Mike Driver
styofa doing anything
One Nice Bug Per Day
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Monterey Bay Aquarium

shark vs the universe
almost home

ellievsbear

izzy's playlists!
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Sweet Seals For You, Always

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Game of Thrones Daily
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
No title available
will byers stan first human second
Cosmic Funnies

祝日 / Permanent Vacation

Andulka

seen from France

seen from Australia

seen from Singapore

seen from Türkiye
seen from China

seen from Malaysia

seen from Netherlands
seen from United States

seen from Malaysia

seen from Malaysia
seen from Spain

seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United Kingdom

seen from Singapore

seen from Netherlands

seen from Malaysia

seen from United States

seen from Australia

seen from Belgium
@bartlebett
FOREST OF A THOUSAND LANTERNS
Court intrigue, serpent gods, and girls who know their value and aren’t afraid to use their beauty. I want the sequel soooo bad
If we’re forced to endure ten thousand different takes on ‘What if the Confederacy had won” could at least one well-polished rendition of something like this get made as compensation?
Pre-Victorian early-Steampunk alternate history.
This sounds AMAZING
A Lady and a Leg Named Cuthbert
This, my most wondrous of tumblrs, is Virginia Hall, another woman who inspired OUR REALM IS THE NIGHT. Virginia was an American woman who worked for the British Special Operations Executive as a spy during World War II.
Before the war, Virginia traveled Europe in the hopes of joining the diplomatic service. When a shooting accident resulted in the amputation of her left leg, she was essentially told her career in diplomacy was over. Because prosthetics give -10 diplomacy or something??
Others might have considered Virginia’s disability a problem, but she certainly didn’t. When WWII broke out, she joined an ambulance service in France until the puppet Vichy government occupied her location. She didn’t feel like working for them, so she figured no big deal, she’d just smuggle herself over to Britain.
Which she did.
She promptly trained for spycraft and got the SOE to send her back to France, where she coordinated the French underground for over a year. Things were going okay until 1942 - but when the Nazis finally seized full control of France, they had a list of names and Virginia’s was at the top. As the number one most wanted member of the French Resistance, Virginia figured it was time to peace out.
So she walked
Over the PYRENEES
on her prosthetic leg.
I mean, I have exactly 0 ambulatory disabilities and I would probably die in the Pyrenees. And you know the best part? Virginia had named her prosthetic ‘Cuthbert.’ When she informed SOE operatives of what she was going to do, she joked, ‘I hope Cuthbert doesn’t give me any trouble on the way.’
The operative didn’t get it. He signaled back, ‘If Cuthbert troublesome, eliminate him.’
Virginia Hall trained guerilla forces, made maps, and communicated with the Allies from Spain until the war was over. She was awarded an MBE, and she is the only civilian woman to be awarded a Distinguished Service Cross for WWII.
I can’t believe I didn’t hear of this legend of a woman before a couple of years ago. We will SPEAK HER NAME. And please Lord let someone write an amazing book about her.
glorious
She walks with storms in her heart and battles in her eyes.
Nicole Lyons (via nicolelyonspoetry)
*whispers* what is this piece of beauty
Walt Disney announced that Liu Yifei (also known as Crystal Liu) will star in the live-action version of 'Mulan.'
“Meet the newly anointed star of Walt Disney’s live-action Mulan, Liu Yifei (also known as Crystal Liu).
Walt Disney studios announced the major casting Wednesday for the movie to be directed by Niki Caro (The Zookeeper’s Wife). The new Mulan is inspired by both the legendary Chinese ballad and the popular 1998 Disney animated film.
The original animated film follows Mulan, the young daughter of aged warrior Fa Zhou, who impersonates a man to take her father’s place during a Hun invasion and becomes one of China’s greatest heroines.”
Read the full piece here
YES!!!
HOW LONG DO I HAVE TO WAIT FOR THIS
Dutch longsword fencer Tosca Beuming
Photographed by Martin Philippo and Andress Kools
aaah!
Seven-regiment Lizzie
Today’s super amazing kickass woman is Lizzie Compton, the Union soldier who wouldn’t let a little thing like being expelled from the army on account of her gender get in the way of fighting.
There’s little to go on for Lizzie’s early life, mostly because she never stuck to one story. Some say she came from Canada, some from the North, and one story even goes that she was born in Tennessee to abolitionist parents.
Whatever her beginnings, she enlisted with the Union army at the age of fourteen, and went out to fight. Lizzie’s adventures usually went something like this:
1. Enlist as a boy 2. Get injured 3. Get discovered while receiving treatment for her injury 4. Get kicked out of the army 5. Find a new regiment, rinse, repeat.
Sometimes Lizzie would wrangle herself a transfer, fearing she’d been discovered (or occasionally, having been discovered already). All in all she enlisted seven separate times, earning her the record for most re-enlistments. When she was arrested for dressing as a man, Lizzie reportedly said that she would rather die than be a lady. Ouch!
Eventually, Lizzie was discovered one too many times and kicked out of the army for good. She settled in Ontario and disappeared from history.
Lizzie is just one of numerous women who dressed as men to fight in the American civil war. These women are a strong reminder that as long as men have been fighting, women have been sneaking off to fight, too.
Bessie Coleman
This is another fave of mine who inspired me while I was writing OUR REALM IS THE NIGHT.
Bessie was born on this month in 1892 to a family of sharecroppers in Texas. All her life she wanted to be an aviator, but no US flight school would admit her. Why? Because she was a black woman of Native American descent.
So what did Bessie do? She saved up money, and went to France to learn how to fly instead. Her incredible perseverance paid off and not only did she become the first black woman to hold a pilot’s license, she was the first person of Native American descent to do so as well.
Bessie wasn’t just a pilot. She did air shows and stunts, often honoring black veterans of WWI.
This absolute legend of a woman died in an air accident in 1926. She didn’t let anyone tell her that her heritage banned her from doing what she wanted, and she demanded the respect of an American public and system that had initially tried to deny her dreams.
Chinese emperor Ai of Han, fell in love with a minor official, a man named Dong Xian, and bestowed upon him great political power and a magnificent palace. Legend has it that one day while the two men were sleeping in the same bed, the emperor was roused from his sleep by pressing business. Dong Xian had fallen asleep across the emperor’s robe, but rather than awaken his peaceful lover, the Emperor cut his robe free at the sleeve. Thus “the passion of the cut sleeve” became a euphemism for same-sex love in China. — R.G.L.
get you a dude who will fuck up his own clothing for you
NO OKAY THIS IS REALLY COOL SO SHUT UP AND LISTEN KIDS. Ancient China was super chill about homosexuality okay. Like we have gay emperors and feudal lords, lesbian princesses who were girlfriends with their serving maids, gay ass poets who wrote lots of poems about that one courtesan who played the guzheng so well. In fact homosexuality was so okay that in Shiji, which is basically the Bible of Ancient Chinese history, there is an entire section dedicated to the gay lovers of emperors. What’s the best part? All the laws and criticism about homosexuality in Ancient China were all about shit like prostitution and rape. These laws were outlawing homosexual stuff were all very specific. For example, there were laws banning male prostitution, but no laws against homosexuality. These laws were passed to stop the spread of prostitution and laws targeting prostitution in general were pretty common in Chinese history. There were also really strict laws about male rape. Rape was punishable by death, regardless of the gender of the victim. Rape a girl, you die. Rape a guy, you die. Have sex with a minor, you die regardless of whether it was consensual. The lightest sentence you could get was slavery where you were bound to the army. Also scholars wrote essays criticising the boyfriends of emperors, saying that they distracted the emperor from work blah blah blah but THEY ALSO DID THE SAME FOR THE CONCUBINES. That’s right - the issue wasn’t homosexuality but rather the hormones of the emperor. They didn’t care about the gender of the emperor’s favourite lover but rather the fact that the emperor was too horny to get shit done. “But WAIT, Modern China is a hardass about homosexuality!!!! How do you explain that!” Yes. That. That’s because of the late Qing years where Western influences entered the country and brought their gross ass homophobic attitudes with them. And the Qing government was so anxious to seem modern and be seen as equals to their Western counterparts. So they adopted Western ways and discarded their previous attitudes about homosexuality. Hence you have Modern China. So the next time someone tries to tell you that being LGBT is wrong because it goes against traditional Chinese values, tell them to go fuck themselves with 3000 years of Chinese queerness.
I love every word of this
Diana + Her Shield
you can tell me that it’s a terrible film.
You can tell me it rips off Captain America
I will still not give a shit
Put the “fun” back in “fungi” by learning about the time when giant fungi were the tallest living things on land!
Seriously, you’re gonna want to thank a mushroom once you’ve learned everything that they’ve done for us.
woo palaeontology!
The White Lily of Stalingrad
Hello, kickass people of all genders! Today I’m going to talk about one of the women who most inspired me as I wrote my novel, OUR REALM IS THE NIGHT. This lady was intelligent, driven, positive, kind, beautiful, and utterly devoted to a country that refused to acknowledge her heroism until decades after her death.
Her name is Lidia Litvyak, but some call her the White Lily (or Rose) of Stalingrad.
Lidia was born in 1921 in Moscow. Early in her life, her father was accused of treason by the Soviet Union, and sent to a work camp in Siberia. Lidia became dedicated to restoring the family name. And when the Russian air force was destroyed by Hitler in 1941, breaking the truce between the Soviet Union and Germany, Lidia got her chance.
Lidia had enrolled in a flying club at 14, and was making solo flights from the age of 15. When she heard that another great flyer and a Hero of the Union, Marina Raskova, was founding female aviation regiments for the new war, she was determined to join the fight. There was just one problem: she’d already been rejected from another aviation unit. She didn’t have enough experience, they said, even though she’d trained nearly 50 men to fly planes.
So what was a girl to do? Lidia decided to sidestep the problem by inflating her own hype. She lied about her experience and was assigned to the all-female 586th Fighter regiment. Later she was moved, from regiment to regiment, joining mostly-male regiments and showing up her colleagues. She liked to bleach her hair and collect bouquets, which she’d stick in the cockpit of her plane. She also ended each mission with unsanctioned aerial antics, right above the base - a move that irritated her male commander no end.
Lidia flew a plane called a Yak-1. People called her a natural-born fighter pilot, and she was the first female pilot to shoot down enemy aircraft. Not only that, but to this day Lidia holds the record for most kills made by a female fighter pilot - most people agree that she made 11 solo kills and 3 team kills.
But in 1943, at the age of 21, Lidia disappeared.
She was on her fourth mission of the day, escorting other Soviet aircraft to their base. As they neared it, Lidia saw a group of German bombers and moved to attack. But she didn’t realize that a pair of Messerschmidts were flying cover. The Messerschmidts moved in, and the three planes disappeared behind a cloud. Another pilot in the dogfight said that the last he saw of her plane, it was pouring smoke and pursued by up to eight enemy aircraft.
Her colleagues found neither Lidia nor the wreckage of her plane. Without proof that she’d died, Soviet policy dictated that Lidia should be considered compromised - captured and forced to reveal information, essentially making her a traitor to the Soviet Union according to the rules at the time. For all that she’d wanted to redeem her father, she hadn’t managed to escape his fate.
Lidia’s downed airplane was found 36 years later, near a village called Dmitrievka. Only then was her name cleared of potential treason, and she was posthumously awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union award in 1990.
Lidia and her story always struck me as one of contrasts - not just the contrast between male and female, which usually gets overhyped, but the contrast between love for one’s country, and a country’s love for its citizen. The stories of the USSR’s female aviators, and how they fought the state in order to fight for the state, always stuck with me.
And when I think of this contrast, it’s often the image of Lidia I see in my mind - fighting to get home in a smoking plane, giving everything that she is, all for a country that called her traitor for 36 long years.
The Cadaver Synod
Okay people, BUCKLE UP for a piece of history full of plot twists and more spirit than Scrooge’s house on Christmas Eve.
This is the story of three Popes, the trial of a dead person, and a miracle. And it all begins way, way back in the year 864 AD.
We begin with a (sort of) protagonist to the tale: Formosus, a bishopy guy, in the heart of the Holy Roman Empire. Formosus loved missions (not the Han Solo type mission, the let’s-talk-about-Jesus type mission). He decided to mission in Bulgaria and teach the Bulgarians about Catholicism. This went pretty well for him.
UNTIL.
He got accused of some pretty serious stuff from the Pope, a fellow named John VIII. John accused him of corrupting the Bulgarians and attempting to overthrow him as Pope, which I’m sure you can figure is a big no-no. John VIII kept Formosus out of power and out of the spotlight until he died in 882.
When John VIII bit it, Formosus waltzed back in to the Holy Roman Empire and resume his bishopin’ ways. And things seemed to get EVEN BETTER for him: he became Pope!
Being Pope carried a lot of political power and responsibility. Formy got to deal with the Holy Roman Emperors, who’d set their sights to conquering Italy. Worried about the itchy fingers of Emperor Guy, Formosus invited Guy’s nephew to come on down and invade Rome for a good old-fashioned coronation. I couldn’t tell you whether it turned out to be good luck or bad, but either way Formy died soon after crowning Arnulf of Carinthia as the new Holy Roman Emperor. Both Arnulf and Formosus shuffled off this mortal coil in 896, leaving the door wide open for the epic smear campaign that became THE CADAVER SYNOD.
Technically, Formosus was succeeded as Pope by Boniface VI, but Bonny only lasted a couple of weeks before he, too, went to meet his maker. The man who became Pope thereafter: Stephen VI.
And Stephen did not love Formosus.
Now, Pope Formosus died on April 4th, 896. Nine months later, in January 897, Stephen exhumed Formy’s remains and put him on trial. According to historians, Formosus was propped on a throne and an unlucky deacon was appointed his counsel. Formosus was accused of corrupting the Bulgarians and trying to overthrow his predecessor, John VIII. The Holy Roman Emperors looked on, ensuring that Formosus would get his humiliation for acting against them during his lifetime. Once it was ensured that the dead guy could mount no decent defense for himself, they stripped him of his Papal vestments, cut off the fingers he’d used for blessings, and dug him a new grave in a cemetery for foreigners. Just in case you thought that xenophobia and the ‘foreigners’ question is solely a question for our times.
But this. Wasn’t. Enough.
Somebody decided that the best way to end THE CADAVER SYNOD was to dig up the mutilated corpse of Formosus, tie weights to it, and toss it in the Tiber River.
And thus, surely, the strange and morbid tale of the Cadaver Synod would be over, right?
NOPE.
Rumors began to spread. People didn’t love Stephen’s spectacle against his enemy, and whispers ran through Rome that Formosus’ body had washed up on the banks and was now granting miracles. Formosus body was recovered and interred in St. Peter’s Basilica, in Rome. Pope Stephen, on the other hand, got chucked in prison where he was strangled in the summer of ‘97. Numerous Popes went back and forth on who was the real bad guy of the Cadaver Synod, leaving us with but one gem: it is now illegal in the Catholic church to put a dead guy on trial.
I’d say Let that be a lesson to you, but I’m not sure what lesson we’re supposed to learn from all this. Perhaps that History doesn’t do lessons. History just is, and it’s strange and weird and sometimes disgusting.
Oh hi everybody. The famous day has finally arrived, our graduation film is out for the whole world to see it! We are so so excited *jumping all around the place* Here is a link to the youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heFs6YVkNkY We are all so proud and so happy to be able to share it with you guys! We really hope you will like it as much as we loved making it. Big hugs from all of us, and thank you for following us in that adventure.
Yes! Beautiful film about the Night Witches.
Lady Olenna: Awesome Portrait Sketch by Andrew Domachowski
There is a badass lady that I’d like to have on my team :)