The optics are janky as fuck

Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.

[steinbecks]

me @ various prestige dramas

[eclipxium]

so many "period" films come out but they always gotta have A-list celebrities and it's like. idk if you want to make something super atmospheric and immersive its hard for me to believe in what youre showing me when you have like. tom holland. im not gonna be like oh thats a guy from ancient greece im gonna be like Thats Tom Holland

[endofloves]

why do we always bash “mutinous” officers for pushing their captain down the hold but we never question if the captain has bad vibes? or is just unpleasant to be around?

[annabelle--cane]

saw someone be wrong about a tv show in a social media post and I'm being so brave about it

[aangisdead]

sometimes…….things that are fanon………are worse

[romanceyourdemons]

when the blackberry bushes have thorns to discourage mammals from monopolizing the consumption of their fruits and encourage birds to spread their seeds but they don’t know that the mammal in question is ME #notdiscouraged

[city-of-ladies]

Ancient DNA analysis reveals Wiltshire’s Upton Lovell Shaman was a woman

Exclusive: Analysis offers ‘smoking gun evidence’ that overturns previous assumption that bronze age individual was male

"The Upton Lovell Shaman, a bronze age individual who has been depicted in museum exhibits as a bearded spiritual leader and metalworker, was female, an ancient DNA analysis has revealed.

The 4,000-year-old skeleton, along with the extensive collection of stone axes, metalworking tools and the remains of an elaborate ceremonial cloak found in the grave, is viewed as among the most significant bronze age burials in Britain.

The artefacts date to about 1,800BC, a time when the ability of metalworkers to transform lumps of rock into molten metal would have given them a special – possibly even spiritual – position in society. Such roles, many had assumed, would have been reserved for men, but this narrative has been turned on its head by the latest analysis."

[lordansketil]

Okay, but saw this in a post about Project Hail Mary by @sea-salted-wolverine and it also perfectly encapsulates the difference between Book!Cromwell and Show!Cromwell in Wolf Hall. One of them is a poor little meow meow and the other one is absolutely kind of a weasel deluding himself (and the reader) into thinking he is a sad meow meow. He did enable literally every step of the process that got him where he was.

[catilinas]

everyone i've talked to about this has been completely unaware so: if you didn't know already, there's going to be a solar eclipse, with totality or coverage of 90% or more in some places, over a lot of europe, on august 12th 2026. in the uk it will start just after 6pm, and the maximum will be at 7:13pm.

here is a map of the path of the eclipse (from timeanddate)

get eclipse glasses if you want to look at it. it is not safe to look at through sunglasses. ok informative post over o7

[thatbuddie]

“omg why is no one talking about—”

[carolsturka]

how it feels to talk about anything at all

[classicslesbianopinions]

it is like. i am deliberately not posting that much about the nolan odyssey because i don't have much genuine interest and i find the whole like outrage theater people do at adaptations to be exhausting and unproductive and often misguided + i don't really care what celebrities are doing. but zendaya's 3000-year-old iranian earrings are like. such an on-the-nose fuck you. like 1. you can practically feel the stylist going "oh, it's old, it must be on-theme!" without really considering that ancient cultures are not interchangeable. but also 2. there's a very clear and important difference between ancient greece and ancient iran, in that there's a reason zendaya isn't wearing ancient greek artifacts on her ears--ancient greece has a cultural cachet that ancient iran does not, by virtue of its position as the perceived origin point of "western" (white) civilization. they are just interchangeable enough that zendaya can wear the artifacts of one civilization to a premiere of a work based on the mythos of another, but just different enough that she can get away with one but not the other.

and of course there's 3. which is that modifying and wearing a cultural artifact of dubious provenance taken from a country the us is actively bombing (and in doing so presumably destroying plenty of historic buildings/artifacts) asserts a certain lack of respect for and/or sense of ownership over that country's people and culture. and obviously this is what makes it seem like such a specifically heinous move.

[perrenlore]

Really important to note when it comes to (3) that the elite (and frankly Orientalising) appropriation of ancient Near Eastern artefacts as jewellery has a long colonial history. Cylinder seals are these little cork-shaped cylinders with pictoral or written designs engraved on them, and work the same way as a signet ring in that you could roll them over wet clay to leave an impression of the engraved relief on the clay to dry. They look like this:

(Cylinder seal of First Dynasty of Ur Queen Puabi, found in her tomb, dated circa 2600 BC, with modern impression. Inscription: 𒅤𒀜 𒎏 - Pu3-abi(AD) Nin - Queen Pu-abi. Nicked straight off Wikipedia as it's a fab comparison of seal / relief.)

In the British Museum you can find "Lady Layard's jewellery". Austin Henry Layard is a guy whose academic efforts I'm admittedly very indebted to. He was passionate about Venetian and Roman glass and did a great job re-popularising both styles in the UK, but more importantly he was the assyriologist who excavated Nineveh and the Library of Ashurbanipal—where we've found the majority of the Gilgamesh tablets. Pioneer figure in terms of Near Eastern archaeology... but check this out:

This is a necklace Layard had made for his wife. It uses real cylinder seals.

To quote the British Museum's entry on the item: One cylinder seal is Akkadian (about 2200 BC) and four belong to the second millennium BC, but eight are late Assyrian (about 1000-612 BC). Late Babylonian and Achaemenid stamp seals (about 600-350 BC) are used for the pendants and clasp.

Enid later wrote in her diary that, when they dined with Queen Victoria in 1873, it was 'much admired'.

Ancient Near Eastern artefacts, repurposed as jewellery in a set that doesn't give a single fuck about accurately dating them, let alone treating them with the sort of respect you might perhaps expect of items over four thousand years old. Instead they've become a mark of elite colonial status, an Oriental curiosity utterly separated from their historical context. They're 'old'. They're non-descriptly 'other'. Time and place dissolve into an attractive and vague exoticism.

All while the place these seals have been appropriated from is busy being exploited by the very empire this "jewellery" is being shown off to!

So to bring it back to your third point: you're absolutely right!!! And this has precedence dating right back to the start of Western study (and plundering) of the Ancient Near East. It's a carelessness, it's an ignorance of historical context, and it's explicitly colonial.

[mogifire]

the colors of the sunrise

[refrigeratedwater2]

people who grew up with money will deadass look you in the eye and ask if you’ve ever gone skiing

[thatssodeer]

tai & Shauna are such an underrated duo, like they were obviously so close 🙁🙁

[avontarrant]

this gag killed me

[politicalprocrastinator]