Thanatopsis @blindiemac - Tumblr Blog

Today I chose to get dressed and become an architect. But not without cleaning out my nostril first. I felt the need down in my core.

#picoloapp

berlynn-wohl

What I love about ducks is that they really do quack. It’s not just hype.

castielrisingabove

Ducks really are all they’re quacked up to be

natalieironside

I think A Knight's Tale is the best movie I've ever seen.

Now, thematically, it's not an exceptional movie. It's good but not great, it's insightful but it's not particularly artistic or profound.

What it is is a story that knows exactly what it wants to be from the word go and accomplishes its goal flawlessly. It's the film version of watching of an old tradesman build a porch.

sea-salted-wolverine

Historical accuracy is just, not a concern, because they don't care. The love interest is hot and she looks like a time traveler but what's important is that she is hot. The transcendent elements of a sporting event are Queen played at full volume and shirtless drunk dudes with face paint and beer bellies so the movie has that despite the fact that this is a jousting tournament not a football game. Jeffery Chaucer is a maniac MC with a gambling problem.

They are telling a story and we all kinda know the plot beats before it even starts, but they're doing the job well and everyone is happy to be there. No one is reinventing the wheel and you could easily throw the plot into any setting you choose, and that's the point. It's a well-told story and the fact that it's told well makes up for the fact that it's somewhat of a mediocre story.

We all know the craftsman is gonna make a porch, and the porch is gonna look like a porch and it will serve the purpose of a porch. but the dude knows what he's doing and it is a joy to watch

natalieironside

tbf I think the portrayal of Geoffrey Chaucer was the most historically accurate thing about that movie. He was a mad lad with quite a lot of time he couldn't account for.

xxamorxexmortexx

We not gonna mention the medieval dinner party breaking out into dancing to the song "Golden Years" by David Bowie?

natalieironside

Well if we sit here and list out every single thing that's buck wild and awesome in A Knight's Tale we're gonna be here for a very long time

traegorn

A Knight's Tale is not historically accurate in detail, but is historically accurate in spirit. Like it uses it's medium to accurately depict the tone of the time period and events of the film.

The only other thing I can think of that achieves the same effect is the TV show Dickinson.

natalieironside

I'd even say it's in the same spirit as Chaucer's actual Knight's Tale, which for y'all who don't know is about the chivalrous knights of ancient Greece who go to mass at the cathedral of Zeus.

e-the-village-cryptid

seen so many posts that are like “I was so confused when I saw all this posting about some non-existent movie “Goncharov” like it was real” I wasn’t. this happens 5 times a week. my dash is routinely filled to the brim with passionate analysis of absurd-sounding movies and tv shows I have never heard of. I never for a second doubted the existence of a russian mafia movie set in italy with massive numbers of bizarrely named characters and no cohesive understanding of the movie’s themes or plot until I saw a post saying to tag it as unreality. this is tumblr. this happens daily. not one thought crossed my mind except “ha, looks like a few of my mutuals have a new hyperfixation.” this is what tumblr has done to me. you could tell me there’s a new tv show about dolphins with french accents living as royalty in victorian england while secretly starting a cult to renew the worship of the greek gods and the shipping discourse is intense and I would simply think “sounds legit” and keep scrolling

umbrie

orpheuslament

they hate me for finding romance in the violent & violence in the romantic. also for the killing

sexy-necromancing-bird

Bein’ a vampire is actually way less sexy when you consider you must now live a life without garlic knots

xemeterydr

I’m lactose intolerant but I still eat ice cream. I’m no pussy and neither are vampires

sexy-necromancing-bird

your so smart

xemeterydr

Dude that was over 2 1/2 years ago why are you just now responding

sexy-necromancing-bird

Are you mad at me

skunkmallow

people are cowards about fantasy settings and not including some things in em. I get the aversion to not wanting too modern of tech, however dwarves would invent and fucking love metal folding chairs

huffy-the-bicycle-slayer

They invented them as a weapon first then later discovered their use as a seating option

elidyce

Not that that isn’t funny, but consider this:

Everything built by every other species is always *too high*. So they had to invent a small, portable folding ladder in order to avoid the embarrassment of having to ask for help.

Which was metal, obviously, for strength and durability and making it useful as an impromptu clubbing weapon.

And then one dwarf looked at his ladder one day, and thought “y’know, if I put a seat on this, it could do *three* things,”

ofbetterbodies-deactivated20250

I’m stupid and bi and it’s all u need to know about me

sharkfinsoap

Remembering the time in college when I had thought the girl I was hooking up with was aware of my trans status

funnytwittertweets

spaceyshenanigans

Objectively the funniest thing to come out of twitter’s sinking ship

foxes-in-love

sandersstudies

I’m 25 and sometimes it still hits me that I can do whatever I want.

sandersstudies

Me: man I wish I could go to the zoo.

Me:

Me: …wait.

madlori

please go to the zoo if you want I’m a zoo docent and I love talking to grownups who are visiting the animals and want to know all about them.

captainclickycat

You can buy yourself stuff in the gift shop too, if you have the money. Don’t need to ask a grownup or anything. If you want that toy gorilla it’s yours.

crying-over-really-dumb-things

@prince-of-moths

andiamburdenedwithgloriousfeels

Do you ever start bullshitting a paper, and then look over it halfway through and think, ’…Wait a minute, I could be onto something here.’

imguiltyofthis

this is the definition of college.

comic-canary

Literally I was writing a paper on Asian salt water crocodiles, like a simple about them paper for a college class, and I started noticing some inconsistencies in the scientific papers I was sourcing and I accidentally discovered that the crocodile has been misdiagnosed as least concerned on the endangered species list when they should be classified as endangered and now my professor is having me write a formal report to the international Red List to have them reclassified and all I wanted to do was write this paper on an animal I thought was cool and now I’m considered an expert on this species…

waluwadjet2-deactivated20180727

this is how it works half of esteemed biologists trip and fall into their specialty while pursuing something else. one lecturer i just went to started as a biochemist researching antibiotics and discovered that crocodiles change colors based on environment and now he has 30+ crocs in his yard for research purposes and he’s just like… “wait… i’m a chemist…”

polywoggiest

How did so many people end up with crocodiles on accident?????

bionelly2

you just go into science and after a while, crocodile…

original-character-chaos

You… Very clever person.

brightlotusmoon

We did walk into that one.

systlin

GUYS THEY FIGURED OUT THE ROMAN CONCRETE RECIPE THAT MAKES IT IMMUNE TO SEAWATER

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/mystery-of-2000-year-old-roman-concrete-solved-by-scientists/ar-BBDO5VC

beautifultoastdream-deactivated

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

systlin

I KNOW RIGHT?!???

ella-raene

I can’t help but feel this is one of those things where we had actual documents saying “it was done with this and this”, and some old rich white guys looked at it and went “oh mirth, the ancients were so silly. They probably wrote this basic stuff down and the actual builders had Secret Techniques we need to Discover”

For a long time, archeologists didn’t know how greek women did their high-piled braids and hair. There was a word that translated to “needle” in the descriptions. They went, “seems like we’ll never know.” Then a hairdresser took a fucking needle (big needle) and did the fucking thing you do with needles, which is sew - and by sewing the braids into place, she replicated ancient styles.

The Egyptians had diagrams of construction steps for their pyramids. Archeologists went “oooh, ancient primitive people, how they do this?” LITERALLY MYTHBUSTERS OR THE OLD DISCOVERY CHANNEL or someone went “what if we did the thing the pictures said they did” AND GUESS FUCKING WHAT. GUESS FUCKING WHAT.

Also that thing with native Americans saying squirrels taught them how to get sap for maple syrup, and colonizers going “that’s a myth sweaty”

Sincerely, if the scientists had to do actual analysis like spectroscopy or whatever, kudos, and no flame. But swear to god, if all these years, we’ve had the recipes and there was just this fuckin institutional bias against just TRYING THE THING THEY SAID WOULD WORK, HELLFIRE AND DEMENTIA.

systlin

In this case, it was more they had roman writings saying what went into it but figured there was some secret because when they followed roman recipes it never turned out quite right.

Because the sources left by Romans always just said to mix with water. Because, if you were a Roman??? Obviously you knew that you used seawater for cement. Duh. That’s so obvious that they never really bothered specifying that you use seawater to mix it, because it wasn’t necessary, everyone knew that.

But then the empire fell, other empires rose and fell, time passed, and by the time we were trying to reconstruct the formula the ‘mix the dry ingredients with seawater’ trick had been forgotten, until chemical analysis finally figured it out again.

It’s sort of like the land of Punt, a ally of Egypt that’s mentioned all the time, but we don’t actually know where it was located. Because it isn’t written down anywhere. Why would they write it down? It’s Punt. Everyone knew where Punt was back then. It’d be ridiculous to waste the ink and space to specify where it was, every child knows about Punt.

3000 years later and we have no damned clue where it was, simply because at the time it was so blindingly obvious that it was never written down.

feitanswife

So moral of story is be specific

chronicmuppetbrain

I was thinking it was stupid that they didn’t specify seawater but then I had the thought that we don’t specify to use chicken eggs in baking because DUH so we just write eggs

aethersea

2000 years in the future people are going to be making scrambled fish eggs and crying bc the ancient recipes make no sense

lierdumoa

Forget eggs what about milk? They’ll look back at us, the ancients, and think we drank human breast milk by the gallon. When asked for evidence they’ll pull out from the deep archives the historical records of anime tiddies proving ancient humans had huge boobs. i mean some serious honkers. a real set of badonkers. packin some dobonhonkeros. massive dohoonkabhankoloos. big ol’ tonhongerekoo—