Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

Fen | 20 | White English | they/them Profile pic by @blanketempress

[windcarvedlyre]

Two different constituencies that have apparently voted conservative since the 1880s have flipped. Jesus christ.

[windcarvedlyre]

A friend ( @legimus-ergo-sumus ) and I went through the party's past election performance in terms of total seats.

The conservatives have 121 of the 650 total seats with only 2 constituencies left undeclared. If we only look at their performance as the conservative party this is the worst they've ever performed.

If we include their predecessors, known formally as the Tories, this is the worst they've performed since 1761:

But it gets even worse if you scale results to the number of total seats. If proportions remained the same, the 1761 result would have been 130 of 650 seats and the 1754 result would have been 123 of 650 seats.

By that metric this is again the worst they've performed ever- and the party first materialised in the late 1600s.

(Edit: The locations I mentioned in the OP are Bury St. Edmunds and Dorking, btw.)

[fairycosmos]

it is very childish and naive but i am still so shocked to see that so many people are just fucking outright mean

[sherlocking-out-loud]

I haven't seen this circulating here on Tumblr, so I decided to make my own post.

last saturday, in Porto, there was a pride parade going down the street and this old man was standing there, by his front door, waving the portuguese flag. most people on the parade probably thought the same: old person waving the national flag? he's probably protesting against the parade, he's a nationalist of some sort.

then the old man called for that person to come near him. the whole parade stopped. everyone just.. stopped moving. they didn't know what to expect, and most expected the worst. and that person decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and approached the old man. and then... they traded flags, he hugged the person and then he waved the pride flag happily. everyone cheered him.

such a wholesome moment. 🥹❤️🌈

[quasi-normalcy]

This is so funny

[kurganfilledwithbearbones]

[homunculus-argument]

No joke is one-size-fits-all, but adding "but I remain optimistic" at the end of any somewhat-speculating statement makes it funny, taking a different tone in each.

Adding it to the end of something positive gives it an unexpected twist - implying that whatever the good thing that happened was, it wasn't what you expected or hoped to happen, but you're yet to give up hope of whatever the fuck you've now vaguely implied towards might still happen. "He survived and is expected to make a full recovery, but I remain optimistic."

Adding it to a neutral statement implies that you think something can be done about it, funniest if the statement is something that obviously can't be affected. "Apparently it's tuesday tomorrow, but I remain optimistic."

And the bleakest, most hopeless statements just become bleakly funny by the grim absurdity. "About 30 seconds remain until impact, and the chances of any of us surviving the crash are zero. But I remain optimistic."

[sometransgal]

I keep thinking about that one post that was going around talking about the potential origins of cheese and everyone immediately jumps to it must've been rotten milk that they ate out of desperation. But I'd like to posit that the first cheese was probably someone adding an acid to warmed milk and realising it splits it. Like it's not that big a stretch of the imagination for someone to think "oh I like warm milk but I also like this acidic fruit, I wonder if I can mix them". From there a little experimentation on separating the new curd from the whey and you've got a simple fresh cheese.

I dunno I think the reason I wanted to make this post is just that we tend to desscribe a lot of discoveries around food as desperate acts of starvation and not genuinely thought out experimentations based on observations like every other form of human knowledge. Ancient people weren't stupid starving unwashed masses and it's important to remember that. They were people who could think and deduce and logic their way through things as good as you or I.

[fishing-lesbian-princess]

Studying sustainability has taught me that the answer to things like “is it better to use paper or plastic bags?” always ends up being something like “we would need to perform an extremely in depth study on the entire life cycle of both types of bags from virgin material collection to product recollection, compare things like amount of product each type of bag can carry, material usage per bag, how frequently double-bagging is occurring, and take into account a ridiculous number of factors down to the fuel efficiency of the trucks that transport them and even after all that we would have to try to find a way to compare whether the higher carbon emissions of producing and transporting paper bags is better than the fact that the plastic bags will be plastic bags for the next thousand years. And at the end of the day all this research would ultimately not be particularly useful because our waste collection streams in the US are so fucking bad it’s depressing.”

And then someone will ask about reusable bags and you’d have to do the study again only to reveal that you need to use the reusable bag like a couple thousand times to offset the carbon emissions it takes to make the reusable bag and make it worth it over disposable bags and that’s not taking into consideration bags breaking before then or being forgotten about completely.

The answer always leads to “it’s incredibly complicated but our current practices are so terrible we would need a full scale restructuring of our economy and practices to such a degree that can literally never happen because our government is lobbied by the people who make money off of said unsustainable practices.”

So the answer to “paper bags or plastic bags?” is that we need to destroy capitalism

[quousque]

I just saw the most Galaxy Brain gender take ever, from a cis man on reddit

[ID: a screenshot of a comment from reddit, with no username visible. The commend reads: This doesn’t make a ton of sense to me either. Setting aside the question of whether gender/sex is assigned or observed at birth, the gender I was assigned at birth was ‘boy.’ The gender I have now is ‘man’. Boys and men have different gender roles, and few adults identify as boys anymore. From this standpoint, every adult has a different gender than the one they had at birth. End ID]

Framing “girl” and “boy” as separate genders from “woman” and “man” is such an amazing take. it’s a framework that accommodates and explains so many trans experiences. Some trans people never were their AGAB. Some feel like they were their AGAB, but that that changed (usually when puberty hits, which is when you start “becoming a man/woman”. The accepted societal path is that girls grow up to into women, and boys grow up into men. But some girls grow up into men, and some boys grow up into women. This guy was a boy who grew up into a man, which generally works out pretty well for people. Some boys and girls grow up into people who aren’t men or women, even! It’s like this random cis guy skipped right over transgender 101, 102, 201, etc. and stumbled directly into Transgender Nirvana.

[unionizedwizard]

also just a general rule of thumb: when nationalized/public service industries are striking, they ARE striking for YOUR benefit, ultimately. bus drivers are the ones who fight against capitalist upper management trying to shut down bus routes that "don't generate enough profits" or trying to generally set up a worse (public!) service for the sake of """"efficiency""""" and """"""cost optimization""""""" (read: pay less people and overwork them to give YOU, the public, a much worse service or commodity).

it's like this in schools, hospitals, public transportation, literally everywhere. the striking workers care for the public' needs more than the bosses will ever do. sure they want better work conditions which is (should be) enough of a reason to support strikes in general, but by supporting striking workers, you ultimately support your own quality of life. it's all intertwined

[thatlittleegyptologist]

Hello. If you don't mind, I have a question that runs kinda parallel to the whole Egyptian curse discourse you've been suffering lately.

Tw: discussion of religious intrusive thoughts.

A while ago I was reading about modern Hellenistic worship and there was a bit about how serious it was to commit yourself to a certain deity, what a big decision it was and how for many deities it was a lifelong choice, but that that commitment didn't necessitate a ritual if the practitioner didn't feel called to one. My intrusive thoughts immediately started pledging themselves eternally to a wide variety of Greek deities (mainly the ones I would least like to associate myself with) and although I don't believe in those deities the idea that I might accidentally pledge myself to a power beyond my understanding was a tad distressing.

So today I'm exploring a new archeology YouTube channel and the host has a video about getting a replica of the oldest tattoo ever found on a mummy and my immediate gut reaction, based solely off of the thumbnail, was "but what if you accidentally pledged yourself to something you wouldn't want to be tied to?”

And then I thought of the mummy's curse discourse and I wondered how this reaction of mine fits with that orientalist idea. I want to believe the reactions are different, that mine is more about an acknowledgement of the potential for any supernatural belief to have validity and therefore not fucking around unless you are very sure you want to find out, but I have self serving reasons to want to believe that and so hoped to get the outside perspective of someone who knows a lot more than I do on this subject.

Thanks in advance and hope you're having a groovy day.

C

Your reaction wasn’t “oh ewww a curse” or “put it back you’ll get cursed” but “what if I pledged myself to a deity by tattooing something on me?” which is entirely different. What that speaks to is a concern not to be overstepping boundaries and thinking about whether it is right for you to do something that might have cultural implications. This is fine! You’re not immediately associating having the tattoo with being cursed, but instead asking if what you’re doing has religious implications.

With the person getting the tattoo? That’s up to them and their choice to get it. I know several Egyptologists who have tattoos of hieroglyphs, including replica placements of ones found on mummies. These people can read hieroglyphs, and they understand what the signs represent. Some of them may have deeper meanings that were not aware of yet, (I have an article on some tattoos on a woman from Deir el Medina if you’re interested) but I’m not aware of any tradition in Egypt, especially at the time the woman lived, where a tattoo would pledge you to a god. Egyptian religion doesn’t work like that. Even if one did, the person would have to believe in the Egyptian gods for it to have any meaning. Meaning lies with the owner of the tattoo. If they say it means something then it means that thing. If they say it means nothing and is just a picture then that’s what it is. It’s about agency and intent.

Egyptian religion works by people understanding the intent behind certain motifs and symbols (because people can’t read). If the intent doesn’t match then the Egyptian belief that heka can work through images will not work. So basically, if the intent of the original tattoo was a protection of Thoth (baboon symbol), then it’s a protection of Thoth for the deceased who has it. If the researcher intends to get a replica of the tattoo of Thoth just for fun, then the intent is “for fun” and heka cannot work.

[thatlittleegyptologist]

Anyone talking about 'curses' and 'letting curses out if you open things' on the Pyramid post, but also y'know Ancient Egypt in general?

Thanks for perpetuating Orientalist othering! That's pretty racist of you!

✨Go Fuck Yourself✨

[ktempestbradford]

The only time I felt that was an appropriate joke was when they were gonna open the black sarcophagus they found flooded with sewer water. There's no way THAT wasn't cursed and should never be opened.

Otherwise, she's right.

[thatlittleegyptologist]

It wasn't an appropriate joke then, either, tbh. That was genuinely one of the worst times to be an Egyptologist, because everyone was caught up in 'oooooh spoooooooky cuuuuuurse of the sarcophagus' that they didn't listen to any explanation of why what they were seeing was nothing out of the ordinary.

Many sarcophagi in Egypt are made from black granite. This is a normal building material for statuary, stele, and sarcophagi for most of Egyptian history. There's nothing strange or unusual about it. In fact, fellow Egyptologists and I made posts back in 2018 (this one from Rudjedet) about how granite sarcophagi are nothing unusual or scary. People just saw the word 'black' and associated it with bad things, and they probably need to consider why it is they do that.

That being said, it is clearly a reused sarcophagus. The burial is Ptolemaic, but the coffin is Late Period. Judging by its size I'd wager a guess that it might have been for an Apis Bull at one point. Or at least a large animal burial. Sarcophagi like this would have been extremely expensive, so the reuse of one isn't at all surprising.

To no one's surprise, it was filled with sewer water because it was found near to a leaking sewer

Inside were two men (one in his 30s and one in his 40s) and one woman (in her 20s), and they appear to have been purposefully buried there as there are some small gold items that represent rebirth. I can't remember if we found out if they were all related, but it wouldn't surprise me if this was a family burial. One of the males was initially thought to have suffered an arrow to the head, and thus they were thought to be soldiers, but it turns out it was a trepanning hole that had healed long before their death.

It was discovered in an area of Alexandria where Ptolemaic royal buildings would have once been, and probably still are they're just under the modern city. So we tend to find these things piecemeal, and lacking context.

If this sarcophagus had been found anywhere else, people would have laughed about poop skeletons and never mentioned curses. I think people need to ask themselves just why that is.

[deafmangoes]

How much of it do you take as Orientalism versus generic "it's bad to disturb the dead/places of the dead" that we find in most cultures?

I understand there's the whole association with "curses" and Egypt because of our erstwhile 1920s/1930s graverobbers and journalists, but wondering where that intersects with discussion about, say, finding a "spooky" Roman or Celtic burial in the UK.

(Interesting to learn that stuff about the sarcophagus! Thanks for sharing it!)

[thatlittleegyptologist]

Most of it. There's a specific 'flavour' of this behaviour that comes alongside dealing with finding anything in Ancient Egypt. It's never just with tombs when it comes to Egypt. It's with every single artefact we dig up from pots and cookery stuff, to papyri and statues, has multiple comments or articles about how it should be put back because it's cursed. Meanwhile, a giant mosaic is uncovered in Rutland and no one bats an eye. Uncover Roman burials in York and everyone says 'oh wow I wonder what these people were like?' Discover two skeletons entwined in a burial in Rome and everyone romanticises them as lovers. There's an effort to show what these things actually are, and how they functioned, which you don't get with discoveries from Egypt.

There is also significantly less push back and pantomime for the discovery Roman and Celtic burials in the UK than there is for literally anything coming out of Egypt. The Roman little girl who was found when archaeologists surveyed a building site of what would eventually be the Gherkin in London? I've posted about that, and the responses I got were all about how sad they were that she was found all alone. If you google her, you get lots of sites telling you about her and what happened to her after she was discovered. Contrast that with the two bits of information I've posted about discoveries in Egypt in the last week. The new intact Book of the Dead? More than half the comments/tags were 'put it back it's cursed'. The new tunnel discovered in the Pyramid? Many tags are 'don't go in there it's cursed' or 'don't unleash the curse on this world' Even going back to the sarcophagus mentioned above; if you google that then your results are overwhelmingly 'look at this spooky black coffin' or 'mysterious coffin that might curse us all has been found'

The occasional 'spooky celtic burial' comment is absolutely nothing compared to the overwhelming amount of bullshit I have dealt with regarding any archaeological find from Ancient Egypt.

[bilbobagginsomebabez]

I think it’s relevant here to remind everybody that there’s such an intense cultural and historical record of othering towards Egyptian history that white people literally ate mummies into rarity. There were so many mummies everywhere because of burial practices and soil characteristics combined with this genuinely unbelievable level of mystic racism that white people in the early 1900s literally started eating them by the millions for “medicinal” or ritual purposes. because old egyptian human remains are spooky and obviously must be magic so…. eat it in 1910 or baselessly fear it in 2023.

[thatlittleegyptologist]

I’ll agree with that! Except the eating to rarity, which is a myth (thankfully). They thought they were but they were mostly fakes made by Egyptians to sell to gullible white folks!

Were mummy unwrapping parties and medical cannibalism of mummies still things that happened in the 20s? The discourse surrounding the Darnel

[havingrevelations-deactivated20]

imagine being sappho of lesbos writing some poetry abt ur gf and then 2000 years later ‘there are two common adjectives for love between women and you won’t believe who they’re named after!’ ‘by the delights of athena, you can’t mean that one of them is named after me?’ ‘no both of them are’

[kushblazer666]

[mercuryfountain-deactivated2024]

I don't mean to be callous but when I talk about walkability/transit and someone says "what about people who live out in the country" I'm like yeah, what about them? What does that have to do with how people in cities get around?

[mercuryfountain-deactivated2024]

I have a post very explicitly about pedestrian fatalities in disenfranchised neighborhoods and how people who can't afford cars are treated as second class citizens and someone commented "tell me y'all don't live 20 miles from the nearest town without telling me." I've had an IRL conversation where the guy interjected "well there are starving people in remote West Virginia, that's the REAL poverty." And it's worth asking, why do you valorize and sympathize with rural poverty but not urban poverty? JK, I know why.

[3liza]

you know everyone, in addition to what rthko is saying, in countries with functional transit, the people in rural areas ALSO can walk on to buses and trains. because the public transit goes to those places. walkability also means you can live in a farming community and catch a train to the city on the weekend. this is the reality in many places in europe and japan. a long time ago i accompanied my boyfriend-at-the-time to a series of techno festivals all over germany without a car and it was fine. the trains just went everywhere, even the smaller towns. for less dense areas there was a lot of support for biking as well.

[altruistic-meme]

a collection of my favorite tweets regarding the Ever Given in the Suez Canal

[coolbeanscoolbeans]

happy 1st bday to... this.

[modmad]

I personally am declaring this to be a new International Holiday 

[spaghettioverdose-deactivated20]

Happy 2nd anniversary to the Suez Canal blockage!

[micdotcom]

Watch: Poet G Yamazawa nails what it’s like to grow up in the U.S. as the child of immigrants.

[bostonbakeddeans]

“I am selfish

writing poems

And poems and poems

About Japan when my name

Is the only word I know how to write

In Japanese.”

Watch this performance on YouTube.

[bisexualshakespeare]

[ID: gifs of the poet G Yamazawa, a Japanese man with his head shaved except for a stripe down the middle, tied back into a knot. He says, “Whenever I speak to my dad in English he returns the foreign favour. For him, speaking Japanese is a walk in the park. I imagine speaking English is like climbing a barbed wire fence. My father’s accent isn’t smooth like my birth certificate. It’s the rough edges around my family’s grave. My father’s accent is a hole in a Japanese internment camp fence. It’s an escape route to his culture. His accent is think and his words stick together like the vinegar rice on his working hands. He spent more time cooking for people than working on his speech because he knew standard English wasn’t going to feed his children. The recipe is his way of talking to Americans. It’s how people understand what his heart is trying to say. The accent is the mark of an immigrant. It’s a ruler with mile-long increments that measures the distance away from home. See maybe Asians are known to be good at math because that’s the only homework our parents could help us with. Or maybe I’m just defensive because I’m afraid that my rusty Japanese is a broken chain in the link that can’t hold my lineage together.” /]

[of-void-and-stars]

Hey! I'm offering pixel art in @fandomtrumpshate, a fanworks auction benefitting charities that support progressive causes, and bidding is open now! For a minimum bid of just 10$ (that, again, goes to a charity of your choosing from a given list!) you could have pixel art based on The Magnus Archives, Rusty Quill Gaming, or Wheel of Time.

Examples of my work below

ID: a collage of four pixel art pieces.

Top left: an overfull carboard box filled with off-white paper files. The box is messily labeled "uncategorized", the background is light green.

Top right: Martin Blackwood, a fat white man with lots of freckles, standing with his bare back to the viewer. He's wearing black boxers and he has short curly reddish brown hair. The background is a pastel blue to pink gradient.

Bottom left: Jon and Martin from a Spiritfarer AU, standing on a grassy hill under a star-filled night sky with a crescent moon. Martin noteably has fogged over glasses and wears a capelet with a large, bright clasp - the everlight. Jon has moth traits - antennae, neck fluff, two extra arms, and of course wings.

Bottom right: Grizzop a grey goblin in a cream, laced shirt, seen from the chest up and smiling fondly. The backgrouns is dark green.

End ID

I'm very much open to negotiation and talking about what you'd like to see so feel free to reach out here on tumblr beforehand!

Bidding runs till this Sunday, March 5th, at 8PM EST.

Ready to bid? You can find my auction here

There's a bunch of other great auctions in each of the listed fandoms too so I encourage you to browse those tags, or those of other fandoms you're interested in, as well!