Aesthetics, rants, interesting things and reblogs. Also some writting, headcanons, fandoms, etc.... Pro LGBT+, feminist, Brazilian. Trying to write, but god its hard!
Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.
So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.
If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)
And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't
ignore that cultural trauma, ask an archeologist / paleontologist.
how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?
to use an old quote, the last ape became the first human not when he picked up a stick to reach some fruit, but when he used that stick to bash another ape over the head and take away his fruit.
I disagree with pretty much all of that, actually. Modern archeology is only just in the process of pulling itself out of hundreds of years of racism, bias, colonialism, disproven assumptions, widespread graverobbing, and massive, blatant pseudoscience; many ideas and publications in the field that older than about 20 years are of highly questionable provenance.
I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)
Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:
If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you-
even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You
put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that
being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning
when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good
to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to
make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful
and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy
oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had
something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with
both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.
The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many
theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have
been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of
sling or net carrier.
So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975).
But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody
with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having
achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news...
It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest
there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the
wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another
one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin-
ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of
the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is
with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject,
words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.
-via Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Originally published 1986, new edition with forewords and commentaries published 2024.
Oh also if any technology did make us human, archeological evidence currently very strongly argues it was when we harnessed fire and invented cooking.
Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.
Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially
Cooking may be more than just a part of your daily routine, it may be what made your brain as powerful as it is
Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain.
Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.
-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.
Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:
Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions.
August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602–608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.
The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process.
By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164.
Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.
Or, less scholarly:
It takes a lot of calories to power a human brain. Find out how cooking and gut microbes help us make the most of our food.
Humans are not defined by our capacity for violence.
Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.
By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.
By our millennia-long quest to make our lives, and the lives of those we love, more and more into something we can live
Also like do go ahead and ask an archaeologist/anthropologist. Ask them about the healed broken bones they've seen that is evidence of humans caring for one another since we became human. Ask them about the hearths they've found for humans to gather around, and the cookware they've seen crafted by human hands. Ask them about the small circle of bricks in front of hearths that confounded them until someone realized it was to keep chicken chicks in the house where children could play with them. Ask them about the tools of creation they've seen. Ask them about the musical instruments, and the artwork spanning back to when we lived in caves. Ask them about the children's footsteps, their play preserved in mud. Ask them about the clothing they've seen and the hands that stitched them or wove them.
Ask them how long ago we looked at wolves and saw friends. Ask them when we first tilled the soil and planted seeds so we could grow things on purpose. Ask them how long ago we began to travel simply to explore the world around us.
Ask them why they put their hands on the earth searching for history and spend hours digging through archives and talking to other humans about the past. Archaeologists and Anthropologists are like the #1 people to love humans so much they want to know everything about all of the humans across history, and IMO the questions you ask them are a bigger reflection of the person asking them than anything else.
There are many wild things about Amok Time as an episode but I feel like we don't talk about the fact that the resolution is pulled from Romeo & Juliet. Like. Administering a drug that feigns death? For the purpose of escaping an arranged marriage? Spock/Romeo falsely believing the trick and being devastated?? This shit is from the most classic romance of all time what the HELL
Ilya makes it his life's mission to make Shane realise just how hot he is so that he can live out his ultimate fantasy: He'll take Shane to a club where many men will flirt with him because he's ridiculously hot. And Shane will shamelessly flirt back because he knows he's ridiculously hot. And after a few hours where Ilya will get to drink and dance and watch many men try and fail to shoot their shot with the hottest man in the room, Ilya will walk straight up to Shane, kiss him in that way he knows makes Shane all soft and pliant and his. And then, throwing a shit-eating grin to all the disappointed men, he'll drag Shane home and fuck him any way Shane asks him to. Because he's the only one in the world who gets to.
the first time shane called ilya baby he meant it in the “you big baby” sense. ilya was pouting and shane was smiling at him fondly saying “baby” but so much adoration was bleeding through his words it felt like it was delivered as a pet name. and ilya looked up at him awestruck and lovesick and looked like he could faint right then and there. so shane made it his mission to call ilya his baby all day every day
Cats fucking love lanolin (naturally occurring on sheep's wool, secreted by their skin) so it's possible that whatever brand of wool you buy doesn't strip all the lanolin off during processing. The majority of wools will have as much stripped out as possible but it depends on what you buy and where/how it was processed.
I know Hayden is meant to be Shane's Main Friend and Jackie and the kids are more of an extension of them being best buds, but I love the idea of Jackie's obsessed with being the first WAG to feed you being the prelude to Shane and Jackie bffism. Jackie's always had a sense for kindred spirits and through Hayden's funny work stories and the brief interactions she's had with Shane at social functions, she just knows.
Beyond that, I love any exploration of them as Metros Captain and default Head WAG. Maybe the invitation is an understanding: if Shane and JJ are still single next year, then Jackie's probably going to have a lot of on her plate. She wants to make this work, not be a cross-purposes.
Shane is dryly funny in a way that takes her by ambush halfway through replying, and he takes himself seriously in a way she admires. She's plugged into hockey enough he doesn't have to edit or explain himself, but removed enough from it that she isn't relying on him the way the guys do, or trying to enforce some kind of no shop talk rule in her home that Shane never knows how to talk around. His parents have always divided up childcare and hockey and household tasks in ways that made sense instead of adhering to the gender roles hockey families often default to, so even though he's very much a Hockey Guy, he doesn't discount Jackie's contributions the way Hayden's AHL teammates were forever doing. She also appreciates that she's never caught him staring down her neckline (another delightful habit of the AHL teammates).
The thing about not being the most socially adept and growing up with a really narrow experience of life is that you learn to read between the lines. You guess at the rules other people just intuit. People reference things you've never heard of and it turns out asking just grind everything to a halt and makes people uncomfortable, so you interpret. You infer. You improvise. So Shane rolls with it when Jackie started pushing more into Real Friend territory, and yeah, totally's his way through various conversations about Jackie's yoga friends and childcare and wouldn't a quiet low-key dinner with friends would be nice until he ends up doing at home yoga sessions every morning and being the Pikes' most dependable babysitter when the twins are born and coming over for dinner every Wednesday night.
The friendship just works, but so does their leadership style.
The next year, when Shane is Captain and Jackie's de facto Head Wag, there's always something happening that falls under at least one of their purviews, and they like coordinating their approaches and reading each other in on the State of the Metros. Jackie's good at reading people in a way Shane just isn't, and has helped him untangle a few interpersonal messes before they could show up on the ice, but Shane has a big-picture impression of how things not only feel from the inside but read from the outside that's helped Jackie head off more than one issue on the WAG front that might otherwise have hit social media and blown up in all their faces.
There's a mutual disconnect with being in a position of authority that they align on. Nobody elected Jackie, she doesn't hold any genuine authority, and she's only twenty-three. The reason people come to her for help and abide by her decisions is because she stepped up and then didn't step on any toes.
Shane's only twenty when he's given the C, and the Metros old guard might like winning but they don't like taking orders from a kid. Every team he's ever been on, Shane's stood out—age, race, dedication, social disconnect, and above it all, talent. Always too good not to be crowned with authority he teammates don't like from him. It's trained him up to a particular kind of peer leadership that differs from what's expected from most team captains—always leading by example, never raising his voice, mediating between players and staff. It's a double edged sword—he can carry out his duties as captain without creating resentment or completely removing himself from being one of the guys. He can be exceptional and also be liked in the room. But it's brittle. They can need him, but he can't need them. Every perceived imperfection is an in-joke he has to tolerate.
No one particularly wants Shane and Jackie at the helm, but there will be hell to pay if they don't steer the ship well.
Hayden does his best to be more enlightened than the average hockey player, but he's still grown up in sports and is socialized to not really see male-female friendships, so in his mind, he's the Main Friend, but he's kind of third-wheeling it in his own home whenever Shane's over for dinner, especially during what he calls the Council Meetings. He's a solid A and always ready to back Shane up, but he's more used to enjoying the comradery of a locker room than setting the tone.
He's just happy to have a buddy his wife not only tolerates, but actively encourages inviting over. An AHL teammate got a girlfriend who couldn't stand the team. It had been hard on the guy, and made Hayden determined to strike a balance that made himself and Jackie both happy, especially since she'd gotten pregnant with the twins partway through that season.
Jackie does her own version of this, funnily enough. She loves platonically sharing the throne with Shane so she's petrified of how it would go if Shane got a girlfriend who wouldn't Get It. Not only would she have to step down as Head WAG, she'd lose her bff/babysitter/conspirator/comrade-in-arms against deep-fried everything for dinner. She has to take matters into her own hands and get him a love interest who likes her. He's handsome, he's successful, and he can hold a genuine conversation with a woman. It's a miracle no one's locked him down yet. She has to move quickly!
Years down the line, when the Ilya of it all come to light, she does feel a little silly for never considering that maybe Shane never once checking her out might have been more than just manners. In her defense, all her gay friends are lesbians. She just never really many male friends in high school and uni.
-
Also, I just think it would be very funny if just one time, Shane accidentally introduced Hayden to someone as "My friend Jackie Pike's husband, Hayden."
Hayden buries this memory. He Cannot think about it.
I was just thinking about that scene during the Shane Rose era, when Ilya asks Connor to go out and Ilya goes, “We’re in Montreal, we find a fucking club.” And it hits a little differently when you realize Ilya had always been there with Shane whenever they were in Montreal. Without him, Ilya genuinely didn’t know a single club, a single spot, or even where to go.
It’s such a small moment, but somehow it says everything about how much of Montreal was tied to Shane for him.
we all know adult humans dont get enough enrichment but the other day i was walkin home past an empty playground and impulsively ran over to spin myself on this zipline merry-go-round contraption for a few minutes and it really did feel like it unlocked some neglected part of my brain. like damn we really should all go outside and play more. fuck. they werent kidding with this play time thing. have you guys heard about play time. it could be huge.
Asthra Polaris @asthrapolaris - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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