Moony Owly and much more...

[holyfuckingshitbatman]

Example 4,305,108 of Alfred being an absolute savage

Batman: The Long Halloween Part 1

[regina-bithyniae]

[alex51324]

In a totalitarian state, anything you can find to do that is neither forbidden nor compulsory is an act of liberation.

In a totalitarian state, wasting the authorities time and resources is a positive good.

My fellow Americans, act accordingly.

[one-and-five-nines]

Yo I feel like the idea that the only historical women who counted are the ones who defied society and took on the traditionally male roles is… not actually that feminist. It IS important that women throughout history were warriors and strategists and politicians and businesswomen, but so many of us were “lowly” weavers and bakers and wives and mothers and I feel like dismissing THOSE roles dismisses so many of our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers and the shit they did to support our civilization with so little thanks or recognition.

[ardatli]

YES. This is such an important point. Those ‘girly’ girls doing their embroidery and quilting bees and grass braiding were vital parts of every domestic economy that has ever existed.

This is precisely what chaps my hide so badly about the misuse of the quote “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” because this is precisely what the author was actually trying to say.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a domestic historian who developed new methodologies to study well-behaved women because they were

1) so vital, and

2) their lives were rarely recorded in the usual old sources.

“Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all. Most historians, considering the domestic by definition irrelevant, have simply assumed the pervasiveness of similar attitudes in the seventeenth century.”

Original article: “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735” (pdf download from Harvard)

[prismatic-bell]

If you didn’t know: Abagail Adams (John Adams’ wife) led a very successful effort to fund the American Revolution. How did she and her tiny army of women do it?

They made lace, and sold it to the aristocrats. Real lace (the stuff you see on old outfits in museums, not the machine-made stuff you might be familiar with from today) is stupidly difficult to make, takes a lot of time and skill, and, well:

If you watch this through, you’ll hear her say this is DOMESTIC lace. This is not fancy, this is for household objects. You can imagine what it would take to make some of the elaborate pieces you see on old aristocratic clothing, and see why it was so expensive and valuable. (Incidentally, if you’ve ever heard the music from the musical 1776, in the song where Abagail and John are trading letters and he’s like “ma’am we need saltpeter” and she’s like “dude we need pins,” THIS IS WHAT THEY NEEDED THE PINS FOR. That song was based on real letters between the two.)

And this is all those revolutionary Revolutionary women did, every free moment of every day. They pulled out their pins and their bobbins and they made lace until they couldn’t see straight, and they sold it to revolutionaries and royalists alike, anyone who would pay. Yard upon yard upon yard of lace to earn cash to translate into rations and bullets.

The war was won by a women’s craft. Not even a “vital” women’s craft like cooking or cleaning. It was won by making a luxury item whose entire purpose was to say “look how wealthy I am, I can afford all this lace.”

Lace was not the only source of income for the Revolution. But it was a major one, and it is extremely fair to say it turned the tide.

And until this post, I bet you didn’t know.

[findingfeather]

If you know Discworld, you know the observations about “ladies who organize”?

That’s not something Pterry made up. That is reality. Ladies Who Organize have been a major driving force of history - usually unremembered b/c everyone remembers the guy who was officially involved and not, eg, his wife who organized a massive letter writing campaign and seven soirées that funded Mr Historical’s entire enterprise.

Ladies Who Organize both started and ended Prohibition, as noted above funded American Independence, and were the ONLY people who got their shit together with regards to eg the 1918 Flu in a lot of cities (Philadelphia is a really great example).

Ladies Who Organize is just ONE area of history where that’s the case. It’s just they did things in mostly socially accepted ways and when they pushed the envelope they did it strategically and tactically, leveraging whatever else they had to offset that.

Now, we get to know about them because they were not only nearly universally literate but MASSIVELY WORKED VIA LETTERS so as we started actually paying attention we had sources. Imagine how many of these we’ve lost because the record ONLY contained the other stuff.

[4x01]

“in order to create loving males we need to love males” means teach boys that they can be themselves without being less of a man. it means being encouraging and nurturing of their emotions so they don’t become cold and hateful. it means showing boys, early in their lives, that they have value outside of what our society deems proper masculinity. what it doesn’t mean is that it’s our job to handhold men who see women as walking sex toys through the concept of empathy, and maybe if we’re really really nice to them and don’t say things that hurt their feelings they’ll stop killing us for saying no

[cardassiangoodreads]

This is what that bell hooks essay actually says, btw.

[memewhore]

[kabillieu]

The commitment to the bit! The t-shirt that names the over-the-counter pain killer this man will have to take after this Oscar-winning performance!

[butchfagminotaur]

just overheard my wife spelling something on the phone and i shit you not saying the words “E as in Eeyore” i am on my hands and knees wailing screaming crying pleading and begging people to learn the NATO phonetic alphabet

[butchfagminotaur]

like the reason this exists is because none of the words sound like each other, which means that even with a terrible signal both parties should be able to clearly understand the words being spelled

i am dead serious that i believe this should be taught in school

[catasters]

[darkfringes]

"in my" also includes "in anyone's"

Also see 'intolerance paradox'.

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[himikochan]

@swanfloatieknight @felagund-fiollaigean besties I know what we’re going this weekend

[fiollaigean]

when there's medieval apple fritters at the function 🚶🏼‍➡️➡️

[thememedaddy]

[prokopetz]

An incomplete taxonomy of esoteric texts:

This text is discussing esoteric subject matter

This text is being deliberately obscure because its author knows they don't have a coherent thesis and they're blowing smoke

This text is written in earnest, but its author has very poor communication skills

This text's translator has misunderstood something that was meant completely literally as a complex metaphor

This text is actually perfectly straightforward in its native language, but every available translation fucking sucks

[kinsey3furry300]

6. The author is a troll, and is fucking with a very specific target audience, who would have been well aware they are being fucked with.

You are not the target audience, and thus are missing the joke.

[mysteriouslyunlikelycloud]

7. This text was reasonably accessible in the context it was written in. It has been removed from that context and is now completely impossible to understand.

The book you are advised to read to understand what this book is going on about has not been digitised. There is a reference copy available at a library 800 miles away. An eBay seller based in Russia is selling a copy for £300, there is no picture of the book included in the listing.

[downtroddendeity]

Cryptography.

[crazynerdandproud]

#johannes tritheimus still funniest bitch i found out about by complete accident#man so good at cryptography it took 500 years for anyone to realize how good he was at cryptography

wait, who? what?

[downtroddendeity]

Johannes Tritheim/Trithemius was a 15th-century German Benedictine abbot. He wrote on all sorts of topics, including one of the first books about cryptography ever published, titled Polygraphia. He also had such a reputation for doing Wizard Shit that he may have been one of the inspirations for the legend of Faust. He mentored Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, who became one of the single most influential occultists of the entire Renaissance. In 1499, he wrote an occult treatise titled Steganographia, meaning "sealed writing," which describes magical rituals to invoke angelic spirits to communicate secretly over long distances. It influenced a bunch of later grimoires, and landed on the Catholic Church's list of heretical documents for centuries.

Except, in 1606- 107 years later- somebody published a decryption key, which revealed that the entire first two volumes of the grimoire were actually in code, and the real contents were a second treatise on cryptography. However, they hadn't found anything in the third volume, and since it references a number of occult texts that are generally believed to be in earnest, occultists argued that this meant book 3 was still probably intended as legitimate esoteric writing.

In 1998- 499 years later- somebody cracked the third volume.

It was more cryptography.

[embroiderycrafts]

[screenshotsforencouragement]

[rainbowdazzle]

omg this made me emotional 😭

[unashamedly-enthusiastic]

We named him after you we hope you don't mind

[bigandretired-deactivated202501]

Let’s goooooooo

[whydidisavethistomyphone]

[kaijuno]

My dad has bees. Today, I went to his house and he showed me all the honey he had gotten from the hives. He took the lid off a 5-gallon bucket full of honey and on top of the honey there were 3 little bees, struggling. They were covered in sticky honey and drowning. I asked him if we could help them and he said he was sure they wouldn't survive. Casualties of honey collection I suppose.

I asked him again if we could at least get them out and kill them quickly, after all he was the one who taught me to put a suffering animal (or bug) out of its misery. He finally conceded and scooped the bees out of the bucket. He put them in an empty Chobani yogurt container and put the plastic container outside.

Because he had disrupted the hive with the earlier honey collection, there were bees flying all over outside.

We put the 3 little bees in the container on a bench and left them to their fate. My dad called me out a little while later to show me what was happening. These three little bees were surrounded by all their sisters (all of the bees are females) and they were cleaning the sticky nearly dead bees, helping them to get all of the honey off of their bodies. We came back a short time later and there was only one little bee left in the container. She was still being tended to by her sisters.

When it was time for me to leave, we checked one last time and all three of the bees had been cleaned off enough to fly away and the container was empty.

Those three little bees lived because they were surrounded by family and friends who would not give up on them, family and friends who refused to let them drown in their own stickiness and resolved to help until the last little bee could be set free.

Bee Sisters. Bee Peers. Bee Teammates.

We could all learn a thing or two from these bees.

Bee kind always.

[roach-works]

also: the bees aren't strong enough to pull the drowning ones out, and the humans aren't delicate enough to clean them off afterwards. helping takes a lot of forms.

[mr-deep-downer]

coworker: hey you should come look at the results of a ph test for a customer’s water

me: I’m king of busy rn

coworker: no really just come here

the ph test:

my honest reaction:

[teaboot]

I dont k ow what OP is testing for or what most of the table says but whatever water they've sampled it has the same PH levels as seawater and there's enough mineral content for stalagmites to form inside the sample container. If line 2 is nitrates- the stuff produced by dead junk- then there's enough of it to make them sick.

So like. Whatever this is, and I hope to God it isn't someone's tap water, then as far as my untrained brain can tell, it is reading as a sample pulled from an unfiltered saltwater fish tank that someone filled with street gravel and didn't clean for a month.

Or like. The groundwater well behind an abandoned farm house in Missouri that hasn't been touched since 1953, possibly after a raccoon fell inside it

This is the kind of water you'd read about in an old dead British guy's expedition journal in an entry dated two days before the entire party died of dysentery

[arbis-official]

IT GETS WORSE

[teaboot]

OH MY SWEET CHRIST

[byjove]

There was a TikTok post about an advertisement for “blood-making pills for weak women” someone found in a newspaper from the 1890s and everybody seemed to think it was just an example of the weird misogyny of the day and age but no. Anemia was a massive public health concern. It always has been through history but part of the reason we have this idea of old timey women thought history being physical weak, chronically cold and pale and fainting is because they often they were. Anemia was also a massive problem for men in that day but even now it disproportionally affects people who menstruate. So tonics full of stimulants and “healthful vitamins” were marketed at young women in pages upon pages of advertisements in every newspaper. People generally felt like shit all the time back then.

[judiops]

I've seen old folk remedies for anemia, particularly cooking with cast iron and putting rusty nails in an apple, leaving them in overnight, then removing the nails and eating the rust-infused apple.

It was A Whole Thing.

[byjove]

What’s interesting is that that would have worked better than a lot of the ‘medicines’ being hawked during that time. To this day, adding a small chunk of iron to a cooking pot with a mild acid is being used to prevent iron deficient anemia.

[byjove]

Yep! Absolutely. It was a much more pervasive and deadly problem throughout history because of a lack of dietary variety and medical science not completely understanding the needs of the human body. Now it is less common because many foods are fortified with additional minerals and multivitamins are inexpensive and widely available.

[kick-a-long]

people forget but before enriched flour people DIED like all the time of pellagra. a literal vitamin deficiency. people also died of tooth decay... until antibiotics and floriated water. people died and were paralyzed for life because they swam in the summer, or just drank water, or ate out at a restaurant of polio and cholera and typhoid until vaccines and effective health codes. it was expected that like a third of all kids born would die from things the MMR vaccine prevents.

learning about the history of public health is SO important to understanding why scary chemicals are WAY less scary than life without them.

[aetherograph]

this is also why vaccines are so important. 'well what did people do before then' I have heard a lot of that sort of sentiment from anti-vax folks and like... martha, they DIED. Babies DIED. In the thousands. Go to an old cemetery and look at the graves. Look at the ages. I have seen so many graves for children under the age of 3. For infants that hadn't been alive long enough to have a name.

Measles, mumps, rubella, and the seasonal--SEASONAL--plagues of water-bourne diseases (polio, cholera, dysentery) that diarrhea you to death killed thousands of children every year. Every fucking year. Vaccines can prevent the first three, can prevent chicken pox/shingles, can prevent, these days, even hepatitis. But there is no vaccine for dysentery, for typhoid, for a surprising number of the Old Plagues, because we eliminated them using a completely different method: Public Health and Sanitation, which kills them at the source.

In 1949, the government actually commissioned Warner Bros' animation department to put together a video explaining to people the importance of paying tax to fund the public health system--and it still explains the basics pretty well:

On the other side of the pond, there's a reason London celebrated Joseph Bazalgette's design and building of the first sanitary sewer. He saved lives.

Sometimes I think Present-Day America's utter squeamishness; and inability to talk seriously about things that have to do with bodies and bodily functions, is actually what is costing us critical health infrastructure. We already cannot get public toilets off the ground in this country bc the minute you mention 'toilet' people lose their fucking minds, and are so uncomfortable with the fact that Everyone Poops that they can't stop babbling jokes, and nothing can get done. But public toilets are a public health issue. People need to piss and shit, and if you don't give them enough places to do it in a safe sanitary way, they will still need to do it and will go and do it in an alley or on a building or what-have-you, and that's a public health issue!

Public Health is so often derided, indeed it's even dismantled because people don't like to acknowledge its worth or just plain never learn about it as anything but a joke. Oregon doesn't have fluoridated water anymore, did you know that? They literally rolled back a public health measure for not goddamn reason other than an acute breakout of hysterical ignorance. If you're out and about in just about any city in this country—and even in Canada and the UK as well—you're still on a Bladder Leash, because there are just about ZERO bathrooms accessible to the public. That's a public health issue!

If you live in NYC, you get the importance of sanitation workers shoved up your nose every time you go outside. They used to have metal trashcans, but that was rolled back and now the bags just pile up on the sidewalks. That's a public health issue!

My small town has inadequate waste collection, meaning trash that doesn't fit the exacting rules and tiny single trash bin piles up in our home. There is no government sanitation, it's outsourced to a private company based out of state. That's ludicrous, and I imagine we aren't the only small town with this public health issue!

Children and adults aren't required to be vaccinated before going to school and work, where they could spread or start epidemics. Children and adults aren't required to mask in public places anymore, even when showing signs of communicable disease. Children an adults aren't required to stay home if showing signs of illness. That's also a fucking public health issue!

Eating out, swimming in public pools, going to water parks, concerts, conventions, parties, theme/amusement parks, theatres, rallies, and parades are all possible to do safely because of public health departments and public health measures. The fact that so many have been dismantled, made voluntary rather than mandated, and generally gutted is genuinely worrying. We have the technology to live without diseases, and to eradicate new ones within months, and the Western world just doesn't, because we fed so many generations the lie that we aren't part of a larger community and have no responsibility to other people.

That's so, so incredibly wrong, and Miss Rona pointed that out sharply.