testudoaubrei-blog

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if cats had tiktok it would probably go a little something like this: "did you know making biscuits is actually a trauma response??? 🤯 running from room to room at night is actually NOT normal 😳 it's a symptom of adhd 😬 LISTEN to your body!!! phrases like 'you were just fed this morning' and 'you have dry food in your bowl' are GASLIGHTING RHETORIC !!! also that older man trying to give you brushies is literally a groomer 😒😒😒"

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This was my first year hearing both the Matthew Passion and the St John Passion in churches during Holy Week and that was something else. But I still need to do 1)Leipzig and 2) A performance where they encourage the audience to sing the Chorales.

Me: Maglor is one of the least relatable of Fëanor’s sons

Also me: *owns and plays five different instruments, has taken singing lessons and been in a choir, has a playlist for every imaginable situation, wants to visit Leipzig just for Bach related reasons*

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Listen sometimes you just know that you need to see the Matthäus-Passion in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig.

Me: Maglor is one of the least relatable of Fëanor’s sons

Also me: *owns and plays five different instruments, has taken singing lessons and been in a choir, has a playlist for every imaginable situation, wants to visit Leipzig just for Bach related reasons*

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New locked tomb fic tag just dropped: nunilingus.

#it came to me in a dream #like actually #woke up with this word in my head #the locked tomb fanfiction #the locked tomb

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the thing that people are missing about TLT—what makes it so good and so extremely affirmingly gay—is that it is layered through and through with queer desire of all kinds: Sick desire, wrong desire, desire that will never be voiced let alone fulfilled, desire that CANNOT be spoken of, desires that shouldn’t be fulfilled or run counter to social mores of the setting in ways that are alien to the reader’s own. It is So. Horny. People are horny for corpses. They’re fucking using other peoples’ bodies (without consent). They’re subtextually fucking their siblings. The core homoerotic relationship is a necro/cav relationship, which in the book’s setting, romantic or sexual necro/cav relationships are considered repulsive.

And it will never be fulfilled or consummated in the sense that most people imagine them. Nobody is getting what they want. Girls are kissing girls who are in love with someone else’s corpse. Girls are lobotomizing themselves to save other girls’ souls. Girls are spearing their hearts on iron fences and offering their souls to other girls to eat. They are both profoundly Not Getting Laid and also having intimacies and consumptions that make sucking and fucking seem about as profound as a puddle. The penetration metaphor of Naberius’ death and the bottoming metaphor of Gideon’s cannot be overstated. Someone’s arm is amputated and it’s the closest thing that book has to a sex scene.

And somehow, even though it portrays repression in some cases, it is not Repressed(TM). The girls are Jesus; the girls are reading porn rags; the girls are dying as virgins. Someone tries to fuck a hallucination that is also the ghost of the Devil and also of the Earth. The ghost of the Earth and the Devil says “Huh. One moment, I have to cross time, space, and the River beyond death” and roughly… a day later, fully possesses their body.

Sex doesn’t begin to describe it. It is sublime; it is spiritual; it is as crass and visceral and compulsive as whatever sick pornographies anybody gets off to; it is as grimy and solipsistic and subterranean as any human unconscious.

You simply could not get that in a light and happy “found family! ✨” rainbow sci-fi

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I would agree! Sadly this isn’t what most people here mean by ‘read theory’.

So many of the bad takes on here about international politics (and especially people both calling something “imperialism” that isn’t and/or denying something is “imperialist” that very much is), all you can really say is “please just read or watch the news, the actual news, not this website and not other social media shit either. Also, maybe take some time to learn the like, bare minimum about the countries involved and their histories. Read a history book, but even like, the Wikipedia page would be great. And I mean like a book about actual specific events that happened in their histories, not theory that was designed to apply to a wide range of international conflicts. I mean that you need to learn more about where these places are and their specific histories regarding their relationships with other places and their individual cultures.”

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Expanding on it and being less glib, I do think OP hits the nail on the head that a huge appeal of Big Idea Leftist Ideology to people is that it isn’t much work, or at least not much boring work. You can read theory all day without having to encounter the messy reality of the facts on the ground and account for the thousand ways they don’t align with your theory or the grand Narrative of History that it is propping up.

In this way folks on here who construct abstract narratives first and fit the facts to them are not unlike the tech bros who listen to Sam Harris podcasts and read Stephen Pinker books - there is a common preference for a neat narrative that doesn’t require detailed and difficult study to understand complex topics.

The real world is messy. Real history is messy, and contradictory, and does not follow some grand design or tidy narrative with a beginning middle and end. It is messy because people and the institutions we build are messy and because there is not actually one explanation for why we do the things we do. The best way to understand it is to embrace the complexity and mess and seeming contradictions and understand that your various theoretical frameworks are not actually The Way Things are but tools you can use to understand aspects of The Way Things Are. Marx was a smart guy, who said useful stuff, and he is most useful when taken as one guy who had some penetrating insights into how societies worked, not as the prophet who revealed the nature of reality. Also that perhaps we can use Marxist analysis to gain insights into our society without assuming it is functionally identical to Western Europe in 1870.

So many of the bad takes on here about international politics (and especially people both calling something “imperialism” that isn’t and/or denying something is “imperialist” that very much is), all you can really say is “please just read or watch the news, the actual news, not this website and not other social media shit either. Also, maybe take some time to learn the like, bare minimum about the countries involved and their histories. Read a history book, but even like, the Wikipedia page would be great. And I mean like a book about actual specific events that happened in their histories, not theory that was designed to apply to a wide range of international conflicts. I mean that you need to learn more about where these places are and their specific histories regarding their relationships with other places and their individual cultures.”

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“Read theory” is just “pray about it” for tankies.

So many of the bad takes on here about international politics (and especially people both calling something “imperialism” that isn’t and/or denying something is “imperialist” that very much is), all you can really say is “please just read or watch the news, the actual news, not this website and not other social media shit either. Also, maybe take some time to learn the like, bare minimum about the countries involved and their histories. Read a history book, but even like, the Wikipedia page would be great. And I mean like a book about actual specific events that happened in their histories, not theory that was designed to apply to a wide range of international conflicts. I mean that you need to learn more about where these places are and their specific histories regarding their relationships with other places and their individual cultures.”

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national identities were a hoax invented by Big Nineteenth Century to sell more fascism

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The specific brand of «therapy language» that’s crept into wellness and self-help culture and by extension into every piece of contemporary zillennial «self-aware» literature, is just navel-gazing by another name, and while this isn’t the hill I’m willing to die on, I’m at least going to put up a fight here.

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btw

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There is a growing body of physiological, anatomical, ethnographic, and archaeological evidence to suggest that not only did women hunt in our evolutionary past, but they may well have been better suited for such an endurance-dependent activity. We are both biological anthropologists. I (co-author Cara) specialize in the physiology of humans who live in extreme conditions, using my research to reconstruct how our ancestors may have adapted to different climates. And I (co-author Sarah) study Neanderthal and early modern human health. I also excavate at their archaeological sites. It’s not uncommon for scientists like us—who attempt to include the contributions of all individuals, regardless of sex and gender, in reconstructions of our evolutionary past—to be accused of rewriting the past to fulfill a politically correct, woke agenda. The actual evidence speaks for itself, though: Gendered labor roles did not exist in the Paleolithic era, which lasted from 3.3 million years ago until 12,000 years ago. The story is written in human bodies, now and in the past.

[...]

Our Neanderthal cousins, a group of humans who lived across Western and Central Eurasia approximately 250,000 to 40,000 years ago, formed small, highly nomadic bands. Fossil evidence shows females and males experienced the same bony traumas across their bodies—a signature of a hard life hunting deer, aurochs, and woolly mammoths. Tooth wear that results from using the front teeth as a third hand, likely in tasks like tanning hides, is equally evident across females and males. This nongendered picture should not be surprising when you imagine small-group living. Everyone needs to contribute to the tasks necessary for group survival—chiefly, producing food and shelter, and raising children. Individual mothers are not solely responsible for their children; in forager communities, the whole group contributes to child care. You might imagine this unified labor strategy then changed in early modern humans, but archaeological and anatomical evidence shows it did not. Upper Paleolithic modern humans leaving Africa and entering Europe and Asia show very few sexed differences in trauma and repetitive motion wear. One difference is more evidence of “thrower’s elbow” in males than females, though some females shared these pathologies. And this was also the time when people were innovating with hunting technologies like atlatls (spear throwers), fishing hooks and nets, and bow and arrows—alleviating some of the wear and tear hunting would take on their bodies. A recent archaeological experiment found that using atlatls decreased sex differences in the speed of spears thrown by contemporary men and women. Even in death, there are no sexed differences in how Neanderthals or modern humans buried their dead or the goods affiliated with their graves. These indicators of differential gendered social status do not arrive until agriculture, with its stratified economic system and monopolizable resources. All this evidence suggests Paleolithic women and men did not occupy differing roles or social realms.

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Imagine you’re some little evil woman sitting in Hades’ throne room when Orpheus walks in to make a deal to get Eurydice back, and Hades is like “yeah ok, just don’t look back otherwise she has to stay here” then walks out of the room. Almost immediately after hearing the conditions, Orpheus breaks his own neck so that is is physically impossible for him to turn it, and then demands that you gouge out his eyes for good measure.  Eurydice then gets really upset because she’s convinced this is a sign that Orpheus hates her and never wants to see her again, and Orpheus is completely convinced that this was a normal and logical thing to do.

You are literally the only person in the universe who recognizes this as an act of love. They both then insult you to your face for thinking this is anything other than very normal (Orpheus), or petty hatred (Eurydice).

You are Ianthe Tridentarius.

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Plot and pacing. All my favorite novels are basically plotless but the trick with that is that you have a plot that you then remove like 95% of, leaving a more natural (or disjointed or surreal) feeling series of occurrences strung together without a visible connecting thread. Or you have to be Virginia fucking Wolf.

I'm doing an experiment

Edit: Should've added smut. If smut is your top struggle and you want to or do write it, reblog and say so <3

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Rebecca could have written this while drunk.

It’s mean of Keely to gaybait me :(

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Efeso, Turquía

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For a while I assumed you meant Theophrastus’s writings on plants.

artists of classics tumblr, someone should illustrate some of the characters from theophrastus. for example there is a description of the kind of person who "is apt to keep a jackdaw as a housepet, and buy it a little ladder and make it a tiny bronze shield to hold as the bird hops up the ladder" (characters 21)