human: *gentle “owl” hooting*
actual owls: *tiny velociraptor screams*
Sade Olutola
art blog(derogatory)

izzy's playlists!
Today's Document
AnasAbdin
$LAYYYTER
Cosmic Funnies

#extradirty

Andulka

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣

Product Placement
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

shark vs the universe
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

Love Begins
taylor price
No title available
i don't do bad sauce passes

roma★

blake kathryn

seen from United States
seen from Singapore

seen from United States

seen from Germany

seen from France

seen from Vietnam
seen from Argentina

seen from Türkiye

seen from Türkiye
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from Bulgaria

seen from Singapore

seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from United States
@petrichoramber
human: *gentle “owl” hooting*
actual owls: *tiny velociraptor screams*
neilman, as I think of him when writing good omens back in the 90s: exactly the same as now, an older and little bit weary guy who’s seen a lot written a lot done a lot. fairly wise and has had decades of life experience. looks like the odd grand uncle that’s the younger brother to your grandmother and you only see maybe twice every 5 years but he always imparts a weird but thoughtful tale from his youth that leaves you stunned and existential
neilman, actually:
some punk ass bitch wearing shades indoors, a cocky smug motherfucker who thinks he knows what hot shit is and that he’s it. this man is illiterate and does not look like he wrote good omens with esteemed author sir terry pratchett but rather did several hits of cocaine of a balcony railing post rock concert. he looks like crowley
My Good Omens copy has a picture of Neilman and Terry in the back, and if it wasn’t for the Pratchett Hat, I would have assumed it was just some models they hired for a pictured of Crowley and Aziraphale.
How dare you put that comment without sharing the picture?!
It was a library book, so I can’t. You might be able to find it searching for Good Omens 20th anniversary edition.
So I’ll just describe it in more detail. Terry was wearing a white suit and Neil black leather and sunglasses. They were in front of some ruined brick wall.
Is this the one?
At the NADWCon back in 2011 they talked about writing Good Omens and pitching it. Neil was staying over at the Pratchett house for some reason, I think they were pitching the book to someone, and he was sleeping in the attic. Unbeknownst to Neil, Terry’s daughter was keeping pigeons on the roof. He left the skylight open because it was hot. So he woke up to pigeons fluttering around him. Terry went up to go wake up him, saw this scene of him sitting up in bed with birds fluttering around him dramatically, and yelled “You bastard! You’re so fucking stylish even when you’re asleep!”
(It’s been years I might not be totally accurate on this story)
Apparently Terry gave Crowley sunglasses specifically to make fun of Neil for wearing them constantly, so I am 100% prepared to accept this as a photo of Crowley and Az.
Something that’s been very interesting to me, in this new wave of post-miniseries Good Omens fandom, is the apparent fannish consensus that Crowley is, in fact, bad at his job. That he’s actually quite nice. That he’s been skating by hiding his general goodness from hell by taking credit for human evil and doling out a smattering of tiny benign inconveniences that he calls bad.
I get the urge towards that headcanon, and I do think the Crowley in the miniseries comes off as nicer than the one in the book. (I think miniseries Crowley and Aziraphale are both a little nicer, a little more toothless, than the versions of themselves in the book.) But maybe it’s because I was a book fan first, or maybe it’s because I just find him infinitely more interesting this way–I think Crowley, even show!Crowley, has the capacity to be very good at his job of sowing evil. And I think that matters to the story as a whole.
A demon’s job on Earth, and specifically Crowley’s job on Earth, isn’t to make people suffer. It’s to make people sin. And the handful of ‘evil’ things we see Crowley do over the course of the series are effective at that, even if the show itself doesn’t explore them a lot.
Take the cell phone network thing, for instance. This gets a paragraph in the book that’s largely brushed off in the conversation with Hastur and Ligur, and I think it’s really telling:
What could he tell them? That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city? And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people? In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves. For the rest of the day. The pass-along effects were incalculable. Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.
In essence, without any great expenditure of effort (look, I’d never say Crowley isn’t slothful, but that just makes him efficient), he’s managed to put half of London in a mental and emotional state that Crowley knows will make them more inclined to sin. He’s given twenty thousand or a hundred thousand or half a million people a Bad Day. Which, okay, it’s just a bad day–but bad days are exhausting. Bad days make you snap, make you fail at things, make you feel guiltier and more stressed out in the aftermath when you wake up the next day, makes everything a little worse. Bad days matter.
Maybe it’s because I’m a believer in the ripple effect of small kindnesses, and that means I have to believe in its opposite. Maybe it’s just that I, personally, have had enough days that were bad enough that a downed cell network (or an angry coworker because of a downed cell network) would honestly have mattered. But somebody who deliberately moves through the world doing their best to make everyone’s lives harder, with the aim of encouraging everybody around them to be just a little crueler, just a little angrier, just a little less empathetic–you know what, yes. I do call that successful evil.
It’s subtle, is the thing. That’s why Hastur and Ligur don’t get it, don’t approve of it. Not because Crowley isn’t good at his job, but because we’ve seen from the beginning that Hastur and Ligur are extremely out of touch with humanity and the modern world and just plain aren’t smart enough to get it. It’s a strategy that relies on understanding how humans work, what our buttons are and how to press them. It’s also a strategy that’s remarkably advanced in terms of free will. Hastur and Ligur deliberately tempt and coerce and entrap individuals into sinning, but Crowley never even gets close. We never see him say to a single person, ‘hey, I’ve got an idea for you, why don’t you go do this bad thing?’ He sets up conditions to encourage humans to actually do the bad things they’re already thinking of themselves. He creates a situation and opens it up to the results of free choice. Every single thing a person does after Crowley’s messed with them is their own decision, without any demonic coercion to blame for any of it.
You see it again in the paintball match. “They wanted real guns, I gave them what they wanted.” In this case, Crowley didn’t need to irritate anybody into wanting to do evil–the desire to shoot and hurt and maybe even kill their own coworkers was already present in every combatant on that paintball field. Crowley just so happened to be there at exactly the right time to give them the opportunity to turn that fleeting, kind-of-bad-but-never-acted-upon desire into real, concrete, attempted murder. Sure, nobody died–where would be the fun in a pile of corpses? But now forty-odd people who may never have committed a real act of violence in their entire lives, caught in a moment of weakness with real live weapons in their hands, will get to spend the rest of their lives knowing that given the opportunity and the tiniest smidgen of plausible deniability, they are absolutely the sort of people who could and would kill another human being they see every single day over a string of petty annoyances.
Crowley understands the path between bad thought and evil action. He knows it gets shorter when somebody is upset or irritated, and that it gets shorter when people practice turning one into the other. He understands that sometimes, removing a couple of practical obstacles is the only nudge a person needs–no demonic pressure or circumvention of free will required.
I love this interpretation, because I love the idea that Crowley, who’s been living on Earth for six thousand years, actually gets people in a way no other demon can. I love the idea that Crowley, the very first tempter, who was there when free will was invented, understands how it works and how to use it better than maybe anyone else. And I really love the idea that Crowley our hero, who loves Aziraphale and saves the world, isn’t necessarily a good guy.
There’s a narrative fandom’s been telling that, at its core, is centered around the idea that Crowley is good, and loves and cares and is nice, and always has been. Heaven and its rigid ideas of Right and Wrong is itself the bad thing. Crowley is too good for Heaven, and was punished for it, but under all the angst and pain and feelings of hurt and betrayal, he’s the best of all of them after all.
That’s a compelling story. There’s a reason we keep telling it. The conflict between kindness and Moral Authority, the idea that maybe the people in charge are the ones who’re wrong and the people they’ve rejected are both victim and hero all at once–yeah. There’s a lot there to connect with, and I wouldn’t want to take it away from anyone. But the compelling story I want, for me, is different.
I look at Crowley and I want a story about someone who absolutely has the capacity for cruelty and disseminating evil into the world. Somebody who’s actually really skilled at it, even if all he does is create opportunities, and humans themselves just keep living down to and even surpassing his expectations. Somebody who enjoys it, even. Maybe he was unfairly labeled and tossed out of heaven to begin with, but he’s embraced what he was given. He’s thrived. He is, legitimately, a bad person.
And he tries to save the world anyway.
He loves Aziraphale. He helps save the entire world. Scared and desperate and determined and devoted, he drives through a wall of fire for the sake of something other than himself. He likes humans, their cleverness, their complexities, the talent they have for doing the same sort of evil he does himself, the talent they have for doing the exact opposite. He cares.
It’s not a story about someone who was always secretly good even though they tried to convince the whole world and themself that they weren’t. It’s a story about someone who, despite being legitimately bad in so many ways, still has the capacity to be good anyway. It’s not about redemption, or about what Heaven thinks or judges or wants. It’s about free will. However terrible you are or were or have the ability to be, you can still choose to do a good thing. You can still love. You can still be loved in return.
And I think that matters.
Having friends on tumblr is really great. I often refer to you guys in real life as “my friend from england/australia/california/new york” and it makes people think I’m very well traveled when really I’ve just spent a lot of time on the Internet.
Glad I’m not the only one that does this
the switch from ‘a girl worth fighting for’ to coming upon the decimated village in mulan is THE MOST kick-in-the-teeth mood change IN ALL OF CINEMA
That scene shift did more for our generation’s understanding of the horror of war in ten seconds than Game of Thrones did in eight seasons, and it did it without showing us a single dead body.
OKAY BUT HOLD ON THOUGH.
I’ve spent the past… five? Let’s say five - the past five years analyzing the structure of Disney Musicals as part of the process to write my own/a parody of them, and the thing is that all the modern ones have roughly the same number of songs - except Mulan.
Mulan has about half, because after AGWFF ends with that unresolved final phrase, there are no more songs until the end credits, which isn’t even sung in-universe.
Mulan wasn’t even the REALM of fucking around - when they arrive at that village, when the true horrors of war are brought into the story, not only does it interrupt THAT song, it breaks the entire fucking mold - the movie’s damn genre changes; it is no longer a musical.
And the Huns represent this from the start - Jafar and Hades are notable for not having proper villain songs, but Jafar does get his Prince Ali refrain and Hades and his plan get sung ABOUT by the muses. No scene with the Huns has any singing, they are mentioned once in song (the second line of Man, natch), and they of all Disney Villains are probably the most serious - no jokes, no witty asides, no sassy delivery of dry humor. The Huns are an invading army who plan to straight up kill a fuckton of people, including children, and AGWFF’s sudden end is the moment when our happy go lucky MUSICAL protagonists finally come in contact with them and their work directly - and it breaks them. Because shit like the Huns cannot exist in happy go lucky musical world. They just exist in our world. The real world. And you can’t sing your problems away here.
The end of A Girl Worth Fighting For is a brilliant use of metanarrative sensibilities to convey a message. It is utterly perfect.
Daaaamn, Tony. That’s fucking deep, my guy
I didn’t spend two years and thousands of dollars on a Master’s Degree in literature to NOT over analyze every text I engage with.
my brother is sitting in the chair in my room studying a practice test thing for his final test before he becomes a fully certified EMT tomorrow and he’s mumbling some of the questions out loud and he just went “a child has fallen from a monkey at school…” and he just got dead quiet and stared at the wall for like a solid minute with the most stricken look on his face before he whispered “there’s no protocol for monkeys”
bro
bro it means monkey bars
now he’s googling “child falls from monkey” and apparently the only thing that pops up is Fall Out Boy’s “Thnks Fr th Mmrs”
I M L AHUGNI N G SO H ARD HE WENT INTO THE KITCHEN LIKE 5 MINUTES AGO AND STARTED A CONVERSATION WITH MY MOM AND I HEARD HIM JUST STOP MID SENTENCE AND THEN SHOUT “FUCKING MONKEY BARS”
this was a post meant for like 6 people who actually know my brother and now this is the only image he has on this site he’s the “monkey protocol” guy for almost 100,000 people I give up
Something that’s been on my mind for a bit that your professional word may be able to help with. Would you happen to know how ethnically diverse the Greek and Roman empires were?
very
next question please
…
…what, you want more? Oh, fine, but for the record this is not the sort of thing people just “happen to know.”
Okay so I’m assuming by “Greek empire” (remember, kids: there was never a politically autonomous and unified state called “Greece” or “Hellas” until 1822) you mean Alexander’s empire (320s BC) and the Hellenistic successor kingdoms (323 BC – 31 BC), and by “Roman empire” you mean Rome starting from the time it becomes a major interregional power (say, following the second Punic War, which ended in 201 BC) rather than just Rome in the time of the Emperors. You could spend like most of a book on each of these just corralling the data that might let us answer this question, but whatevs.
Lesson one: the ancient Greeks and Romans did not think about ethnicity in the same way as we do. In particular, they were not super hung up on the colour of people’s skin – skin colour in ancient art is more often a signifier of gender than race, because women are expected to spend less time outside and therefore have lighter skin (which is another whole thing that we shouldn’t even get into because this is an aristocratic ideal of female beauty and of course lots of Greek and Roman women would have worked outside). Arguably the most important signifier of ethnicity to the Greeks and Romans was actually language, with everyone who didn’t speak Greek or Latin being a “barbarian” (traditionally this word is supposed to come from the Greeks thinking that all foreign languages sounded like “bar bar bar,” although I’ve also heard a convincing argument that it comes from the Old Persian word for taxpayer, barabara, and originally signified all subjects of the Persian king).
In the modern world we have designations of ethnicity that are super broad and grow in large part out of early and long-since-debunked anthropological theory that divided humanity into three biologically distinct races, Caucasoid, Mongoloid and Negroid, and don’t really reflect a lot of important components of ethnicity. The thing is, as the internet will happily tell you ad nauseam, race is a social construct. Like, yes, designations of race describe real physical characteristics that arise from variation within human genetics, but the way we choose to bundle those characteristics is arbitrary, and where we choose to draw the lines is arbitrary (like, for a long time in the US, Greeks and Italians weren’t considered “white,” but today they definitely are, even though nothing changed about their genetics). If we today were brought face to face with a bunch of ancient Greeks and Romans, we would probably be pretty comfortable with assigning a majority of them to the big pan-European tent of modern “whiteness,” but if you had asked them about it, they certainly would not have felt any kinship with the pale-skinned people of northern and western Europe from whom most English-speaking white people today are descended. Those people were every bit as barbarian (and every bit as fair game for enslavement, for that matter) as the darker-skinned folk of the Middle East and North Africa. Ancient Greeks and Italians also had loads of internal ethnic divisions – like, the Latins (the central Italian ethnic group to which the Romans belonged) were a different thing from the Umbrians to their east, the Etruscans to the north and the Oscans to the south. In Greece, you had Dorians in the Peloponnese, Ionians in Attica and Asia Minor, Boeotians and Thessalians in central Greece, Epirotes in western Greece, and DON’T EVEN ASK about the Macedonians, because boyyyyyyyyy HOWDY you are NOT ready for that $#!tstorm. The point is, race and ethnicity can be basically anything that you think makes you different from the people in another community.
So yeah, Alexander’s empire. Alexander the Great conquered Persia, which was already the largest empire the world had ever seen at the time and incorporated dozens of ethnically distinct peoples (including many Greeks of Asia Minor, some of whom willingly fought against Alexander) through a philosophy of loose regional governance and broad religious tolerance. Now, here’s the thing: Alexander had no idea how to run an empire of that scale. No Greek did. No one alive in the world did – except for the Persians. Alexander didn’t have anything to replace the Persian systems of governance or bureaucracy, so… he didn’t. Individual Persian governors were usually given the opportunity to swear loyalty to him and keep their posts; vacant posts were filled with Macedonians, but the hierarchy was basically untouched. Alexander himself married a princess from Bactria (approximately what is now Afghanistan), Roxana, and had a kid with her, and encouraged other Macedonian nobles to take Persian wives as well, to help unify the empire. Unfortunately Alexander, of course, had to go and bloody die less than two years after he’d finished conquering everything, and tradition holds that on his deathbed he told his friends that the empire should go “to the strongest,” which was an incredibly dumb thing to say and caused literally decades of war, which we are not even going to talk about because it is the most Game of Thrones bull$#!t in the history of history. All you need to know is that when the dust settled there were basically three major Greco-Macedonian dynastic powers: the Antigonids in Greece, the Ptolemies in Egypt, and the Seleucids in Persia.
In terms of ethnic makeup the Antigonid kingdom is in principle the most straightforward because they’re basically still running the same Greece that Alexander’s father had conquered. Even then, you should bear in mind that a) most Greek cities had legal provisions for allowing foreigners to live there under certain conditions (“foreigners” often meant Greeks from other cities, but in principle could be anyone), and b) the Greeks had a lot of slaves (many of whom were, again, Greeks from other cities, because that’s fine in ancient Greek morality, but a lot of them would have come from all over the place), and even though the Greeks didn’t count slaves as “people” or consider them a real part of a city’s ethnic composition, WE SHOULD. The Ptolemaic kingdom in Egypt seems to have had a relatively small Greco-Macedonian upper class ruling over a native Egyptian, Libyan and Nubian peasant majority. Members of that ruling class seem to have been kind of snobbish about any mixing between the two – only the very last Ptolemaic ruler, Cleopatra VII (yes, that Cleopatra), even bothered to learn the Egyptian language. However, the Ptolemaic rulers did make some important cultural gestures of goodwill towards the Egyptians. They took the native title of Pharaoh, which previous foreign rulers of Egypt hadn’t, and adopted a lot of traditional Pharaonic iconography like the double crown. They also worshipped some of the most important Egyptian gods, most notably Isis, and may have kind of… deliberately created a new Greco-Egyptian god, Serapis, by blending together Osiris and Dionysus (Serapis actually becomes super important in the Roman period and is widely worshipped even outside Egypt). And then there’s the Seleucids, an empire that did nothing but slowly collapse from the moment it was established. They have a rough time of it because they have the largest land area to cover and dozens of distinct ethnic groups to bring together, and it doesn’t help that they kinda keep doing the Game of Thrones thing for about two hundred fµ¢&ing years. They often get a bad rap in history and have a reputation for oppressing the non-Greek populations of their empire, but that’s probably at least partly because some of our most important sources for the Seleucids are Jewish, and the Seleucid kings’ relationship with the Jews broke down in a fairly spectacular fashion during the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (r. 175-164 BC). It’s not clear whether that’s representative of the Seleucids’ normal relationship with their subject peoples, or a worst case scenario. Also, the Seleucids tend to get painted as villains in the historical record by both the other Greek powers and the Romans, and never really get much of a chance to defend themselves because we don’t have Seleucid histories. What is clear is that they inherited all the ethnic and religious diversity of the Persian Empire, and most of their rulers were half-Persian because they followed Alexander’s example by marrying into the Persian nobility. After an initial period of conflict they also seem to have maintained cordial relations with the Mauryan Empire of India, their neighbour to the east, for several decades, and contemporary Indian sources talk about sending Buddhist missionaries into Seleucid lands, so… like, there might have been a bunch of Greek Buddhists running around the empire; that’s a thing.
Whew. Okay, so that is a criminally brief answer to-
OH CHRIST YOU ASKED ABOUT THE ROMANS AS WELL
WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE WANT FROM ME
Right. Romans. One of the major schools of thought on how the Romans were able to create such an enormous and long-lasting empire in the first place is that their openness to accepting foreigners into their community gave them an enormous manpower advantage over every other ancient Mediterranean state. Greek politics generally operates on the level of cities; even in the age of Alexander, individual cities have quite a lot of legislative autonomy. Citizenship is also something that works on the level of cities: you aren’t a citizen of, say, the Seleucid Empire; you’re a citizen of Antioch, or Tyre, or Babylon, or whatever. But then the Romans happen. The Romans are weird, because they will sometimes just declare that all the people of an allied city are now also citizens of Rome. In the early period of Rome’s expansion in the central Mediterranean, this meant (or so the theory goes) that they could draw upon larger citizen armies and sustain more casualties than their rivals. This is how they beat Pyrrhus, the Greek king of Epirus (r. 297-272 BC), when he invaded Italy in response to disputes between Rome and the Greek colony of Tarentum; this is how they beat Hannibal, the legendary Carthaginian general, even after he annihilated the largest army the Romans had ever fielded at Cannae during the second Punic War (218-201 BC). Now, at this point they are basically still just bringing in Italians, which we might consider ethnically homogenous even if they didn’t, but there’s more.
Once they really start to get going, the Romans enfranchise entire provinces at a time, like when the emperor Claudius (r. AD 41-54) decided to make everyone in Gaul (modern France, more or less) a Roman citizen. The really interesting thing about this particular decision is that we actually have a copy of the speech he made to the Senate in Rome at the time, so we can examine his rationale. Claudius’ argument is basically that being inclusive has always been what has made Rome stronger than its rivals, going right back to their mythological past, when Romulus populated his city with disenfranchised criminals from other communities (and, uh… women that they kidnapped from the next town over). The Romans believed that everything great about their civilisation had originally been learned or borrowed from someone else – metalworking and irrigation from the Etruscans, infantry combat from the Greeks, shipbuilding from the Carthaginians, etc – so it wasn’t a huge stretch for them to believe that all these people should eventually become part of Rome as citizens (well… the ones who weren’t killed or enslaved in the conquest, anyway – no one ever said the Romans were saints).
The reason Claudius feels he needs to justify all this to the Senate is that citizenship (rather than any of the forms of semi-citizen rights that Romans would sometimes grant to their allies) will make rich Gauls eligible to become Senators themselves, and occupy other high-level posts like provincial governorships. The decision affects the ethnic composition of the Senate, so even though he doesn’t actually need their permission to do it, he asks as a courtesy (the emperors’ relationship with the Senate is a weird and complicated thing). Even without being a citizen, you could actually do a great deal in the Roman government in Claudius’ time. Many of the most important jobs in the empire were ones that had existed during the age of the Republic, when Rome was theoretically a democracy, and all of those were restricted to citizens even after they stopped being elected positions – but there was also an imperial bureaucracy that answered directly to the emperor and his aides, and he was free to choose literally anyone to fill those positions. As a result, a lot of emperors deliberately picked slaves and former slaves for loads of senior positions, specifically because their lack of citizen rights meant that they could never be political rivals, and because they were a useful counterbalance to the power of the blue-blooded Roman aristocracy. And, again, slaves can be from basically anywhere. A lot of these administrative slaves were Greeks, because Greek education provided useful skills for running the imperial bureaucracy that the Romans themselves often didn’t have, but emperors could and did commission literally anyone for these positions.
Eventually the emperor Caracalla (r. AD 211-217) just decided it wasn’t worth keeping track anymore and declared that every freeborn person in the entire empire, which by that point stretched from northern England to Morocco to Romania to Jordan, was now a Roman citizen. All of these people are now “Romans,” regardless of their language or culture or religion; the only criterion is that they not be slaves or former slaves (and even if they’re former slaves, their children will be Roman citizens). And these people can move, in ways that were never possible before the Empire existed, because Rome is the first – and so far the last – political entity ever to unite the entire Mediterranean region, which allows them to wipe out piracy almost completely and jump-start trade and travel in ways that would never happen again for over a thousand years. My own research on Roman glass has led me to encounter glassblowers with Syrian or Jewish names working in northern Italy – people who were probably integral to spreading the technology of glassblowing to western Europe. The Roman army also moves people around – like, a lot. You might enlist in your home town in Syria, then serve on Hadrian’s wall and retire in northern England – in fact, we know that this happened because we’ve found stuff like inscriptions in the Aramaic language in Roman Britain.
Also Rome had, like… a whole dynasty of African emperors one time. Septimius Severus (r. AD 193-211) and his successors were part Italian, part Punic (of Carthaginian descent – ultimately Middle Eastern, since the Carthaginians were originally a Phoenician colony) and part Berber (native North African), and Severus grew up in what is now Tunisia. And that wasn’t really a big deal for the Romans, 1) because Severus’ Italian ancestry made him a Roman citizen, which trumps all other signifiers of ethnicity, and 2) Rome had already had a couple of emperors of Iberian (= Spanish) descent by this point who were considered some of the best ever, and the Iberians are just as “barbarian” as the Berbers as far as Rome is concerned. Other Roman emperors of varied ethnicities include Philip (Arabian), Diocletian (Illyrian), the three Gordians (probably Cappadocian), and Elagabalus (Syrian, and incidentally the gayest Roman of all time; like, normally I would warn you to be super cautious about using modern labels like “straight” and “gay” for Romans because they just didn’t think about sexual orientation in those terms, but I make an exception here because Elagabalus was super gay).
Oh, and just because someone will definitely bring it up if I don’t, there was a big fuss in the news a few years back because someone discovered the skeletons of what they claimed were Chinese people living in, of all places, Roman Britain. And to me, one Chinese family in Britain in the first century AD is not particularly a dramatic stretch of plausibility (a handful of people could easily slip through the historical record and just never be mentioned), but the evidence in this particular case falls some way short of “proof.” There’s chemical data that suggests these individuals grew up somewhere far away from Britain, which is well and good, but the thing that points specifically to China is not the isotopic analysis but a study of bone morphology, and trying to determine someone’s ethnicity on the basis of what their bones look like, on the universal scale of things that are sketchy, ranks “sketchy as all fµ¢&.” Again, I’m happy to believe that they exist, because China (Seres in Latin) and Rome (Dà-Qín in Chinese) definitely knew about each other, and we occasionally find Roman artefacts and coins in eastern Asia, or Chinese artefacts in the eastern Roman Empire, but the specific evidence for these individuals isn’t there, in my opinion.
…that was a brief answer. Let it stand as a warning to others.
This is a masterpiece
Vincent Van Gogh - ‘In spite of everything’
this is beautiful
I have a lot of deep and personal feelings about this. It is going to take me a minute, the wind has been knocked form me.
This is great on so many levels.
i love my mutuals because we never talk but we still… like… follow each other……….. and i admire that we stick together even tho there is no communication in the slightest………u kno what i mean… hello…
does john mulaney know that he is literally one of the only stand-up comedians to ever transcend traditional media and become a meme and social media icon or does he just live in his 1950s schoolboy bliss
HE KNOWS NOW BECAUSE HIS WIFE MAKES FUN OF HIM WITH IT
John Mulaney: the English major who never read Shakespeare
i just fuckin’ love when antoni porowski stands there looking like a model and perfectly put together and then proceeds to repeatedly sniff LITERAL GARBAGE as everyone else runs away, and also velocipators across a room
I was just watching a documentary on fermentation and thought who the eff is the dude who saw rotting milk and thought “I bet it’s not even that bad!”
So much food history makes more sense now
rom-coms (romantic communists)
oh my god IT’S TRUE
also much as i hate to mention the solo movie when chewie introduced han to the wookie they found in the mines his first reaction was to pat hans head like you would when you meet a new dog
To further the analogy of Han is the Dog, According to various canon sources, a Standard Human in the Star Wars universe has a life expectancy of roughly 100-120 years. A Wookie has a life expectancy of around 400 years. So, caring for Han for Han’s whole life is a commitment of less than a quarter of Chewie’s life. It’s like having a dog that lives to 20-22. A long term companion, but one you know you’re probably going to outlive.
When they kill your dog
oh my god
draw some fat elves you cowards you tepid fools
okay
yes good
Hope it’s not too late to join the elf pudge party
Did someone say fat elves…?
@bace-jeleren, have you seen these high quality elves yet?
I haven’t seen the third elf and let me say that this post just keeps getting better and better!
beep
hello yes i would like to add some chubby elves (whut about them dude elves tho)
inktober day 10
cool propt dude
God I fucking love this post and it gets better and better with every fat elf
This is the best thing
@bace-jeleren have you seen these new additions?
1. I love this post probably more than I love myself
2. I love that people always think to tag me whenever they see it because every time, there’s a new fat elf!!!!!
@dia-mond-universe @mangos-and-witchcraft LOOK AT THIS BEAUTY
These are called bretons