Xuebing Du
Sweet Seals For You, Always
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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
NASA
hello vonnie
if i look back, i am lost
Love Begins
EXPECTATIONS
shark vs the universe
Andulka
The Bowery Presents
taylor price
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
roma★
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todays bird
Cookie Run:Kingdom Official!
Game Changer & Make Some Noise
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@the-grape-bowl
five & vanya through season one & two
Five: i don’t have a favorite sibling… but let me make it clear that if vanya ever got pissed at any one you i would gladly help her hiding the body
Luther: vanya was the one who ended the world
Five:
People are upset with the way Ferrari treated Seb when it came to NOT having a contract.
Imagine having a contract and STILL getting fired.
HELL YES YOU FUNKY FRENCH BOY YOU DID IT!!!!
Hi all, long time no chat! Just a question to anyone moderately interested in me as a person: going to be starting a new blog, a personal blog, and maybe semi-abandoning this one. I’ve outgrown this as my personal tumblr, I feel, and while I could just make a side blog, I like the idea of separating myself entirely from the past seven years of tumblr-activity (not quite tumblr-old but i aged like not-fine wine on this hellsite).
The new blog is likely going to feature some self-promotion of my personal works (fic will probs stay on this blog, if I write any more - I have ideas but also, why do I wanna write fic for a fandom whose author is a transphobic piece of bullpoop?) and other, more personal, interests of mine. I want this to become not quite a ‘private-private’ blog but somewhere to promote my fandom-centric things (like fic/fanart) and to engage in fan-culture without having a connection to my actual name and life. Does any of that make sense?
Basically, would anyone be interested in following that sort of blog, and if so, please let me know as I’m not going to be sharing the name of it publicly due to my want to distance that blog from this one (and all the years of turmoil I’ve endured on this site). You can DM this blog, or comment on the post and I’ll send you the blog when I (finally) come up with it, but otherwise - thanks for everything, you guys; I’ve really enjoyed these past 7 years and look forward to many years more, even if it’s under a different name!
• Waistcoats.
Date: 1830's
Medium: Silk satin, embroidered with silk and chenil thread.
Worldbuilders naming towns: I named this town Elygwe’meth which means “Where the Dearly Beloved King died next to his Lover” in the language I invented and also a combination of the Old English word for diamonds and the Maori word for apples since that’s their main exports
People in real life naming towns: I named this town Big Falls cause big fall there
me poring over a fantasy map: Shit I already used that name for a town, I can’t use it again, that’s such sloppy worldbuilding
real life maps: There are six rivers in Britain called the River Avon, which means River River, because when the Romans asked the Celts “what is that?” they replied “a river?” and the Romans nodded and jotted it down
Download and learn more about the app here.
BOOST THE FUCK OUT OF THIS
This is so fucking amazing!
Some solutions may seem so small but this is a greater impact.
BOOST THE FUCK OUT OF THIS GUYS
REBLOG AND DOWNLOAD APP
@yenneferofvengerbergg Look, Darling, maybe this will help you understand the importance of the matter.
IMPORTANT NOTE: the app link in the article is for the California one.
There’s one for every state.
(From the looks of it, I haven’t looked to see if there’s 50 apps.)
[Edit: nope. There’s not one for every state.]
States with apps: California, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Michigan, North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, New Jersey, Colorado, Missouri, Minnesota, Arizona, Maryland, Oklahoma, Mississippi, New Mexico, DC, Nebraska
Reblogging because it’s still a greaaaat idea.
Police brutality in Belarus.
2/2
Share this video!
Credits to owner.
#ЖывеБеларусь🤍❤🤍
More than 7000 people have been detained. They started to release them slowly and all the prisoners talk about how they were tortured, beaten, bones and spines broken, they couldn’t get any food for days and so on. People don’t receive any medical treatment there and are dying in the hospitals after they are released from detainment. And of course, the government denies everything.
PLEASE HELP TO SPREAD THE INFO IT’S OUR ONLY HOPE
You can find more info here: 1 , 2, 3
It’s in russian, so feel free to attach any good articles in english on reblogs. The world must know about it.
I’m reblogging it again because some people think that everything is good now, but it’s not and I can’t be silent about it. Yeah, today was a very calm day with huge peaceful protests, flowers, smiles. But it doesn’t change the fact that people were detained and tortured.
Families and friends of these people still don’t know where they are and are they alive or not.
YOU CAN SUPPORT US BY DONATING HERE OR JUST SHARE THE INFO. TALK ABOUT IT. READ ABOUT IT.
I’m a simple queer. I see a craft, I want to try it
> #i will now add rug making to the growing list of crafts i want to start but definitely dont have money or space for my grandma (and her mum) did rugmaking! idk if it’s the same style you’re thinking of, but their took a lot of space (a whole ass loom) but really not a lot of money, since the traditional nordic (?) rugs just are made of lots of scraps and a little thread. (if you don’t happen to have scraps lying around, going to your local second hand and buying five shirts for $10 goes a surprisingly long way)
x:“Mika can’t sing high notes anymore”
Mika: “Put your loooove loOoOoOve LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE”
Pervis Payne has spent 32 years on death row in Tennessee and has always maintained his innocence. Newly discovered DNA testing could prove
Here’s his White House petition. As of August 17, 2020 it has 81,578 signatures out of 100,000. It closes on the 24th.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/justice-pervis-payne
ok so anyone who signs it that doesn’t live within the states doesn’t count apparently and it can run the risk of if being ignored bc it inflates the numbers. if you dont live in america DON"T sign it; get your american friends to do so.
Confirm Your Email If You Sign or it Doesn’t Count
10 hours left; still need just under 6,000 signatures.
Please Sign (If American) and Signal Boost
Still Needs 5,463 signatures; 4pm, 8 hours to go.
8 minutes until what i believe might be the deadline - as it stands, this Needs 4,699 signatures by August 24, 2020 to get a response from the White House.
i will update if it’s still up past midnight
12am it’s still open; this might mean it’s open until possibly 1159pm august 24th.
Keep Reblogging. Keep Spreading.
A billion is an inconceivable amount of money.
tag yourself, i’m the fool
So I understand why Baz uses “Aleister Crowley” in place of Normal exclamations (I.e. “Jesus Christ”, but anyone have any ideas about why he would invoke the name of Noam Chomsky? @rainbowrowell?
Because Chomsky is a linguist. And language is magic.
A FEW MORE AMAZING LINGUISTS because language IS magic :) these are my favourites:
(BTW I would die if any of these ended up in the books...just sayin’)
EVE CLARK
Works currently in psycholinguistical studies, focusing on how language is acquired in humans from birth onwards, specifically first language acquisition by young children — an amazingly quick feat that has baffled linguists for centuries. She is a pioneer in the field of teaching second languages, too, because of her research into initial language acquisition and her methods of mirroring that process throughout the second language teachings. MAGICAL: she has introduced more efficient methods of teaching language as well as expanded our knowledge of how the brain picks it up.
REG MALING
Considered the inventor who paved the way for widely used Communication Boards as speech devices for those with Autism, paralysis, and Parkinson’s. His invention of the Patient Operated Selector Mechanism (POSM) plus the following, inspired-by-him Patient Initiated Lightspot Operated Typewriter (PILOT) in the 1960s kicked off a new wave of research into a more indepenant look at severely Language-Handicapped peoples. While not technically a linguist, he gave so many people previously thought too “simple” for communication a means to do so. MAGICAL: Gave a whole, gigantic, new demographic a way to communicate
BEVERLY VICKER
A speech-language pathologist who researched the best ways to design communication boards for people with varied, nonoral-communication disabilites. She introduced variations of colours, symbols, designs, and pictures onto boards tailored to her individual patients, and standardised the thought that each person with a disability had a unique way/want to communicate. MAGICAL: Her methods are still used in creating Communication boards today, and now it’s a standard to think of each person communicating uniquely
Pāṇini
This guy is frickin amazing. Around the 5th century BCE, he developed the first, written, comprehensive scientific theory of grammar! He analysed his first languages of Sanskrit so deeply, he wrote analysis upon analysis on how words, sounds, and sentences were formed. What he managed to compile is the earliest known complete description of a language, including more than 4000 rules. MAGICAL: Bro spent his life dealing in semantics so that milenia later, we can still know how to speak it like his contemporaries did
RUQAIYA HASAN
My sociolinguistics girl! She has been pioneering in areas of the relations between language, text, and culture, including the development of specific subgroups within socioeconomic, racial, and gender groups. She’s divided linguistic theories into the groups of “externalist” and “internalist” based on their revolution about language — externalist refers to the meaning of an idea, concept, or object being brought forth before a language equivalent, which reduces the existence of language to simply a series of labels for prexisting things. Hasan has changed the linguistic community’s insistance on this central ideology, and instead brought forth the thought that language does two things at once: that meaning is inherently intrinsic to language, that meanings derive from language; and that these created meanings affect a person’s experience of the world around them. She basically said — the reason we understand so much is because we are able to communicate that understanding to ourselves and others. MAGICAL: Language and meaning are connected, and literally so magical we’ve been able to create specific dialects to talk with specific people within our own languages
I LOVE LANGUAGE
Fun Home 2020 press call highlights Pt 2, video courtesy of Play DB, featuring;
Maps - 방진의 Bang Ji Ui (Alison), 유시현 Yoo Shi Hyun (Small Alison), 최재웅 Choi Jae Woon (Bruce)
Rain Coat of Love - 방진의 Bang Ji Ui (Alison), 최재웅 Choi Jae Woon (Bruce), 이아름솔 Lee Arum Sol (Helen)
Pony Girl - 최재웅 Choi Jae Woon (Bruce), 유시현 Yoo Shi Hyun (Small Alison)
Ring of Keys - 유시현 Yoo Shi Hyun (Small Alison), 최재웅 Choi Jae Woon (Bruce)
Fun little thing about medieval medicine.
So there’s this old German remedy for getting rid of boils. A mix of eggshells, egg whites, and sulfur rubbed into the boil while reciting the incantation and saying five Paternosters. And according to my prof’s friend (a doctor), it’s all very sensible. The eggshells abrade the skin so the sulfur can sink in and fry the boil. The egg white forms a flexible protective barrier. The incantation and prayers are important because you need to rub it in for a certain amount of time.
It’s easy to take the magic words as superstition, but they’re important.
The length of time it takes to say a paternoster was a typical method of reckoning time in the Middle Ages. It’s likely that whoever wrote this remedy down was thinking of it both as a prayer and a timespan and that whoever read it would have understood it the same way.
I wonder if this shows up in other historical areas besides medicine?
I ask because I have a very Italian, very Catholic friend who was once describing how she makes pizzelles. They’re cooked in a specific press, similar to a waffle iron, long enough to get light and crispy but not burnt, and in her own words: “I don’t know the exact time it takes to cook them in seconds, but I usually do either two Hail Mary’s or an Our Father and a Glory Be.”
I would be extremely surprised if medieval people didn’t use prayers while cooking. You don’t want to roast an egg for too long, have it explode, and get hot yolk in your eye. :P
I know that church bells were definitely used as timekeepers.
Before oven thermometers existed, one way to check the temperature of your oven was to stick your hand inside and recite an Our Father. The length of time before you snatch your hand out was timed by how far you’d gotten in the prayer. The shorter the time, the hotter the oven. So you knew that if you wanted a hot oven to bake bread, you wanted your hand out by “kingdom” (for example) but to slow cook a stew, you might want the oven cool enough to get to “trespasses”.
This popped up in “Nanny Ogg’s Cookbook” as well, though there the timing method wasn’t prayer but X verses of “Where Has All The Custard Gone?”
Other timing methods are “a while” (approx. 35 mins) and “a good while” (variable, up to 10 years, which the book suggests is a bit long to let batter rest before making pancakes…)
All absolutely standard, and also varied from region to region. The use of prayer was more common than most, since the Catholic church had a monopoly on… well, pretty much everything. And all the prayers were in Latin, and at a specific cadence, so the effect is similar to watching the second hand on a clock today.
it’s important to note that to the medieval people the prayers were important because of timekeeping AND god. like, i think as modern people we do tend to want it to be “just timekeeping, they weren’t just superstitious idiots, they had a good reasonable scientific reason!” but it’s also important to remember just how culturally steeped in a mystical religion they were, a relationship with christianity entirely unlike the modern relationship found in modern american culture even amongst the most religious people. i have no doubt that in the medieval mind, they were aware of the prayer being the time it took but also if there had BEEN another way to measure that time, the prayer would have been held to be preferable and important in its own right because of the importance of spiritual assistance in worldly things like bread-baking
Definitely, this is a great point! I was talking to somebody in the comments who was saying that medieval medicine was mostly bunkum because it involves spirituality, supposedly meaning it couldn’t also have logical basis behind it. But that’s a really modern way to see it. To the medieval worldview, those things aren’t contradictory. They’re part of each other. Think about how many medieval Christian scientists were monks, nuns, and priests.
*INHUMAN SCREECHING*
M Y T I M E H A S C O M E
You guys don’t understand how excited it made me to read this post, I literally wrote my master’s thesis on this exact topic.
STORY TIME
Sometime in the 10th century in Anglo-Saxon England (for context, this is before the Norman Conquest and near-ish to the reign of Alfred the Great), a dude named Bald asked another dude name Cild to write a book. Not just any book. A leechbook, which was essentially the medieval version of WebMD for practicing doctors. BUT NOT JUST A LEECHBOOK. This leechbook was gonna be the damn Lamborghini of leechbooks. This thing was going to be split into two parts, the first dealing with external medicine and the second dealing with internal medicine—something that was unheard of at the time. It was going to be organized (head to toe, like all the good leechbooks were). It was gonna be nice (leather and vellum). It was gonna use all the best ideas (from all over the known world). And the whole thing was going to be written in Anglo-Saxon. Now, a few medical books had been compiled in Anglo-Saxon before, but none like this. This one was going to be EPIC. And it was—and still is.
Bald’s Leechbook (also goes by the more boring but more informative MS Royal 12 D XVIII over in the British Library) contains a lot of medical remedies. A lot of them rely on things like prayers and chants and odd charms, like one for a headache, which recommends plucking the eyes off a living crab, letting the crab back into the water, and wearing the eyes about your neck in a little sack until you feel better. However, it’s worth pointing out that the really wild remedies, the stuff that makes absolutely no freakin’ sense, is most often recommended to treat ailments that are hard to treat even today—migraines, toothaches, cancer. These things are really painful or deadly and, without modern medicine, almost impossible to treat. So are you going to make up some nonsense to make your client at least feel like they’re doing something, and hey, if it sort of works, it works? Of course you are. You want to help people. Even if it sounds crazy, what else are you going to do? You have to try something, and the people who are suffering are willing to try anything.
But there’s also things that make complete sense. To echo concepts that have been mentioned by commentators above, there is a recipe that calls for the recitation of the paternoster while boiling a honey-based salve meant to treat carbuncle. The book instructs the physician to bring it to a boil, and sing the paternoster three times, and remove it from the fire, and sing nine paternosters, and to repeat this process two more times. A century ago, historians read the use of the paternoster as a magical incantation, but today, most agree that in lieu of a stopwatch, the paternoster is just meant to make sure you don’t burn the honey.
BUT THAT ISN’T NEAR THE COOLEST THING.
Now, this book was compiled by a master physician (we don’t know if it was Cild himself or if Cild was the scribe for an unnamed author) who was compiling recipes that had been written down for some time, and had, as many things do, gone through various permutations over the years. Many came from Greece or the western Mediterranean, and had been adapted for local English horticulture and herbs. Some came from around what is now Germany, and some ideas came from farther away in the Middle East (King Alfred was a sickly king; some scholars believe that he had his physicians seek out cures from all over the world in an attempt to treat himself). But there is one recipe that has only ever been identified in England. Not only has this recipe only ever been identified in England, it’s only ever been identified in this one manuscript. When translated into modern English, it reads as follows:
Work an eyesalve for a wen [stye], take cropleek and garlic, of both equal quantities, pound them well together, take wine and bullocks gall, of both equal quantities, mix with the leek, put this then into a brazen vessel, let it stand nine days in the brass vessel, wring out through a cloth and clear it well, put it into a horn, and about night time, apply it with a feather to the eye; the best leechdom.
For those who don’t know and/or are lucky enough to have never had one, a “wen” or a stye is a bacterial infection that manifests like a boil or a cyst that on the eyelid. They hurt something awful, and can cause larger infections of the eye. They are usually caused by Staphylococcus aureus.
With me? Okay. Fast-forward to 1988. A former biologist turned historian called M.L. Cameron decides to take a look at this old medical leechbook to see what he can see. He takes a good look and says “Lads I do believe these Anglo-Saxon leeches weren’t nearly so daft as we thought they were” (he did not and probably would never actually say that, I’m paraphrasing). Cameron was particularly interested in the recipe above. As a scientist, he knew a few things:
Garlic and cropleek (leek or onion, or another related plant) have been known to have antibacterial qualities for centuries.
Wine (alcohol) also has antibacterial qualities.
Bullocks gall (literally bile taken from a bull) is known to have detergent properties, and has long been used as an additive to soap for particularly tough stains.
A brazen vessel, or a vessel made of brass, contains a good amount of copper in it. And that copper, when left to sit around for, I don’t know, about nine days, would have plenty of time to react with the acids in the onion and garlic and the tartarates in the wine to create copper salts.
Coppers salts, as it happens, are cytotoxic, meaning they kill everything: tissue and bacteria.
What an interesting find.
Fast-forward again to 2015. A paper is published by a team from the University of Nottingham, who’ve been working on an ‘Ancientbiotics’ project to investigate ancient medical remedies and see if they actually work. They’ve turned their sights to the Anglo-Saxons, and are, as was Cameron, particularly interested in this recipe for an eye salve. Without boring you with the finer details of the experiment and its various trials (read it yourself!) I will spoil the ending by telling you that they discovered a few things:
This recipe, which was over 1,000 years old when they tested it, worked.
It worked well.
It worked extremely well.
So well, in fact, that (in a lab setting) they even got it to kill Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or as it’s more commonly known, MRSA. MRSA is a modern superbug that has built up a resistance to the antibiotic Methicillin. And this goddamn Anglo-Saxon witches’ brew freakin murdered it.
Now, as an advocate for modern medicine and sound scientific method, I’m not about to say that we should go throwing this salve on everything in 2019, because it is, if anything, just a starting point for modern scientists. This salve is still incredibly crude by modern standards and comes with a lot of potential problems. But as a historian… it works, you guys, it really works.
Medieval physicians were not idiots. They believed in magic, they believed in all things supernatural, they believed in all those things that are ‘unreasonable’ or unpopular today, and they practiced them too. But they also interacted with the real world with brains and intellects as sharp if not sharper than yours and mine. They were smart, they studied, they talked to each other in Latin and Greek and Arabic and Anglo Saxon. They made old recipes better and came up with brand new ones. They tried dumb stuff and they tried smart stuff. They didn’t have access to even the smallest fraction of the information we have at our fingertips today, and yet they created things like this.
To this day, no one knows who created the eyesalve recipe. And no one truly understands why this is the only copy of it. If it worked so well, why isn’t it plastered to the headings of every medical textbook from Alfred to Victoria? Speaking personally, I would argue that it has to do with language. Not so long after Bald’s Leechbook was written, the French invaded England and took over. Latin and French became the language of the court, and while Anglo-Saxon lived on throughout the country, and certainly lay doctors would have used Anglo-Saxon books daily, the language of formal English medical education was Latin. Oxford and Cambridge were late to the medical ed game after Salerno, Bologna, Paris, and Montpellier, and naturally fell in step with continental schools as a result, using Latin almost exclusively, and sometimes Greek or Arabic.
Point being, by the time medical licenses and medical college degrees are a thing in England, not only does almost no one of university-eligible class speak Anglo-Saxon anymore, no one has use for those Old English texts, because they don’t get you your degree, and you can’t make a living as a doctor without a degree and doctor’s license. And no one’s going to translate an old Anglo Saxon text into Latin when Avicenna’s newest old hit, now in Latin, is fresh off the boat from France.
All that to say: Never write something off because it’s old. 1,000 years is a long time ago, but human ingenuity and intelligence are hardly modern inventions. The science of the world hasn’t changed; only our tools and our perspective.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk
Further reading:
The 2015 Ancientbiotics report: A 1,000-Year-Old Antimicrobial Remedy with Antistaphylococcal Activity
NPR: ‘Ancientbiotics’ Researchers Look For Old Fixes To Modern Ailments
Mental Floss: 20 Anglo-Saxon Remedies from Bald’s Leechbook
Read a paper about how scholars are building on the work of the Ancientbiotics project to better understand how to apply ancient ideas effectively to modern medicine.
Look through Royal 12 D XVIII for yourself! Bald’s eyesalve recipe is on f. 12v and looks like this:
fashion trends we need to bring back:
1. togas
2. long ass capes
3. these pirate shirts with puffy sleeves
