Jewish Self-Determination and Nerdiness @stupidjewishwhiteboy - Tumblr Blog

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My instant block policy has officially evolved to include making arguments we’ve all heard a billion times that have counter arguments we’ve all heard a billion times. If you’re boring, you are not worth my time, and you’re getting blocked

mangled-by-disuse

people have this tendency to view the wheel as a benchmark of human development.

and i feel like people forget just how many parts of the world didn't use wheels consistently until the last couple of centuries

like. not because they were "primitive" or hadn't thought to invent it, but because there are terrains and regions where wheels just aren't useful. in deserts. on islands. in places with a lot of bog or heavy snowfall.

in the upper pennines, wheeled carts only came into common use when the coal industry grew in the 18th century and the gravity train was developed. until then, roads were too hard to maintain and most people just used horses, mules, or sleds for heavy transport.

in argyll and the west of scotland, where mountain terrain hits the coast and where the lochs mean that there is a lot of coast, it is much easier to use boats and rafts than to try to transport freight overland. so small freight was similarly carried by livestock or dragged, and only as far as the nearest body of water.

in the southern fens (before they were drained) rafts were more common than carts, usually being dragged over mud and bog rather than floating in deep water.

and it is relevant to note that all of these were in England and Scotland, places which had, on aggregate, been using wheels since the neolithic. none of these places failed to invent the wheel. they just uninvented it. because it was useless. other cultures in broader terrain areas (like the steppes, or the deserts, or the Arctic) may never have invented the wheel at all, bc, like, why would you? it's useless.

and. idk. i think about that a lot when people talk about progress and universal human development. it puts me in mind of a book from the 1860s i read that was like "and those backwards people in subsaharan africa haven't even thought to invent doors! on an unrelated note all the houses we, the Enlightened Whites, build in the area are unbearably hot and full of flies. wonder what that's about." like. wow. you really are just of the belief that the ideal technological development looks the same wherever you are, huh?

elfwreck

The wheel is invented by most human cultures.

They used it for pottery. They used it for children's toys. They used it for spinning thread. They used it to turn a spit while cooking. They attached it to a box with handles and used it to carry supplies to and from the battlefield. They stuck it in water and used it to power a mill. They made it out of rock and spun it to sharpen blades. They made them tiny and put them on necklaces.

The wheel's a very useful device and it got invented for a thousand purposes, some common to many cultures, some limited to just a few.

They didn't use it for transport until they they had roads.

And a lot of terrain does not take well to roads, not without a whole lot of time and money being spent by someone other than local farmers. You need a whole lot of people using the exact same route, over and over, to justify the hassle and expense of building & maintaining a road that's faster to navigate with wheels than by either loading your stuff on a string of donkeys, or dragging it behind them on a blanket stretched between two poles.

They didn't "fail to invent the wheel"; they failed to invent the ox-drawn cart. Because they had nowhere to use it.

future-crab

So I follow N. D. Stevenson (comics writer and animator, most famous for Nimona and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power) and his husband Lee Ostertag (also a comics writer and animator) on Instagram. When I started following them, they were both publicly presenting as women, and then a few years ago N. D. came out as transmasc nonbinary, and then earlier this year Lee also came out as transmasc. Anyway this is all setup to say that Lee had the chance to make the funniest post of all time and he took it:

Absolutely iconic.

fearoftheminotaur

I want to throw in that part of the context behind this meme was N.D. talking about how he sometimes gets hatemail for marrying a man as a former lesbian, and how many people seem to think he divorced his wife.

I have not managed to find anyone who thinks that in the wild, but it is so damn funny.

myfairynuffstuff

Erika Toliusis (b.1969) - Pacific Angel. 2022. Oil with palette knife on canvas.

sunshinetheinspiration

@teaboot

teaboot

Painted with a FUCKING PALETTE KNIFE?

clowngirrl

fini-mun

Was working on a panel and then suddenly I decided to live vicariously through Tails and have him address the important things in life.

pris-cas

Lesson #28 finger pruning

First lesson Previous lesson Next lesson

Thank you to my awsome beta readers!

@xushibeetle

@the-asexual-winter

@stelosia

kdinjenzen

Werewolf Be Upon Ye

kdinjenzen

Do not cite the deep magic to me, I was there when it was written.

the-haiku-bot

Do not cite the deep

magic to me, I was there

when it was written.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

were--ralph

what's a werewolf

memecucker

TIL the reason this inconsistently shows up in notes for the same post is bc if you look at the notes from a reblog, replies from ppl blocked by the reblogger don’t show up but if you look at it from someone else like OP they do show up

orange-catsidy

huh, i wonder why this person has a problem with being blocked. im sure they have really normal ideas about bringing pets inside restaurants

special-lucky-chosen-one

one of today's unluckiest 10K

brawngp2009

daily affirmations

i can ball

i am cool

bitches love me

i can cook mad RPF

the slowly blooming darkness in my heart is not real and is not bothering me

it's okay to be not okay

innerchildabortionclinic

allegories for oppression in media that rely on innate or biological characteristics making someone 'different' will never work for reasons that should be obvious

"uhhhhhh but what if there WAS, like, this species that is just ontologically evil and can't help it" you have rocks in your brain

dunsparcee

I sneeze

internetwes

hotlikeaspicymeatball

unyieldingsilence

‎

have-you-been-here

Taipei Zoo, Taipei, Taiwan

Have you been here?

I have been here

I have not been here

Remaining time: 6 days 19 hours

strangestcase

Geological horror. You find a geode and crack it open and the crystal lining its walls is human blood that can't be genetically matched to anyone. You find a human skeleton but every one of the bones is made from rock, a rock that you know can't be whittled into those shapes. You find layers of clay and loam that sport ancient fossils at the top and the still-rotting corpses of modern animals at the bottom.

bleu-guacamole

This reminds me of the blood river in Antarctica. For like a century scientists had no clue why this river looked like, acted like, and felt exactly like blood. Turns out it’s just really high in iron.

the-sassy-composer

"Blood River in Antartica" yeah right there's no way a river looks like bl-

...nevermind

wigmund

Blood Falls isn't just high in iron, it's the byproducts of extremophile bacteria that have been isolated under a glacier in a iron- and sulfur-rich anoxic brine for the past 5 million years.

aphractal2

old deer coincidental framing concepts

butt-berry

Does anyone remember that pokemon episode where an unexplained giant Magikarp almost lands on and kills Ash, only for a swole and tanned Nurse Joy to show up, force feed it a whole bottle of opiates, and then effortlessly overhead-press the one-ton fish before throwing it into the ocean, all in the space of about 30 seconds

butt-berry