Jblakewood's Bloggy Thing

Hey! I'm jblakewood, also go by Jblake or Blake

[fandaniel]

[yanguang]

[hotvampireadjacent]

[maid-photographer]

The more I get back into doing creative stuff the more I understand that one Fujimoto quote

[malpensante]

[letatlin]

for anyone wondering about the second quote:

[despazito]

I don't have time for tumblr discourse they're calling the very hungry caterpillar degenerate art over on twitter

[despazito]

good art is when something looks like real life, the more real it looks the more better the art. abstracted figures give my trad children nightmares, one time they were exposed to cubism and couldn't go outside for a week

[boringkate]

You listen to music regularly? Why? Have you even tried quitting? Could you quit? You get music stuck in your head? Wow. You're so ruined and music brained. I bet you make your partners listen to music with you when you have sex. Music addiction has really ruined a whole generation. You know it's not realistic to expect reverb in real life, right? You're probably so desensitized that you don't even feel anything anymore when you hear a bird singing that it wants some fuck.

[paradigm-adrift]

I don't have a problem with people listening to music per se, but I do have a problem with the music industry exploiting & mistreating artists.

Personally, I abstain from all music in order to keep my hands clean but really music should just be illegal outright to protect musicians from abuse.

[terramythos]

holy shit this person in the notes

[discodyke-dogthing]

[anarch0possum]

if i had a time machine, first thing id do is obviously kill hitler. even if germanys fascism was caused by complex socioeconomic factors itd still be worth doing for the bit. then id go even further back to the early 20th century and become one of those old timey bank robbers, when they had names like 'pretty boy floyd' and 'baby face nelson' and id make sure people knew me as 'sweet baby ray' just to see how it fucks with barbeque sauce history

[crazysodomite]

ough

my cute mole cricket basya

look how she tries to dig in the hand... so cute

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Dirt broken :(

[the-falling-eagle]

She dirt broken :(

[parkchanwoohoo]

The facial expressions of everyone trying not to lose it are killing me

[gunsandfireandshit]

This is painfully American

[dirtbaby2016]

Americans be like it is totally normal for an entire stadium (including military members) to stand at attention while a fast food clown mascot sings the national anthem

[tikkety-tok]

Harsh, but I accept it I suppose.

[youkoartemis]

[Transcription: Speaker is a blue-eyed older man with dark blond hair that falls down his back, a round face, and a moustache and beard combo with some gray hairs amongst the blond. His voice is deep, and a bit choked up at points.]

“These are my red flags for women:

If she stabs me more than twice.

If she has a concerning amount of ex-husbands who died on their honeymoon, like... [a brief pause for thought] Like four or more.

If Gozer the Gozerian asks me to choose the form of the destructor and then one of my childhood crushes walks through New York City at 300 feet tall, uh, and steps on a church... [takes a breath and pauses for a second] I mean, it’s not the height! It’s not the height. I like a climb. But, like. [another breath] She stepped on a church. Or any building, really, ‘cause. [deep breath followed by a brief pause] Legally they’re not supposed to be able to ask you about that on like your homeowner’s association application, but- but they’ll ask. They’ll look it up.

If she doesn’t exist in the same physical timeline as I am... [several seconds long pause before continuing, sounding distraught] I’m not doing that again.”

[galaxywarp]

Greg Universe.

[parasitoidism]

The celebrity Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavors being some of the best ones is like the retail equivalent of having to go to a restaurant and order a rootin tootin yeehaw cowboy burger or something

[parasitoidism]

The Tonight Dough is a downright hedonistic ice cream flavor concept but in order to obtain it you have to purchase a pint of ice cream with Jimmy Fallon's face on it and then see him in your freezer every day for a week

[underestimated-heroine]

[wifegideonnav]

why are there so many tonight dough posts

[dogpuppy]

[scramratz]

[shitboy96]

[punkrock-bottom]

It’s important to occasionally be a horny pervert on main so your mutuals know it’s okay to be a horny pervert with you

[jake-clark]

[meiiiwaku]

@hellsite-hall-of-fame @worldheritagepostorganization

[hellsite-hall-of-fame]

is this the ORIGINAL?!???

[laughconfetti]

[creepymutelilbugger]

oh holy shit i didn’t even know where this meme came from

[roses-blog-of-things-deactivate]

OH MY ACTUAL GOD THE ORIGINAL

[thenumberonevelvetcake]

ORIGINALS ON THE ROLL

[wtf-fun-factss]

Traces of coca and nicotine found in Egyptian mummies - WTF fun facts

[jillyaintfromphilly]

well DUH. a lot of historians are still trying to process the fact that ancient egyptians knew how to build boats, which is ridiculous. why would they not be seafarers and explorers?

[youngbadmanbrown-deactivated201]

this is not new or surprising information at all. it pretty much day one of any african-american studies course.

the egyptians knew that if they put their boats in front of the summer storm winds it’d blow them right across the sea to the Americas and they shared that with the greeks.

[doublehamburgerjack-deactivated]

It’s really hard for people to understand that everyone had boats, exploration, and trade interactions without the same level of murder, colonization, and violence that the Europeans did. It’s really hard for people to get that.

[cantyousayanythingnew]

Well, no people find hard to understand that one of the earliest civilizations could build a boat sturdy enough and reliable enough to cross a 8,766 mile stretch that gave people thousands of years of technological progress later great difficulty.

[prokopetz]

The notion that technology is a steady upward climb of “progress” is, itself, part of a Eurocentric historical narrative revolving around the tacit teleological assertion that Western European civilisation represents the culmination and endpoint of history.

In reality, technologies are frequently discovered, lost and rediscovered, often multiple times, and frequently in parallel. A Dark Age in one region may be a time of rapid technological development in another region, and it’s not uncommon to encounter evidence of ancient civlisations using technologies a thousand years out of whack with the “proper” order of discovery… where “proper” is defined in terms of the order in which those technologies were discovered in Western Europe - there’s that Eurocentrism again.

I mean, just to give you an idea of how flexible the order in which technologies are developed can be and how ultimately wrong-headed the notion of linear technological progress is, there are Central American civilisations that had indoor plumbing, central heating and hot and cold running water before inventing the wheel. Some of the First Nations in what is now Eastern Canada had sophisticated climate models and reliable weather prediction - including functioning barometers and other simple meteorological instruments - before they figured out metallurgy.

So no, it’s not particularly incredible that the ancient Egyptians had boats far more advanced than they “should” have given their overall level of technology. That stuff happens all the time.

[jenniferrpovey]

People invent the technology they need. They can even invent a technology, then not use it.

The Inca are often accused of “not knowing about wheels.”

Except, they did have wheels. They just didn’t use wheels for long distance transportation. They had a huge road system. On which everything was moved by pack animals and people. The Inca road is an incredible feat of engineering.

So, why didn’t they use wheels?

Because their land was so freaking mountainous that the road would repeatedly turn into this:

Tell me what earthly use a wheel is when your road keeps having to have steps and narrow bridges because you live on top of a mountain.

But that image shows us what they did have.

That’s a suspension bridge. Europeans didn’t invent those until centuries after the Inca did.

Because when the most efficient route through your home hits chasms, guess what?

You get real good at making bridges!

And when the best way to move goods through your desert homeland is a big river?

You get real good at making boats.

The technology a culture develops and uses is the technology they need. In Europe that was one suite of technology, and because white folk are so dang arrogant, we think that’s the superior means of development. It’s not, it’s just how technology develops in Europe.

[alinaastarkov]

The Minoan civilisation in Greece, around 2,500 BCE, developed huge technological advancements, including fully operational water and sewage systems, complete with flushing toilets. This would be around 3,000 years before one was invented in England.

Minoan Greece was also a sea power. They had huge fleets of ships, which meant they did a lot of exploration. They also built one of the biggest trade networks in the world, reaching as far as Egypt, Cyprus, Canaan, Syria,  the Iberian Peninsula (modern-day Spain and Portugal), the Levantine coast, Anatolia and Mesopotamia (modern-day Turkey, Israel and Iraq).

A volcano eruption on a nearby island, which caused a tsunami, possibly destroyed their sea power and left them vulnerable, which is why most of their technology was lost.

The Late Bronze Age Collapse a few centuries later led to the simultaneous destruction of advanced civilisations in Greece, Egypt, the Near East, Asia Minor, North Africa, Caucasus, Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean. This caused a dark age across two continents which created isolated village cultures, and is the reason most of their advancements were lost.

The notion that technology can only advance is some white nonsense.

[jenniferrpovey]

That too.

(Minoan Crete may have been part of the inspiration for Atlantis).

[prismatic-bell]

This is also why Egyptians didn’t bother with the wheel* for like three thousand years. What fucking good are wheels when EVERYTHING IS SAND?

But on the flip side…they came up with a way to use water to basically hydroplane those giant stone blocks in their buildings across the desert. Which is a hell of a lot more useful in an unpaved sandy region.

Likewise let’s not forget the Aztecs, who came up with a farming system so efficient (chinampas) that parts of it are still used today and really ought to be revived on a wider scale as part of sustainable farming. And also Native Americans, and I’m using that term BECAUSE it’s so broad: look at tribes across the country and you’ll see something interesting. Iroquois, living in a cold, well-forested, and often icy land, built immovable longhouses—which would survive the bitter northeastern winters. Plains tribes developed the tipi/teepee—while they also faced long, even dangerous winters, they also lived in a place where travel was far easier and the worst of winter could be weathered by heading south. Or down where I live, the Sinagua (later assimilated into the Hopi) built their homes IN CLIFFS. And by that I mean “off the ground, built into the cliff face with adobe.” Aka, some of the best pre-refrigeration insulation against the heat that you could possibly hope for. We still don’t know how they did it, incidentally. “With ladders, dumbass” is an obvious answer in some of their dwellings, but in others it’s not clear how they just….hung over a sinkhole, a quarter of a mile or so above the water, and chipped out the front doors so they had a place to sit while they made the rest. Scaffolds? Very well-balanced rope ladders? Smaller cliffs they chipped off afterward to prevent enemy incursion? We don’t know, but we do know they found a way to make the extreme heat survivable and even sort of a nonissue. They never bothered with stuff like modern central AC because they found a way to let the stone and clay do the job for them.

Technology isn’t always a race. Sometimes it’s just an evolution.

*nominally. We have extant toys from this period that have wheels to make them move.

[jblakewood]

They ancients of the Eurasia and Africa did not visit the Americas, we know this because they were humans, and humans like to fuck, when they do they leave behind kids with their genes and we can read the fucking genetic markers of more modern populations and know that there was no intercontinental contact thousands of years ago

[funny-tik-toks]

[tomonohebi]

love that they gave such a sweet adorable girl the power to live out her terrifying sadist fantasies