thistle and thorn @thistle-and-thorn - Tumblr Blog

stuckinapril

happy if you have scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with your sexuality july

attonitos-gloria

I am sorry it is SO FUNNY to me that this comes immediately before the "if you gaze into the abyss" aphorism

baleful-meat-worm

apologies to anyone who followed me for tma. cow studies :) ❤️

jstor

Feeling lucky? This Ephemera Friday, we come to you with a lottery ad that doubles as a visual puzzle.

This chaotic little broadside is told through pictograms. Instead of long blocks of text, it uses small engraved images (cats, coins, eyes, shoes, trees, jugs, dice) to visually “spell out” its message: take a small risk, buy a ticket, and maybe fortune will smile on you. Or at least that’s the promise.

Image: Catch Fortune While You Can… n.d. Wellcome Collection.

gnomesittingunderalargetoadstool

Richard III, Act 1, scene 3

A Storm of Swords, chapter 51

Richard III, Act 1, Scene 3

A Feast for Crows, chapter 42

Richard III, Act 1, Scene 3

gnomesittingunderalargetoadstool

Queen Margaret then serves as a kind of ghost in the play, bringing with her the unquiet traces of the past. In Michael Boyd's production, during her first scene, she unwrapped from a bundle the skeleton of her son, lovingly reassembling the dry bones on a piece of cloth as she spoke. Quite literally, she carried the past on her back.

from Emma Smith's lecture on Richard III

What Tolkien called "the petty wars of princes," have become a feast for crows indeed, for the books are haunted by the missing and the dead, as we see in the figure of the undead Lady Stoneheart, once Eddard's wife Catelyn...

Grief Poignant as Joy: Dyscatastrophe and Eucatastrophe in "A Song of Ice and Fire" by Susan Johnston

technofinch

I often complain about my life but one thing I am grateful for is that I've almost never been shot at with a cannon. That happened all the time in the old days and it seems like it sucked a lot

junietuesday

not shipping something bc i think the characters have a cute romantic relationship and think they would actually be good together, more like i enjoy putting them in a relationship in the same way behavioral scientists enjoy putting mice in obstacle courses

derinthescarletpescatarian

Love the implication that the mazes are just to fuck with the mice

azaablue

the best fanfiction you've ever read was written by a woman in her 40s before she made dinner for her kids. it was written by a teenager after school when they should've been studying for a history test. and a barista came up with the idea while they cleaned the espresso machine and busser fact-checked it on their break and the post-doc edited between writing grant proposals and the nurse apologized for typos in the notes after a long shift and behind every drabble and one-shot and multi-chapter fic there is a person with a wonderful and interesting and chaotic life and it is such a privilege that we get to be apart of it because they decided to do this thing we all share, for fun.

utahunfiltered

A petroglyph panel near Crescent Junction, May 2025. This site features hundreds of glyphs scattered across a boulder field.

tieflingkisser

decadent-trans-girl

'why is so much politically-focused genre fiction centred on monarchies' many reasons, but one which I think deserves attention: monarchy is an obvious way of tying together the dysfunctions of the domestic to those of the state

wtf-scientific-papers

Submitter comment: I'd like to submit this '[s]tudy of defensive behavior of a venomous snake as a new approach to understand snakebite' not for it's topic (worth studying!) but for it's insane methodology, which... well, I'll just let the researcher speak for himself:

[Q: Why did you decide to do this experiment?

A: Snake behavior has been generally neglected as a field of research, especially in Brazil. And most studies don’t examine what factors make them want to bite. If you study malaria, you can research the parasite that causes the disease—but if you don’t study the mosquito that carries it, you will never solve the problem. Up until now, the popular wisdom was that the jararaca would only attack if you touched it or stepped on it. But that was not what we found.

Q: Why did you need to be the victim?

A: The best way to do this research is to put snakes and a human together. In this case, the human was me. We put the snakes inside a ring on the floor of our lab until they got used to it, then I stepped in wearing special protective boots. I stepped close to the snake and also lightly on top of it. I didn’t put my whole weight on my foot, so I did not hurt the snakes. I tested 116 animals and stepped 30 times on every animal, totaling 40,480 steps.]

From the recent (aptly named) interview: Researcher steps on deadly vipers 40,000 times to better predict snakebites