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@fangirlnerdintrovert
Okay, we got a new one, boys.
Close enough welcome back Chekov's gun.
Prev you canāt bury this in your own tags
I also like the idea of showing something as a problem before itās shown as a strength. Almost every character trait has two sides, and by showing the ābadā side first, it sets things up to not only make sense, but to also be very satisfying.
ok so, I approached my local library with a proposal to donate a mural as a way to A: build portfolio/gain practical experience and B: give back to a beloved public institution. The director was very enthusiastic about it and i've been working on it since the beginning of March. Come with me as I endeavor to paint what is in all honesty an excessive amount of birds
I wanted the birds to look like they were actually in the space so first thing after doing the draft was to do a lighting study
after that I covered the walls in letters in lieu of a projector/vr headset bc i have neither of those :) Then i take a picture of the section of wall and superimpose the lineart over top of it so I can pencil in the lines
et voila
and that was a whole week on it's own so next comes the paintin' >:)
and now, the birds
Birds 1 and 2/14: Red Winged Blackbird, Male and female, Agelaius phoeniceus
Bird 3/14, American Robin, Turdus migratorius
hoo boy, ok *out of breath*
GIVE IT UP FOR BIRD NUMBUH 5, THE CANADIAN GOOSE, Branta canadensis!!!!
this guy took me about 4 days to completely finish, all of those freakingk coverts were a bear to render
speaking of obnoxious coverts:
bird 5/14, Bluejay, Cyanocitta cristata
the friggin stripes almost got me chat, i may not make it
Madam....
birds 6 and 7: American Goldfinch, Spinus tristis, male and female
pleasantly simple to paint! next is the flickerrrrr
*melts into goo*
BIRD NUMBER 8, (yellow shafted) NORTHERN FLICKERRRRR, Colaptes auratus
genuinely made me start questioning my sanity around day 3, it's half the size the of the goose, WHY did it take me 4 days to finish??
nothing but pain and suffering, i'm sure hope the next bird will be much easier and with FAR less barring :)
in other news, I am losing my mind hairline
SHE'S DONE!!
Bird number 9: Red-tailed hawk, Buteo jamaicensis
my chains are broken i am FREE. although i did have a great deal of fun with this, the barring on the wings itself took me like four days and i am READY to move on
this was a week and a half of continuous work so please excuse me for getting a little emotional in the bg š
*does a little jig*
BIRD NUMBER 10!!! The Male Mallard Duck, Anas platyrhynchos
the male and female ones are gonna be posted separately bc they're taking a lot longer lol but yea! super happy i was able to capture the iridescent green of the head, i found metallic green and blue paint at a craft store that really made his head POP. it looks better in person i promise
ALSO!! As this is the 10th one, BIG announcement. The end is in sight!!!!! I plan to finish within the next 3 weeks and there will be a small dedication ceremony/ unveiling happening at the library to commemorate its completion on the 16th of May. If you live in the Western New York region and want to check it out for yourself shoot me a dm!
Also thank you everyone for your kind words and support throughout this whole process, it's been a genuine treat thinking there are potentially thousands of you out there cheering me on while I paint this š„¹
aaaand another one bites the duck,
we're movin right along with bird numero 11!! The lady Mallard!! Anas platyrhyncos
the 16th is looming in the distance so i'm trying to get thru these as quickly as i can so i can have as much time for the GBH as possible. i still need to do the names next to all of them so i've got about a week and a half to finish everything which is GREAT because i have adhd and nothing gets my ass in gear like a fuckin deadline, let me tell you
power couple that they are, here's bird number 12 and 13,
the Northern Cardinals, Cardinalis cardinalis
and NOW that they are complete, ITS GO TIME, in the next five days (library's closed for mother's day šš) i need to have the GBH fully rendered, the names of the birds vectored, weeded, masked, applied to the wall, and then painted, plus additional cattails throughout. I may be able to get away with just getting the GBH done in time for the unveiling and then just have the names and cattails added later, but i'm gonna really try to get it all done in time. BUT, i have a plan. Part of why i take so long on these is because i really am just figuring it out as I do it lmao. there have been many a time where i am sitting on top of the ladder googling "how to paint birds" but I think if i take the time tomorro to do all that figuring out how to approach it beforehand, this will go a lot faster. I may also recruit some of my artist friends to help with the placing of the names... hrmm we'll see.
Anyways, shout out to the librarian who tracked down exactly the thing i needed so i could figure out where to place the highlights in my birds eyes, ur the real mvp
thanks for the reminder, kid
at long last, we've reached the end...
Bird number 14 out of 14,
The Great blue heron, Ardea herodius
thank you to everyone who reached out or got excited about this project, it genuinely gave me the fuel i needed to keep going. In total, the 480+ total hrs it took me to cover this wall pales in comparison to how long its expected to spend on there, hopefully imparting a sense of beauty and love for the natural world to the next generation and here's hoping i'm only getting started with these.
i'll see y'all soon :')
S. snuffleupagus, a newly described species of fish, is named after the beloved Sesame Street character, Mr. Snuffleupagus, to which it bear
SNUFFLEUPAGUS REAL
Fantastic article!! The guys looking for it were fish researchers who saw it one time, knew instantly it was an undescribed species, and then tried for nearly 20 years to find and document it!
It's a type of ghost pipefish, related to seahorses, and it floats around coral reefs looking like a piece of algae and hunting unsuspecting prey
They are, of course, named after Snuffleufagus from Sesame Street!
Later on it the project, they got citizen science involved, and people across the Pacific started reporting sightings of snuffy fish from all over!
Hooray for science and hooray for S. snuffleufagus !
Link
I believe he also now has a library card.
He does!
When I was in my teens, I used to make an entire magic system with 900 unique spells, ordered in magic schools and categories, and it boggles my mind that I basically reinvented DnD mechanics, even down to metamagic.
I wanted to make a wiki about it but I don't have time for it.
The point was to try to encompass every "superpower" I could think of into a magic system.
I even got lore related to it all, I'm pretty sure I'm gonna simply reuse it all for OC worldbuilding. Ngl the fun part was naming all the spells, symbols and coming up with the logic of it all. Edit : Due to popular demand, I'm making the wiki now yay. There's even more sigils done now >:]
After almost a year of brainstorming, coding, designing, writing and drawing, I am proud to announce that the magical system wiki I was working on is finally ready to open to the public !
You can check it out here !
World Anvil is a worldbuilding community and collection of tools for authors, role playing games storytellers and worldbuilding
The writing part is done, and I've done enough spells to provide an example for each element. The goal is to fill up that huge array eventually! >:]
āAre you saying that Jesus isnāt fully manā heās literally not. Heās half deity. Why did you word it like that?
āJesus was fully human and fully divineā is conventionally accepted doctrine. Itās called the hypostatic union. Itās in the Athanasian creed.
Sounds like wormnoodless is recapitulating Eutychianism (Christ exists in one nature and of two), which was rejected by the Fourth Ecumenical Council in 451, instead adopting Dyophysitism (Jesus Christ is one person of one substance and one hypostasis, with two distinct, inseparable natures: divine and human), which is still the main belief of most major denominations.
Sorry, wormnoodless, youāre a heretic.
@apocrypals, do I have it (mostly) right?
Correct
Anything other than āfully God, fully manā is heretical
#sometimes the nature of tumblr is that someone accidentally reinvents the great schism (1054) all over again
reblog if ur mom is smart and beautiful
This is one of my favorite sites on here because everyone who reblogged it truly believes it because their moms wonāt actually see it
My mom is one of my greatest role models
Folks, friends, yāallā¦. esk*mo is a slur. I understand a lot of people donāt know that, I donāt want to be a dick about it, but Iāve been seeing it in fics. Wanna write āesk*mo kissesā? Just say ānuzzled nosesā or something.
Iām not here to call anybody out, itās been in multiple fics, Iām not vague posting. This is just a psa. šš»
If you could help me spread awareness about this by reblogging, Iād really appreciate it.
Iāve had this post on insta saved for sometime ā¤ļø
[Text Description: āHey! Reminder: Eskimo is a slur. It means āsnow eatersā in Cree and is a slur against Inuit . Also donāt use āEskimo kissesā. Itās called Kunik. It is a greeting mostly used for familyā¦ Kunik was how Iād greet my mom and grandmother as a small child.ā /TD]
Rebloging for the awareness and especially for the alternative words
And so people who are just learning this now know the proper usage: āInuitā is plural. The singular is āInukā, as in āhe is an Inukā
Iāve reblogged this a lot in the past but one more time for the people who maybe donāt know yet
Apparently my director went to see a production of West Side Story a few years ago, and the guy playing Chino forgot his gun before coming out for his final scene. Once it got to the big scene where he is supposed to shoot Tony, he screeched āPoison Bootsā and kicked the actor playing Tony until he went down. The girl playing Maria then had to jerk the shoe off of Chinoās foot, and had to do the gunshot scene asking āHow many kicks Chino? How many kicks, and one kick left for meā.Ā
There should be a blog dedicated to theatrical urban legends. Like that opening weekend of Dracula where Dracula (still hungover) vomited all over the audience during the first stage direction that everyone has a friend of a friend that worked on the show and was there.
or the one where the bridge never came out for Javertās suicide and so he just pretended to stab himself and then lay there until the lights went out
best story i heard was when a friend of mine saw a show where juliet forgot to bring the dagger out on stage so she just ripped the squib out of her chest and blood squirted everywhere
During a passion play a friend of my brother was supposedly in, one of the roman soldiers who was supposed to stab jesus on the cross and accidentally grabbed the wrong spear- he was supposed to grab one with a fake tip, but instead he grabbed one with an actual metal tip and, well
Jesus screamedĀ āJESUS CHRIST YOU STABBED MEā.
Since that Jesus had to be taken down due to a bad case of stab-itis, the backup Jesus came in, but he weighed significantly less than the original Jesus- which would have been fine, except that at the end the cross was supposed to ascend upwards with Jesus on it, and the weights hadnāt been adjusted.
So Jesus, instead, ROCKETED UP into heaven (or, just, above the stage).
This is wild from start to finish
I was in Peter Pan once and one night at a performance, the adhesive holding our Hookās mustache on was wearing off. It was near the end with a big fight scene and when he got attacked, he let his mustache fall and went āYOU RIPPED MY MUSTACHE OFF!ā in a scandalized tone and it added a new note of hilarity to the whole scene (which was supposed to be funny anyway)
In my seventh grade play, which was a midsummer nightās dream, Thisbe didnāt have a sword so she stabbed herself with a coathanger
My junior year we were doing Romeo and Juliet and after Juliet poisons herself it was supposed to go dark and sheād get off the stage. well the light crew accidentally turned them back on and Juliet who was sitting up slammed back down on the wooden bed with a loud bang. To which my theater teacher says into the com āzombie Julietā and everyone who heard that had to keep as quiet as possible while our eyes were filling with tears.
i attended my countyās performing arts high school majoring in vocal studies, (mostly geared towards musical theater and opera styles) and once a year we got a field trip to new york (we were in jersey, so itās not exactly far). we would do one touristy thing, an actorās workshop with friends of our teachers working in various performing industries in nyc, and then see a show.Ā
my first year doing this, our industry contacts were 1 actor, 1 casting director, and 1 producer to get different aspects of the business, and they all gave us amazing advice and told fantastic stories. the actor in question was Zazu on Broadwayās The Lion King for several years, and told the best story by far.
in The Lion King, there are only two pieces of pre-recorded noise in the whole show. one, when Pumbaa does a MASSIVE fart while fighting the hyenas, and the other being Mufasa saying REMEMBERRRRRR as Simba climbs Pride Rock. the actor told us while struggling not to laugh that, during one nightās performance, someone forgot to flip the tape of these pre-recorded noises.
so, at the end of the show, the great climax where Simba finally accepts his place in the Circle of Life, the heavens parted and-
PFFFFFFFFFRRRRRBTFTBTBFTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT
everyone froze. and then all ran off stage positively HOWLING with laughter.
the lesson: sometimes there are fuck ups you just canāt recover from.
During a high school production of Beauty and the Beast, where I was assistant costumer and assistant prop master, our director decided that we needed to spice up Gastonās introduction. You know: in the movie, when Lefou runs in trying to catch the duck/goose that Gaston has just shot out of the sky?
Originally, the actors were going to stroll on stage with our Lefou hauling in the really neat (and real!) taxidermied deer head that we had found in a local thrift store. Now, two days before opening night, our director wants Lefou to run in from off stage and catch a stuffed duck that Gaston has just shot. This, of course, requires two things to work properly as a scene: a gunshot noise, and a stuffed duck.
The gunshot noise, we had covered. Blue-collar, redneck school? Guns a plenty to record. The stuffed duck? Harder than you might have thought to obtain.
Three hunting stores, two taxidermists, and one Pet Supply Store ā¢, Iād finally found a semi-realistic pheasant squeaky toy. What follows is an account of the ways this dog toy managed to be the nightmare prop of the six show run.
Opening Night: The stagehand, who was supposed to drop the bird from the ceiling catwalk, missed his cue and didnāt drop the it. Lefouās actor rolls with it and does an excellent job of looking around foolishly before getting cuffed upside the head by Gaston. The stagehand then drops the bird squarely on Gastonās head. Cue laughter.
Saturday Matinee: Different stagehand throws the bird instead of dropping it and beans Lefou directly in the face with the prop. Lefou falls over. Cue laughter.
Saturday Night: Bird is missing during curtain call. Director hauls the deer head down from itās place on the tavern wall and tells Gaston and Lefou to revert to the old blocking i.e. no gunshot, no bird, just walk in with trophy. During Gaston and Lefouās conversation, gun shot sound goes off and a stagehand throws the bird onto the stageā¦from the wrong side of the stage. Lefou and Gaston stare at it in awkward silence for a solid thirty seconds before Lefou makes off-script, subtle joke about Gastonās gun going off late instead of early. Cue adults in the audience laughing.
Sunday Matinee: Director begs the stagehands to get the cue right at least once. Gunshot and bird prop go off without a hitch. Lefou accidentally catches the prop when it falls from the catwalk. Heās so startled that he caught it that Gaston runs right in to him. They drop both the gun and the bird props, and grab the wrong prop in their scramble. Gaston spends the rest of the scene gesturing dramatically with a stuffed pheasant, instead of a gun.
Sunday Night:Ā Director is fed up with bird prop, decides that Lefou should just carry bird prop in after gunshot happens off stage. Lefou accidentally squeezes the prop during the intro conversation, startling both actors into silence with the squeaky toy noise - apparently, neither of them realized it was a dog toy.
Monday Elementary School Show: Lefou walks on stage with the bird. Accidentally drops the prop during conversation with Gaston. Gaston doesnāt notice the dropped prop and steps on it. Cue depressingly sad squeaky toy noise. Cue ten years olds laughing.
I was in Twelfth Night during high school and we were lucky enough to have identical twin girls playing Viola and Sebastian. Due to the blocking in the first half of the play, their characters didnāt appear on stage together but rather almost consecutively one after the other for a majority of the first act.
It was awesome because when people saw the play and didnāt know the girls were identical twins, it literally looked like it was one actor doing multiple, uber fast costume changes.
One of our first performances was for our peers and it was a big school so lots of people didnāt know the twins. This - for some reason - was also the performance they chose to record.
Listening to the confusion of the audience during the playback was fantastic and completely topped by the moment Viola walked off stage left just as Sebastian walked on stage right and someone right beside the camera goes āOH WHAT THE FUCKā so loudly it drowned out everything else.
The best thing? That was the copy of the play that was made available for purchase by family and parents. Haha.
Oh my god. I went to one of the Spiderman shows where he flew out above the audience and then got stuck and had to awkwardly hang there for about 10 minutes, but these stories are brilliant.
okay so, my senior year of high school and Iām part of the stage crew for Peter Pan. Thereās a scene where Hook and Smee are searching for Peter and the Lost Boys. Now the theater department at my high school isnāt very well funded (in the southern USA, football is king), so the sets we managed to make were pretty kickass for the money we had. We had a structure painted like a big tree stump for the entrance to the Lost Boysā hideout. You could climb to the top of it, but also go inside it through a trap door that we kept locked up during most of the play.
Itās like our third show and everything has been going surprisingly well. Hook and Smee climb to the top of the ātree trunkā, supposedly looking for Peter and not knowing theyāre standing above his hiding spot the whole time.
Turns out someone didnāt close the trapdoor properly, because the second Hook steps on it, he plunges through the thing. Heās able to catch himself, but heās got his ass and one leg dangling through this hole where itās like a ten foot drop to the ground. All of us stage crew are literally two feet away from him offstage, just gaping at him because???? Y'all this fall looked BAD. Looked like my dude did the splits in mid air. The whiplash caused his fucking wig to come off. The audience is dead silent, all of us backstage are dead silent, the director is like already looking up how to treat a broken groin.
The kid who was playing Hook was like a fuckin sophomore and he KILLED it. He gave himself a second to catch his breath, never broke character, just looked up at his castmate and growled āSmee, you fool, help me up!ā. He ended up playing off the wig thing as an embarrassing comedic bit for Hook, and the play went on. He was completely fine. It was the best thing Iād ever seen.
There was an infamous performance of the opera Don Giovanni where in the last act Giovanni was suppose to be dragged into hell via trapdoor but the overweight actor got stuck, leading someone from the audience to shout: āHey everyone, Hellās full!!āĀ
Iām pretty sure Iāve reblogged this before but the Lefou story has me in tears every time.
As someone who did Tech stuff in High school for 4 years, Lefou!
I was a costumer on a stage version of Titanic, and in the scene where the women and children are getting in the lifeboats, one of the men (who was supposed to be saying goodbye to his wife he knows he will never see again because his is about to die), realized his fake mustache was falling off and instead of playing it coolā¦ he rips it off his face, and hands it to his wife with the line āSomething to remember me byāā¦it was the funniest thing that I have ever seen in my 8 years in theatre, the entire cast lost their shit laughing at the most dramatic moment possible
I am laughing so hard Iāve been crying for ten minutes. Thank you
My high school did Dirty Rotten Scoundrels one year and still one of the best bits, especially on opening night, was some museum bit.
Lights come up on the stage and thereās a statue dead center of the stage that two characters are circling around while flirting. The whole scene goes down without a hitch.
Well, because we couldnāt get a statue prop, the staue was actually one of my friends in just some really good makeup, a perfectly still pose, and plaster in her hair that really sold it.
So then the characters walk off stage and the lights donāt go down. So she waits. She waits. Then she just shrugs with a big, dramatic sigh and storms off stage in a comedic fashion and everyone died laughing in the audience so we rolled with it every night after that.
Oh, manā¦ I have finally found this post again, and can now add my own tale.
A few years ago, I was part of a production of She Kills Monsters. Very briefly summarized, there are āreal worldā scenes, plus fantastical scenes within a D&D campaign, guided by a dungeon master character. My job was to sit in the audience (no headset) and draw on a tablet during the D&D scenes, which was projected onto the back of the stage (like home-drawn maps or settings for the campaign).
The first few shows go awesomely. Then we hit night four.
Thereās a scene where the adventuring party is in a dungeon, so Iām drawing away at drippy stones and cobwebsā¦ and then realize, suddenly, that I canāt hear any of the usual audio cues. In fact, the previous scene was slightly off, too. No sound effects, no music. The performers are speaking, but thatās it.
Then, I faintly hear the sound of hurried footsteps outside the theatre space, circling from the booth at the back all the way around and down to the backstage entrance. Something is clearly up, but I canāt stop drawing to go ask.
I would not find out until afterward that the sound board had just up and died. Massive hardware failure. That means no audio cues, no crew headsets, and had no way to carry messages other than by running from booth to backstage and back again. The director was also not in attendance for this show, and if I recall correctly, there was no intermission to try to troubleshoot anything. The show must go on.
On the plus side, weāre well enough into the run that the cast and crew manage to hit nearly all other cues from memory.
On the downside, two upcoming fight scenes are heavily reliant on music.
I gotta applaud everyone for just winging it like maniacs, particularly the dungeon master. For the dance-off battle set to a rap track, the DM sweeps in off-script and declares the fight will be done to the beat-boxing of the NPC who had just been ākilledā a few moments earlier (said actor immediately sits up and just goes off, no hesitation, I still have no clue if this kid had ever beat-boxed a day in his life before this). For the climactic battle of the protagonist versus the five-headed dragon set to speed metal, a crew member leans in from stage right with a handheld stereo held aloft, determinedly blaring the closest royalty-free track the crew could find on short notice. It was amazing.
The audience loved it. Everyone I spoke to afterward had no idea anything had even gone wrong.
"Did you ever have an imaginary friend?"
The beer can was thoughtfully swirled. "No," she said eventually. "I tried, though. It just - it didn't work."
The wind blew over the stoop, cool and smelling of rain.
"'Didn't work?'"
"I wanted it to work, it - I was six, and I was in my dad's truck, and we were in the Wal-Mart parking lot at night - I don't remember why - and I thought, 'I should make an imaginary friend,' so I looked through the window and-"
She frowned. "Fuck. This sounds like a joke, but I made a Vaporeon. It was just a fully formed, perfect Vaporeon in a parking lot of a Wal-Mart. And I was so happy and I opened the door to make it jump in so I could take it home with me.
"But there was something - wrong with it. I'd made it perfectly, but I forgot to make it alive. It just sat and stared and I begged it to jump in the truck with me before my dad drove off, and it sat and stared, and we drove off and I was so sad and confused and - disappointed."
She wiggled the tab of the can. "It's still there," she said quietly. "I drive past that parking lot sometimes, and that same Vaporeon is still sitting in that spot. I've seen that parking lot get full to the tits in the middle of the holidays, I have never, not even once, seen someone park in the spot it's sitting in."
A car drove by. After a moment the frogs in the ditch started to chirp again.
She tipped her head back and downed the rest of the beer. "Anyways, that's what I think god's deal is," she said.
If youāre ever read Sun Tzuās The Art of War, you were probably a bit surprised by how common-sense Mr. Tzuās advice was. Of course you need to feed your army. What idiot wasnāt feeding his army? The thing was, nobody had actually written this stuff down in one place yet.Ā
Think of Rhazes like the Sun Tzu of Alchemy. The Kitab al-Asrar is full of ancient occult wisdom like āmake sure the room youāre doing alchemy in has windows so you donāt inhale metal fumes and die.ā Rhazes assumes the would-be alchemist has access to five things: Literacy, technical knowledge, space, financing, and reproducibility. These standards would become so influential, people would quote Rhazes as an authority on alchemy and medicine well into the 17th century.Ā
Islamicate Alchemy, today on patreon.
The "potion-crafter" archetype of alchemist used in fantasy is often, like, an independent chemist that works off commission or sales to create fireball elixirs or exorcism salves. Is there a grain of truth, there? Did alchemists in any period you studied make a living by synthesizing magical items (like panaceas or DIY-chrysopoeia-kits or somesuch) and selling them on to any willing customer, or was that not really in their domain?
Ha! You know sometimes it can be a bit annoying answering asks like this, because most fantasy media isn t terribly interested in authentically representing history, BUT THIS TIME I can give y'all a specific and direct answer!
The archetype of the potion-crafter you're talking about almost definitely has its roots in an actual pre-paracelcian european medical profession; the Apothecary.
There were three types of doctors in the 1500s. There were diagnosticians, the people who went to school to learn about anatomy, and were allowed to call themselves "doctor." There were surgeons, the low-skilled workers who were in charge of hacking off limbs and draining bedpans. And there were apothecaries, basically the medieval equivalent of a pharmacist.
If you were a wealthy merchant, and you went to a doctor for your runny nose, he would look you over, and give you a prescription that you were supposed to take down to your local apothecary, so you could buy a potion from them.
But these prescriptions weren't exactly strict. A doctor might prescribe you an exact list of ingredients with the amounts, or he might just prescribe you "a healing ungent of cooling and drying herbs." So the apothecaries occasionally had some wiggle room based on supplies and expertise.
The important thing to remember, is that apothecaries were NOT considered magicians or alchemists.
That is, until Paracelsus came along.
See, good ol' Paracelsus was a radical innovator. He was one of the first physicians in history to be all three types of doctor at once. He was a diagnostician, a surgeon, and an apothecary. He argued that all doctors should have knowledge of their entire profession, and that no doctor was above suturing their patients wounds, and mixing their patients medicines.
He was also, crucially, an alchemist and a magician.
Alchemy was the cutting edge of technology for the time, a practice regarded with equal parts awe and suspicion, but it was more the realm of glassblowers and metallurgists than doctors or botanists. Paracelsus disagreed. He argued that if it's part of God's creation, it should be used to heal the human body.
This extended to magic. Paracelsus figured that you had to factor in things like "the movement of the planets and their influence on the earth." And he was known for prescribing patients things like "astral talismans to be worn about the neck." A practice that, even for his time, was often seen as backwards and superstitious. (Although given how harmful medieval medicine was, the astral talismans might have been your best option sometimes.)
Paracelsus was a radical. People fucking hated him, especially when he was alive. But his ideas were extremely influential, and exploded in popularity after his death in 1541. I can confidently say that the fantasy archetype of the Potion Brewer is based on Paracelcian physicians, the doctor/alchemist/apothecary/magicians who followed his theories.
Here I'll link my Patreon if y'all wanna support my research! I have a whole section on Paracelsus.
Give me your Islam trutherism stance. Lay out the whole position. I think I've asked about this before but I forgot. I'm kind of an Islam head. Islam is the only Abrahamic religion I give a shit about. I think the other ones are bullshit. Academically I think critical scholarship on Islam is like just getting off the ground so we barely know anything about it yet. Anyway drop the trutherism. Mohammad was a girl... Mohammad was actually a beautiful anime woman...
well see the thing is. mohammad was almost certainly a real guy, who was some sort of leader of a group of people. POSSIBLY he never lead a large group, and the large group didnt form until afterwards. but it seems like he led at least a large-ish group. he probably had some sort of religious teaching, altho its unclear if he had any original doctrine or was just a passionate judeo-christian monotheist. oh and yknow, he lived and did stuff around arabia (well. some people say syria. probably not syria).
and that's...sort of all we can say for sure about the real muhammad! there's all sorts of other stuff that MIGHT be true about muhammad, especially after they got to medina. but his early life is a blank to us, the same way jesus' life before his ministry is a blank to us. who knows! but people who confidently tell you "mohammad lived in a city of pagans and converted them all" are exceedingly credulous. we have no good evidence that happened
one interesting thing the shwepisode talks about: so, obviously the islamic conquests "happened". in the sense that there wasn't a state there, and then there started being a large state there. but we dont see them archeologically! which is not crazy, they allowed people to surrender. they didnt just raze everything to the ground. but it's unfortunate, it would be nice if we could use archeology to say stuff about early islam. in part, we cant use archeology re: early islam because a huge number of artifacts were destroyed, there's a weirdly small amount of surviving stuff that could tell us about early islam. but it's not clear! posssibly even the *stories* about uthman destroying a whole bunch of alternate qurans aren't true!
its a very weird field. something that is clearly very important to a huge number of people, and yet is in some ways even more poorly evidence than the early history of the christian church, which we have a large number of texts from (i mean, starting in the early 2nd century. but christianity grew much more slowly, so "early christianity" lasted much longer than "early islam")
If I remember my own reading on the subject, it doesnāt make sense to talk about āIslamā as a religion until the Umayyads; before the reign of Abd al Malik really. In this period, the proto-Muslim community is a sort of reformist, Arabist current within Abrahamic monotheism that is not doctrinally super defined. The Quran itself is composed in this periodānot just written down, but actually written in the first place, using heterogeneous streams of tradition within the incipient Islamic movement. Thereās no oral tradition, Quran or Hadith, thatās at all likely to go back as far as Muhammad himself.
Much of even secular work on the history of early Islam adopts the orthodox Muslim narrative about Muhammad, his followers, and the political and economic state of Medina and Mecca, and a lot of this material (especially that last category) actually becomes surprisingly hard to pin down once you try to corroborate it using other lines of evidence. Mecca for instance probably wasnāt a prosperous trading city during Muhammadās lifetime; its geography is kind of all wrong for that, actually, and most trade routes through the region passed (as you might imagine) down along the coast, not inland where Mecca lies.
IIRC Donner's book, which is one of the ones you mentioned reading, does not present a very widely accepted thesis. I don't know exactly what kind of evidence he uses, but I have heard most critical scholars are skeptical of his conclusions. I haven't read the book so I can't judge for myself. But my sense is that rather than representing a state-of-the-art emerging consensus it represents a sort of heterodox theory that not many people besides Donner himself are convinced of. But last time I looked into this was five years ago so idk if that's still true.
the trutherism doesn't match well what i've heard qur'an scholars like marijn van putten say. the conventional secularized account largely fits with linguistic evidence from what I can tell. There was a poetic register shared by a number of Arabic dialects but Muhammad's day to day language was one of those dialects, likely with a fricated jim and some imalah (front vowel harmony phenomena) and no cases; the poetic register being closer to the artificial Classical Arabic. That can feel like multiple authors but it's kind of like saying Sun Yatsen's didn't write what he wrote because there were influences from both vernacular and classical chinese.
There's a number of opaque Syriacisms in the Qur'an that likely weren't obvious to readers or Syriacs themselves, and a number of stylistic consistencies (like in the details of broken rhymes) suggestive of a single author from the Hijaz who knew some esoterica, with the variations being largely insignificant (like ambiguous readings that don't really mean much differently) and consistent with going through reciters with slightly different imalah (like where i and a are both read e).
Idk I get the urge to downplay the religious aspects but the trutherism stuff is kind of just a step removed from ancient aliens type patronization. Obviously Muslims wouldn't have the most sober account of their prophet but that doesn't mean they're liars or bad at recording history.
And people have good faith religious experiences all the time that honestly convince them of things - just look at born again experiences in christianity or the kind of analogous things in hinduism or so on. You don't have to accept anything of Islam to posit that Muhammad had some kind of analogue to a born again experience that made him believe he encountered Gabriel.
Usually you need motivation to lie, covering up an embarrassment or making something look better than it was. So does it really make Islam look better for Muhammad to have lived in a way consistent with a secular reading of the traditional account of his life? For the most part "guy orphaned, taken in by his uncle, exposed to Syriac Christianity and some like leftover gnostic discourse, has some kind of religious thing that gets him in hot water with the meccan authorities" just makes him sound like a guy from that time. What does speculating about conspiracies to make the Qur'an a group project or whatever bring to the table that makes it preferential?
I'm honestly very skeptical of what linguistic evidence of a text can tell us about history. It obviously tells us something, but it's so inferential that it requires a basic assumption about what's going on on the ground to interpret. Which means if you genuinely don't know what's going on in reality, your interpretation of linguistic evidence is massively under specified. And of course it's not *impossible* that what we have written down is true, but it sure seems like the histories we have were written down a loooong time after it all went down, like 100 years a long time. If in living memory, only barely. In a low literacy culture, information distorts fast
Regardless, I'd be interested in sources. A convincing argument for the truth of the orthodox narrative would be very intriguing!
the most disorienting thing thats ever happened to me was when a linguistics major stopped in the middle of our conversation, looked me in the eye, and said, "you have a very interesting vernacular. were you on tumblr in 2014?" and i had to just stand there and process that one for a good ten seconds
#i was in a car with a linguist i had never met before the car trip and like half an hour in he looked at me#after i finished describing a geology thing that was happening out the window and asked if i'd ever spent much time on tumblr#the fuckor of it all#and then we spent six more hours driving#it sure does leave linguistic markers! i'm not sure i'm good with it (tags via @thoughtsformtheuniverse)
it is one thing to be a linguist and another to be a linguist who knows enough of 2010s Tumblr to spot one of its enjoyers
I'm not sure what's more concerning here: the idea that the Tumblr vernacular, a principally written idiom, is discernible in spoken communication, or the fact that if you click through to the original post, its contents appear to have been replaced at some point in the last two months with Minecraft YouTuber fanfic.
This is me, a linguist, being pedantic but what youāre describing (a particular pattern of speech/grammar/vocabulary indicative of a defined group) is technically a dialect; an idiom is a turn of phrase that means something other/additional than the literal meaning of the words (āraining cats and dogsā or āsee the lightā etc etc). You may have been thinking of an idiolect, which is the particular dialect of a single individual.
And if I, a linguist (an intellectual š§), hear Tumblr English out in the wild, I get so excited. Genuinely, I seriously considered writing my masters thesis on tumblr english and only didnāt because my advisor was a bit of a stick in the mud. This is a VERY Exciting Timeā¢ļø for linguists because the advent of the internet (and more specifically areas of the internet that encourage communities to form among people scattered across the globe) has created an era of exceedingly rapid language change, and gives us a huge opportunity to study how language changes on a much shorter timeline than usual. Throughout human history, geography has been a huge limiting factor in language bleed, transmission, and change; but now we have the ability to talk to people from all over the globe regularly enough that we are picking up vocabulary, grammar, and linguistic markers from all over the world.
Like, do you get how fucking cool it is that english speakers who have never visited Asia are able to use borrowed words like isekai and honorifics like -san fluently?? Do you get how many idioms and weird little grammatical constructions weāve created that are unique to OUR dialect of english? Think of pissing on the poor or (like I used earlier) me, an intellectual. Our dialect, here on this hellsite, is the only one I can think of that has created a significant catalogue of complex tone markers specifically for the written form to compensate for the shortcomings of the written word in communicating meta-linguistic information like sarcasm or mockery or excitement. This dialect, primarily created in the written form (which is nearly UNHEARD OF), exploded onto the linguistics scene in 10 or 20 years when normally it can take centuries for dialects to distinguish themselves. It's academically BONKERS and I am HERE FOR IT. It's in the same realm as NĆ¼shu, the Chinese written script only used by women.
TLDR: As linguists we are collectively shitting our pants about this fucking dialect and are OVER THE MOON to hear it 'in the wild.'
Pero buatefack
-_- apparently the cut-off for this thing I want to submit to (which closes tomorrow) is 70k words, and Iāve got 67k
I need to think of three thousand words of bullshit to pad this thing. like a chapter where everyone goes for coffee, or something.Ā
okay there are 42 chapters in the book, and dividing 3000 by 42 = ~72
so Iād have to write the chapter titles like this:
Chapter 2: In Which an Elf Is Concussed, but itās Not Really My Fault Because What Would You Have Done? Would You Not Have Concussed the Elf? No, Of Course You Would Have. We All Would Have Concussed the Elf. Besides Which, I Am Very Sorry for Concussing Her and Will Try to Make Amends Later If She Stops Trying to Kill Me. Also, Her Intent to Kill Me Was a Highly Relevant Factor In My Decision to Concuss Her
and who will stop me? God?
TWO YEARS LATER! Titan Books is publishing this, and every chapter title takes up a third of the page. god didnāt stop me after all
(you can pre-order here: Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Indigo, Waterstones, Forbidden Planet, Bookshop.org)
itās so funny to see this all fancy and formalized
Aromantic Fantasy Book Recs!
It's Aro Week, so here are a few of my favourites!
List:
