dressesandalchemy

[dressesandalchemy]

I know this is a tiny part of the wider problems born of diet culture, fatphobia, classicism, and racism but like god the idea that "healthy" food must inherently taste bad has completely ruined us as a society.

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Be the reason people still believe in good intentions, genuine energy, and gorgeous hearts of gold.

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I must not mock Gen Alpha. Mocking Gen Alpha is the mind killer. Mocking Gen Alpha is the little-death that brings total generational solidarity obliteration. I will engage with Gen Alpha lovingly. I will permit them to be cringe. And when they grow up I will turn my eye to their accomplishments. Where mocking has gone there will be nothing. Only generational solidarity remains

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So I've been lurking on AO3 and most of the modern AUs of Iliad characters I've seen have made Helen a model or something; which to be fair has a clear basis in the myth...

... but Helen is a very skilled weaver, so I put it to you that in a Modern AU she should be some sort of terrifying engineer, or possibly work for NASA, its only right.

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I can’t afford another bond with the wrong soul.

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Tarot cards by Charles Souvrard

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Be the person Uncle Iroh knows you can be

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In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll noted that every animal exists in its own unique perceptual world — a smorgasbord of sights, smells, sounds and textures that it can sense but that other species might not. These stimuli defined what von Uexküll called the Umwelt — an animal’s bespoke sliver of reality. A tick’s Umwelt is limited to the touch of hair, the odor that emanates from skin and the heat of warm blood. A human’s Umwelt is far wider but doesn’t include the electric fields that sharks and platypuses are privy to, the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes and vampire bats track or the ultraviolet light that most sighted animals can see.

The Umwelt concept is one of the most profound and beautiful in biology. It tells us that the all-encompassing nature of our subjective experience is an illusion, and that we sense just a small fraction of what there is to sense. It hints at flickers of the magnificent in the mundane, and the extraordinary in the ordinary. And it is almost antidramatic: It reveals that frogs, snakes, ticks and other animals can be doing extraordinary things even when they seem to be doing nothing at all.

~ Ed Yong, NY Times Opinion, 6-21-22

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Hey weird question but what happens if you put two reasonably likeable anthropologists of wildly different cultures together in the same room? Do they study each other? CAN they? Is it like an infinite conversational feedback loop? I'm imagining two dogs eternally sniffing each others butts at the park

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knitting tutorial made by a twenty-something knitting influencer: 18 min long, 12 of those minutes being the intro and a sponsor plug, they show the first few steps of the tutorial at the slowest speed known to man, they show the most important steps at a neck-break speed, they stop every five seconds to talk about what they just did, 40,000 comments filled with questions ranging from insightful to “how do i knit”, filmed with a camera that costs more than a car, the tutorial is incorrect.

knitting tutorial made by a seventy-something grandmother: two min long, filmed 17 years ago, shows you what you want with the skilled patient hands of a beloved deity, made with the world’s shittiest camera, the best video on the fucking internet, four comments and 30 views, you lose the video and never find it again.

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Now that I'm working in the anthropology department and we're teaching human evolution, I wonder how many anthropologists looking for ancient hominids must have found modern human remains instead. You didn't find a fossil of human evolution... but you did find the remains of a person. Isn't that meaningful, too? And also... they are so similar to us, that it's not unlikely that so many remains that could have been key to understanding human evolution have been misidentified as just humans (which raises the question "weren't they just human" but I digress)

There's an interesting story about Sahelanthropus (a hominid similar to chimpanzees who walked upright about 6 millions ago in modern Chad). When it was discovered, the remains presented wear and tear from wind and sun exposure, which was wierd because they were found buried. It was then the anthropologist noticed it was buried with its head facing towards Mecca, like in proper Muslim burial practice. Muslim nomads must have found the remains of Sahelanthropus, they would have thought it was a human, and decided to give it a proper burial, even if they didn't know its story or who was it life, they thought those bones deserved to rest.

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I was about to be irritated at a shitty "kids' education" website on 1770s clothing but then I learned that there's a staymaker buried at King's Chapel and now I'm just delighted to know the gravesite of a clothing worker from that era and I want to take him flowers

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tiktok is such an awful app, it's almost designed to feed you misinformation and expose you to insane discourse. unlike beloved tumblr, the app that feeds me misinformation and exposes me to insane discourse

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Yes I love when you get all anthropological.

There is a ruleset for social interactions and complex roleplaying in D&D. It's just observed and taught orally. You can tell this external ruleset exists because, most of the time, a new (adult) player has to be taught how to pretend, and then how to roleplay.

The way someone new learns how to play- finding the possible ways to interact with the fictional space, understanding the edges of the play area- is an agreed-upon concept that the players opt into when they sit down around a table together. Complex roleplaying is an additional layer on top of the shared game, and it's usually negotiated by playing with someone until you find the mutual ground you share.

anyway

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imagine: you are chilling in front you your house getting high. along comes an old family friend who you last saw when you were six, you are now in your 50s. after a brief convo where he is kind of a dick to you, he’s like damn you’ve changed :/. and your like yeah bestie it’s been five decades why the fuck are you here. he leaves. later that night a shit ton of people show up and trash your house. just throw and absolute rager. halfway through the family friend from earlier shows up. he announces in full earshot of everyone that he wants you to come with him to rob a bank. you of course say wtf??? one of the people who broke into your house calls you a pussy. another person shoves you a contract which declares if you get shot robbing the bank they will not pay for your funeral. you pass out. when you wake up you find the contract on your table and your house almost completely back to normal. you stare at the contract for a moment and decide, fuck it this is just as a good a midlife crisis than anything.

this is what happened to bilbo baggins

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Spending this afternoon doing a timeline of the development of electric lighting, for novel research purposes, and I just have to say that it is absolute grade A bullshit that Thomas Edison gets any credit as 'the inventor of the electric light bulb', because no, absolutely the fuck not

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