Birds and Beasts and Things that Crawl

Age 20, in Chicago, currently weeping my way through a history degree. There's an old W.C. Fields quote that goes "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull."

[safelyendangered]

It’s piday!

webtoon / website / facebook / twitter / patreon

[minddpalaces]

it will forever confuse me that the german tumblr app now says “… hat deinen Eintrag gelikt” and not “… hat deinen Eintrag als Favorit markiert” which is just shortened and very nice but I don’t read gelikt as [gelaikd] but as [gelikt] and that sounds as if someone licked my post and i really wish i could unread/unhear that

[steegeschnoeber]

Man nennt mich Kuh In tiefster Nacht Liegt all zur Ruh Ich trapse sacht Auf deinen Blog Den Hals gestreckt Und habe schon Den post geleckt

[salparadisewasright-deactivated]

@amandavonpanda

[petermorwood]

Bredcow Peotry has gone up another notch.

And the Fraktur calligraphy is rather pretty too.

[thekingofelfland]

@lightninging

[yesterdaysprint]

Boston Post, Massachusetts, August 19, 1921

[yesterdaysprint]

Boston Post, Massachusetts, February 17, 1921

[yesterdaysprint]

Boston Post, Massachusetts, July 16, 1921

[yesterdaysprint]

Boston Post, Massachusetts, April 6, 1921

[charliecox]

The 89th Academy Awards - BEST PICTURE MOONLIGHT (2016) dir. Barry Jenkins

[neil-gaiman]

I have been reading George Reynolds on the Plane.

A small thought on reading George W M Reynolds’ Wagner the Wehr-Wolf on a plane.

It was obvious, just as it was open to no doubt, no kind of doubt at all, oh reader, that the person, the fine, good hearted gentleman who had written this story, a man with the frosty hair of too many winters yet still with the apple-cheeked demeanour of a lad of no more than thirteen summers,  a lad ready to clamber out on a spring morning his pockets filled with marbles, aye and perchance even stuffed with several of the miniature animals that comprise a Noah’s Ark as well: this individual of whom I speak, this person and this noble, fusty elderly and yet young person alone, was, there was no arguing with it or saying that it was not happening, for it was, it was and none could deny it with an honest heart and a clear conscience: this man and no other, I tell you, was being paid, recompensed and otherwise compensated by the word.

[onion-souls]

Under D&D rules, a dagger does 1d4 base damage. The average human has a Strength score of 10, adding no bonuses. Several of them, due to the military background of many, likely had strength or dexterity scores of 11-14. But only two or three, and quite a few would be frail with old age, sinking to 8-9 strength. All in all, we can only add a total of +1 damage per round from Brutus.

An estimate of sixty men were involved in Caesar’s actual murder. Not the wider conspiracy, but the stabbing.

Julius Caesar was a general, which is generally depicted as a 10th level fighter. Considering his above baseline constitution and dex, weakened by his probable history of malaria, epilepsy, and/or strokes (-1 dex modifier), and lack of armor at the time of the event, he would likely have something along the lines of AC 9 and 60 HP. The senators would likely hit him roughly 55% the time.

So the Roman senate had a damage-per-round of 66, more than enough to kill Caesar in one round even without factoring in surprise round advantage.

[aseekersjourney]

.Let’s not forget a person can only have up to four people flanking them at the same time. The other 4 people around Caesar wouldn’t receive a flanking bonus. Plus factoring in the movement actions of those involved, that means only 16 senators could attack Caesar a round. So in actuality it would take a little over 3 rounds to kill him.

[shardlab]

You all keep forgetting that every senator had to do time as a Roman soldier in the Legions. You didn’t get political power unless you were an experienced warrior as well. So these aren’t just a bunch of flabby old men in togas. These are the canny SOBs who survived and led lives of privilege earned in the blood of Rome’s enemies. They’re prestige level tacticians, fighters, and backbiting Advisors. And most of them haven’t forgotten how to wield a blade. Damn sure Caesar didn’t. So that’s a lot more damage behind each stab than just 1D4.

Caesar wasn’t some scrub NPC General. Caesar was an Epic Tier Warlord. He was a full on player character with all the CHA he needed to not only take power, but inspire so much fear when he decided that he’d keep it.

His assassins had to scatter like cockroaches when his people heard about what they’d done.

Dictator For Life had to be taken out unnamed in the seat of his power by “trusted” friends. Because damned sure he would have won any civil war they’d have brought to him. Massive debuffs rendered upon him from the shock of betrayal alone. They had to do it that way in game terms as well because a Warlord’s best weapons are the people loyal to him.

[onion-souls]

Going by 5th Edition, with its notable attribute inflation, the best trained NPC soldiers are “Veterans.” STR 16 DEX 13 CON 14, Multiattack. Adding them into the flat human average of 10 across the board inflates the to hit percentage and damage a bit, but Caesar still goes down in a round without grid rules.

Caesar wasn’t epic level. Epic levels don’t exist under current 5th Edition rules, and I think you’re seriously underestimating 10th level fighters. Epic level fighters in previous edition could fight archdevils and gods; no human being historically even approached those levels. Even so, if we inflate Caesar to 20th level and 18s in all stats - better than a Vampire Lord - his AC still only hits 14 and his hit points are 160ish (20d8+80).

Note that a Werewolf is STR 15, DEX 13, CON 14. An ogre is STR 19, DEX 8, CON 16.

Caesar was unarmed, and did not kill any of his attackers with his unarmed strikes due to Caesar’s lack of Monk levels. His charisma, while high, has no effect on combat. He was not a paladin or swashbuckler.

So even HyperCaesar goes down against average humans with 5 veterans in about 5-6 rounds (30-36 seconds). He would have received 20-24 attacks, but failed to do sufficient damage with any of them.

[haruspicus-deactivated20241106]

@clodiuspulcher

[jobeeart]

80s business witch on her way to do important 80s witch business

[gabriellemkari]

Dramatic comic of Nael’s, Age 6 poem: The Tiger

[jillbearup]

Turns out people really like me waffling about Narnia on Twitter.

So here’s a more hopeful spin on Susan Pevensie. (From the author’s pen to your eyeballs.)

Storify link.

[why-bless-your-heart]

@allieinarden

[mahdialynn]

blessed International Punching Nazis Appreciation Day, everyone.

[drawing-bored-deactivated202312]

and, you know, kirby was jewish. and so were siegel and shuster. and so is stan lee. comics nerds should all be rolling up our sleeves.

[thekingofelfland]

#reminder that jack kirby was drafted into the us army and served as a scout and is rumored to have killed roughly 3 nazis

via why-i-love-comics

[allthecanadianpolitics]

A required read from Michael Oman-Reagan.

This is all true. This all happened in Canada, and its very likely it will happen in the USA under Trump and be worse than Harper’s crackdown on Science ever was.

Links cited in this twitter essay:

The Big Chill: “Scientists Can’t Do the Job They Were Hired to Do”

More than 1000 Jobs Lost, Climate Program Hit Hard in Coming Environment Canada Cuts

Leaked document says Canadian federal climate scientists being blocked from media contact

Harper Government Trashes Another Federal Science Library

Federal scientists closely monitored during polar conference

Science Silenced: US Scientist Caught in Canadian Muzzle Climate-change scientists feel ‘muzzled’ by Ottawa: Documents

The Canadian War on Science: A long, unexaggerated, devastating chronological indictment

http://ourrighttoknow.ca/

http://write2know.ca/

https://evidencefordemocracy.ca

[inland-delta]

Félix Vallotton, Washerwomen at Etretat, 1899

[profmeowmers]

high key can u give me a rundown of ur fav wacky wwii shenanigans

Okay friends today we are gonna learnabout the GHOST ARMY, which, disappointingly, was not actually anarmy made of ghosts

pictured: the unit patch for theGhost Army, which is DOPE AS FUCK

see one of the things that made WWII sofucking nuts was the totally bizarre level of technology. Like wow weinvented the first real computer and radar but also if you wanted tosee how many troops were hanging out somewhere you had to send a dudeto fly over and take pictures manually??? this left A LOT of room forshenanigans

so the normal method of dealing withaerial surveillance was to cover shit with camouflage netting. Sayyou’ve got an nice air base that you really don’t want any bombsdropped on- you literally just cover that with a ludicrous amount ofnetting and some fake trees and BAM now it looks like just an emptyfield from the air

there’s a building under that weirdlump

that’s cool! That’sreally cool! But not cool enough

At some pointsomebody sat down and went “hey wait. What if…what if instead ofdisguising buildings and units as fields, we disguise fields asunits”

holy fuckingshit!!!

the British hadused a bunch of fake tanks and like, boxes of provisions stacked upin tank shape and then covered with a tarp in 1942 during OperationBertram and it worked really well, but they didn’t have a specialunit devoted to just clowning on the Germans like that.

so the US militarydecides they do want a designated clowning unit and goes out andrecruits a bunch of fucking nerds from all the art schools and makesthem into the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops aka THEGHOST ARMY, WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU USE ANY OTHER NAME LIKE SERIOUSLY

the ghost army’sjob was basically to go in, sidle up to a real unit, and thenbasically set up a fake version of that unit while the actual unitsneaked away to go dunk on Nazis where the Nazis weren’t expectingthem

okay time to getinto the really cool part of this story, which is HOW the ghost armyfaked being a real unit:

step 1: INFLATABLETANKS AND AIRCRAFT OH MY GOD

that’s a big ol balloon!!!

the ghost army hada stockpile of inflatable tanks, aircraft, artillery, cars, whatever,that they would set up and then poorly cover with camouflagenetting so from the air it looked like someone had just done areal shit job of hiding actual materiel. They even had dummy soldiersthat they would set up to make the scene look populated, since theghost army itself was about 1,000 dudes regularly imitating units of30,000 men

what’s really coolis that visual deception was more than just the inflatable stuffitself. If the ghost army plopped down a balloon tank, they then alsohad to go out with shovels and rakes and shit to make a fake trackthat a real tank would have left, because it turns out tanks arereally hard on your landscaping

step 2: “spoofradio”

the last couple ofdays before the real unit moved out, the radio operators of the ghostarmy would move in. see, radio transmissions were done in Morse code,and it turns out every radio operator has a slightly different “fist”when typing Morse. A “fist” is basically typing style- somepeople would take longer to type out certain letters or would havepauses between groups or anything like. Anybody listening to theradio transmissions who was skilled enough could tell different radiooperators apart from just their fist

anyway the ghostarmy operators would move in and basically listen to all the realunit’s radio transmissions until they had learned the real operators’fists. Then they would take over radio traffic, imitating that fistso it seemed like the real operator had never left. I forgot to makethis section funny because I was too caught up in how rad it is SORRY

step 3: making alot of noise

the ghost army hadspecial trucks fitted with huge fuck off speakers and a whole libraryof stock sound effects. Once the real unit left and the fake unitinflated, the sound trucks would come in, select a combination ofsound effects that matched the unit they were impersonating, and thenplayed everyone in the 15 mile radius of the speakers their fire mixtape

step 4: fuckinpartying!!!

see the thing aboutimpersonating your own units is that other allied units would knowabout it and might talk about it where enemy collaborators couldhear. So the ghost army had to fool the Germans but they also had tofool their own army. Every time they impersonated a new unit,the ghost soldiers would paint that unit’s insignia on all the fakemateriel, make fake signs with the unit’s name and colors, and sewthe unit’s patches on their own uniforms

once they weredressed up as soldiers from the impersonated unit, the ghost armydudes would go into town and mingle with other soldiers from actualfighting units nearby and hang out in bars while loudly saying thingslike “YES HELLO I AM DEFINITELY A REAL SOLDIER FROM THE WHATEVERDIVISION, ABSOLUTELY FOR REAL STATIONED ON THAT HILL OVER THERE”

so anyway thisbunch of weedy American art nerds staged 20+ battlefield deceptionsbetween 1944 and the end of the war, sometimes fooling that Germansso successfully that they actually got shelled

I'mma leave youwith this quote from the book “The Ghost Army of World War II” byRick Beyer and Elizabeth Sayles, because it’s a quote from an actualmember of the Ghost Army and that alone makes it funnier thananything I could ever write:

On anotheroccasion, two Frenchmen on bicycles somehow got through the securityperimeter. Shilstone managed to halt them, but not before they hadseen more than they should. “What they thought they saw was fourGIs picking up a forty-ton Sherman tank and turning it around. Theylooked at me, and they were looking for answers, and I finally said‘The Americans are very strong.‘”

[elandrialore]

Here’s a podcast if you have a half an hour. And if you have a whole hour, there’s a documentary on youtube. Super interesting.

All of them talk about stealing as much time as they could to sketch and paint. There was an adorable little old man who was talking about sketching ladies at the local house of ill repute and one of the ladies said she would go upstairs with him if she could have the sketch and he basically no ma’amed her and kept his sketch. A lot of them went onto further careers in art too.

They actually had pretty extraordinary luck. They missed the Battle of the Bulge by about four hours. Another time, one guy was going into town to return a film at the library and an MP was all, “What the heck are you doing here? Get the hell out of here, the Germans are coming!” and that’s how they slipped away from another battle.

I will admit that the whole time I was watching, I was picturing smol Steve Rogers being recruited as an artist for the ghost army and running across Bucky and the 107th. I can just see Bucky flipping his lid and all of the Howlies being completely in awe of these little artist nerds going up against the enemy armed only with fake tanks, sound machines, and simple handguns.

[badgersnbooks]

This is so crazy. This type of stuff is why I’m fascinated with WWII and all the ludicrous things that happened in the name of sneaky shenanigans and how EASY it was to fool people and sneak in places, unlike the modern era where you can check things more easily with computers and faster research. It seems like they spent a crazy amount of time and money trying kooky stuff…I hope it actually worked. Hahah.

[thekingofelfland]

If Shakespeare was alive in 2017:

Someone: POLITICS and ART should always be SEPARATE! There is NO REASON why ART should be POLITICAL!

William Shakespeare: *laughs. writes 3 more tiny hand jokes into his latest play, King Tiny Hands.*

[seabois]

[discardingimages]

[darkhei-noam]

discardingimages:

calligraphic dragon

Torah, Germany ca. 1250-1299

BL, Add 21160, fol. 19r

Gorgeous! Although I should clarify that this is not a ‘Torah’ in the sense of a Torah scroll (where no decoration at all is permitted), but rather a vocalized Masoretic Torah codex, known more commonly (and correctly) as a humash.

The art of micrography, using miniature text to form decorative borders and figures, is one of the oldest Jewish art forms. In this case, the micrography uses the text of the Masorah, a collection of grammatical and orthographic notes on the Biblical text which basically nobody was reading anyway, so might as well make pretty designs!

This particular humash, known as the “Yonah Pentateuch,” has an extensive program of micrographic and decorative illustration throughout the book. Here are some more examples:

A noble hawking! If you’re interested, there’s a whole academic study of Jewish attitudes to hawking in the Middle Ages.

Decorated ‘inhabited’ letters, for the opening of Shemot [Exodus]:

A jousting knight! Here, have another academic article on images of knights in medieval Hebrew manuscripts.

Jonah and the fish, whence the name “Yonah Pentateuch”:

And finally, a stunning micrographic dragon-gate for the closing of the book of Europe:

[trashvarietyhour]

janin (who wrote this comic) & i were re-listening to that episode where taako & kravitz share two bottles of wine at their pottery class, and we remembered this bit of canon trivia about taako and almost died

[skelaman]

wheres the joke about nut