I am a little high but what if people proposed with beautiful, intricate knives. Ladies would gather around the table and be like “guess what finally happened!!” And pull this beautiful, intricate dagger out of her purse and all the other ladies would gasp and congratulate her

"Babe, in a world where it statistically likely that harm will come to you at the hands of your male partner, I propose with this knife as a symbol that I want you to always be protected. Even if you have to protect yourself from me.”

OR

“Babe, the vikings had it right [see below]. So for you to be prepared, I propose with this knife.”

Why Everything You Know About Vikings Is A Lie

True story - There are historical accounts (well, there’s at least one historical account) in which English people whine about how the Norse men bathe so often they’re able to seduce the local women away from their husbands.

^^^ Yep. Turns out the women were way more into the hot well groomed muscular dudes who liked to smell nice.

*Hot, well groomed men who liked to smell nice and knew their way around sharp objects.

“I just don’t know why you couldn’t marry a local boy sweetie.” 

“What can I say dad, Hjalmar bathes regularly, smells nice, has shoulders, can wield a sword and can wield his sword ifyaknowwhatImean, and when he comes back from raids likes to shower me in rare gifts from overseas. Look at this necklace! The amber beads came from the lands of the Rus! Also, he’s teaching me how to shoot a bow and use a spear because he thinks it might be nice if I could go on raids too someday.”

A Refined Ant With Expensive Taste Attempts to Steal a Loose Diamond From Wholesaler’s Desk

fucking superb you funky little felon

Alternately

Scott Lang enlists ants to help test the security products Ex Cons sells

fun fact: The last supper would have been more like this, according to tradition:

so casual i love it

a sleepover with jc and the boys

Paul: Judas truth or dare??

Judas: dare

Paul: okay lmao I dare u to kiss JC

Jesus: ok your turn peter truth or dare

Peter: truth

Jesus: would you ever betray me peter

Peter:

Jesus:

(a few days later)

Peter: *betrays Jesus*

Jesus:

Jesus: *returns*

Peter: “Jesus… you’re back ?”

Jesus:

this post gets more absurd every time it crosses my dash

Another fun fact:

The Last Supper was actually a Passover Seder which means by the time they broke the food out, these guys were likely already drunk out of their minds.

Drunk Jesus: guys take this bread

Drunk Jesus: it’s me

Drunk Jesus: guys look at this wine lol

Drunk Jesus: it’s my blood

Everybody: *is off the shits laughing*

There are two types of people in the world. People who are alive, and people who are dead. And i intend to make you the third type of person.

- Victor Frankenstein, addressing his monster before bringing him to life

Fun fact y’all, the reason why so many Ancient Greek and Roman statues have tiny genitalia was because large ones were associated with stupidity, ugliness, and foolishness. Smaller penises meant rationality, wisdom, and authority. If you look for ancient statues of well-known horny and mischievous figures like Pan, they have hella large dicks.

i’m stupid and my meat is huge

himbos

A jock in an ancient Grecian locker room: lol look at this dudes tiny meat

The guy whose about to invent the rumor that a tiny penis makes you smart: oh you havent heard?

Unpopular opinion: Being intelligent isn’t an excuse for being unkind.

Pretentious asshole is OUT! Pretentious Sweetheart is IN! Wearing dapper clothes and holding the door open for others makes you feel COOL AS H*CK! Glance up from your hefty books to give a stranger a smile!! Quote literature to inspire others! Be presumptuous in the way that you presume that everyone needs their day to be a little brighter!!!

Administration showed us this tweet on day one of grad school and boy did it hit home

My students are taking a midterm. And I’m shaking with laughter. Fuck. Too real. This post ruined my illusion of being a stoic teacher proctoring an exam.

not to take a joke post seriously but this is literally the ideal period humor because

1.) no gendered language

2.) no assumption that people only use tampons (weirdly prevalent??? in discussions about periods)

3.) Thor is here and Thor makes everything better 

Egypt, 3,000 BCE; “Hey if you let electric eels shock you it helps with pain.”

The Modern Era, 5,000 years later; “Hey wait, we can use electricity to interrupt nerve signals and relieve pain.”

The ghosts of two ancient Egyptian doctors, giving each other a high five of vindication; “Took ‘em long enough.”

Also The Modern Era, 5000 years later; “We don’t need science to ease pain. I got homeopathy and essential oils.”

The ghosts of two ancient Egyptian doctors; “Oh my Gods, Karen, do some research.”

Electric eels don’t live in Egypt though

They live in South America

My bad, electric catfish, got ‘em mixed up.

it is a much funnier mental image for it to be this funky chunky fish

Egyptian doctors, 3,000 BCE, pointing to a pool with one of these bois in it. “Yeah go stand in there and your arthritis’ll feel better.”

Ancient Egyptian with bad knees; “You’re shitting me, right.”

Ancient Egyptian doctors; “Did we fucking stutter.”

[This is a long story, for the TL;DR scroll all the way down.]

So I’d never heard of this before, and I decided to see if I could find anything concrete about this. After some digging I found two papers from a seemingly legitimate source on this subject. These come from the Academia profile of one Rosalind Park M.A., B.Sc., who has authored a good deal of papers on astronomy in Greco-Roman Egypt. The one that’s most pertinent to this alleged use of live electric catfish in Egyptian medicine as pain treatment is “Ancient Egyptian Headaches: Ichthyo- or Electrotherapy?”

In her abstract she starts by saying that she’s going to speculate whether or not certain treatments in Egyptian medical papyri are to be taken as early forms of electrotherapy. She does this by comparing these treatments to later treatments in Greco-Roman times, looking at existing translations and suggesting possible new translations. 

The treatment she gives in this paper is Ebers 250:

My translation of this treatment is as follows:

The most important words for this discussion are nar, catfish, snwx, to boil/to burn/to fry, and Hr mrHt, in oil.

Ebers 250 is a remedy for disease(s) in the side of the head, which Park takes to be migraine. That’s a reasonable assumption, considering “side of the head” is specificied here. However, she finds it highly improbable that the Egyptian physician would sit down and fry up an entire head of catfish as a treatment. Instead, she suggests that the translation should be read differently. 

Her argument is that snwx should not be read as a verb, “fried”, but rather as an adjective, “frying”. Though she does say that we can only make guesses as to how the Egyptians viewed the concept of nature’s electricity, she then states that snwx might be “the best-fit technical word the Egyptians could come up with for the related concepts of ‘electrophysiology’.” (2007: 4) Her reasoning behind seems to in part hinge on the Arabic word ra’ad, which fishermen nowadays use to describe this fish, and which means “thunderstorm” or “lightning”, and that a different electrically charged fish native to Egypt is allegedly used as a hieroglyph in the word for “thunderstorm”, hAhAty, which I am unable to locate.

Park then goes on to suggest the following amended translation and rewording:

In her view, the catfish needs to be alive and was to be applied to the head of the sick person in a form of proto-electrotherapy. 

Straight off the bat there are two major problems with her translation and subsequent conclusion. The rewording is not the biggest issue - in general, it’s not frowned upon to take liberties with a translation in order to attain a more legible result, though I personally think in medical translations it’s for the best to stay as close to the source material as possible. However, in her reworded translation Park completely emits the words “in oil”, which make up half of the treatment, thus changing the entire contents of the remedy.

That’s a massive red flag. If I put “in oil” back in, while taking her interpretation of snwx as an adjective into account, I get this:

That’s a lot more ambiguous still than her “reworded” translation with half the remedy missing. 

The other glaring problem with this is the phrase “[snwx is] the best-fit technical word the Egyptians could come up with for the related concepts of ‘electrophysiology’.”

“Frying” to refer to the concept of electricity or electrophysiology is an English idiom, and there is absolutely no evidence the Egyptian language made use of a similar idiom. Park’s additional suggestion that we need to consider the words Arab fishermen use to describe this fish is extremely tenuous. I could accept the words “numbing” or “stinging” as a possible technical fit, but I need a hell of a lot more evidence to accept “frying”.  

I reject Park’s conclusion that the verb snwx in Ebers 250 should be read as an adjective, and therefore points to the possible existence of a type of proto-electrotherapy. She claims her rewording is a “more lucid” interpretation of this remedy, citing that it seems improbable a physician would fry up a fish head to cure migraines. Considering that the Ebers Papyrus lists a remedy for trouble passing urine that requires cooking/frying a document in oil and rubbing the stomach with it for a number of days, it doesn’t sound all that improbable to me. I’m also very opposed to attempts at qualifying Egyptian remedies by terms such as “lucid”, because they bypass the Egyptian point of view and engage in modern bias.  

I’m currently unable to find any  remedies in the medical papyri that use live, electric catfish in an unambiguous manner that could be said to be a form of proto-electrotherapy. Greco-Roman sources do seem to be using live electric catfish, but Greco-Roman Egypt is a whole different ballgame from Egypt-5000-years-ago. There are recipies that involve catfish, but these specify a particular part of the catfish to be used. When a medical papyrus gives a part of an animal to use, they mean only that part. When they write “rub the balls of a black ass against the belly”, they certainly don’t mean “lift up the entire live donkey and hold him dick-first against the patient”. 

TL;DR: There is, to my knowledge, no evidence Pharaonic Egyptian physicians from 3000 BC onward used live electric catfish to treat afflictions such as migraine, gout or arthritis. There may be some evidence that Greco-Roman era physicians did use live electrically charged fish in their medicinal administrations, but this isn’t enough to indicate a one-on-one “they did it too” connection. And if you are going to suggest a new translation that fundamentally changes the content of a text, please remember to use all the important words. 

Just because I’m a nerd, and I’ve discussed this with @rudjedet after I couldn’t give up on whatever the hell hAhAty was, I did some digging on my own.

First off, the reason Sonja and then myself had such a hard time tracking down hAhAty was because Park had not used the correct transliteration: using the h (normal h) instead of X (h with a line under it). Therefore, hAhAty should read XAXAty and has the translation of ‘tempest’, which is congruent with Park’s assertions.

However, when it comes to Park’s assertions that the ra’ad fish is yet another ‘electric fish’ in the Nile that could perform this task I have some serious reservations. 

For a start let’s name the fish that Gardiner transliterates as XAt, and calls Oxyrhynchus. For Egyptians this was the Medjed fish; the fish that was supposed to have eaten the penis of Osiris when Seth cut him up and chucked his body in various parts of the country. It’s associated with ‘bad things’ metaphorically like ‘corpse’ and ‘widow’ as it’s the fish related to the Osirion myth. The Egyptians liked their cultural throwbacks in word design! In modern terms, we know this fish as Mormyridae, or ‘Elephant fish’, because it has a little ‘trunk’. This fish does have a very weak electric current which it uses to sense its surroundings in turbulent waters (Nile cataracts). From what I can tell it’s not strong enough to do anything to a human, let alone cure a headache if applied directly to the head. 

So she can argue the toss about it being ‘electricity’ but the elephant fish is used in so many other words that have nothing to do with ‘lightning’ that the metaphor would need modern knowledge of how thunderstorms work to actually fulfil its purpose. The only reason that fish is used in the word for ‘thunderstorm’ is that the elephant fish and thunderstorms are associated with Seth (he fed a penis to that fish, and he also was said to cause storms), and therefore it’s a cultural metaphor to link ‘storms’ with Seth and not a case of ‘this fish has an electric current’. The entire premise of the paper is on very shaky ground as it is, and it’s only taken Sonja and I some brief research to prove it entirely unfounded and full of modern bias that distorts the Egyptian record to show something that it does not. 

Hi we’re Egyptologists on Tumblr and when we read a bad paper we sink our teeth into it. 

Going back to the actual contents of Ebers 250 real quick, and how Park thinks the original translation is nonsensical because who on earth applies a fried catfish to the head in order to cure a migraine - I just realised that we probably should not look at the catfish as the main ingredient, but at the oil.

I also mentioned the Ebers remedy for a person who has trouble passing urine, which is cooking/warming a document in oil and rubbing it into the belly. Now, in both cases (and many, many more Egyptian remedies), the original phrasing is ambiguous for us modern people. But considering the nature of Egyptian medicine, which was empirical, with a good portion of its treatments being manually therapeutical, I’d propose a slightly different reading of either treatment.

To wit, it’s not the catfish head that should be applied to the head, or the document to the belly, but the oil in which either has been cooked.

Then it makes perfect sense even to us, and Park needn’t worry about it not being “lucid” enough to cook a catfish to cure migraines. The catfish (or the document) is the ingredient that passes its effectiveness onto the oil (the ingredients chosen for recipes like this are almost always metaphorical or religious), but it is the oil itself with which the ailment is treated. The original word used for “apply” is “gs”, which can also be translated as “annoint” or “smear”. Manual massage with oil imbibed with an ingredient that has a specific religious connotation is a fair interpretation of the original remedy, and one that could have had an effect. Perhaps not in the case of migraines, but tension headaches, or upset guts, might have found relief from a massage with (warm) oil, regardless of what had been cooked in that oil beforehand.

This is also supported by many other recipes in which parts of the body are massaged by ointments and unguents in order to effectuate a cure. I think that’s a far more reasonable explanation than electrotherapy-by-fish.

And this is also why it’s so important to not leave entire ingredients out of a translation.

This is fascinating. I was taught the ‘Egyptians used electric catfish for primitive electro-therapy’ thing in school as fact, and tbh this is even cooler.

.

This is the most encouraging thing I’ve ever seen

On the Connor treatment hatred

Me protecting this precious movie from haters. SPOILERS AHEAD

Ok I too think killing John was not the best angle they could have taken (though I still can’t think of a better one), I too got the “Force awakens” whiplash (worst cause I refrained from all marketing materials so I got the full effect RIGHT IN the cinema ouch my neck and heart). But after thinking on it I realized, UNLIKE FORCE AWAKENS, they actually are honoring Sarah AND John Connor’s legacy even more with Terminator Dark Fate. — last spoiler warning —

See, Terminator 2 wasn’t just about saving John Connor from yet another terminator sent from the future. John, Sarah and Nice!T-800 also actively tried to ERASE Skynet from existence, they learnt the move from Skynet itself. While on the run, JOHN, most impressively, pushed them all to mess with Cyberdyne and convinced Skynet’s founding creator to stop and destroy all that could develop into Skynet, effectively aborting it before it got sentient. Thing is, even with the sad sacrifice of Nice!T-800 so nothing could be reverse engineered into Skynet, when T2 ended John and Sarah Connor got no real confirmation that they succeeded, that they really did save the world from the apocalypse of Judgement Day on August 29th 1997. They can only wait and live till then to see. Sarah was hopeful for any future though cause she witnessed Nice!T-800 choose humanity. Terminator Dark Fate confirms it. Yes, John and Sarah Connor WON. They did stop Skynet’s ENTIRE post-apocalyptic EXISTENCE. That also means John Connor’s post-apocalyptic leadership never happens BUT, life wouldn’t have continued in peace beyond 1997 and Dani Ramos (and Grace) wouldn’t even HAVE been born if John had not successfully CHANGED HIS FATE. Sarah Connor recognizes they saved 3 billion lives. But she still spends the majority of Terminator Dark Fate asking the same question as us audience: So what’s the point? What’s the point of it all if John died but Judgement Day still comes? She ran on hatred and revenge for 27 years, killing two terminators, for John. Sarah didn’t even know she saved Dani Ramos, and thus the new future, twice, even before the events of Terminator Dark Fate started. Remember how small Sarah looked sitting on that tree branch? Like us she thought her and John were just fucking REPLACED by fate. Like there’s no point to her and her son’s difficult existence. “Let someone else be Mother Mary”. History is just repeating itself so, how is there is any ultimate victory, any hope?

But when Grace revealed Dani Ramos is the new future’s “John”, Sarah Connor realizes what her purpose (her new fate if she chooses) CAN BE, and she fulfills it. Sarah Connor mentored Dani Ramos. That was Terminator Dark Fate’s development to the lore: Sarah Connor, with all her decades of motherly love, anger and understanding of their world, CHOOSE TO BE THE REASON why Dani Ramos was prepared. Sarah Connor, with her determination to carry on John’s legacy, trained Dani to be the new John.

All of Sarah Connor’s suffering and struggles has galvanized her into becoming the realistic Founder of the human resistance against terminators.

Is this the best story that can be told that will further, yet still honor, Sarah and John Connor’s legacy? Maybe not, though I still can’t think of a better one. But this definitely isn’t a Force Awakens situation where they shoehorn the baton on to a new cast. They killed Grace who, second to Sarah Connor, is the lead of the film, NOT Dani Ramos. Dani may be the focus of sequels IF they do make them but she isn’t in Terminator Dark Fate. The movie literally opens and ends with Sarah Connor.

I Just Love This

“If I wasn’t everything you think I am, everything I think I am… would you still help me?”

“I’m not the man [she] thought I was. I never could be. But that’s the point. That’s the whole point. Who she thought I was is the man I want to be. Get yourself a piece of that.”

“She’s out there, she likes you, and she’s alive. Do you have the first idea how lucky you are? Do something while there’s still a chance, because that chance doesn’t last forever. Trust me, Sherlock: its gone before you know it. 

Before you know it.”

A Few Weeks Later…

Molly’s life is threatened… 

…and Sherlock looses it.

That scene where he is forced to kneel… just look at his face omg he looks SO DONE with everything (it’s hot ngl) anyway this is my fav bucky edit

Okay but turn the sound on.

i love this girl KEJSKDJSK

You forgot the best one!

This is Beebinch!!! She’s on Instagram twitter and tiktok and she does incredible work. Give her a follow you won’t regret it

It gets better!

I-fucking-CONIC

US things that I only know from the internet/tv and that i won’t believe until i’ve seen them with my own two eyes: 

can’t believe i forgot 

I can’t believe, in an industry ripe with falsehoods, you managed to list everything that actually exists