The Nest

Kes, she/they

[dduane]

Ancient Romans had 'overwhelming' genetic diversity, study finds

A DNA study of inhabitants of ancient Rome found some surprising results, and helps chart mass migration dating back 9,000 years.

Surprise. :)

[bemusedlybespectacled]

romans: conquer a shitload of the known world, including parts of africa and the middle east

romans: institute a policy that says that conquered peoples are allowed to gain citizenship by military service, but also can’t serve in their home areas (because armed native soldiers + angry locals = revolt), thus requiring everyone who wants to be a citizen to work abroad for years of their lives, creating diversity.

racists: a single black person in an educational video about rome is unrealistic and i feel attacked.

[heroineimages]

And a lot of times legionaries settled down not far from where they served once their service was up. Some brawny Libyan kid signs on with the legions and gets stationed on the Rhine frontier. He learns to fight but also how to build roads and walls. After his service is up, he finds work as a mason, settles down with a sandy-haired German lass, and has a couple half-Libyan, half-German kids.

It ends up being a multi-generational thing when one of the kids also signs on with the legions. He gets stationed in Iberia, protecting Rome’s silver- and steel resources. He falls in love with a Celtiberian woman and has a couple quarter-Libyan, quarter-German, quarter-Celtic, quarter-Iberian kids.

Libyan kid’s grandson keeps the family tradition going by also signing up for the legions. He gets assigned to the Parthian frontier and after retirement settles down with a Syrian woman to raise a bunch of eighth-Libyan, eighth-German, eighth-Celtic, eighth-Iberian, half-Syrian kids.

And this is just from the legions. This isn’t counting trade fleets and caravans, the tourist industry, the slave-trade, or migration to Rome and provincial capitols for jobs or political reasons.

[jeanjauthor]

Stop clutching your pearls, racists. The Roman Empire was problematic in many ways, but racism wasn’t one of them. (They did occasionally act bigoted toward people of a specific nationality, but that was about culture, not about appearances.)

[dduane]

A poster boy—literally—for this diversity: black Egyptian kid grows up in Thebes (where there were a lot of people of color due to Ethiopia being next door), joins the Roman army, rises to command his largely-black home legion, and is sent with them to Gaul to deal with an uprising.

さらに読む

[praguegirl]

they just don’t do any classic homophobic children moments like this anymore 

[coughloop]

There was really no winning that one

[keatxu]

abandonware should be public domain. force companies to actively support and provide products if they don't wanna lose the rights to them

[omikronsoul]

Game companies hate emulation, but none of them seem to understand that a lot of us would just buy ROMs from them directly if we could. I don't want a fifth remake of Final Fantasy IV, I want to pay five bucks for the 3MB file you already made bank with thirty years ago. Nobody who wants to play something for the purpose of retro gaming is going to consider a $40 remake as the alternative option, and we're certainly not going to let the original dissappear. They're crying about opportunity cost for a product they're not even selling.

[justletmeremember]

op i know you're probably talking about like, video games, etc, but this is also critical for research science - my lab has so much abandonware, either because the company's out of business, or the company decided to not maintain it, and it's a fucking nightmare. we have two windows 95 computers that are CRITICAL for performing experiments/data analysis because the software needed is abandonware. one of the main roles for a guy in my lab is to maintain these little dinosaurs because if they go out, we lose access to ~20 years of raw data for research. part of why is that these companies also make their own file types, and make it difficult-to-impossible to convert those file types without their specific software. by habit, i convert all research files to more generic versions (txt, pdf, tif, etc) so that i minimize risk of losing my shit, but some stuff can't be converted.

for example, we have a microscope that is perfectly functional, good microscope, but its software is abandonware because the company refused to maintain it. the company is still in business, still makes essentially the exact same software, but they made all of the old tech incompatible with new software to force people to buy the new microscope tech. it would cost a quarter million dollars to replace this microscope. this perfectly good microscope.

so like, i know a lot of people look at the original post here and go "well op just wants old video games to play" (which is valid! games companies should not be able to push shit to abandonware and then close it off) but also this is critical for like. biomedical research. if y'all had any idea how much basic infrastructure built on science relies on shit that is technically abandonware, you would probably be horrified.

[macleod]

When I worked for the government a few years ago, one of the offices I was in charge of managing for their network, security, and IT systems was the nuclear task response office, this is the office that is in charge of toxic cleanups, nuclear fallout (if such a thing ever happened), and more.

They required having tech from the past sixty years ready at a moments notice (if X fails, try Y, then Z, etc). A lot of the older digital methods are all abandonware, sitting on computers developed in 1991 because they couldn't figure out how to safely transfer or migrate them to newer hardware (or even knew they had! found a server from '95 at the back of a closet somehow still running! connected to a powerstrip from '89! I kept the powerstrip, it's so chunky.)

One of my favorite jobs was figuring out how to get this software that had virtually no documentation remaining (likely buried in the office, but I never found it), or instructions, or really anything to a modern, more resilient, system. The company went out of business in '93, and the only known developer I could track down was in a retirement home.

I did eventually shift it over to run in a container/emulator for DOS, but it was a nightmare (one I loved) that took me months of hacking things together to figure out how it all went together.

Abandonware, the source code, the documentation, the IP, all of it, should be legally required to be disclosed, released, and submitted to public and government archives after either 12 years after first release, and/or upon dissolution. Until that happens, this entire era is likely going to be referred to as the digital dark age. Where everything was once online and available, but where nearly all of it was lost.

[thecrumbez]

Happy Pride Month to those two women dancing together in the foreground of the boat scene in Godzilla (1954).

I’m sorry your romantic foibles were overshadowed by a big ass atomic lizard thing.

[erratic-dragon-fruit]

out of the tags with you

[ilikewritingandspeedcore]

EXCUSE ME THERE IS A PLANT THAT CAN MIMIC FAKE PLANTS?????

IT'S CALLED A BOQUILA TRIOFOLIOLATA AND IT'S FUCKING WITH MY BRAIN

IT APPARENTLY CAN MIMIC OTHER PLANTS AND AT FIRST I WAS LIKE "oh cool man it must take it's genetic code and copy it or feel the roots or something like that!! :3"

AND THEN I READ AN ARTICLE ON IT AND THESE FUCKING PARAGRAPHS HIT ME LIKE A BUS

LIKE READ THIS SHIT

WHAT THE FUCK MOTHER NATURE

[rhyperographer]

I went to find the article. It's fascinating.

[digital-magus]

In retrospect, consider the number 1 thing every grade-schooler knows about plants is they take in light, the idea they might be able to see should not wreck my shit as hard as it does

[vielens]

[goldensunset]

hate when people think the only archetype possible for a male sidekick to a female protagonist is a soft boi and/or himbo. like the implication there is that the only reason a man would ever defer to a woman’s authority is if he was a bumbling idiot. love male supporting characters who are smart and strong and confident and can step up when necessary but still kind and humble enough to let someone else take the lead most of the time

[goldensunset]

ok another good point here

[tuxankhamun]

sorry kids daddy lost all his money betting on rhinoceros beetle fights again there won't be a christmas this year

[bester-jester]

good news babies, momma just cleared some chump of everything. Two christmases this year. God i love beetles fighting

[malinaa]

what if we all explode

[derring-do]

This very production of Orpheus & Eurydice is now available to stream, free, for the month of June.

[wizardarchetypes]

when i was a little kid (age 8 and on) i had 3 veryyy intense special interests i constantly infodumped about to anyone who gave me the time of day. these were:

The Bubonic Plague

Vampire Folklore

Tree frogs.

So as you can imagine my mom spent many years prepping me for social outings by doing a call-and-response litany with me that went "let's focus on tree frogs tonight. let's tell people about tree frogs."

[wizardarchetypes]

pov you are an unsuspecting adult at a social function who made the mistake of talking to me like i'm a person for 37 seconds and now you're going to learn everything about vlad the impaler from an enraptured third grader

[b33tl3b0y]

homunculus let out into the yard for a few minutes of recreational getting thrown from the roof time

[transmortifried]

idk why people are still trying to do "hear me out"s on tumblr

you could talk about wanting to fuck the space needle on here and people would still call you a poser for insisting on fucking "conventionally attractive architecture" as if that's a coherent, easily-recognizable category

[charlesoberonn]

I want to fuck Antoni Gaudi's unbuilt Hotel Attraction skyscraper design

[anatomizer]

"hear me out" and it's a picture of the most fuckable building you've ever seen. c'mon now.

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[fruitcakebro]

Holy moly they're GOOD. The music is fucking FIRE, and the outfits??? They're all so PRETTY???

[snoodly-boop]

Does anybody know who these are??? Do they have albums!! 🤩🤩🤩

[raspberryslut]

I was so curious that I had to go find this band. They're called Fortress Dwellers and they have a website with all of their socials!

They released an album too! I don't think this song is on it but the rest of their stuff is SO GOOD !!

MUSIC | Fortress Dwellers

Step into the fantasy world of Fortress Dwellers. A fantasy Renaissance musical collective blending epic original music, immersive performan

[spontaneousmusicalnumber]

In The Road to El Dorado there is only really one inexplicable thing within the plot. Miguel and Tulio plausibly bluff their way through or slip out of most situations. However, I’d never figured out why the volcano actually stops erupting when Tulio commands it. 

The conclusion I finally came up with is that the actual gods were watching their big entrance go down, and thought “oh, this’ll be hilarious”

[sweetvantass]

theres a lot of evidence throughout the movie to say that the armadillo (whose name is bibo) is a god.

they first find him in the jungle, where an armadillo has no business being

they find the entrance to the city, while being followed by him

he is present when the volcano starts to erupt (previous concept art also showed him in the background actually stopping the eruption)

miguel and tulio sucked ass at the ball game, so they used Bibo as a ball. He ricocheted himself all over the place and defied physics to get into the hoop every time

they come up with the flood plan to stop cortez when bibo pushed a glass over in front of them

[famouslysleepy]

YOUR TELLING ME THEY USED GOD AS A BASKETBALL?

[ovadrive]

[castellankurze]

The Gimli Glider is one of those stories where every aspect sounds more fake than the last and yet it all actually happened.

-A passenger plane was underloaded with fuel because Canada had just converted to the metric system and everyone supposed to double check their numbers got it wrong. -When the plane ran out of fuel they were too far away to make it to an in-service airport and had to head towards the Gimli military base.  Which was shuttered. -They were coming in to fast due to a lack of flaps control and had to perform a series of slips (as shown in the video above) to slow down, basically drifting a giant passenger plane. -As they come down they realized that just because Gimli’s been decommissioned doesn’t mean it’s abandoned because a bunch of people are having drag races on the runway they’re about to need. -Despite everything they managed to land safely and no one was killed or even hurt which is why it’s one of the best air disasters to meme on.

[zanmor]

The Wikipedia page on this is fantastic and my favorite line from it is “Flying with all engines out was never expected to occur, so it had never been covered in training.”

[lesferatu]

Nice

[isuggestkillingyourself]

[tactfulsaboteur]

[psybomb]

Every time I see that last pic, I have to note that the funniest line is the one immediately after the highlight

[inkskinned]

Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

I’m not worth the cost of a watch.

[inkskinned]

i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

we are both worth more than the watch, anyway.