribing the german text. here's what i got (don't take this as authoritative):

Ouch vindet man vil lüt da die baide gelider hant man und wiber gelider und manner und wiber natturenn Jch main die gelider zwischen den bainen und die selben lüt hant die ain brust groß und die andern clain als ain wip und ain man und so sy wellent so tragent sy kint als hie zu lant wib tûnt und machent ainandern zu tragent als hie zu lant glich ain man ainem wib tüt wenn sy wellent wenn sy beschlauffent sich mit baiden natturen

english translation (again, just my interpretation):

One also encounters many people who have both members, the members of men and of women, and the nature of men and of women. I mean the members between the legs. And those same people have one big breast and one small one, like a woman and a man. And when they want to, they carry children just like women do over here, and they make each other pregnant just like over here a man makes a woman [pregnant], when they want to, [and they do so] by sleeping with each other using both natures.

:))

[next-of-kith]

OK, now what about the other illustration: the headless people with faces on their torsos?

[cuties-in-codices]

they are called blemmyes (or blemmyae, or akephaloi, or headless men). they're a mythical species/folk that people in the middle ages (and since antiquity!) believed existed, and that were thought to inhabit parts of africa or india. there are many cool illustrations of them in all kinds of genres (travel accounts, romances, maps, encyclopedias, accounts of the apocalypse, etc.), and they were pictured in varying ways (face on the chest, face on the back, eyes as shoulders).

in a broader context, they are just one of many so-called "monstrous races" that were very popular in medieval times. the idea was that basically, if you travel far enough, you will eventually meet all kinds of freaky and curious half-human people, all with their specific lore, weird ways of living, weird phenotypes etc. (with these fabulous peoples, there's probably also a gray area between "what people actually believed in" and "what just made for a great story", but this is not the right place to tackle that question.)

here's a collection of these "monstrous races" in a book from 1493 (an edition of the "Nuremberg Chronicle"). you can see the blemmyes in the third row left AND our beloved one-breasted gender-non-conforming pals in the 5th row left! :)

source: Munich, BSB, Rar. 287, fol. 12r and 12v

[maniculum]

Until I saw this exchange, I hadn't realized how little we'd even acknowledged the blemmyes.

[homunculus-argument]

Imagine trying to explain online media piracy to a medieval peasant. If you managed to avoid getting stuck on trying to explain what the internet is or what a movie is, you'd get to the point where you're like "so the thing itself is a copy of a copy, infinite and immaterial, so obtaining it in these outlaw ways takes nothing out of someone else's hands. It used to be that people argued it was taking the bread from the table of the people who created the content, but it turns out that the official distributor isn't compensating them for their work anyhow."

And this guy just nods along like "ah, like the printing presses. I was taught to read and write you know, and once used the gift I was given to sin. I wrote out in grand detail of all the ways I would wish to fuck the miller's wife. Some typeblock-clacking print rat got his hands on it and is now printing copies of Confessions of Lewd Sinner Unnamed at great profit. I cannot take the matter to court because the miller is strong enough to pick up an ox and knows where I live."

[thaylepo]

the moral of this story is, of course, that if you go back in time to explain anything to a medieval person you will inevitably end up talking to Chaucer

[maniculum]