The second coming of the Nerd

[nerdwithabrush2]

Doctor JJ Kelly-Mavel indie

Critical role muses

Doctor Jacob Kelly-Marvel indie

Emily Moon-SHIELD Daycare

THE Lady Sif-Marvel canon divergent

Carlyle Chase-Marvel indie

My personal-personal ooc

Samuel Wilson-Marvel canon divergent

Rapunzel-Tangled inspired

Marian Hawke-Dragon Age inspired

Lila Potts/Ben Hargraves- UA

THE Lady Sif-Marvel canon divergent  (twice? How nice!)

Jennifer Walters Esq.- Marvel canon Divergent

The Chameleon Project-multi muse

And soooo many others....maybe I have a problem. That problem is not enough time set aside for writing.

[tatiannamaslany-blog]

[do-you-have-a-flag]

tomorrow

[thecatholicbadwolf-whowaited]

Always reblog NSYNC the day before May

[ackles-wants-snackles-with-cas]

Queueing this for next year

[violets-and-cupcakes]

[bisexualshakespeare]

At least there’s one thing I can count on in this crazy mixed up world

[boxlunches]

oh there he is

[scarswillhealsoon]

Panic attack during a CT scan

[catgirl-kaiju]

Love how this accidentally captures exactly how a panic attack feels

[feral-ballad]

Clementine Von Radics, from In A Dream You Saw A Way To Survive; “You are on the floor crying”

[Text ID: “And you have been / on the floor crying / for days. / And that is you / being brave. / That is you getting through it / as best you know how. / No one else can decide / What your tough looks like.”]

[agentjjkelly]

😞

The past three days have been the hardest of my life.

Yesterday morning my mom passed away after a sudden incident at the hospital Wednesday night.

It’s been just ~14 months since her mother died unexpectedly.

I’m numb.

[zarabella73]

[starlightacademia]

“It's taboo to admit that you're lonely. You can make jokes about it, of course. You can tell people that you spend most of your time with Netflix or that you haven't left the house today and you might not even go outside tomorrow. But rarely do you ever tell people about the true depths of your loneliness, about how you feel more and more alienated from your friends each passing day and you're not sure how to fix it. It seems like everyone is just better at living than you are. A part of you knew this was going to happen. Growing up, you just had this feeling that you wouldn't transition well to adult life, that you'd fall right through the cracks. And look at you now, it's happening.”

[ithinkthiswasabadidea]

the only two vibes of Wildemount vs Issylra

[bixbiboom]

[puwumats]

critical role c3e64 || the last supper - leonardo da vinci

[sparring-spirals]

im thinking about bor'dor, towards the end of that brief and bloody battle, going "just do it", "take me out of my misery" "just turn into a giant spider while you do so?" and its like. its like tragically funny but also so. so fucking sad.

because its essentially about bor'dor exhausted and injured and knowing he wont live, going "do it", wishing for a quick end, surrounded by people who liked him and will now kill him because he betrayed them (they betrayed HIM- before he could know how much he'd like them). its about the resigned exhaustion of- what else do i have to lose?

Except I think about the devastated way Bor'dor talked about the loss of his mother, of his friends in the Ruby Vanguard, and the grief and the fear and the anger, and I don't think it's the first time he's thought that. Bor'dor joining the Ruby Vanguard at all, fighting a vendetta against the gods, is not someone who thinks they have lots of options. You don't generally agree to plans that could devastate the existing world unless you feel like you have more to lose than gain. Bor'dor, his magic a curse, his loved ones lost, the world cold and cruel and painful, being spun a tale of a world without gods, of a fight and a battle and a purpose, even if there are casualties, losses along the way.

Bor'dor, full of grief and rage, having lived a hard fucking life, being promised a solution, a world without gods, maybe thinking: what do i have to lose? they've never done anything for me. Then, he's watching a plan go awry, watching friends and comrades he'd made and bonded with fall to a bunch of- nobodies, cutting through them like it's nothing, remembering he does have things to lose. Bor'dor, knowing that the plan went wrong and his friends bodies are lifeless somewhere far away from where he is, lying furiously and ridiculously about being a shepherd and unknown magic to the suspicious faces of a bunch of killers. Probably thinking. what do I have to lose?

Except he eats with these people, he trades watches with them, he fights with them, he heals them, he shares a pipe and they share hopes and fears and pasts, and-

and he's standing as they all recoil from acid, everything falling apart, and. maybe he did have something to lose, after all.

[lloerwyn-deactivated20201104]

Medievalists of Tumblr: what inaccuracies annoy you the most in movies set in the Middle Ages?

Mine is probably the ‘everyone was constantly caked in mud and only wore grey and brown’ aesthetic.

[mediaeval-muse]

Same. Also the idea that “women were property so they did nothing but sew and have babies and the time was inherently backwards and violent”

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

the complete absence of christianity from pop culture perceptions of the medieval period really bugs me (or it being relegated to the fringes and a few monks somewhere)

like… this was a major part of most people’s daily lives even if it didn’t necessarily look like christianity as we know it. also medieval theology is fucking wild! where are all the debates about cannibal babies in pop culture medieval stuff? WHERE is the twelfth century werewolf renaissance? the fuckign infancy gospels?? give me weird medieval theology you cowards

[cukibola-deactivated20200917]

A lot of them had already been mentioned, so may I add

“The dishes were only bland soups and maybe some moldy bread”

I’m studying English language and literature, not History, but like… Pork vs Pig… Deer vs Venison… Cow vs Beef… May give you the idea THEY FUCKING ATE MEAT AT LEAST GODDAMIT

And not even like we do

Where’s the feast with venison? The ridiculous amount of salmon and other fishes? The little gardens full of spices? Or the trade of exotic foods? Slaughtering season was celebrated in some places not that much ago (like… I saw one when little), why not portray one?

And more importantly

WHERE’S THE CHICKEN WITH HELMET???

GIVE ME CHICKEN WITH HELMET OR GIVE ME DEATH

[lloerwyn-deactivated20201104]

Yeah, and for better or for worse they were much less picky about which animals they ate than we are. Porpoise, anyone?

Medieval people loved their spices; The Forme of Cury has a lot of flavours I’d associate more with Indian food than anything else. Even if you weren’t a wealthy seasoning-loving king like Richard II, you could still have garlic, onions, and herbs.

Also please link me a picture of the chicken with helmet if you can, I need to see this.

[cukibola-deactivated20200917]

Here it is

Here’s a link with more info. Apparently the dish is called Singing Chicken… But that’s a chicken with a helmet

Top 12 weirdest Medieval food

In Medieval times, food was medicine, religion and status. And in Medieval feasts, an art-form The Medieval poor mostly ate pottage - basic

[lloerwyn-deactivated20201104]

This is the best thing I’ve ever seen.

[elfwreck]

Hollywood has a tendency to portray the past as “just like today, minus whatever of today’s things we know they didn’t have.” There’s no concept that the past had things that today doesn’t.

Like bawdy medicinal tips.

[akashic-gleek]

@candiceirae

[candiceirae]

The idea that people used spices to cover spoiled meat is similarly stupid and utterly infuriating.

And yes, the gaping absence of religion from depictions of the Middle Ages is jarring.

[sca-nerd]

All of this, but mostly that they existed in a sepia toned world with no color, pattern, or texture.

[crows-n-cats]

Going off the colors of textiles, the assumption that their textiles were always crude and rough compared to today’s. Think of the twills and brocades! The cloth of gold! The silks, and the wool so gauzy you could see through it! The soft wool clothing! The quality and variety of fabric we have available has plummetted since the industrial revolution.

[brunhiddensmusings]

beyond conventional spices the medieval cook and especially the resourceful housewife would have been exploiting herbs by the fistfull on a level we today cannot comprehend, like we dont even know what some of the names of herbs they used even mean anymore and they grew them like suburban homeowners today grow ugly border hedges. whatever soups they had access to had a decent chance of being something that would be 100% locally grown and every bit as flavorful as any regonal dish today withiout having to resort to saying ‘well they could possibly have been eating curry’ instead of giving them a flavor identity of their own. just because ‘spice’ isnt readily available dont assume ‘flavor’ is out of reach, the aromatics they used would be on par with the modern french concept of mirepoix but, moving past the kitchen the two things that irk me are that everyone toiled miserably and everything was grey stone, rudely carved buildings, shoddy construction unadorned well yeah, if you went to a decrepit ruin thats been abandoned for centuries it would look like that, but not when people lived there! you see the shows and movies and sweet baby cheese the kings residence looks like a dank basement and sometimes he doesnt even have a change of clothes when castles were in use they were prominent displays of power and wealth, whitewashed so that even small amounts of light reflected well inside them so that they illuminated well, paintings and murals in a riot of colors and displaying personal tastes, tapestries that may be the local lords wife, aunt, or grandmothers gift to them as tappestry making was a popular hobby at court where women gathered to gossip and giggle while making vibrantly colored decorations that are usually dismissed because the only ones that survive had endured about 500 years of sun damage, smoke damage, and uncertain cleaning history

that clearly showed the people of the time valued color, had style, and only occasionally made horses look like a dog made out of play-doh. even people who didnt live in a castle still had access to paint to liven up the plaster walls of their homes, brightly dyed fabrics and flowers were as available to them as and they sang, constantly. what we assume was a life of toiling in the mud from dusk till dawn the whole year was typically a relaxed paced life of 10 hour a night sleep in a comfortable bed where work didnt start untill you had your flagon of ale and a song with your buddies as you walked to the field, you sang as you worked, took three ale breaks from work while singing, and then you sang as you walked to the tavern so you could sing while you played nine mens morris or cheated at mancala because you thought the miller was too soused to notice. we barely know any of the songs they sang and humanity is less for it, a scant handfull of them do remain and its just beautiful to hear what a table of tavern patrons would break into song about to prove they werent too drunk for another round song and story were all day every day, theres a reason the most well known middle english text was canterbury tales- whose narrative was that a selection of travelers on the way to the same location had an ongoing bar-bet about who could tell the better story, asking bartenders to judge the complexity of these stories, all of which were absolutely valid as just shit you would say to another drunk in a tavern, would give modern soap operas a swift kick in the pants and its sad that it takes a historian to tell you just how crass and lowbrow humor they were on a similar vein to how so many people somehow forgot that shakespear was lowbrow humor for the commoner and not somehow too sophisticated for rubes it wasnt just bards who would own an instrument, instruments are wood, leather, string, bone/horn, or even clay… those are all commonly available and affordable if not straight up FREE items to someone in the medieval world so a hefty chunk of the population would have an instrument and know how to use it, anything from a wood flute to a simple drum to an ocarina. many designs were even specifically for travel so you could always have it at the ready

how about this- in all the versions of robin hood i have -EVER- seen the most historically accurate any of them got was the scene in kevin costner ‘king of theves’ where friar tuck was singing to himself while on the road ‘women wine and whoring’. not just because its one of the only times in any medieval period movie ive seen someone singing to pass the time in the mind-numbing hours of traveling before the invention of the car radio, but ALSO because they based the tune he sings off the classic ‘ Bache Benne Venies’, the oldest known drinking song we still know the words and tune of and let me tell you that song slaps talk to me about historical accuracy in movies and ill tell you that tolkein writing hobbit songs for walking, drinking, or describing what an elephant was was more historically accurate then all of GOT passed through a sieve to collect every grain of stray element of medievalness gaily dressed hobbits full of pie, sitting in a well decorated room full of beautiful hand carved furniture, on their fifth ale, and singing about the man in the moon getting shitfaced is about ten times historically accurate as most anything else i can think of if you ignored the historical accuracy of them being hobbits

[lloerwyn-deactivated20201104]

To be clear, when I say ‘like Indian food’, I’m not generalising or trying to deny them their own flavour profile, I’m talking about how Forme of Cury uses things like cardamom, ginger, and pepper that I’ve also had in curry or kheer. I’m just comparing it to the closest thing I’ve eaten, not saying the two are the same. My voice teacher did once make me a medieval French bean dish with duck and smoked bacon, and it was excellent.

But yeah, I know that some people get exasperated by the number of songs that Tolkien has in his books, but I really think it completes the world. It makes it feel fleshed out and more enjoyable and individual in its own right but also ties it to history. Singing is such an accessible pastime and I really don’t think people in fantasy do enough of it. (And as a bonus, Tolkien also gives us some Middle-earth lore in his lyrics. Which is great for the reader and also reflects how important an oral information-sharing tradition is within the world itself.)

I will say that even though I’m not a fan of many of the creative choices made in GoT, I can understand GRRM making his world in ASoIaF a bleaker place than is realistic because part of the whole thing of low fantasy is The World Is Shitty. I’ve heard people say that Dunk and Egg is a less depressing story and it’s more of just a fun knight adventure. I’d like to read it. I definitely enjoyed ASoIaF, but it’s just so heavy sometimes. As for GoT, I never finished it.

[apocryphalia]

Ok so I cannot speak to the accuracy of everything here, but let me tell you a little bit about textiles because (obviously this is news to everyone) I Love Them.

I studied late antique textiles in undergrad. Late antiquity is a weird period with multiple different scholarly definitions, but the gist is that it’s the transition period between the ancient and medieval worlds. Christianity was a thing, but people were also still heavily influenced by older stories/mythologies/religions (the vast majority of textiles that survive from this period come from Egypt because of the climate, so in this case it’s Greek and Roman traditions that still hold influence).

Anyway. The textiles from this weird nebulous period of history are straight-up gorgeous, and not just to a nerd of my particular type. Take a look at Dumbarton Oaks or the Met’s collections and come tell me that ancient/medieval hand-woven textiles were all rough and poorly made. And you know why people spent so many hours making these beautiful things painstakingly by hand? (Every single step of the process, by the way - shearing, carding, spinning, dying, all before you get to the actual weaving. This stuff was incredibly skilled, intensive labor.) They did it because textiles were incredibly important. We don’t think much of them now that they can be mass-produced, but there was a whole Thing with the Virgin Mary spinning and metaphors about her weaving Christ on a loom, and textiles were used for protective magic, and they were part of everything important in people’s lives.

There were dyes that were prohibitively expensive, yes - Tyrian purple is literally still so expensive that we couldn’t buy a big enough sample to test our actual antique textiles against effectively. In the Byzantine Empire, it was controlled exclusively by the imperial family - hence the whole royal purple thing. But guess what? There are so many purple textiles, because people used other things! Madder and indigo! Both affordable! Mix them together and you get a very pretty color. Change up the mordants you use to seal the dyes and you can get a whole range of different colors out of one plant!

And people took these things and they wove them into literal artwork and wore it around on their clothes. They had hangings on their walls for decoration, sure (and also insulation and noise control), but they also had curtains! Textiles separated rooms the way wooden doors do now! The reason I have a weird thing for liminal spaces is because textiles were associated with them, and they were given power. The hanging in your doorway could protect your home from misfortune. Protective symbols around the neck and sleeves of your tunic could keep you from getting ill. And all of these things were pretty and colorful and painstakingly crafted by laypeople and professionals alike, and they were everywhere.

Basically, the ancient and medieval worlds were alive and full of color and magic. Not gray stone and plain cloth and misery.

And also textiles are important and you should love them.

[apocryphalia]

ALSO this is what Roman socks looked like, and aren’t they adorable!

(This particular one is a child’s sock and it’s from the Royal Ontario Museum. A lot of other examples are red, possibly because red was a protective color - it’s also more common in surviving children’s items, likely because of high infant mortality and a need for extra protection for kids. Red was also common as a border color around sleeves and necklines and such - this is the liminal spaces thing I was squealing about!)

[prismatic-bell]

OKAY ALSO

“They were unwashed”

Entirely incorrect.

At a MINIMUM, your average Christian peasant would have bathed once a week, to be clean for church, and they likely bathed more frequently than that, including a decent rinsedown of face/hands/pits daily. Jews and Muslims would have bathed daily due to ritual bathing, and Christian peasants would have washed their hands before meals to clear away whatever physical remains of their work might taint the food (field dirt, sheep smell from yarn, etc. and so forth). No, they didn’t wash their hair with soap (the soap available at the time wouldn’t really…work…on hair), BUT: hair was covered for the most part, and combed out daily, which distributed the oils evenly and removed dead skin from the scalp. Their hair didn’t smell all fruity like we’re used to in the modern era of perfumed everything, but it was in fact cleaned and cared for.

ALSO WHERE ARE ALL THE FUCKING BLACK PEOPLE

The earliest known record of a Black person in England is from the 800s and he was “an African” who was an assistant to a monk named Bede. I haven’t been able to track down the dude’s actual name, but he could read and write in several languages, which is an achievement in any era but especially one where schooling was patchy and varied. Black people were in Western Europe, and for a very long time they were treated the same as their light-skinned counterparts. Sorry not sorry, get over it.

[traycakes]

In addition to normal immigration, the roman empire included large parts of Northern Africa and part of the way they maintained control was by sending soldiers (and their families, and traders who spoke the soldiers language, and countless other support people) from one part of the empire to another part far from it. As a result Black romans were spread throughout Europe.

And of course there was the Moorish invasion after that.

The idea of a lily-white non-diverse Europe is ahistorical nonsense.

[nerdwithabrush2]

Nenn update:

Fam- I’m stretched so thin I’m barely on this plane of existence.

I’m trying, I really am but just existing is gonna have to be good enough atm.

The talking to people thing and being actively social & engaging thing is even too much for my brain since it just wants to stare at a wall in silence. But feel free to message me in discord or hit me for my cell. Idk

I miss you all.

[alwaysbewoke]

my favorite part is the “fuck you” at the end lmaoooo

[randommeanders]

It’s the nonchalant walk away for me 🚶🏾‍♂️😩😩

[gobbluthbutagirl]

[harompontkilenc]

[soundsofmyuniverse]

Backwater (details) by Charles William Wyllie (1853-1923)