Mostly C:tL stuff

[fullmetalfisting]

Tbh germ theory DOES sound crazy. Like if you told a regency-era nobleman that tiny creatures lived on the surface of everything and THAT’S what causes consumption, they’d be like “ah, I see you are a lunatic. Would you reside in my hermitage? Rantings and ravings do so amuse my guests”

[mysteryteacup]

But if you told a Medieval person this they would probably go "Ah, so when the miasma settles on surfaces it gains evil life. I understand."

[alarajrogers]

Yeah, actually, it would probably be pretty easy to explain germ theory to a Medieval person as tiny evil spirits that live on everything, but they can be purified by soap and water, or by alcohol, because that is why God has granted us those things. And because they can float in the air, if you cough or sneeze after they have infested you, that can cause them to infest others. And when you are sick, the angels God has deputized to defend the bodies of His beloved children are at war with the evil spirits, and, sadly, sometimes they lose, but the best way to help your angels win their battle is to rest, drink plenty (this would probably be small beer in this time period, not water, because the water was also infested), stay clean, and for the sake of God do not allow anyone to let your blood, for the angels need that blood in their war against the evil spirits. Bloodletting is good for some types of illnesses but not the kinds caused by the tiny evil spirits.

[chekhovs-raygun]

boiling as a sterilization measure is also easy to explain. water returns to the air when heated and it rises as steam back up to the floodgates of heaven; we know God created the world in seven days, He's not up there making more water every time it rains. it circulates. the returning of water to heaven also purifies the water of unclean and malign influences. you know wormy water from a muddy puddle will kill your kid. you know you wouldn't wade into a bog and have a slurp. water that remains in the low places of earth absorbs all that is unclean from our waste and it may also sponge up new diseases from hell, we're not totally sure about that one, but it seems likely. God set up the heavenly water cycle so that the earth's waters wouldn't totally fill up with gunk.

what does this have to do with boiling your surgical tools? well look, the boiling water releases bubbles of steam which carries the malign influences up to heaven. you boil a knife, you send all the miasmic particles off with the steam to heaven. if you rinse the knife off in a bucket the water isn't hot enough, the particles go into the water and then right back on to the knife. you gotta boil it to get the particles all the way away. how can a tool or rag or a bed have miasmic particles on it when you can't smell them? humans have a lousy sense of smell. look at your dog on the hunt. are there no rabbits in the woods just because you can't smell them? we know that miasma is carried on the air, and is what makes stench so dangerous, and we know that humans can't smell worth a damn compared to dogs cats horses etc. a dog can smell if a rat died in a corner of the room last week. you can't. do you think licking the spot where the rat died is going to go well for you? luckily, what humans lack in snout we make up for in brains. we have extra brains where our sniffers should have been. God set that up for a reason.

and why does a rinse with wine spirits work? man, look how fast alcohol evaporates. my guess is that because wine contains a lot more vice than water, it evaporates a whole lot faster, in sort of an equal and opposite way that a rock falls faster than a feather. if you want the miasmic particles to get off there FAST, you dunk it in something that's going back to heaven at a gallop.

what's up with honey? it just preserves things against corruption. doesn't clean them off. honey doesn't evaporate at all. probably because bees don't sin. it's not good for ridding a tool of particles-- it's sticky-- but fine for preserving anything you don't want to go to heaven OR hell. this is why you wash the wound with wine spirits or purified water FIRST, to sluice the miasma out, then slap the honey on AFTER. and boil the damn bandage, too. you wouldn't put a rotten door in a sound doorframe and expect it to keep out bandits, would you? cmon.

[itsjustfish]

Day 5: Brunch

For @montereybayaquarium ‘s Deep Sea December

[abyssalco]

thank you for all the lovely reactions to my last fish post :‘)

[susiephone]

if you want to read more but have trouble finishing things, i really recommend short story collections (ESPECIALLY anthologies by multiple authors) and literary magazines. if one story sucks you can just skip to the next one, and anthologies and magazines will have work by multiple authors so you get a wide variety of styles, and if you find a story you really really like, you can look to see if that author's published anything else.

i'm not as well-versed in literary magazines as i should be (trying to fix that), but here are short story collections i suggest:

lesser known monsters of the 21st century by kim fu (speculative fiction, horror). personal favorite story: "pre-simulation consultation xf007867"

the paper menagerie and other stories by ken liu (speculative fiction). personal favorite story: "the litigation master and the monkey king"

slasher girls and monster boys by various (horror). personal favorite story: "the birds of azalea street"

what we fed to the manticore by talia lakshmi kolluri (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "the hunted, the haunted, the hungry, the tame"

africa risen by various (afrofuturism, speculative fiction). personal favorite story: "a dream of electric mothers"

a small apocalypse by laura chow reeve (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "real bodies"

the secret lives of church ladies by deesha philyaw (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "dear sister"

a phoenix first must burn by various (speculative fiction). personal favorite story: "wherein abigail fields recalls her first death and, subsequently, her best life"

woman hollering creek and other stories by sandra cisneros (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "woman hollering creek"

bliss montage by ling ma (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "yeti lovemaking"

how to love a jamaican by alexia arthurs (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "the ghost of jia yi"

radicalized by cory doctorow (speculative fiction). personal favorite story: "radicalized"

life ceremony by sayaka murata (literary fiction, horror). personal favorite story: "life ceremony"

shit cassandra saw by gwen e. kirby (literary fiction). personal favorite story: "here preached his last"

through the woods by e.m. carroll (horror). personal favorite story: "his face all red"

[vryfmi]

[id: an ink portrait of Lucy Carlyle (Lockwood and Co books) looking to the side with a worried expression. on either sides of her face are a total of four skulls positioned in rotation of turning away from her until their gazes are averted./end id]

without you there is no me my bag of bones bring your body on home sweet heart of stone you've gone and left me all alone

Bag of Bones by Medicine Boy

[seatrench]

New Zealand Longfin Eel

(source)

[morayeelfan]

this is one of my all time favourite moray eel videos

[targetedknowledge]

[its-funnytwittertweets]

[king-incarnadine]

We'll Make them Look Up

(A Gold-Spotted Eel and Mercury)

[emilyaillustrates]

Big mythical Mama Eel to test out a Riso brush pack

[cherryhatter-deactivated2015072]

KICK THE CAN!

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

To kick the can, reblog it. I wanna see how long this can go on for.

[visibun]

the oldest reblogs for this post that i can find are from january 2nd of 2013. this can has been getting kicked around tumblr for almost 13½ years now

[drtanner]

And yet somehow this is my first time kicking it!

[punkitt-is-here]

quirky fourth wall breaking character but theyre just fucking. wrong about the medium theyre in. they keep making references to cinematic techniques and directorial styles and the other fourth wall breaking character is like "dumbass we're in a fucking comic book" and they are in a video game.

[meli-writes]

a full meal

the government says this plan will increase the integration of vampiric persons into normal society. the national health service says their trial will help 'people with disordered hemosynthetic parasitism' manage their health and avoid poor, condition-derived choice.

everyone knows it's kinda bullshit.

the clinics are too far apart, the waiting lists too long, the supply too short and the subject of endless headlines about the bagfeeders stealing from our veins. (0.4% of daily donations, to be precise.)

and you're still basically disabled without RADE (risk-aware dietary enhancement), and taking it from a partner is just a call-out post and a lost mutual aid network waiting for a breakup.

you could do bloodwork. it'll even be not-yet illegal if you don't let them fuck you, which is only the most required part if you aren't a top 0.1% earner and still wanna make rent.

no. what everyone knows really is that it's not enough, and it's not supposed to be. they want you starving, barely able to get up in the evening, getting fired totally because you can't keep up and all these complaints which are totally valid.

they want you thinking about making those poor, condition-derived choices. so they can simper about how much they sympathise with your condition and how unsafe you must feel while they lock you up and cancel all their plans and trials for being ineffective.

so you're in their corridors, their halls. it's where they want you. cheap, and vulnerable, and needy. with the people who could make it better and won't. who'll enjoy you and feed you and toss you when the headlines get too close to finding out.

but maybe this time you want to make one of those choices. and maybe, for first time in so so long, you're going to remember what it means to feel full.

[prokopetz]

A problem with the whole Important Queer Media™ discourse is that a lot of folks don't seem to be able to parse "Important" as anything other than a moral judgment, and it's really not. Art is a dialogue. All works are in conversation with other works, and sometimes, works that have merit are deeply in conversation with works that suck. Acting like we can't talk about the latter at all is essentially demanding that we imagine an alternative universe in which those works weren't part of the conversation, yet somehow we ended up in the same place – and while alt-history may be a fun intellectual exercise, it's not a great critical lens.

[kkinkshamer]

[mhalachai]

“By the first world war, soldiers swore so much that the word “fucking” came to function as no more than “a warning that a noun is coming”. “

Guardian review of Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing by Melissa Mohr 

[jumpingjacktrash]

i would like to take this opportunity to present my headcanon about that infamous “language!” line: steve and the howlies had such dirty mouths that they had to be constantly reminded to clean it up for the reporters that followed them around. so steve heard a swear word over the radio and had a kneejerk stop that we’re being filmed for the folks back home reaction.

in other words, he said “language” not because he never swears, but because if he’s not on guard he swears way too much. :D

[halloweenatasha]

“the word ‘fucking’ came to function as no more than “a warning that a noun is coming”

[jenniferrpovey]

And the interesting thing about actually dealing with people who do swear to that degree, which I have, is that eventually your brain completely tunes the word fucking out.

You basically don’t hear it. It becomes unimportant noise.

[froborr]

I was actually just talking to someone last night about how when I was a kid (the 80s), no one said “fuck” or “shit,” ever, but people casually tossed slurs around like nobody’s business. Now people use “fuck” and “shit” like punctuation, but slurs are increasingly taboo–and that’s exactly how it should fucking be.

[jenniferrpovey]

You can tell we were kids in the 80s in different places…

[laylainalaska]

OH MY GOD I FOUND THE POST AGAIN!!

When I first saw this post go around, I was traveling, but I had something I wanted to say and I could never find it again.

Okay, so, this post isn’t wrong, but what the original gifset doesn’t take into account (though some of the commentary touches on it) is how incredibly situational swearing was in the 1940s.

So, yes, men swore a lot – around other guys, in certain contexts. But they were very heavily conditioned not to swear around women and kids.

I think this might be one of the big reasons why a lot of people my age and younger got the idea that people didn’t swear during the 1940s. Most of us fell into the “kid” or “female” categories, or both, and guys our grandparents’ age would never, ever say “fuck” around us. And those words weren’t usually used in media of the era for similar reasons, so we got the idea that people that age were very prim and polite, when it’s more that they were prim and polite around us.

I remember as a young woman walking in on groups of old blue-collar guys talking among themselves, with profanity flying freely, and then noticing me in the room and immediately clamming up and apologizing to me for swearing around me.

There’s a bit in the Douglas Bader biography I was reading a month or so ago that demonstrates this in a WWII context. According to the book, the squadron pilots swore freely in their radio chatter to each other in the field, to the amusement of the WAAFs (female service personnel) who were listening to the radio in an ops room as they moved counters around on maps (much like we see Peggy doing in TFA) and the embarrassment of their commander:

After awhile, to the regret of the Beauty Chorus [the WAAFs], Woodhall disconnected the loud-speaker in the Ops Room, feeling that some of the battle comments were too ripe even for the most sophisticated WAAFs. (“They laugh, you know,” he said, “but dammit I get so embarrassed.”)

… so, right, even in the middle of a war, pilots saying “fuck” over the radio was something the female staff had to be insulated from.

Say what you will about the baby boomers, but they largely demolished that wall between “swearing around men” and “swearing around women”. Most guys my dad’s age don’t do it anymore, at least not to that much of an extreme. By the time you get to my generation (I’m 40), people might swear or they might not, and they usually don’t swear around young kids, but swearing around men but not around women is just not a thing anyone does anymore. At least I don’t know anyone who does it specifically and consistently who’s not elderly.

It’s not really an individual-sexism thing, more of a socialization thing – sexist on a societal level, sure, but I don’t think Steve would balk at swearing around women, kids, or in a refined or professional social setting because he’s a sexist or a prude. It’s just something you didn’t do as a polite person. Like blowing your nose on the tablecloth in a fancy restaurant. I think he could and probably would unlearn that, but it’d take time.

So, to me, about half the examples up there work just fine (“now why the fuck would I do that” to Bucky – absolutely! Or “Is everything a fucking joke to you?” to Tony) and several jar horribly, because they’re not the right context (like the “there’s only one God ma'am” bit – noooo, you aren’t going to get “fuck” and “ma'am” in the same sentence! not for a Steve fresh from the 1940s! – or “we have our fucking orders” … in a polite, professional context like that, no). Steve would never. Or, I should say, someone from Steve’s culture – who tries in general to be a polite and respectful person, as Steve does – would never. Maybe after he’s had a few years to acclimatize to the more relaxed social climate surrounding swearing in the 21st century, but I think it’d take him awhile; he would sort of instinctively jerk himself back from doing it in all but the most relaxed sort of “palling around with your teammates” environment.

(Headcanon-wise, I could see Steve very quickly incorporating someone like Natasha into his mental schemata as “one of the guys” – not consciously, but on a subconscious level: like, he doesn’t hold back from swearing around her pretty quickly – but taking a LOT longer with someone like Wanda or Pepper.)

tl;dr disclaimer: not a historian, was not alive in the 1940s, so please correct me if I’m wrong on things here.

[glorious-spoon]

I’m so glad someone said this, because this is something I think a lot of the Steve meta about swearing misses. Situational profanity, exactly! He wouldn’t cuss in anything he’d consider ‘polite company’, because you didn’t do that. I’m absolutely sure he’s capable of having a very foul mouth in some circumstances (he was a soldier who grew up in working-class Brooklyn, so… yeah), but in the cultural context where he grew up, you sure as hell didn’t say ‘fuck’ in front of a lady, not if you had any manners to speak of.

/speaking as someone who cusses like breathing, even.

[phoenixtawnyflower]

This is the best explanation of Steve’s ‘language’ line I’ve ever seen.

[ororium-z]

Happy Pride!

[rootbeergoddess]

Every pride, you must reblog this. No exceptions

[thesaltofcarthage]

I love that four different people on my feed scheduled this joyous person to reblog by 8am on June 1. I look forward to seeing this a dozen more times today.