Fish in a Hat

How did you even get here??

[vhsdogs]

laika doodle i never posted here

[lysimachias]

Not "The Character did nothing wrong" or "The Character is irredeemably awful" but a secret third thing: The Character may display moments of deep love & compassion, may even have a strong sense of ethics, and may also be capable of brutal cruelty that is irreconcilable with those traits. The constant tension between the different sides of The Character's nature is exactly what makes them compelling, and attempting to reduce them down to simply "a terrible person" or "innocent & misunderstood" is missing the point of the questions a media with nuanced characters is asking you to consider

[shisasan]

Ph. laurapetresc

[proteidaes]

Like, srsly, have you even frolicked lately!?💐✨

[apricops]

that post about “you get bandits when you cut soldiers loose without pay” reminds me of the Thirty Years War, because one could say that beneath all the religious schisms and diplomatic jockeying, the heart of the thirty years war was “what happens when you have a state with just enough capacity to raise massive armies but without enough financial capacity to actually pay those armies” and the answer is that the line between professional armies and roving gangs of bandits disappears and every time you try to raise an army it just becomes another independently acting wildfire devouring the countryside. No matter how bad things get, every day I wake up and thank my lucky stars that I do not live in 17th century Europe. Or 17th century China. Or the 17th century Americas. Or basically anywhere in the 17th century.

[probabilitydirigible]

One of my favorite little anecdotes about ancient mercenaries is that it was tradition for most of history to give your mercenaries two wages- "Bread" and "Gravy." Both were set at a daily value, but where "Bread" was intended to cover regular maintenance and life stuff and therefore paid out frequently (Here's your week's meal and gear repair budget!) the "Gravy" wage was paid out exclusively at the end of the contract as one lump sum. So like, your gravy wage and bread wage might be one silver coin per day each, so you're getting a handful of coins every week to cover food, and then at the end of an 800 day campaign, you get a wheelbarrow with 800 coins.

Employers liked offering this structure because then they didn't have to like, try to guess how long the invasion of spain will take and then carry 800 coins per soldier around the battlefield where it could be captured. It also gives them the chance to budget around the assumption that they take an enemy city and *find* vast sums of treasure even if they don't have the full value at the beginning of the war.

The main flaw of this system is that it's very easy to end up in a scenario where if you have, say, 50,000 guys that have been fighting for 800 days, you now owe 40 million silver to your army, and if the budget has not worked out to a 40 million surplus, you literally can't afford to end the war, but you can probably afford to pay them for a couple more weeks. So then you have to start thinking creatively.

Anyway across all time and history a lot of generals were ultimately beaten to death by men chanting gravy.

[zanmor]

can I get a source on the use of that term, bread and gravy wages?

I assume that's a more modern historian coming up with a clever characterization of army pay, but all I've been able to find is either sites talking about modern fast food wages or else a thousand articles about "why ancient roman soldiers were paid in salt"

if it is a historian's invention I think I wanna read what else this person has to say

[wicker-and-scrap]

Don't know what @probabilitydirigible 's source was, but Bret Devereaux was writing about this subject recently, and mentioned the Classical sources calling them σίτος (bread) and ὀψώνιον (sauce).

(I had a brief moment of recognition reading that, because "opsonins" in immunology are a category of proteins that stick to foreign objects and make them tasty to your immune cells.)

Collections: Ancient Mediterranean Mercenaries!

This week we’re going to take a look at mercenaries in the ancient Mediterranean world! This was one of the runners-up in the latest ACOUP S

[thesoulgetaway]

when you stumble upon new music that scratches your brain just right >>>

[ryllen]

🍮

[queen-ofthe-faeries]

My parents always told me and my sister "all you can do is your best". I used to think it only applied to exams cause that's when I heard it the most, but it's actually impacted me much further than that. School really gave me a lot of issues with perfectionism and feeling like I'm never good enough, and I'm always sending myself into a spiral of self doubt (especially with my last job where there was SO much expected of you even if you were only there once a week). But my parents brought me back down to earth by saying "all you can do is your best", and what they weren't saying but there was an underlying sentiment of was "you can't give what you don't have, and if this is all you can do for today then that's enough. It doesn't make you a failure and it certainly doesn't make you less in our eyes". It's a hard lesson to internalise for me, but a massively important one

[passionpeachy]

my new moon snail plushie 🌙

now available here: link

[hahaoatmeal]

"Roxas Eats Shit and Dies" by Me

[all-mammal-creechur]

Proboscis Bat Rhynchonycteris naso

It is found from southern Mexico to Belize, Peru, Venezuela, Bolivia and Brazil, as well as in Trinidad. The bats are nocturnal, sleeping during the day in an unusual formation: most of them line up, one after another, on a branch or wooden beam, nose to tail, in a straight row.

In the photo, the two bats on the lower left are carrying young.

img source

[all-mammal-creechur]

I really love how dedicated these guys are to queuing.

[dogpuppy]

[milobyte]

commission

[hoot-alex]

[sandersstudies]

“They’re just looking for attention.”

Oh, a human being is seeking a social response? Human being, the social animal wired to make and track social connection? A human desires the vital blood that permitted their species to survive for millennia? The human being who was born completely helpless and primed in every way by nature to seek attention and help from their community?

Wow that’s crazy. How embarrassing. Humiliating even. Should we isolate them from community? Should we call Wire Mother?

[valcubust]

ive got samara on my mind......

[despazito]

[seventyeight-moose]

[notaplaceofhonour]

Ryan Gosling’s career has just been one long quest to climb the Warner Bros water tower

[notaplaceofhonour]

that man has been trying to climb this tower since he was 16. he has asked multiple times, and every time they said no, but now he’s famous enough & variety was able to convince them to do a shoot on the tower. it all led here. it was all for this.

[notaplaceofhonour]

I’m obsessed with the implication that this was a coming-of-age ritual where a boy becomes a man, like a bar mitzvah