Not today Justin
occasionally subtle
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Three Goblin Art
styofa doing anything
One Nice Bug Per Day
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Janaina Medeiros
JVL
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Jules of Nature
Cosmic Funnies
Sade Olutola
i don't do bad sauce passes
Origami Around
$LAYYYTER
Sweet Seals For You, Always
JBB: An Artblog!
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
noise dept.
seen from Türkiye
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@fuzzyberry
The transition from a young plantling to a full fledged, grown up mother plant is a fascinating (but at times awkward) journey.
Shown here is a Dandelion, Strawberry and Helleborus flower - from newly sprouted bud to mature blossom!
💭.늘:: 𝘀𝘂𝗻 𝘀𝗮𝘆𝘀: 𝗅𝖾𝗍'𝗌 𝗉𝗅𝖺𝗒 𝗶𝗺𝘃𝘂 𝗍𝗈𝗀𝖾𝗍𝗁𝖾𝗋!! ✧. .⃗ @𝗌𝗎𝗇𝗌𝗁𝗂𝗇𝖾 ::불면증 ♡ 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗲𝘁𝗹𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 ⌕🕊:: ꜥꜤ𝖻𝗅𝗎𝖾 (𝗌).𝗌𝗄𝗒⊹⁺𝗅𝗂𝗄𝖾 𝗈𝗋 𝗋𝖾𝖻𝗅𝗈𝗀 𝖺𝗇𝖽 𝖽𝗈𝗇'𝗍 𝗋𝖾𝗉𝗈𝗌𝗍!::✰꒷
Level 1: Being disappointed that there’s no core magical girl class in Dungeons & Dragons.
Level 2: Collecting various third party and fan-made magical girl classes.
Level 3: Writing your own magical girl class.
Level 4: Coming to understand that every character class can be a perfectly serviceable magical girl class with only slight adjustments.
Level 5: Realising that Sailor Moon is a bard.
WelderWings aka Welder Wings aka Francisco Abril and Nuria Velasco - La Présence Pure, Digital Arts: Collages
iM???? kkshd;bgdjsmmsnd;sn;
An orc wrote this.
An orc who knows how to treat a lady
On Academic Slapfights
[epistemic status: probably not, I’m afraid] [CW: glorification of violence, bad discourse norms, entire post reeks of testosterone]
So, you know that Deleuze meme?
This one.
This meme is funny because the intensely violent tone contrasts with the subject matter. Or does it? Isn’t overwrought continental philosophy kind of intensely violent in its own way? Not in the honest way that physics is, but in a more sinister way.
Let me explain.
Suppose you and a friend are having a slap fight. You’re not mad at each other, you’re just amusing yourselves by smacking the shit out of each other’s faces, seeing who can slap harder and who can take it better.
There are two ways to go about this.
The first way is a celebration of violence, and of the body’s response to violence. When you get hit, your head turns from the impact, you yell involuntarily, your whole body moves to the side like a spring coiling up, and then the spring uncoils and your open palm comes flying back towards your friend’s face like divine judgement itself.
Crucially, your actions and reactions should amplify what you feel but should not exaggerate it. There’s a difference. An amplifier doesn’t exaggerate sound, it just increases its volume while maintaining as much fidelity as possible. The external drama of your shouts and motions should reflect what’s going on loud and clear. You say (to anyone within earshot) “Look! See what’s happening! That slap was an especially good one, didn’t you see? Didn’t you hear?”
Then there’s the other way, which is a denial of both violence and of the self. That way is actually more common: you maintain a stoic demeanor, your head doesn’t move if at all possible, you stare calmly at each other, you stand perfectly upright as you trade slaps. At the same time, you hide the effort behind your blows, you try to look like you’re doing nothing while doing as much as possible.
What this way says is: Nothing is happening here. That didn’t hurt. You call that violence? Meh.
And also: I didn’t feel that. I don’t really have nerve endings. I am a stone statue.
And also: I’m not even trying. Did that hurt? It shouldn’t have. Are you weak?
Why does this second way prevail? I think it’s a tragedy of the commons. If one of you is reacting dramatically and the other is stoic, the stoic one looks stronger; the violence of their blows is being acknowledged, while that of yours isn’t. Similarly, if you can hide the energy you’re putting into your own slaps, you can make your opponent look more thin-skinned than they are. Doing things the first way, with big motions and loud noises, requires a mutual commitment to celebrate and amplify.
…
Anyway, academia:
The thing that makes academic discourse great is how violent it is.
No progress can happen without authors facing each other like gladiators and smacking the absolute shit out of each other’s most dearly-held ideas and worldviews. Whether the subject matter is rho mesons or rhizomes, the back-and-forth of journal articles is essentially a series of deeply violent blows. At its best, this is a constructive violence, so it certainly deserves both celebration and amplification.
What does that look like?
Suppose someone says your theory isn’t worth shit. Show that you felt that! Yell and rage on social media! Get in an argument during the Q&A period! Ideally, throw chalk!
And let your head move in response to the blow, if it was a good one – change up your story, drop the weakest parts of your theory, show the spectators how much force was behind the attack.
And then get back at them! Show you can give as good as you get! Write unnecessarily long rebuttals to rebuttals to rebuttals! Subtweet them in your papers! Build entire castles of theory just to get the high ground! Wave your arms real big, let everyone see how hard you’re trying.
What’s the alternative?
Well, you could hide your pain. You could receive criticism politely, without budging an inch. You could downplay the force and violence of it, and hit back as quietly but forcefully as possible. Fill your words with barbs, but wrap the barbs in cotton. Talk circles around your opponents, bury them in jargon, mumble them to death.
That’s not any less violent, at the end of the day, but the violence is hidden. Worse, the violence is unproductive. Theory piles up endlessly, never getting swept aside by a particularly good hit. Every theorist stands like a statue, issuing ever more obscurely vicious proclamations, unmoved by any outside force. The blows keep landing, one after another, but no outside observer could ever tell which have true strength behind them and which are a token effort. The silence stretches on and on, meaninglessly.
In conclusion, the divergent discourses of the “hard sciences” and “soft sciences” contain differentiated logics of sublimated dialectical violence, manifesting a latent–
just kidding SCIENCE CULTURE IS BETTER THAN HUMANITIES CULTURE, FIGHT ME OUT LOUD YOU DEGENERATES
“hey, just checking, have you ever actually been in a fight?”
what do you think
i’m a physicist
look
what does it matter
‘by-the-tide’
Vinicunca Rainbow Mountain, Peru by Marian Lubawski
Sun eating celestial crocodile from African tribal belief. It causes sun eclipse 🐊
Shutting my brain off to enjoy fantasy novels gets harder and harder all the time.
Stuff the European Middle Ages didn’t have and it distracts me when they show up:
Potatoes
Oranges you could peel with your hands and eat
Sparkly diamonds
Musical harmony, eg guitar chords being played under a melody
A colourfast black dye for clothes
WHY DO I HAVE TO KNOW THESE THINGS. NO ONE CARES.
Petition to be able to scrub my brain of overly-detailed knowledge of the past.
(This is part of why I enjoy The Untamed. My brain is not stuffed with facts about Chinese history, so I don’t automatically notice when they put a 15th century sleeve on a 13th century outfit. I realize this will wear off as I learn more about Chinese history, but it’s nice while it lasts.)
Lis I hope you know that every time I watch The Tudors I now giggle helplessly at the black clothing next to the skin thing.
Also now I have to check what sort of oranges they would have had in Tudor England ;).
Moors brought bitter oranges to Spain in the 10th century. The Alcazar palace of Seville in Spain is scented with extensive orange plantings. That’s why in English, they’re often known as “Seville oranges”. The oranges don’t make good eating raw, but pieces appeared in food for their flavour and orange oil was used in perfumes for its scent. Orange marmalade in England is documented back to the late 15th century (and these days, English marmalade is the main use for bitter oranges, everyone else having decided they were too much trouble). Sweet oranges, which go back ages ago in China, only reached England after 1660.
(Here’s a page about the history of citrus, which includes records of Henry VIII’s citrus purchases)
I was about to say, they definitely had oranges, diamonds, and musical harmony. I'm not sure about potatoes, or the dye
They had diamonds. They did not have sparkly diamonds. Europe didn’t develop the technology to make diamonds that refracted light and glittered until the middle ages had ended.
Medieval diamonds were cut very simply, so in some lights they would appear clear like glass, but they just as easily appeared black.
This is how diamonds were depicted in artwork:
Here are examples we have of diamonds cut using the table or point cuts available:
So all those medieval princesses with diamonds that “glitter like starlight” or give off a “brilliant white fire”... yeah no. You want the 1600s and 1700s for that.
An genuine inquiry: what makes a secondary world fantasy ping "medieval" for you, rather than "old timey mishmash"?
(Also why is the old world/new world divide wrt produce bothersome in a secondary world setting?)
Hmmm, let’s see. What pings medieval for me:
Communal eating, living, and sleeping arrangements; people’s daily lives being very intertwined; extremely blurred boundaries between public and private, business and leisure; privacy being a luxury; the constant presence of servants, children, and animals; a grounded sense of what people owe to each other
Food that is varied, local, precious, and flavourful; menus closely tied to the landscape, climate, and season; a household distribution system for food (eg. important servants getting first pick at their employers’ leftover plates); intense work put into processing and storing food (our recent discussion on acorns as a food source; using spices to preserve foods; a background noise of longterm food preparation projects, like cheese, ale, or cured meats)
Aristocracy who actually do meaningful work similar to civil servants of today—amassing and distributing resources, solving disputes, and organizing a community
Communal experiences of justice and worship—having regular social gatherings that address community concerns and allow for the creation of a communal narrative around them
Interwoven experiences of work and play, art and practicality—someone reading a romance while ladies sew, peasants singing as they harvest their fields, music creating a common rhythm for washerwomen, fishermen, and more
To me, the Middle Ages speaks of a time when the world was a patchwork of different cuktures and areas trying to figure shit out, before anyone but a bunch of aescetic monks had discovered a Grand Unified Theory of Anything.
When I was a child the old world/new world divide bothered me because I was an annoying pedant. These days it gets me for two reasons:
Crops like maize, potatoes, and squash represent centuries of intense biological scuence to come about. These are amazing and unnatural plants that were made possible because of intense cultivation by people who were deeply knowledgeable about nature. They’re kind of the biological version of putting a CD player in with your lutes—they were not produced by the same level of technology.
Botanically, medieval Europe was so weird and diverse and full of local plants, and a lot of that diversity was pushed to the wayside when the agricultural revolution happened. Now, I happen to like potato more than turnip or parsnip or swede, so I can see why the replacement happened, and also why authors don’t want to research what exact root vegetable a peasant in that part of Lithuania would put in their stew—but potatoes are basically a reminder to me that everything that was used before changed when the Middle Ages ended, and it meant flattening a lot of local and specific cultures and landscapes into a common mold.
“they definitely had [...] musical harmony”
NOT LIKE TODAY DOES, THEY DIDN’T. Playing chords under things just. It doesn’t really exist. I read an entire article to try to work out a proper harmony for the Boar’s Head Carol, and later realised that I’d read an article on 13th C polyphony, whereas the Boar’s Head dates to, I don’t remember, like the 15th C or something. And so all the theory I was reading about didn’t apply to that piece.
But the important thing is this: before you can have guitars playing chords under singing, YOU HAVE TO HAVE THE CONCEPT OF CHORDS. And the medieval period doesn’t think about chords like we do. Most basic chords that people play on guitar are made up of a triad of notes that are thirds apart, like ACE. CEG. And so on. But in Medieval musical theory, a major third is considered an ‘unstable’ interval, and is avoided. As much polyphony as possible revolves around octaves and fifths. In modern musical theory, too much use of octaves is considered gauche.
It’s six months after I did my couple of weeks’ intense study of that theory piece of polyphony, so I don’t remember all of the details. And I am not even close to a medieval music expert, but even just the little reading I did showed me just how alien it is to our modern concept of music. When we talk about cadences, we talk about say, a V to I cadence, like this one, from the Wikipedia article on cadences:
No-one gives a shit if that bass note has a large drop from the G to that much lower C. It still sounds Right and Correct.
Whereas the 13th C article above and the wikipedia article are focused on dyads or intervals, not chords, and the aim is to move your two or more voices into octaves, ideally through a stepwise motion, or where one voice moves one step, and the other might move a third. So you get this example from Wikipedia.
Notice there’s no jump down like in the modern example above. The notes in each part are very close between the two bars.
Wikipedia describes Medieval music this way:
In the medieval era, early Christian hymns featured organum (which used the simultaneous perfect intervals of a fourth, a fifth, and an octave), with chord progressions and harmony an incidental result of the emphasis on melodic lines during the medieval and then Renaissance (15th to 17th centuries).
That’s the thing. Chord progressions are an ‘incidental result’ of an emphasis on melody. But in modern music, chords are everything. They’re what you start with. They’re the foundations of a piece of harmony. The way I was taught to arrange in school was to basically start with a melody, then work out what chords you want underneath (considering how they progress into each other), and essentially fit the notes from the chords amongst the parts. That’s ... not at all how Medieval music thinks about harmony.
It’s not until the Baroque period (again, I’m drawing from the Wikipedia article on chords & their history) that you start to get that modern idea of chords underlying everything.
(Also re: a colourfast black dye? I was just watching a historical costuming video that quoted advice for sewing from the Victorian period that advised against dark-coloured linings against the skin, because they still weren’t reliably colourfast, 400 years later.)
I was hoping someone was going to address the music issue
Guillaume de Machaut had to write and dedicate his Messe de Nostre Dame to Pope Urban to persuade him that polyphonic music was not inherently evil
A crinoid swimming +1000m deep in the ocean. [http://bit.ly/2yxbvHJ]
musical variant of @slimyswampghost‘s sirenhead
Dragapult’s my new favourite Pokemon
Fish oh fish grant me the cursed dolphin facts
dolphin sonar is so advanced that they can literally use it to look inside you and peek at your organs like a fucking sonagram!
naturally, they use this literal x-ray vision to find your most punchable organs and target them ruthlessly, at least if you’re a shark.
found out last night about the cricket player Don Bradman, whose batting average of 99.94% is “the greatest achievement by any sportsman in any major sport”, nearly a full 40 points above the second best player. Apparently they had to invent a whole new type of defense to try and deal with this dude.
I have no idea how cricket works but it’s hilarious that the best sportsman who ever lived chose to play British baseball of all things.
I tried understanding the rules for cricket purely to better comprehend how someone could be so almost supernaturally dominant like
“average person is decent at cricket” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person is terrible at cricket. Bradman Don, who lives in Australia & bats over 99 each test day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
Ok so there’s these tidal islands in Northern Germany that are connected by little tiny trains that you have to drive yourself, which is already delightfully ghibli-esque.
But then I found out UNTIL THE 196OS, THE TRAINS HAD LITTLE SAILS AND WERE WIND-POWERED?
THAT’S THE MOST GHIBLI THING TO EVER EXIST ON THIS PLANET, BRING IT BACK YOU MONSTERS.
Affall estuary on the southcoast of Iceland
