Teacups and Ponderings

Mental meanderings of moderate interest (For a given definition of "interest").

[conspiracy-chicken]

Apparently I can’t listen to slam poetry because now nothing I read stays in a straight line.

[conspiracy-chicken]

So, I’ve found this post with tens of thousands of note. Notes that I want to read, but which get cut off after a few hundred (almost entirely likes); after that, the “load more notes” button disappears. What I want to know, is is there any way to load more notes?

[coto524]

as a welsh person i want you all to accept that W is a vowel because honestly it makes pronouncing acronyms so much easier. wlw becomes ‘ooloo’, wjec becomes ‘oojeck’, love yourselves and stop giving us shit when we tell you welsh has 7 vowels. english actually has 15 vowel sounds but because y’all only use 5 letters you have to rely on a spelling system devised by satan

[saethwr-blog]

and please, enough with the “keyboard smashing” jokes. not original, not funny.

[coto524]

“ #okay but can any of y'all even pronounce your own town names tho? #bye”

yeah, we can actually because the spelling is phonetic. meanwhile english folks have placenames like bicester or keighley or beaulieu, which you have to learn the pronunciation for individually because the rules are so inconsistent. i mean people can’t even agree how to pronounce marylebone but sure welsh place names are the weird ones

[coto524]

“#But are you aware your language literally looks like a potato rolled across a keyboard”

fun fact: for decades children were beaten for speaking welsh in school, even in areas where english was barely spoken, because the government decided in 1847 that the language made people lazy and immoral

fun fact: welsh orthography is actually easy to read if you take your head out of your arse for one minute and learn our alphabet - just like french, or spanish, or korean, because surprise! languages use different spelling systems that are not based on english. novel, i know - and in the 18th century, travelling schools were able to teach people to read and write welsh in a matter of months, so that wales enjoyed a literate majority, a rare thing in europe at the time

fun fact: the english have been taking the piss out of welsh for years, just like they’ve been doing for irish, and scots gaelic, and cornish, and british sign language, and a hundred and one other languages, because evidently the fact that the whole world isn’t anglophone and monocultured and Still Part Of The Empire is a problem, and something that needs to be corrected

[conspiracy-chicken]

Out of curiosity, why is “w” a vowel? If you’re going to transcribe an existing language with a foreign alphabet, why designate one sound to a symbol already representing a completely different sound?

[song-of-the-spheres]

DEAR RESEARCHERS OF TUMBLR

You know what’s awesome?  Research.  You know what’s not awesome?  Not being able to get access to research because it’s stuck behind a paywall and you don’t belong to an institution/your institution doesn’t subscribe to that particular journal.

FEAR NOT.

Here is a list of free, open access materials on a variety of subjects.  Feel free to add if you like!

GO FORTH AND LEARN SHIT, MY FRIENDS.

Directory of Open Access Journals- A compendium of over 9000 journals from 133 countries, multilingual and multidisciplinary.

Directory of Open Access Books- Like the above, but for ebooks.  Also multidisciplinary.

Ubiquity Press- Journals covering archaeology, comics scholarship, museum studies, psychology, history, international development, and more.  Also publishes open access ebooks on a wide variety of subjects.

Europeana-  Digital library about the history and culture of Europe.

Digital Public Library of America- American history, culture, economics, SO MUCH AMERICA.

Internet Archive- In addition to books, they have music and videos, too.  Free!  And legal!  They also have the Wayback Machine, which lets you see webpages as they looked at a particular time.

College and Research Libraries- Library science and information studies.  Because that’s what I do.

Library of Congress Digital Collections- American history and culture, historic newspapers, sound recordings, photographs, and a ton of other neat stuff.

LSE Digital Library- London history, women’s history.

Wiley Open Access- Science things!  Neurology, medicine, chemistry, ecology, engineering, food science, biology, psychology, veterinary medicine.

SpringerOpen-  Mainly STEM journals, looooong list.

Elsevier Open Access-  Elsevier’s kind of the devil but you might as well take advantage of this.  Mainly STEM, also a linguistics journal and a medical journal in Spanish.

[conspiracy-chicken]

Internet Archaeology: Archaeology articles, hosted by the University of York

HathiTrust:  Open accss to a lot of historical books and articles. Granted, download is locked to institutions, but it’s browsable.

Canadian Conservation Institute: Lots of resources for handling material cultural objects

Perseus: Classical Greek and Roman texts, sometimes multiple versions. Searchable.

Persée: Database of French hist/arch publications. Some censoring of photos, likely due to copy-rights held by individual institutions.

PLOS: Public library of science. What it says on the tin.

Society for Historical Archaeology: A great resource for dating finds.

Digitized Diseases: 3D interactive scans of pathological bones

[conspiracy-chicken]

Me, answering door and guessing halloween costumes: and.. darth maul?

Guy’s friend starts laughing

Guy: -sigh- I’m whatever you want me to be.

[local-moonbat]

It’s 3am and my fourth captain just died, what’s up?

[conspiracy-chicken]

We call it “pulling a Schleimann”.

~an actual archaeologist

[foxglove-grove]

Does anyone else just lay in bed for an hour or so before they fall asleep and generate their own fanfictions? And they are super elaborate and you just sit and go through it and wasting precious sleeping time. Reblog if u do.

[conspiracy-chicken]

If ethics were a required course in school, like math of english, would we be a more moral society, or would we just get better at rationalizing our bad behaviour?

[thesnadger]

I googled the name, but only got your posts in response. She must be an entity of some sort, yet not recognized by any religion I know of. From what I saw, Meg and Cora were probably students at Northfield Mount Hermon in Massachusetts, which was separated into two schools a long time ago: Mount Hermon School for Boys and Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies. It was a Christian school founded by evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody. I'll keep doing research and try and find more information. Good luck!

Oh man, thanks. That’s really interesting….

They must have been in the girls’ school. I googled the name and got this:

From some sort of outdoor festival I guess. It’s kind of eerie looking at it.

[conspiracy-chicken]

It’s a maypole, probably for May Day (1st of May, or thereabouts). They happened mostly at girls’ schools in the States.

[thesnadger]

When I was in school, one of my art teachers used to say “this world needs more creators. There’s more than enough destroyers in the world today.”

Just a reminder, if you create anything–art, writing, food, machines, ideas, equations, knits, tools, gardens–the world needs you.

[worlyworlyworlywalld]

Yeah? Well my fourth grade teacher said “there is no use for imagination in the real world”!

[thesnadger]

Your fourth grade teacher was a tool.

[conspiracy-chicken]

Tools create.

[thearborealgirl]

i swear to god sometimes etymology in anatomy is basically shitposting. like in the pelvis. did you know that the part of the hip bone that makes up the leg joint is called the acetabulum, which means “shallow vinegar cup”

shallow vinegar cup?!!?

[conspiracy-chicken]

Sella turcica - “turkish saddle”. It’s part of the inside of your skull.

Innominates- “Nameless”. The three pelvic bones (Illium, Ishium, Pubis), which are all clearly named.

Pyramids and olives - to paired structures along the brainstem. The point where anatomists clearly said “fuck it” and gave up on latin because it was time for lunch and they were hungry.

[conspiracy-chicken]

Best frenemies

I want Tom and Marco to be best frenemies. Like:

“Only I get to feed his internal organs to the hounds!”

“What the hell, Marco?!”

[thesnadger]

Now that it’s Halloween the First, I should really talk more about how amazing Over the Garden Wall is.

I promised a million years ago that I’d make a post analyzing my thoughts about The Beast and this is probably the month to do it. I have a LOT to say about him.

Before I actually make the big post, there’s one thing I think is worth mentioning–there’s a lot of creeps and creatures that look intimidating and scary in Over the Garden Wall. But only one of them is actually monstrous.

That’s a running theme in OTGW. The gorilla is really your boyfriend, just trying to get help. The “ghost” is just as scared of you. The killer dog is just sick because it ate something bad. The real threats, like Adelaide or Lorna, tend to be presented as friendly or helpful before they attack. 

There’s only one figure that the boys are warned about who turns out to be a true threat, and that is the Beast.

[conspiracy-chicken]

Arguably, even the Beast serves a purpose. Lost souls become trees even without his involvement, he clears them away. The turtles are probably evil, though. And Adelaide.

[lesbianshepard]

my favorite out of context quotes from my archeology professor so far in no particular order

and floridians are just as human as you and me!

and the moral of the story is that there are no deadly snakes native to alaska

you might know this guy as one of the only archaeologists cool enough to be mentioned by indiana jones

it’s my dream to have my name said by harrison ford

i’m not going to apologize for having this class at 6am because you paid for it and it’s your fault. 

we don’t all dress like lara croft. i tried to get it to be a thing on a dig and my colleagues yelled at me. 

they were pretty good archaeologists except they were too racist to realize anything they found. 

i take back what i said about us not dressing like lara croft because lewis binford here is wearing nothing but short shorts and a cowboy hat. take notes for an academic halloween costume!

archaeologists can be good artists! not me, though. or anyone i know. but if you can draw just know you have options.

sometimes you find dead bodies when you dont really expect it and you just have to deal with it

archaeologists are the only people allowed to get exited when they find corpses. 

once i ruined thanksgiving dinner when i told my family i had gotten my degree in archaeology and my uncle commented he liked dinosaurs too

the closest i’ve ever been to a grizzly bear is when i left my glasses in my tent on a dig in alaska,  saw a big rock in the distance, and almost screamed

[lesbianshepard]

additional quotes

ah yes. archaeologists. or, as i love to call us,  pottery analysts

i mean he was kind of a good guy for helping us beat britain but he owned slaves so that really cancelled it out.

archaeology is like cultural anthropology, except after you interview the person you turn around and shoot them in the head.

do not use trees! trees are bad! don’t do it!

usually you find shards, but it’s super exciting when you find a really big shard

it’s basically like a waterpark, except you’re fully clothed and walking through a dark tunnel knee deep in muddy water. so, basically splish splash.

 i dont believe in curses but my colleagues and i like to encourage the idea of them so people stop touching our stuff

usually, you would find a knife in a kitchen. or underneath your pillow to really freak out your roommate who is a history nerd and has no idea why you would sleep with a knife under your pillow and he’ll get really scared and freaked out and okay i’m getting off topic

no matter what the other scientists say, archaeology is a real science.

don’t worry, i promise you, and whatever government agency that’s spying on me right now,  that i’m not a crazy communist trying to overthrow the government

by now you’ve noticed the big “POP QUIZ” written on the board. there isn’t one, but i wanted to see the looks on your face when you saw it. but you’re all dead inside so it’s not really funny.

everything was fine except the citizens of pompeii just woke up dead the next day

the number one question you should ask when you read old archaeology papers is “how the hell do you know?”

nothing pisses off old men more than young people asking “why” and “prove it” so do that as often as possible

this is incredible! all it takes is a computer the size of this room!

[lesbianshepard]

also sweet dicks this has a lot of notes wtf

[conspiracy-chicken]

More arch prof quotes:

- Many stories with the words “...That time the government tapped my phone” -We use to have a unit called “how to lie with statistics”, but the girl who TA’d it has a PhD now. -The bulks are sacred -Apparently Total Stations look suspicious to Airport Security, so we were there for two days -My wife says when I die she’s tossing all my stuff, so I plan to have a backhoe dig my grave and be buried with my things. -I miss hand drafting... -The building I wanted to go into was closed for a dig, so I broke in. -The local kids used to steal the strings from our dig sites, so we brided them with a pizza party. Then the goat happened. -I’m a little high right now, so I might lose track of the lecture more often than normal -Can we PLEASE stop talking about the parrot? -We’re waiting for the owners to die so we can dig up their yard. It’s the only way. -(On monstrous iconography during the Hellenistic period) ”So, it’s basically the twilightification of all monsters?” “...Yes, but if you call it that again I’m failing you on principle.” -Basically, all the women were named Cleopatra. -After three days of fasting I, too, had a vision. A pair of magnificent golden arches. -If I remember, I’ll bring in the skeleton I have in the box under my bed. -Some people call them “shards”, but they are “sherds” It’s important not to get too angry at those people. -Enrollment always goes up after an Indian Jones movie. Even Crystal Skull. -If you can’t tell, my wife and I both really like Flinders Petrie. -The bulks are sacred

[the-precisionist-procurator]

I’ve recently become stumped as to what Masters actually look like. We know they’ve got hands and feet. Or, at least, they appear to have hands and feet. But how does that work, exactly? Maybe it’s something like one of these ideas…..

But then again. Perhaps… what we’re really dealing with… is something far more terrifying.

[conspiracy-chicken]

(I know this is a joke, but have you considered pterosaur wings?)

See, unlike a bat wing, the membrane is stretched between the torso and the lateral most digit, thus hands and feet remain intact.

[best-blurst-of-times]

Deep Frog

[rasec-wizzlbang-blog]

do you think this is what lovecraft meant whenever he described something as being beyond description

[conspiracy-chicken]

ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD!

[conspiracy-chicken]

Headcanon: The reason Ford knew where to send that postcard to Stan was because he asked the all-knowing mailbox. The one from Dipper’s Guid to the Unexplained.