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@kiwi-birdy
the plot chickens
why do 70,000 people have as bad of a sense of humor as me
2,300-Year-Old Saddle Blanket from the Altai Mountains of Siberia: this saddle cover was preserved in the frozen barrows of Pazyryk for more than two millennia
This elaborate saddle blanket dates back to about 400-300 BCE. It was discovered in the Pazyryk barrows, located in the Altai mountains of Siberia, where it had been preserved in the permafrost for more than 2,000 years. It's made of felt, leather, horsehair, and gold foil.
Above: the appliqués at the center of the saddle blanket
The central design features two identical appliqués, each depicting an ibex being pinned down by a griffin.
Above: close-up of the appliqués
The sides of the saddle cover are also decorated with circular pendants made of felt; each of these pendants is trimmed with leather, encircled by tufts of horsehair, and embroidered with a stylized depiction of a ram's-head. A pair of horned tigers can also be seen at the base of each pendant.
Above: the pendants that hang from each side of the saddle cover
This artifact is attributed to the Altaic nomads of Siberia, who formed part of the larger group of cultures that are collectively known as the Scythians (or Scytho-Siberian peoples).
According to the Hermitage Museum:
Saddles used by the ancient Altaic nomads differ from those used today. They had no wooden base and consisted of two leather cushions filled with reindeer and horse hair and sewn together on one side. Felt saddle covers were traditionally decorated with scenes showing a beast of prey tearing to pieces a herbivorous animal.Â
The Scythians were among the first cultures to begin using horses as mounts, and they invented one of the earliest forms of saddle. They were extremely skilled and accomplished riders, and their early mastery of mounted warfare enabled them to gain control over vast sections of Eurasia. That dynamic led to the development of a very noticeable "horse culture," with horses playing a critical role in many different aspects of Scythian life (and afterlife):
The horse was an essential part of Scythian life and was the most important and multipurpose animal used by the nomads. Initially, the Scythians reared large herds of horses mainly for their milk and hides, but eventually were among the first people to harness the horse as a mount.
By the 7th century BCE, the Scythians were already master horsemen and controlled a vast corridor of land that stretched across southern Siberia, from the Black Sea to the fringes of northern China. This expanse of land was greater than the Achaemenid Persian Empire, which the Scythians outlasted.
The Scythians produced many horse-related artifacts that have been discovered at sites throughout Eurasia, but this saddle cover is one of the most elaborate and most well-preserved examples of that tradition.
Above: the saddle cover from Pazyryk
Two other artifacts from Pazyryk have previously been featured on my blog -- a 2,300-year-old plush bird and an elaborate horse headdress.
Sources & More Info:
Hermitage Museum: Saddle Cover
World Archaeology: Do the Clothes Make the Horse? Roles, Statuses, and Identities in the Pazyryk World
University of Washington: Artifacts from Southern Siberia/Pazyryk
Expedition: The Textiles from Pazyryk (PDF)
Cambridge University Press: The Origins of Saddles and Riding Technology in East Asia
Routledge: Pazyryk Culture Up in the Altai
University of Leicester: At Home, with the Good Horses (PDF) (this is a really great paper)
my goals in life? a little stone cottage in the countryside nestled within pleasant woodland with a quiet room to write and air that always smells like fresh bread baking, and there's an overgrown garden i can see from the kitchen window, and we never slam doors
I love how bunnies don't make any particular casual vocal sounds. Like they'll do extremely soft snuffling sounds, do that foot-drumming thing for reasons if they need to, and the only real vocalisation they ever do is a blood-curdling
SCREAM
online communities are so strange because people slip away so easily. you can be on here for years, folding people you've never met into the fabric of your daily life, and then they disappear, leaving only ghost posts scattered across tumblr behind. or their blog stays dormant, for weeks, months, years, until you're only still following them because you remember that they love sunflowers or they were kind to you when they didn't have to be or the last thing they posted was sad and raw and you still worry about them sometimes.
and sometimes they come back when you least expect it, years later, even, and there's this sudden rush of relief like there you are, there you are, even though you barely knew each other.
there's a strange kind of love to it. i don't know you and i want to hold your hand across miles and time zones and oceans. i can still see the imprint of you in this community you left. you don't anyone will notice or care when you're gone, but we notice and we care and we wish you well.
i hope you're all okay out there. i hope the sun is shining on your face and you are breathing deeply. i miss you.
I actually think about this so much you have no idea.
I mourn every friend that's gone off somewhere
my body, tearfully: when sleep???
me: my dude we just woke up!! Itâs time for wakefulness and doing things and Productivity
my body, weeping: but???? when sleep?????
me: okay, finally now is sleep
my body: no. wrong.
What if we win?
What if the children go to schools unafraid of tear gas and bullets?
What if the birds come back, and the bees are healed, and every species moves from endangered, to threatened, to thriving?
What if the rainforest ADVANCES?
What if every parking lot had solar panels? What if every structure had solar panels? What if we built climbing gyms and terraced gardens in the skeletons of old coal power plants?
What if you baked your neighbor bread, and they shared their home-grown blackberries?
What if every person who needed a home, had one? What if every person who needed healing was healed?
What if every body was treasured for what it was, not what it should be?
What if every trans child's parents attended their graduation, their wedding, their new-name-day?
What if every warehouse became a closed-circle repair station? Goods flowing out, and back, and out again? What if landfills started to SHRINK?
What if the water and air were clean? What if there was enough public transit that the cars dwindled, leaving the streets safe for kids on bikes, evening deer, midnight cats and foxes?
What if we win?
How would you win?
And we've won a lot already, mind you.
The condors are back. The whales are saved. The sea turtles are no longer endangered. The cranes are back. The bees are recovering. The air in LA and Tokyo and London is clean again. The aquifers in the LA Basin are refilling.
Children are kinder than previous generations. Parents are stopping the abuse cycle. Being trans and queer is more acceptable than ever on a ground level.
It's hard to see if you're young, if you don't know how to step back from social media and the news. But remember--bad news sells, and the algorithm knows despair keeps you scrolling. It's a skewed lens.
We are fighting and we are winning against this adminstration's bullying. We are coming together against the bullies and they are running away scared because they don't understand that we will do that.
People are working hard every day to find ways to make sure fewer animals get hit by cars and planes and rockets.
Maker spaces are more common than ever. Solar and wind are more common than ever. Coal plants are shutting down every day.
Unprecedented numbers of acres are being bought back or given back to their rightful stewards, and the world heals because of it. People are working hard every day to learn how to help a forest recover faster.
We are not at zero. We are at decades of effort to heal the world. We've come SO far.
In 1982 there were only 22 California Condors left in the world. In 1992, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), with its public and private partners, began reintroducing captive-bred condors to the wild. In 2001 the first wild nesting occurred in Grand Canyon National Park since re-introduction. In 2002 there were only 8 pairs of wild nesting birds population-wide. In 2008, for the first time since the program began, more California condors were flying free in the wild than in captivity. Today there are nearly 500 â more than half of them flying free in Arizona, Utah, California, and Baja Mexico.
When I was born, there were no condors in the wild. I'm 37 now, and there are over 250 condors flying free.
When my mom was born in 1955, there were days when she wasn't allowed to go outside to play, because of the air pollution. When I was born, that never happened anymore.
When I was born, humpback whales were critically endangered, and people thought they were going to go extinct. Today, they've recovered to exceed their recorded numbers. Other whales too!
We fixed it.
We CAN fix it and we ARE fixing it and we DID fix it.
Since 1990 extreme poverty has decreased worldwide by over HALF.
This is not the narrative media sells us. We have access to more information about suffering now than we used to, but things are getting BETTER overall. Yeah some people are trying to undo this, but we have made SO MUCH PROGRESS. Don't give up.
I cannot recommend bringing your heritage and culture into how you view media enough.
It is important to consider the culture of the person who created the piece, absolutely; but the different perspectives offered by the viewers is fascinating in and of itself and does not always detract from the message.
As an example, when I was younger, I watched Schindler's List. This movie is famously shot in black and white except for one section, concerning a little girl in a red coat. The camera follows her until her eventual death.
I am Turtle Island Indigenous and I was always taught that the only color spirits could see was red, because it is the color of life and blood.
So the second the girl in the red jacket came on screen, something inside me chilled with fear.
The only color in the movie was that red. At some point, I, the viewer, had died.
I remember sobbing at the sight of the burning human piles that were shown, convinced I was buried in there somewhere. The reason I had only seen red on the girl was that my death was recent. I was the ash in the air mistaken for snow. I had died before her and had followed her, helplessly, until she followed me.
The message I got for that was maybe not what the creator had intended: that there was no "being clever enough" or "good enough" or "kind enough" that would shield or protect you from such a massive tidal wave of evil.
You are not exempt from tragedy, that red jacket whispered. You are not special.
When I told some of my white friends about my experience with viewing Schindler's List, some were shocked and the rest just out-and-out mocked me for my "media illiteracy".
"it was just a filming trick to make you feel something," I remember one saying, which terrified me. How had he not felt anything even before she showed up?
However, when I repeated my viewing to a college class, they were fascinated. The implications of what I had seen and felt made the film all the more terrifying and solemn. It encouraged a lot of people to try to ask themselves what media meant from a cultural perspective, where they hadn't done that before.
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Snel.
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Another more tumblresque variant for your consideration. Thanks for the inspiration!
Thank you for the giggles!!
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I just googled this and⊠yes, itâs absolutely real.
And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.
So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.
The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.
Thank God someone bothered to check.
>I just googled this and⊠yes, itâs absolutely real.
Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.
Scientists may have been unknowingly inflating microplastics pollution estimates, and the surprising source could be their own lab gloves. A
https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138
Nitrile and latex gloves that scientists wear while they are measuring microplastics may lead to a potential overestimation of the tiny poll
Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (itâs a pdf)
Researchers discovered a standard piece of lab equipment has added thousands of microplastic âfalse positivesâ per each square-millimeter un
Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data: That doesnât mean microplastics arenât a problem, though
That should be enough
if parks and rec was still being made theyâd do a bit where ron swanson has to wear a pronouns name tag and itâd just be â???/???â And itâd cut to a talking head of him going
âIâve been a fool all this time. Itâs bad enough the government knows my name, but now they want to know my gender? So Iâm not letting them know my preferred pronouns. As far as Iâm concerned, no one in this building should refer to me at all.â
Ron walks into the main area of the office like âEveryone, announcement! I notice that you have been referring to me with he/him pronouns for YEARS. As I do not think the government has any business knowing my personal information, this behavior may incline them to make conclusions that they have no business even thinking about. Therefore, I request that you switch it up from now on. Keep em guessing. That is all.â
He tries to turn around and walk back into his office, but Leslie starts crying and saying Supportive Things about how proud she is to see him exploring his gender and immediately switches to they/them; she instructs Ben and Ann to do the same. Donna and Chris go for she/her, for different reasons.
Tom assures Ron that he will use only the slickest, coolest, dopest designer pronouns; he sweeps in the next day and announces that he's put together a powerpoint of the most stylish and fashionable neopronouns to come out of Milan this season. The powerpoint includes the scarf, cologne and sunglasses that pair best with each option. Jerry is the only one to attend this presentation, which leaves him even more Big Confused about the whole thing than he already was. In Jerry's efforts to clumsily be an ally, he keeps accidentally "misgendering" Ron four different times in four different ways in every interaction and apologizing elaborately for every single mistake, thereby inadvertently doing the best job out of any of them at fulfilling the brief.
Andy does not know what a pronoun is, but in the spirit of himbo helpfulness, he's made a list of Words that he knows Ron likes, such as "sandwich", "woodworking", and "bacon". (Ron snatches it, tears it up, throws it in the trash, and sets the trash basket on fire, and firmly instructs Andy to never again mention anything that Ron likes while inside a government building.)
April, of course, keeps using he/him until Ron calls her into his office to re-explain the strategy of Operation: Muddy The Waters, whereupon she blinks owlishly at him and says, "I mean, isn't that just what they'd expect you to do if you were trying to hide something from the government? If you exclude one pronoun, then they know that's the one you care about. You have to double-bluff them." Ron squints at her for a long moment and says flatly, "Hm. Go back to your desk." The camera stays on Ron watching her through his window as his voiceover says, "April is a valuable employee. I look forward to one day when she leaves this hellhole and uses her strategic genius and insider knowledge to tear down the government."
He's prostrating himself before the Eucharist, in case you're wondering. Or possibly planking.
@apocrypals
Hi, pope expert here. This isnât funny â popes only do this when theyâre in extreme distress
just some of the the changes in design for the Penguin Symbol on old Penguin PaperbacksÂ
he did a little dance and for this crime he was imprisoned in a bubble
They liked his little dance so much they gave him a spotlight
family album
So while doing some pirate research for the play Iâm writing I stumbled upon one of the most amazing things Iâve ever read. In the 5th century A.D. there was a Scandinavian princess called Alwilda whoâs father tried to set her up to marry Alf, the Prince of Denmark. Alwilda wasnât cool with this so she and some female companions dressed as men, stole a ship, and sailed away. Eventually they met a company of pirates who were in need of a new captain and they were so captivated by her that they elected her as their new leader. Her crew became so infamous that Prince Alf was sent out to stop them. When their ships met he took Alwilda prisoner and she was so impressed by Alfâs skill that she agreed to marry him after all and eventually became the Queen of Denmark.
I stopped caring whether this was factually accurate about halfway through because itâs completely AWESOME.
Medievalist here for triumphant fact-checking: this story is, if not true, at least true according to the history of the Danes (Gesta Danorum) written in the 12th century by Saxo Grammaticus. You can read his account of Alwildaâs story in the original Latin here, or in English translation here. Highlights include:
She exchanged womanâs for manâs attire, and, no longer the most modest of maidens, began the life of a warlike rover. Enrolling in her service many maidens who were of the same mind, she happened to come to a spot where a band of rovers were lamenting the death of their captain, who had been lost in war; they made her their rover captain.
I love the implication that there were lots of Danish maidens just WAITING for the opportunity of a life of piracyâŠ
Reblogging my old post for this A+ addition to it