Dum Spiro Spero

Thea, thirtysomething, low-grade cyborg. She/her

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

modern medieval fantasies don't have enough weasel-based necromancy

[maniculum]

Please elaborate on this topic at length

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

i think i've made my position clear

[oidheadh-con-culainn]

anyway here are some medieval discussions of weasels and their necromantic abilities:

gerald of wales: The weasel also, when its young are dying from any hurt, recovers and restores them to life by the use of a yellow flower. We are told by persons who have witnessed the fact, having put the whelp to death to make the experiment, that the weasel brought the flower in its mouth, and first applied it to the wound, and then to the mouth, nostrils, and other orifices of the little animal, that it might inhale the odor, by which, through the efficacious touch of the plant, breath was restored, though life seemed extinct, some slight and imperceptible vestiges of it only having remained.

aberdeen bestiary: it is said, also, that they are skilled in healing, so that if by chance their young are killed, and their parents succeed in finding them, they can bring their offspring back to life.

thomas of cantimpré: Accordingly they are said to be expert in all the arts of medicine, so that, if they find their offspring dead, they make them naturally recuperate by means of a herb

also in marie de france's lai eliduc, guildeluec uses a flower she got from a weasel that was resurrecting its weasel friend to resurrect guilliadon

conclusion:

behold, a necromancer

[more about medieval weasel beliefs]

[status-quo-hater]

I think one of the funniest abortion stances I've heard was from my parents neighbor. He's a like, hard-core libertarian viking larper guy who is very tall and very fat and very bald.

He believes a fetus is human with a soul, but also its "basically attacking the woman's body" so if she wants to get rid of it, that's "basically self-defense". He compared it to shooting a home invader. So he supports abortion not as healthcare, but as killing a baby in self-defense

[status-quo-hater]

Y'know I'm so glad someone reminded me of this. Because this was also discussed.

My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.

He brought up people consensually hurting each other, didn't go for one of the obvious answers like boxing or body mods or something, no he went STRAIGHT TO BDSM and he DIDN'T EVEN REMEMBER THE ACRONYM

[soup-mother]

i just remembered this British backpacking youtuber wanker who went to chechnya (he straight up said it like "chech-nyar") and he was getting a taxi ride and complimenting the car and saying it meant the guy was rich and this Chechen guy was like "you've come here from England and can pay for taxi rides, you are rich. I'm literally a taxi driver" and the guy got so fucking huffy about it because his whole brand was how low cost tourism he was. really helped cement my dislike for cunts who go to a much poorer country, start acting like they're in and savvy with the locals (while gentrifying their eating spots etc) and getting all white guilty about their position as a tourist with money in a strong currency with strong wages. what a cunt.

[soup-mother]

or like ppl going to thailand or Vietnam and being like "holy shit can you believe it? if you pay enough you can shoot a cow!" like of fucking course you can. you're the Yankee tourist waving US dollars around for whoever fulfils your stupid requests. no matter how much you want to feel better than rich tourists you're still wealthy compared to the lady giving you a manicure or the guy riding the bike.

really makes you wonder why they're so shocked about sex tourism, like of course you can do depraved shit you're waving money (valuable money too) in front of poor imperialised people. it's almost less empathetic to be shocked by it than to understand why it's such a common thing.

and the attitude that tourists get like "oh everyone's just after my money" and paranoia around getting robbed like of fucking course people want your money you're wearing a luxury watch in front of subsistence fishermen, you're showing off how much money you have even just as a regular citizen of empire to people who'll not only never see a cent of it, but who actively are exploited to make your country rich.

rich cunts i went to school with boasted about having a house in Vanuatu and their mum complained about "how dirty the natives are". actually evil. like knowing how much easier it was for them as rich Australians to buy a house there than the people who literally live there. fucking hell.

[sunderwight]

Not to post about The Mummy (1999) in 2026, but I mean if I am gonna then it's going to be on tumblr now isn't it?

Anyway do you think the writers realized that their sequel retcon of making Evie the reincarnation of the skeevy pharaoh's daughter in an effort to up the villainy factor of Imhotep and Ankh Su Namun also implies that it's, uh, pretty likely that Evie's past incarnation is the reason Imhotep became an apocalyptic undead horror in the first place?

I don't even mean that she's the reason the medjai probably knew that more people than just Ankh Su Namun murdered the pharaoh, though there is that, but like... the reason Imhotep become the titular Mummy and not just a very dead high priest, is because the ancient medjai executed him by sealing him alive inside a sarcophagus with flesh-eating scarabs and doing (presumably) a bunch of other stuff to ensure that he would be locked in eternal agony, which as a side-effect also guaranteed that if he ever got out he'd be... y'know. Still occupying his corpse and able to muster up high level dark magic and create sand storms and shit?

The first movie keeps it fairly ambiguous as to who gave the order for Imhotep to get the Curséd Revenant spa special, but like, it probably wasn't actually the medjai themselves who just up and chose it. They knew what it entailed and that it would mean that countless generations of them would have to guard this one tomb to make sure no one ever let Imhotep out, which just sounds impractical, to be honest. Especially when there are many other ways to fuck Imhotep's afterlife over and just be rid of him, even with torturing him a lot before he actually dies. This is Egyptian mythology (loosely), just deleting the sonofabitch would be an option. They could even still bury him alive if they want!

However, 'torture him for all eternity' does sound like the kind of shortsighted sentence that someone who really cared about the murdered pharaoh might ask for. Especially someone who might, additionally, feel some degree of guilt (perhaps for losing the deciding match on who would bodyguard their dad to one of his future murderers?) and be lashing out without much foresight to the whole "btw if we can't successfully guard this one tomb forever then we're all fucked" loophole. Like a rich person with a very skewed concept of scale and the practical requirements of tomb-guarding, for instance.

So yeah I think Nefertiri is the one who had the medjai curse Imhotep, which is the reason Imhotep becomes a Problem later, and also the reason why Evie is the one who has to release him (accidentally) and then resolve the issue (on purpose) and why Nefertiri got locked into a reincarnation cycle instead of just moving on to her own afterlife too. The ancient Egyptian gods were like, yeah nah, and yeeted her back to the world to live out countless lives until Imhotep's soul was either pacified or destroyed.

But also I'm pretty sure that layer of storytelling wasn't intentional. Whoops.

[my-dailydreams]

[catilinas]

everyone i've talked to about this has been completely unaware so: if you didn't know already, there's going to be a solar eclipse, with totality or coverage of 90% or more in some places, over a lot of europe, on august 12th 2026. in the uk it will start just after 6pm, and the maximum will be at 7:13pm.

here is a map of the path of the eclipse (from timeanddate)

get eclipse glasses if you want to look at it. it is not safe to look at through sunglasses. ok informative post over o7

[ex-libris-craux]

mostly missing me but i know a bunch of folks that are right in the path 🥰 enjoy it for me, my lovelies!

[threadworn]

You know I am truly one of the biggest Jonathan Sims Defenders you’ll run into. Like if you let me I can spend a genuinely annoying amount of time ranting about how he was consistently blamed for things that he was not at fault for, put in a truly impossible position and forced to make decisions that no person should ever have to make, and that almost every choice he ever made was entirely understandable given his circumstances and the available knowledge to him at the time. I stand by the fact that Jonathan Sims’ biggest flaw is that he is so devastatingly Human even when everyone around him insists that he is not a human at all anymore. Man was consistently unknowingly demonstrating his humanity until the very end POST becoming the antichrist of the apocalypse and if that makes sense to nobody but me then so be it.

THAT BEING SAID.

I am Also only human.

and I ALSO, frequently, upon witnessing Jon Simsing it, have to put my head in my hands and think, “Oh my god, what an idiot.”

[san-sebastienne]

Dashiell Hammett, who basically invented the noir genre (think: The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man) hung out enough in the queer scene in San Francisco in the 20s-30s that he picked up some contemporary queer lingo that he folded into his stories. In The Maltese Falcon, there’s a scene where the wildly gay-coded villain shows up at a meeting with a skinny little blonde with a bad attitude and a gun in tow, and detective Sam Spade tells him to “leave the gunsel outside” — gunsel being contemporary gay slang for a young, effeminate man who probably bottoms (from the Yiddish gansl, meaning gosling). Basically, he’s saying “I’m here to talk to you, not your twink.”

However, a lot of writers mimicking Hammett did not know gay lingo or Yiddish, saw the word “gun,” and assumed “gunsel” meant “scary bodyguard with a gun.” They took off with a word they didn’t understand and spread it so fast that it’s now basically impossible to read a noir story written between 1930-1960 without someone accidentally being called a twink at least once. Look out for it next time you’re reading Raymond Chandler or his ilk, I guarantee you’ll find it.

[totallynotagentphilcoulson]

Much funnier is how by a decade after Hammett’s death there were a bunch of Westerns also using it to refer to gunmen up to and including the HBO series Deadwood

[sashayed]

has anyone figured out how to turn off the thing where you love your pet so much it slides inexorably into grief-borrowing

[boomstab-papa]

[your-cosmic-creature]

“For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’ When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious.”

[jabberding0]

Feed me, Seymour

[starlingheart]

a Very Important Purchase

[starlingheart]

Mice! With occupations!

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

tag urself I am Chef Mouse

I'm gonna go full Raccacoonie and mind control a kitchen worker :D

[evaceratops]

it just occurred to me that darth vader, master engineer, probably looked at the death star plans at some point and noticed the flaw, but didn’t bother to tell anyone about it because he despised everyone who was involved in the project

[evaceratops]

#krennic and tarkin: [die as a (indirect and direct, respectively) result of the death star’s flaw] #vader, who knew about that flaw and did nothing: unfortunate

[rey-of-moonlight]

“Unfortunate”

[zeonicbolshevik]

Meanwhile Vader, expert ace pilot, acts well below rank to supposedly fight off the attackers. Attackers who, as far as anyone else knows, can’t hope to do shit to the Death Star.

Convenient.

[fluffycakesistainted]

Convenient…

Lol there are some ppl on here all “oh he was feeling a little Light so he knew he had to destroy it to do the Right Thing!!!” like nah. I love my boy but he’s a bag of stinky garbagé at this point and still totally evil.

He just despised the Death Star cuz everyone was all “nyeh heh this thing can do ur job for u u LOSER” and he actively loathed every single person who was on board it. Of course he was petty enough to ignore its self-destruct button. He’s just that bitch.

[ekjohnston]

this seems entirely reasonable sidebar: apparently thrawn treason is, like, mostly Krennic and Tarkin hating each other and i have never read a thrawn book but i might just read that one

[kyraneko]

Vader is high-key insulted by the existence of the Death Star, the effort and expense thrown into making it, and the way everybody’s praising it as the new ultimate power in the universe, and probably the worst part of the whole affair?

 He has no one to bitch to about it. 

Even the Emperor’s jumped on the superweapon hype train. Even the tolerably-competent officers like Tarkin are all #TeamDeathStar, and then there’s smug assholes like Admiral Motti who just won’t shut up about it, and honestly?

Vader’s probably been on the email CC list for the design since the project started. Years of enduring shitty design and interdepartmental bickering and watching some smarmy asshole in an inferior cloak prance about bloviating about his special superweapon like somebody who has an anime body pillow of the superlaser housing.

And then there’s this one scientist who keeps going on and on about this thermal exhaust problem.

Just. Huge amounts of emails on the subject, going on and on and on about it.

Vader is totally the only person who actually reads these after the first, like, five of them. Everybody else just skims through them with a side of “Seriously, Galen? Another one? Force-dammit, Krennic, couldn’t you have left him on that mudball with his family?” But Vader is bored out of his skull with 90% of his job anyway, and it’s not like he has anything better to do. Besides, viciously judging other people’s design abilities is the closest thing to pass for fun when there aren’t any Rebels to slaughter or armies to curbstomp, and there’s plenty of shit design for the judging.

He spots the flaw in the reactor the first time it appears in the plans.

He’d have shit himself if it wasn’t for the suit.

He promptly makes a bet with himself on whether anybody is going to spot it.

Nobody does.

They’re a pack of idiots. Every last one of them.

Maybe he contemplates telling them for like two-thirds of a second. It would be fun to lord his actual mechanical expertise over that little shit, Krennic.

But then he considers that he can only tell them once, and what if it were after the thing blew itself right the fuck up, what if that? He can still point out the flaw, and he can throw everyone’s stupidity right in their stupid faces, but also there’ll be no more Death Star.

So when Galen Erso sends out Thermal Exhaust Problem Analysis Report #6,109 and buried in paragraph 37 is a suggestion of an extra exhaust port, and Krennic responds with “SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT YOUR GODDAMN THERMAL EXHAUST PORT, GALEN, I DON’T GIVE A SHIT!” and Erso goes, “So you approve the solution?” and Krennic goes “S***** F*** LKJDGJFKL!!!!LJF$%#$DJF! YES!” Vader saves the email exchange for posterity and is downright cheerful the rest of the week.

True, he acts in its defense, chasing down Rebels when the plans are stolen. Of course he does. They’re Rebels, and hunting them down is his job and one of the very few pleasures of his existence. But it’s not for the Death Star. In fact, if one of them were to escape with its plans, and hide them successfully, and keep their location secret through torture and worse, and if another of them were to fly a starfighter well enough to keep from being destroyed long enough to drop a torpedo through that vulnerable exhaust port and touch off that reactor instability and turn the whole massive, ridiculous, wasteful, absurd, and vaguely insulting contraption into so much spacedust …

… well …

… oops.

Vader’s only regret about the whole affair is that Krennic predeceased it and is therefore unavailable for gloating to.

It doesn’t stop him from snagging a copy of the Rebels’ footage of the Death Star blowing up and posting it anonymously to the holonet with the added caption “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

[maskedhatter]

What makes this whole thing better is that the comics ( Darth Vader Annual 2 to be precise) backs this theory up

The Annual literally starts with Tarkin arriving on Scarif, only to find Vader had broken into the archive and was just casually studying the Death Star plans

Then later on, he literally says THIS to Tarkin

Vader is the pettiest fucker who hates EVERYTHING to do with his coworkers and the Death Star and I LOVE it

[daughterofstories]

You know, I usually hate these exhaust port conversations, but I think it actually works here.

Because the entire point of the exhaust port is how absurd a long shot it is. If you can survive flying through a narrow trench lined with turrets while in an active dogfight long enough, then you might get close enough to attempt a shot your computers are literally incapable of making.

No matter how many times it gets brought up, no one is going to put time and energy into addressing this, because no reasonable person would consider this an actual vulnerability.

But we’re not talking about a reasonable person.

We’re talking about Anakin “I destroyed a droid control ship from the inside piloting a fighter I had never seen before when I was ten years old” Skywalker.

He sees those plans, and immediately knows how he would take down the Death Star.

Who cares that a computer couldn’t make that shot? It’d be easy, if you use the Force.

You know, the Force? That thing all you Imperial officers are calling superstitious nonsense?

Yes, well… I guess we’ll just see how this plays out.

[maryreadings]

obsessed with this silly tiger

[thesaltofcarthage]

[Jaws music]

[Jaws music]

— wait, what the fuck? where did it go? where did it go?

[squareallworthy]

Everyone will not just

If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.

[flowerais-deactivated20211031]

let love in. believe compliments. be vulnerable and soft-hearted. tell people you love that you love them. see beauty in everyday things. live life like you’re in a movie. don’t be afraid to begin again.

[iravaid]

Visit Original Link

On conservation and survival

[hope-for-the-planet]

This brought tears to my conservationist heart today.

The continued existence of these species is the legacy of so many people whose names we will never know--some of who never lived to see the impacts of their work.

When you count up the flaws of our species, you have to count the good things too--out of the many species throughout Earth's history that have caused the demise or endangerment of other species, we are the only one that tries to fix it out of our fascination and love for other life forms.

(Big thank you to the anonymous asker who sent this in!)

[hope-for-the-planet]

Earth Day reblog of this thing that made me cry.

And I'll add some other recent good conservation news.

•Green sea turtles are no longer endangered

•Giant pandas are no longer endangered

•Panamanian golden frogs were returned to the wild for the first time since they were wiped out by chytrid 17 years ago

•The Eastern humpback whale population has exceeded pre-whaling numbers and many other whale species are showing strong signs of recovery

•Salmon and bison have been returned to their former habitat in multiple parts of the US through dam removal, habitat restoration, and reintroduction

•The Western monarch migration was up 60% compared to last year

•Galapagos tortoises were reintroduced to Floreana for the first time in 180 years

•Attenborough's long beaked echidna was rediscovered after being though extinct for decades

•Five "lost" island bird species were documented by citizen scientist birders in 2025

Do not stand at my grave and cry. I am not there. I did not die.

[kawuli]

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

[yomikoreadsbooks]

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines. 

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted. 

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy. 

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden. 

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching. 

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar. 

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results. 

https://www.mojeek.com/ 

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. 

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/ 

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine