tick tick tocking to the time @elem-nope - Tumblr Blog

Random thing for people to consider is that since Laika is the saint of one way trips should Felicette be known as the saint of safe landings since she did make it back to the ground safely

somefishycat

tu LANCES félicette ? tu lances son corps comme la fusée ? oh ! oh ! prison pour les scientifiques ! prison pour les scientifiques pendant Un Mille Ans !

bug-yogurt

You can understand the French perfectly fine with only context but the English translation I got still had me floored

unhelpfultarot

Temperance and Ten of Swords

Sometimes stabbing it a lot is the moderate solution.

mistylacrimosa

🌼🔪Happy Ides of March everyone 🔪🌼

mymodernmet

Iranian photographer Hossein Fatemi, offers a glimpse of an entirely different side to Iran than the image usually broadcasted by domestic and foreign media. In his photo series An Iranian Journey, many of the photographs reveal an Iran that most people never see, presenting an eye-opening look at the amazing diversity and contrasts that exist in the country.

antlered-vixen

I see a lot of people reblogging, well-meaningly and with anti-war sentiment at heart, Iranian photographs and art and so on. But so much of it focuses on very exoticized imagery that, while a true part of the country - yes, there’s women in black chador and old men with donkeys in dust-bowls - also helps sustain the image of Iran as remote, alien, and already desolate (therefore, how much can life really change with a bit of carpet-bombing? Right?) This is also Iran. Lounges and parties and rock bands and youth culture and skateboards and graffiti art and a lively hip hop scene and acrylic nails and a thriving, multi-faceted culture that the wide-scale destruction of infrastructure, hospitals, roads, industrial sites, etc, will devastate for decades to come.

paradoxial-cunt

bog-goblin

i-am-a-fish

#ides of march

flieslikeamoron

this quote is sending me

#THIS #eastern europeans vs americans in sports #you can always tell an American from a long ways away based on how much they smile #and their baseball caps but that's a different story

john-silvers

At the moment, he’s using it to help the captain. But god help us if he ever realizes what else he could use it to accomplish.

dduane

Via @jonathanjarry.bsky.social: "One of the best sf shows ever made, Babylon 5, is being released on YouTube by Beyond Infinity in collab w/ WB. And it's upscaled!

"One ep every few days.

"Seasons 3-4 are masterpieces, but if you've never seen the show, you can start now!"

#babylon 5

stuffaboutminneapolis

Magician Russell Swann, appearing at the Radisson Hotel, opens an umbrella inside, stands under a ladder, pours salt on the ground, and breaks a mirror in front of a black cat on Friday the 13th while his assistant, June Holden, looks on in horror. The cat's name is Friday and was won as a bridge game booby prize last May 13th (a Friday). (1950) via Hennepin County Library

#friday the 13th #minnesota #really went all in on this one

kuzuyamii

happy anniversary to whatever is going on in this show

#black sails #show of all time

unhelpfultarot

Nine of Swords and Seven of Cups

You're already overloaded to the point of meltdown, and they keep offering you more choices.

#tarot #relatable

miketalkstrash-deactivated20170

Let’s not forget to acknowledge Alexandre Dumas this Black History Month

The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man.

That’s excellence.

latinagabi

Let’s not forget that he was played on screen by a white man. And the fact that he was black is barely ever mentioned or the book he wrote inspired by his experiences.

princessnijireiki

Other things not to forget about Alexandre Dumas:

chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.

grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet

he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.

even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).

(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y'all.)

famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”

for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.

and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.

ALSO IMPORTANT:

SWAG

sugaryumyum-deactivated20170907

I am absolutely ashamed to admit I had NO idea Dumas was black.

elodieunderglass

when this post first went around (a year ago apparently) I was like BUT WHAT ABOUT DADDY DUMAS THOUGH because basically

daddy general dumas was an immense fierce french warrior who was a 6 foot plus, stunningly gorgeous and charismatic Black gentleman

he invaded egypt

the native egyptians said “is this napoleon? this must be napoleon. we for one welcome our majestic new overlord”

then napoleon showed up

napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus

the native egyptians were like “… no… no, we’ve thought very hard and we’ll have General Dumas actually”

this did not make napoleon happy

in fact it made him jealous

napoleon felt so emasculated that he launched a campaign of revenge against General Dumas, including taking away his pension, that probably inspired a lot of Alexandre’s rather satisfying scenes in which fathers are nobly avenged and the money-grubbing villains are rubbed in the mud

liza-not-lisa-deactivated202401

I was never taught that he was Black either. WTF.

petermorwood

General Dumas (aka Thomas Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie) looked like this…

…and like this…

…while “Napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus“…

:-D

I suspect Alexandre Dumas would have laughed at that, because besides looking like someone who laughed a lot…

…he was also a foodie.

sicktress

He was also born in present-day Haiti. Back then, it was the French colony of Saint-Domingue.

you-are-talking-about-this-deac

General Dumas was also the highest ranking officer of African descent to have command of a European army. EVER.

biblioaesthetica

His stuff is in the public domain, you can find them on Project Gutenberg here:

Project Gutenberg offers 73,007 free eBooks for Kindle, iPad, Nook, Android, and iPhone.

And for those of you who would like to try audio versions, this is what is on LibriVox, the free, volunteer run audiobook version of Project Gutenberg:

LibriVox

#alexandre dumas

dsudis

So wait are livestock guardian dogs to their flocks like… Clark Kent among the residents of Smallville? He’s been here since he was a baby, we all know him, and he’s… generally one-of-us shaped, uh, approximately. And then when something goes wrong he suddenly leaps into action and does some terrifying impossible shit none of us could do. And then comes back home and settles in like nothing happened and he’s one of us again.

relevant-catnik

Hmm.

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

ruusverd

Actual answer: the sheep know the dogs are not sheep, and they also know the dog is protecting them and take their cues from the dog about whether they need to run for the barn or can just ignore anything scary that approaches.

However, a friend once had an extremely premature orphan lamb born in December who had to live in the house for a couple of months with leg braces and all that, who due to spending her lambhood with dogs instead of sheep came out of the whole experience convinced she was a livestock guardian dog! She would patrol the perimeter of the fields every evening with the actual dog, stand watch in the barn door at night like the dog, and was more than willing to throw down if she saw something scary coming towards the flock the way the guard dog did. Tragically orphaned lamb did a convincing job at being a guard dog without actually having any of the biological advantages a dog has over a sheep.

Which I suppose made her Sheep Batman.

#animals

ubercharge

look. look at this beautiful sword meme. i’m going to cry

literallybyronic

@petermorwood

petermorwood

I saw and reblogged this one a while back, but it’s always worth repeating, and this time I’m adding a bit of background info comparing common fantasy sword features to the Real Thing (with pictures, of course.)

Leaf-bladed swords are a very popular fantasy style and were real, though unlike modern hand-and-a-half longsword versions, the real things were mostly if not always shortswords.

Here are Celtic bronze swords…

…Ancient Greek Xiphoi…

… and a Roman “Mainz-pattern” gladius…

Saw or downright jagged edges, either full-length or as small sections (often where they serve no discernible purpose) are a frequent part of fantasy blades, especially at the more, er, imaginatively unrestrained end of the market.

Real swords also had saw edges, such as these two 19th century shortswords, but not to make them cool or interesting. They’re weapons if necessary…

…but since they were carried by Pioneer Corps who needed them for cutting branches and other construction-type tasks, their principal use was as brush cutters and saws.

This dussack (cutlass) in the Wallace Collection is also a fighting weapon, like the one beside it…

…but may also have had the secondary function of being a saw.

A couple of internet captions say it’s for “cutting ropes” which makes sense - heavy ropes and hawsers on board a ship were so soaked with tar that they were often more like lengths of wood, and a Hollywood-style slice from the Hero’s rapier (!!) wouldn’t be anything like enough to sever them. However swords like this are extremely rare, which suggests they didn’t work as well as intended for any purpose.

I photographed these in Basel, Switzerland, about 20 years ago. Look at the one on the bottom (I prefer the basket-hilt schiavona in the middle).

A lot of “flamberge” (wavy-edge) swords actually started out with conventional blades which then had the edges ground to shape - the dussack, that Basel broadsword and this Zweihander were all made that way.

The giveaway is the centreline: if it’s straight, the entire blade probably started out straight.

Increased use of water power for bellows, hammers and of course grinders made shaping blades easier than when it had to be done by hand. This flamberge Zweihander, however, was forged that way.

Again, the clue is the centre-line.

Incidentally those Parierhaken (parrying hooks - a secondary crossguard) are among the only real-life examples of another common fantasy feature - hooks and spikes sticking out from the blade.

Here are some rapiers and a couple of daggers showing the same difference between forged to shape and ground to shape. The top and bottom rapiers in the first picture started as straights, and only the middle rapier came from the forge with a flamberge blade.

There’s no doubt about this one either.

The reason - though that was a part of it - wasn’t just to look cool and show off what the owner could afford (any and all extra or unusual work added to the price) but may actually have had a function: a parry would have been juddery and unsettling for someone not used to it, and any advantage is worth having.

However, like the saw-edged dussack, flamberge blades are unusual - which suggests the advantage wasn’t that much of an advantage after all.

Here’s a Circassian kindjal, forged wiggly…

…and an Italian parrying dagger forged straight then ground wiggly…

There were also parrying daggers with another fantasy-blade feature, deep notches and serrations which in fantasy versions often resemble fangs or thorns.

These more practical historical versions are usually called “sword-breakers” but I prefer “sword-catcher”, since a steel blade isn’t that easy to break. Taking the opponent’s blade out of play for just long enough to nail him works fine.