DEAR READER
Show & Tell
Misplaced Lens Cap
Love Begins
almost home
Today's Document
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we're not kids anymore.
styofa doing anything
AnasAbdin
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Monterey Bay Aquarium
NASA
dirt enthusiast
Andulka
Peter Solarz
izzy's playlists!
Kiana Khansmith
Keni
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
seen from Japan
seen from United States
seen from Kenya
seen from Malaysia
seen from Spain
seen from Malaysia
seen from Malaysia
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
@waitingformywings
adhd bitches be like. “there’s this very tiny sound that’s extremely quiet that no one can hear but me but the fact that i can hear it means that i can no longer focus on this task” but also go “sorry i have no idea what you said because you weren’t the only sound being produced in this environment at the time and you weren’t super loud and perfectly enunciated therefore i processed nothing” i’m bitches
THROW OFF THE JANGLY YOKE OF OPPRESSION
“WE ARE THE FUTURE RUDOLPH, NOT THEM”
M: “What’s your name?”
R: “Rudolph.”
M: “What’s your real name, Rudolph?”
R: “… Red-Nose.”
M: “Quite a talent you have there, Red-Nose.”
The only holiday post worth the season
can someone please explain how it’s possible that every single month this year ended as quickly as it started and yet this whole year has felt like an eternity
I want to do things with my life but I also want to bury myself in a forest and let the moss grow over me so where does that leave us
Cottagecore this, goblincore that, no one seems to realize that the ideal is hobbitcore. I wanna be hairy and fat and well fed and happy about that, with a tidy and cozy home and garden, absolutely raucous parties, and a little bit of theft and vandalism, as a treat.
rawest fucking hozier lyrics in no particular order:
i’d suffer hell if you’d tell me what you’d do to me tonight
heat of her breath in my mouth; im alive
i’d be the choiceless hope in grief that drove him underground
idealism sits in prison, chivalry fell on his sword
and when the earth is trembling on some new beginning with the same sweet shock of when adam first came
every version of me dead and buried in the yard outside
the stench of the sea and the absence of green are the death of all things that are seen and unseen
if I was born as a blackthorn tree i’d wanna be felled by you, held by you, fuel the pyre of your enemies
some like to imagine the dark caress of someone else, I guess any thrill will do
before the wave hits, marveling at god; before he feels alone one final time and marries the sea
betray the moon as acolyte on first and fierce affirming sight
i have never known peace like the damp grass that yields to me, I have never known hunger like these insects that feast on me
screaming the name of a foreigner’s god; the purest expression of grief
sweet and right and merciful, i’m all but washed in the tide of her breathing
but you don’t know the hell you put me through; to have someone kiss the skin that crawls from you
so i try to talk refined for fear that you find out how i’m imagining you
my head was war, my skin was soaked, I called your name ‘til the fever broke
be still, my indelible friend, you are unbreaking
remember me, love, when i’m reborn as a shrike to your sharp and glorious thorn
Journals, articles, books & texts, on folklore, mythology, occult, and related -to- general anthropology, history, archaeology.
Some good and/or interesting (or hokey) ‘examples’ included for most resources. tryin to organize & share stuff that was floating around onenote.
Journals (open access) — Folklore, Occult, etc
Culutural Analysis - folklore, popular culture, anthropology — The Mythical Ghoul in Arabic Culture
Folklore - folklore, anthropology, archaeology — The Making of a Bewitchment Narrative, Grecian Riddle Jokes
Incantatio - journal on charms, charmers, and charming — Verbal Charms from a 17th Century Manuscript
Oral Tradition — Jewish Folk Literature, Noises of Battle in Old English Poetry
Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics — Nani Fairtyales about the Cruel Bride, Energy as the Mediator between Natural and Supernatural Realms
International Journal of Intangible Heritage
Studia Mythologica Slavica (many articles not English) — Dragon and Hero, Fertility Rites in the Raining Cave, The Grateful Wolf and Venetic Horses in Strabo’s Geography
Folklorica - Slavic & Eastern European folklore association — Ritual: The Role of Plant Characteristics in Slavic Folk Medicine, Animal Magic
Esoterica - The Journal of Esoteric Studies — The Curious Case of Hermetic Graffiti in Valladolid Cathedral
The Esoteric Quarterly
Mythological Studies Journal
Luvah - Journal of the Creative Imagination — A More Poetical Character Than Satan
Transpersonal Studies — Shamanic Cosmology as an Evolutionary Neurocognitive Epistemology, Dreamscapes
Beyond Borderlands — tumblr
Paranthropology
GOLEM - Journal of Religion and Monsters — The Religious Functions of Pokemon, Anti-Semitism and Vampires in British Popular Culture 1875-1914
Correspondences - Online Journal for the Academic Study of Western Esotericism — Kriegsmann’s Philological Quest for Ancient Wisdom
— History, Archaeology
Adoranten - pre-historic rock art
Chitrolekha - India art & design history — Gomira Dance Mask
Silk Road — Centaurs on the Silk Road: Hellenistic Textiles in Western China
Sino-Platonic - East Asian languages and civilizations — Discursive Weaving Women in Chinese and Greek Traditions
MELA Notes - Middle East Librarians Association
Didaskalia - Journal for Ancient Performance
Ancient Narrative - Greek, Roman, Jewish novelistic traditions — The Construction of the Real and the Ideal in the Ancient Novel
Akroterion - Greek, Roman — The Deer Hunter: A Portrait of Aeneas
Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies — Erotic and Separation Spells, The Ancients’ One-Horned Ass
Roman Legal Tradition - medieval civil law — Between Slavery and Freedom
Phronimon - South African society for Greek Philosophy and the Humanities — Special Issue vol. 13 #2, Greek philosophy in dialogue with African+ philosophy
The Heroic Age - Early medieval Northwestern Europe — Icelandic Sword in the Stone
Peregrinations - Medieval Art and Architecture — Special Issue vol. 4 #1, Mappings
Tiresas - Medieval and Classical — Sexuality in the Natural and Demonic Magic of the Middle Ages
Essays in Medieval Studies — The Female Spell-caster in Middle English Romances, The Sweet Song of Satan
Hortulus - Medieval studies — Courtliness & the Deployment of Sodomy in 12th-Century Histories of Britain, Monsters & Monstrosities issue, Magic & Witchcraft issue
Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU
Medieval Archaeology — Divided and Galleried Hall-Houses, The Hall of the Knights Templar at Temple Balsall
Medieval Feminist Forum — multiculturalism issue; Gender, Skin Color and the Power of Place … Romance of Moriaen, Writing Novels About Medieval Women for Modern Readers, Amazons & Guerilleres
Quidditas - medieval and renaissance
Medieval Warfare
The Viking Society - ridiculous amount of articles from 1895-2011
Journals (limited free/sub/institution access)
Al-Masaq - Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean — Piracy as Statecraft: The Policies of Taifa of Denia, free issue
Mythical Creatures of Europe - article + map
Folklore - limited free access — Volume 122 #3, On the Ambiguity of Elves
Digital Philology - a journal of medieval cultures — Saracens & Race in Roman de la Rose Iconography
Pomegranate - International Journal for Pagan Studies
Transcultural Psychiatry
European Journal of English Studies — Myths East of Venice issue, Esotericism issue
Books, Texts, Images etc. — Folklore, Occult etc.
Magical Gem Database - Greek/Egyptian gems & talismans [x] [x]
Biblioteca Aracana - (mostly) Greek pagan history, rituals, poetry etc. — Greater Tool Consecration, The Yew-Demon
Curse Tablets from Roman Britain - [x]
The Gnostic Society Library — The Corpus Hermeticum, Hymn of the Robe of Glory
Grimoar - vast occult text library — Grimoires, Greek & Roman Necromancy, Queer Theology, Ancient Christian Magic
Internet Sacred Text Archive - religion, occult, folklore, etc. ancient texts
Verse and Transmutation - A Corpus of Middle English Alchemical Poetry
— History
The Internet Classics Archive - mainly Greco-Roman, some Persian & Chinese translated texts
Bodleian Oriental Manuscript Collection - [x] [x] [x]
Virtual Magic Bowl Archive - Jewish-Aramaic incantation bowl text and images [x] [x]
Vindolanda Tablets - images and translations of tablets from 1st & 2nd c. [x]
Corsair - online catalog of the Piedmont Morgan library (manuscripts) [x] [x]
Beinecke rare book & manuscripts — Wagstaff miscellany, al-Qur’ān—1813
LUNA - tonnes from Byzantine manuscripts to Arabic cartography
Maps on the web - Oxford Library [x] [x] [x]
Bodleian Library manuscripts - photographs of 11th-17th c. manuscripts — Treatises on Heraldry, The Worcester Fragments (polyphonic music), 12 c. misc medical and herbal texts
Early Manuscripts at Oxford U - very high quality photographs — (view through bottom left) Military texts by Athenaeus Mechanicus 16th c. [x] [x], MS Douce 195 Roman de la Rose [x] [x]
Trinity College digital manuscript library — Mathematica Medica, 15th c.
eTOME - primary sources about Celtic peoples
Websites, Blogs — Folklore, Occult etc.
Demonthings - Ancient Egyptian Demonology Project
Invocatio - (mostly) western esotericism
Heterodoxology - history, esotericism, science — Religion in the Age of Cyborgs
The Recipes Project - food, magic, science, medicine — The Medieval Invisible Man (invisibility recipes)
Morbid Anatomy - museum/library in Brooklyn
— History
Islamic Philosophy Online - tonnes of texts, articles, links, utilities, this belongs in every section; mostly English
Medicina Antiqua - Graeco-Roman medicine
History of the Ancient World - news and resources — The So-called Galatae, Gauls, Celts in Early Hellenistic Balkans; Maidens, Matrons Magicians: Women & Personal Ritual Power in Late Antique Egypt
Διοτίμα - Women & Gender in Antiquity
Bodleian Library Exhibitions Online — Khusraw & Shirin, Hebrew Manuscripts as a Meeting-Place of Cultures
Medievalists — folk studies, witchcraft, mythology, science tags
Atlas Obscura — Bats and Vampiric Lore of Pére Lachaise Cemetery
Loft apartment in New York | photos by Collin Hughes
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Every few decades we re-invent some new bullshit “free love movement” that just gives ugly men easy and unfettered access to coochie and everybody acts like it’s fucking revolutionary.
[OC] Cheaper alternative
Speaking as someone that spent six or seven years working in the motorsports/automotive industry, this is the most true comic I have ever seen in my entire life.
"can u multitask" yes actually i am losing my mind and chilling at the same time
Me, aged 14, reading Tolkien: Hobbits are considered chuldren until they are 30? How funky! Fantasy worldbuilding! This is so different from us humans!
Me, aged 25: Oh i get it now
JRR Tolkien looking upon a quad of Oxford post-graduate students: "Children, all of them children."
an incomplete list of things that really happen in Moby Dick, an absolutely wild book that I have just finished after four months
Note: events are in the order that I think of them and not the order in which they occur in the book:
Ishmael goes to an inn and they say “there are no beds but if you want to share with this cannibal that’s cool.” Ishmael shares with the cannibal, whose name is Queequeg, and after establishing that he is not going to get eaten, seems to fall madly in love with him.
Quote: “How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’ honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg—a cosy, loving pair.”
Quote: “He pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends; he would gladly die for me, if need should be.”
Fellas is it gay to kiss a man’s nose, cuddle in bed with him, compare yourselves to honeymooners, declare love after 24 hours, and then declare you’re married repeatedly throughout the book?
Backing up a bit, it’s apparently taken for granted the Pacific Islanders are cannibals? But Ishmael also does not seem to have a problem with this, and at some point straight up defends cannibalism (at one point going on a “we’re all cannibals because MEAT IS MURDER” tangent, which is a bit rich for a dude whose day job is killing whales.)
He regularly refers the Polynesian characters as savages, but then will occasionally remind us that he thinks all people are savages, singling out Achilles and, for some reason, German painter Albrecht Durer.
(Occasionally Queequeg will be like “wow Christians are weirdos” and Ishmael will be like “oh shit… he’s right. Why are we such weirdos.”)
At one point while they’re still on land, Ishmael becomes convinced that Queequeg has killed himself, because he’s locked himself in their room. The landlady tells someone to get a sign made that says “no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor;” because, quote, “might as well kill both birds at once.”
It turns out that Queequeg has not killed himself, he is just squatting with a statue of his god held over his head and refuses to move a muscle until sundown. This is how Herman Melville thinks Ramadan is practiced.
Sidebar: Melville seemed under the impression that Ramadan was a Polynesian thing?
Ishamel drags capitalism at every opportunity
and if there isn’t an opportunity, he makes one
“Paying for things sucks but getting paid is the best even though money is terrible and people who chase money are all going to hell”
On one of the ships they run into, one of the sailors has declared that he is the Archangel Gabriel, and basically recruited most of the crew into a cult. This is never mentioned again.
Instead, Melville gives us entire chapters on: whale heads, whale tales, why whaling is a noble calling actually, rope, etc.
At one point Ishmael flat-out says that if you don’t respect whaling he will fight you
There is an entire chapter about the color white, in which he lists other white things he thinks are scary. They include: great white sharks, polar bears, albatrosses, the Andes mountains, and albinos.
There is also an entire chapter about whale penis. At one point, if I read that chapter correctly, a dude makes the whale penis into a suit? Or possibly climbs into it? It’s all very euphemistic at that point.
After they kill a whale, they have to do something known as “squeezing sperm.” (He’s referring to parts of the sperm whale, not actual sperm.“ Ishmael REALLY LIKES squeezing sperm, and goes on about how how sometimes, when squeezing sperm, he accidentally squeezes the hands of his fellows by accident, because they are also squeezing sperm, and Ishmael really likes that and wishes they could hold hands more.
“Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever!” - Ishmael, chapter 94.
He admits that sure, maybe over-whaling could lead to fewer whales, but whales are so big and have been here such a long time that there can’t be any risk of them ever being endangered: look at Elephants! Elephants are doing fine!
The previous chapter did not age well.
There is a dude named Peleg with very strong @dril vibes who, when accused of being a little off his rocker, declares “say that again to me, and start my soul-bolts, but I’ll—I’ll—yes, I’ll swallow a live goat with all his hair and horns on.”
At one point Ishmael’s boat almost gets run over by the ship, and he’s like “is that normal???” and everyone is like “yep” and Ishmael is like “cool if anyone is looking for me I’ll be writing my will” and goes and does that. Which is hilarious because he established in the first chapter that he does not own Anything.
Ishmael is so invested in measuring whales that he tattoos’ whales dimensions onto his arm because he doesn’t have anywhere else to write it down
He’s also really offended that pirates are more famous than whalers.
Queequeg gets a fever and has the carpenter build him a coffin, but then he gets better so they turn his coffin into a buoy. This buoy is the reason Ishmael is the only one not to go down with the ship, so in a way, Queequeg did die to save him. Huh.
Captain Ahab decides that what he needs to kill Moby Dick is a Special Harpoon. He has the blacksmith make one. They are still on their wooden ship at this time and, despite over-explaining every other detail, Melville does not seem to clarify how they did this without burning the ship down.
Ahab also decides he needs to temper it in blood, and asks the harpooners if they’ll contribute some, and they’re like “yeah, whatever, man.”
(The harpooners are all POC who write off all shenanigans as Weird White People Shit, and seem to be the only ones with the braincells.)
The other character with one brain cell is Starbuck, the first mate, who really wants to go home to his wife Mary, and his son, “boy.” I am not convinced he knows his son’s name.
Ahab makes himself a nest on the mast so he can look for Moby Dick and a bird steals his hat
Some out of context quotes:
“Hark! The infernal orgies!”
“Long usage had, for this Stubb, converted the jaws of death into an easy chair.”
“Stubb knows him best of all, and Stubb always says he’s queer; says nothing but that one sufficient little word queer; he’s queer, says Stubb; he’s queer– queer, queer; and keeps dinning it into Mr. Starbuck all the time– queer– sir– queer, queer, very queer.”
“Alas! Dough-boy!”
It’s a very unmarketable, very unique, very weird book. I don’t actually like it. It’s Problematical. It has very few of the justifications that people normally use to forgive and keep consuming problematic work. But I think about Moby Dick an awful lot, I really do. I think my favorite part is how everyone just allowed it to happen, and now it’s a classic. At no point did anyone interrupt Melville, or try to edit his work, or beg him to consider his audience. He had something to say and he put down his pen when he felt he had said it, and made that everyone else’s problem.
US Elevation
The america they don’t want you to see
do you ever think about what it must have been like for the first ancient greeks to discover catharsis
me in ancient greece after watching the first tragedy: being sad slaps actually
