[roughentumble]

my friend just told me that there's a secret second dashboard that solely contains posts from people you've turned on post notifications for, and when i click the link in the messages it opens it within the tumblr app, so the tumblr app also has a secret second dashboard for post notification blogs, and the only way to access it is to open the link for it within the app.

i literally love tumblr

[zunnyzee]

the way tumblr has functions.

[onewiththedemons]

@wh0w0re lOOK

[minionvoice]

Can You Guess Who These Minions Are?

Reblog With The Names Of The Four Minions Show Here For A Chance To Win a Trip To DisneyWorld!

[zsnes]

their names are ass mcdougal dick piece of shit large muscle cock

[minionvoice]

Just Fuck of..

[stlowens]

Sylvia Plath, from The Unabridged Journals

[aww-cute-animals]

Rabbit vs. Hare

[yancakes]

one of them is bigger by uh uhhhhhhhhhhhhh by a hare

[katesattic]

Y’all know those Sims glitches where the children’s arms&legs get really long? That’s what this looks like.

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[powerfulwizard]

[gelledegg]

this is what ancient greek philosophy is like

[airandangels]

Diogenes driving a mobile home into the symposium to ruin Plato’s day.

[redchrominance]

"Behold, a van!"

[spiralstaircased]

due to inflation you must answer my riddles five

[zouffle]

due to budget cuts i will grant you two wishes

[azzehkarla]

My toxic trait is that I truly believe I could win a fight against anybody if I was mad enough. U might have the strength and size but I have pure, unfiltered rage.

[soracities]

Alain de Botton, Essays in Love [transcript in ALT]

[fulviavincit]

sorry but this is absolutely sending me

[captainprissyprincess]

This picture he posted after the video makes it even better

[gertrudisnacht]

I'm tryna be positive but then there's the rage bloodlust hatred wrath

[amnhnyc]

If the Magnificent Frigatebird (Fregata magnificens) ordered fast food, it would definitely steal fries from the bottom of the bag. This species is known for its kleptoparasitic behavior, meaning it specializes in snatching food from other sea birds—harassing them until they let go of their catches.

But this winged pirate won’t stop there. The Frigatebird will even pester competitors who’ve recently eaten, forcing them to vomit up their meals! Then it will chow down on its regurgitated prize. The male’s prominent red gular sac is used to attract a mate and can puff up like a balloon. This bird can generally be found soaring along the coasts of southern North America, Central America, and South America.

Photo: Haplochromis, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons #birds #birdstagram #birdsoftheworld #nature #biodiversity #wildlife https://www.instagram.com/p/CocouGUuJBf/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[finelythreadedsky]

Omg Turnus thinking he's the hero and thus ultimately failing is my favourite thing. I love that trope. Can I... ask more about that? Or sources where I can read about it, if there are any?

so the strength and also the one fault of my program is that it focuses very heavily on original texts in the original language and less so on secondary scholarly literature, with the result that vergil seminar was me reading the entire thing in latin and just having tons of thoughts prompted by that. so i don’t have many sources that aren’t just my response to vergil.

this is the footnote about turnus that ended up in my aeneid paper (which really revolved around aeneas, and i didn’t let myself talk about turnus because that would need to be a whole other paper):

[Aeneas] knows he is an epic hero and fated to act out an epic hero’s arc, and he knows he cannot do anything to stop it, though he might sometimes try.*

*As opposed to Turnus, whose tragedy is that he wrongly thinks he is an epic hero. Molyviati-Toptsi’s reading of vita indignata as implying that Turnus “considers the circumstances in which death occurs unfair of his dignitas” and thus resents dying then takes on an additional meaning (166): he thought, as an epic hero, he was supposed to at least kill his foe, like Achilles, before himself being killed. Turnus suffers throughout the poem from incorrectly imagining himself as Achilles, unaware in Aeneid 9 that his attack on the Trojan camp more closely parallels Hector’s attack on the Greek camp in Iliad 8 and 12 than any action of Achilles. He has thought of himself as the Achilles of the scenario, the epic hero, and thus considers it his right and fate to kill Aeneas and take back his seized woman, if not to survive the war. Turnus is a poor reader of the Iliad in contrast to Aeneas, who had experienced it and knows it intimately, and he has not read the Aeneid and does not know who its protagonist and hero is.

Molyviati-Toptsi is: Molyviati-Toptsi, Ourania. “Narrative Sequence and Closure in Aeneid, XII, 931-952.” L'Antiquité Classique, vol. 69, 2000, pp 165-177.

[masculinepeacock]

"Homer lets us each make our own Helen; and so she is immortal."

Ursula K. Le Guin, Papa H

[animentality]

[headspace-hotel]

It was gut-wrenching when I realized that many people alive today have never seen a truly mature tree up close.

In the Eastern USA, only tiny remnants of old-growth forest remain; all the rest, over 99%, was clear-cut within the last 100-150 years.

Most tree species here have a lifespan of 300-500 years—likely longer, since extant examples of truly old trees are so rare, there is limited ability to study them. In a suburban environment, almost all of the trees you see around you are mere saplings. A 50 year old oak tree is a youth only beginning its life.

The forest where I work is 100 years old; it was clear cut around 1920. It is still so young.

When I dig into the ground there, there is a layer about an inch thick of rich, plush, moist, fragrant topsoil, packed with mycelium and light and soft as a foam mattress. Underneath that the ground becomes hard and chalky in color, with a mineral odor.

It takes 100 years to build an inch of topsoil.

That topsoil, that marvelous, rich, living substance, took 100 years to build.

I am sorry your textbooks lied to you. Do you remember pictures in diagrams of soil layers, with a six-inch topsoil layer and a few feet of subsoil above bedrock?

That's not true anymore. If you are not an "outdoorsy" person that hikes off trail in forests regularly, it is likely that you have never touched true topsoil. The soil underlying lawns is depleted, compacted garbage with hardly any life in it. It seems more similar to rocks than soil to me now.

You see, tilling the soil and repeatedly disturbing it for agriculture destroys the topsoil layer, and there is no healthy plant community to regenerate it.

The North American prairies used to hold layers of topsoil more than eight or nine feet deep. That was a huge carbon sink, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it underground.

Then European colonists settled the prairie and tried to drive the bison to extinction as part of the plan to drive Native Americans to extinction, and plowed up that topsoil...and the results were devastating. You might recall being taught about the Dust Bowl. Disrupting that incredible topsoil layer held in place by 12-foot-tall prairie grasses and over 100 different wildflower species caused the nation to be engulfed in horrific dirt storms that turned the sky black and had people hundreds of miles away coughing up clods of mud and sweeping thick drifts of dirt out of their homes.

But plowing is fundamental to agricultural civilizations at their very origins! you might say.

Where did those early civilizations live? River valleys.

Why river valleys? They're fertile because of seasonal flooding that deposits rich silt that can then be planted in.

And where does that silt come from?

Well, a huge river is created by smaller rivers coming together, which is created by smaller creeks coming together, which have their origins in the mountains and uplands, which are no good for farming but often covered in rich, dense forests.

The forests create the rich soil that makes agriculture possible. An ancient forest is so powerful, it brings life to civilizations and communities hundreds of miles away.

You may have heard that cattle farming is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. A huge chunk of that is just the conversion of an existing forest or grassland to pasture land. Robust plant communities like forests, wetlands, and grasslands are carbon sinks, storing carbon and removing it from the atmosphere. The destruction of these environments is a direct source of carbon emissions.

All is not lost. Nature knows how to regenerate herself after devastating events; she's done so countless times before, and forests are not static places anyway. They are in a constant state of regrowth and change. Human caretakers have been able to manage ancient forests for thousands of years. It is colonialism and the ideology of profit and greed that is so destructive, not human presence.

Preserve the old growth forests of the present, yes, but it is even more vital to protect the old growth forests of the future.

[kijiboop]

@headspace-hotel thank you for your many posts about conservation. It’s because of following you that I’ve started to look at gardening, land management and resource preservation differently. When someone says “buy this and we’ll plant a tree!” I say “what kind of tree? Where are you planting it? Is it being supported after planting or are you just leaving it there?”

[headspace-hotel]

^usually the "we plant trees when you Buy Product" is just, like, a description of how the paper industry works.

Wood pulp used for paper is grown in huge monoculture tree farms that are harvested to be turned into pulp with the trees are like, 15-20 years old.

A company that claims to plant a new tree for every tree cut down isn't doing shit.

[ace-disgrace-on-the-case]

Someday, there will be old growth again. Old Growth, with creaking bones and wizened bark. Old, in the way so many of our myths begin long ago. I’m sure of it. We can have that world again.

We will never live to see it. Nor will our children. But this planet, these forests, are seeds worth planting.

This is what I mean when I say conservation. To preserve, and to heal, what we have damaged. It is difficult. But we must. So that one day trees thicker than you are tall can tower over native plant life, gracefully watching over wetland, meadow, plain—anything and everything—

And be Old again.

[headspace-hotel]

AND THERE WAS A CRACK IN THE WALLS OF MY PRISON 👏 AND 👏THROUGH 👏 IT 👏 I 👏 SAW 👏 A 👏 TREE 👏

[noneedtofearorhope]

for context, for people who don’t feel like doing the math, when they say a 50 year old tree is but a sapling, for a 300 year lifespan that’s equivalent to a 13 year old human (assuming an 80 year lifespan). if tree lifespans are 500 years, the 50 y/o trees are actually equivalent to 8 year olds. it only becomes more drastic when you account for the likelikhood that tree lifespans might be even longer.

and about the soil, here are some pics of soil scientist jerry glover next to some roots.

[catchymemes]

[finelythreadedsky]

i love apotheosis medea stuff but how do you read that she brings her children with her? that sounds like a really interesting way to read it. also HOW did you read all of the aeneid in latin, i've got to read seven books this summer for school and it is really very overwhelming

i talked about it a little here, basically it’s me superimposing demeter and demophon from the homeric hymn to demeter onto medea. with demophon demeter is essentially destroying the mortal part of the child, in a process that approximates death and is only different from death in the slightest way, so that she can make him divine. and demophon’s lineage is fully mortal to begin with. medea herself is not really mortal (her paternal grandparents are helios and persis the oceanid and her mother is also an oceanid, which means her lineage is all titan) and jason is a mortal but descended (more distantly) from aeolus and hermes, so their kids are more than half-divine and less than half-mortal (precisely 62.5% divine). it should be a lot easier for them to apotheosize than demophon.

strictly speaking it doesn’t quite work with euripides’s text, which is pretty clear that she is killing them and also, as @judiejodia pointed out, has her stabbing them, when the way you kill the mortal part of a person to make them immortal is usually through either fire or the river styx.

i think i’m also influenced by marie christine, a musical adaptation of medea set in the 1890s, which has the medea figure sing this to her children just before she leads them offstage to kill them: 

Your grandfather is the sun, But your mother is a woman Who passes on to you An all too human heart. I will love you Too much and more. I will hold you As close as I can. I will keep you From hunger and need. I’ll come in a chariot With gold winged steed And take you on up to the grandfather sun. We’ll live forever And ever. I will love you Til forever is done.

and sure, in the show she’s lying to them to calm them and comfort herself (within the show she definitely does kill them), but what if she wasn’t???

and god yeah the aeneid is overwhelming. it is so much!!! there is so much in it!!! last fall i took a whole seminar on it that’s designed to be half of a student’s entire courseload for that semester. we were assigned to read the whole aeneid and nothing but the aeneid in latin, september through december, one book a week, with some (but really not that much) secondary literature to fuel our discussions when we met as a class once a week. it was a lot but such a valuable experience to really look at the work as a whole and at every part of it. also my latin got SO much better over the course of that one semester. i think by the end i was at the point where i was able to sightread a hundred lines in an hour with full comprehension (minus distractions and tangents. theoretically i could have read all of book 12 in ten hours but it probably actually took me almost twice that because i kept also having thoughts about the latin i was reading). most weeks i probably spent about 16-20 hours on the aeneid, plus four hours of class time.

the whole thing was possible because 1) i had outside-imposed deadlines, 2) i love the aeneid and have many many thoughts about it, 3) i have way too much of a very specific type of anxiety to show up at class without having done the reading, 4) i don’t have enough confidence in my language skills to sight-translate passages i was meant to have read if they show up on an exam or if i’m called on in class, 5) campus culture (more specifically the classics department culture) says this is just how we do things for some godforsaken reason