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.

I’m very in the mode of “when you have a hammer, everything is a nail” but as a historian, but…

Helen is weaving the story of the war, yes? So she could be a historian of current events, recording things as they happen (and maybe “spinning” them) for later generations

When she circles the men in the Horse with their wives’ voices, that’s just recordings from a women’s oral history archive she has

-

Aphrodite is The Most Terrifying grant agency, or possibly advisor, possible.

I love this actually! I feel like the vibe of maintaining all that complex data as its coming in is just right!

I have been thinking about this all day and I also kind of wonder if maybe Aphrodite is NOT the grant agency but like... some sort of other narrative. Like, Aphrodite in the Iliad is very much trying to fit Helen into a specific role (Helen of Troy) that Helen is loudly objecting to, and I sort of see her in this, like, dissent role over the whole story, like:

The Gods: And they were in love, and it was heroic, and it was a great story

Helen: I have learned cuneiform for the express purpose of recording all the ways you are lying.

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

Tarot cards by Charles Souvrard

Be the person Uncle Iroh knows you can be

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

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

tags by @adobe-outdesign

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.

two things i’m noticing in the notes:

1. every artist/crafter/cook agreeing that influencers in their communities also pull shit like this

2. ppl shouting out their fav old lady tutorials and being like “i would die for u diane”

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.

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

I WAS TODAY FUCKING YEARS OLD WHEN I LEARNED THAT THOMAS PAINE WAS A MASTER STAYMAKER?!?!

THE COMMON SENSE GUY. BASICALLY MADE BRAS. FOR LIKE 8 YEARS OF HIS LIFE COUNTING THE APPRENTICESHIP

imagine if you're like. a random lady in England. and you found out that the guy you bought a support garment from one time is now publishing seditious pamphlets in the colonies

things he supported: -sedition -titties

Hence this political cartoon (by his opponents) of Paine lacing Britannia into a corset

(ID in alt)

I know it's meant to be against him, but the image of him plying his trade to shape the spirit of a nation (who the cartoonist chose to have come to his place of work by choice) works for his supporters too, no pun intended.

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

No, no, no, you see on tiktok an algorithm feeds you misinformation. On Tumblr I feed myself misinformation from my charcuterie board of hand-selected unhinged mutuals.

None of that mass market junk. Only artisanal, small batch, sustainably cultivated, fair trade horseshit.

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

Yes I love when you get all anthropological.

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

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

Entering my Thomas Edison hate era

Thomas Edison: that's a nice patent for an incandescent light bulb you've got there, Mr Swan. It would be a shame if someone... stole it...

My favorite response to “that’s not a word” is “then why do you know what it means?”

Every time someone within 30 miles of me says “that’s a made up word” I am uncontrollably compelled to respond “ALL WORDS ARE MADE UP!”

Roses are red, that much is true, but violets are purple, not fucking blue.

I have been waiting for this post all my life.

They are indeed purple, But one thing you’ve missed: The concept of “purple” Didn’t always exist.

Some cultures lack names For a color, you see. Hence good old Homer And his “wine-dark sea.”

A usage so quaint, A phrasing so old, For verses of romance Is sheer fucking gold.

So roses are red. Violets once were called blue. I’m hugely pedantic But what else is new?

My friend you’re not wrong About Homer’s wine-ey sea! Colours are a matter Of cultural contingency;

Words are in flux And meanings they drift But the word purple You’ve given short shrift.

The concept of purple, My friends, is old And refers to a pigment once precious as gold.

By crushing up molluscs From the wine-dark sea You make a dye: Imperial decree

Meant that in Rome, to wear purpura was a privilege reserved

For only the emperor!

The word ‘purple’, for clothes so fancy, Entered English By the ninth century

.

Why then are voilets Not purple in song? The dye from this mollusc, known for so long

Is almost magenta; More red than blue. The concept of purple is old, and yet new.

The dye is red, So this might be true: Roses are purple And violets are blue

.

While this song makes me merry, Tyrian purple dyes many a hue From magenta to berry And a true purple too.

But fun as it is to watch this poetic race The answer is staring you right in the face: Roses are red and violets are blue Because nothing fucking rhymes with purple.

Hirple - To limp or walk awkwardly

Cirple - An old Scots word for the hindquarters of a horse

“Roses are red, violets are purple,

My boner for you has caused me to hirple.”

…

DYING. I AM DYING.

I still think that my favorite urban legend/folklore fact is that there are certain areas in New Orleans where you cannot get a taxi late at night not because it isn’t safe, but because taxi companies have had recurring problems of picking up ghosts in those areas who are not aware that they are dead and disappearing from the cab before reaching the destination and therefore stiffing the driver on the fare causing a loss for the company.

An occupational hazard of cab driving I had not previously considered

I love that the nola problem here is not “ghosts in my taxi cab,” but “ghosts are FUCKING BROKE DEAD BASTARDS & I GOT BILLS”

Horror is when ghosts get into cabs and scare drivers Magical realism is when cab companies have to develop policies to prevent ghastly fare-theft

In a book about the tsunami in Japan in 2011, the writer talked about how there was a huge increase in reports of ghostly activity. Apparently in Japan treating ghosts rudely is basically considered the stupidest thing you could possibly do. For months after the tsunami, taxi drivers would pick up a passenger only to have them give an address in one of the devastated areas. The cab driver often looked up halfway to the destination to find their fare had disappeared. Not wanting to be impolite to the person (even if they were dead) they’d drive to the address, open the door to let them out, then drive away.

Guys, it's time to drop Google.

Google isn't the only search engine in the whole internet, there are others! And we need to diversify our search engine usage or we're gonna end up where we were a decade and change ago with the Internet Explorer issue. We can't let a single brand monopolize everything! This is why Google Search can afford to suck so hard: because people use it regardless! And there are alternatives.

A little bit about search engines, there are 3 types: crawlers, which work by scraping the web and developing their own indexes; metas, which get their results from the crawler-type search engines and therefore depend entirely upon them; and mixed, those which have their own (small) index but also pull results from the crawlers.

Right now, there are a couple of independant crawlers apart from Google, Bing (from Mycrosoft) and Yandex (the Russian one): this are Mojeek and Wiby.

Supporting independant crawlers is the easiest way to fight the shittyfication of the internet.

Mojeek.com is an independant british search engine with its own growing index commited to fighting internet censorship. It's small, and therefore it's usability isn't as good as that of the Big Three, but it doesn't censor, it's fairly respectful of people's privacy, and it doesn't drown you in adds. For those old enough to remember, it's a lot like early 2000s Google: you can find what you need, but if you write "dig shelter" instead of "dog shelter", that's what it's gonna search for. That said, please try to use it and support it as much as you can before we end up entirely dependant on Google, Bing and big corps adds. [click here to go to Mojeek]

Wiby.me is a new indie project that is literally dedicated to bringing back the old-school web. It's goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites. So, for those of you who can't find any answers to technical questions beyond highschool level because Google buries them under a gazillion commercial sites and other meaningless shit, keep an eye on this project! It has a lot of potential. And, if you know of any personal websites that have great stuff but have been murdered by Google, you can go over to Wiby and submit it to their index. [click here to go to Wiby]

Aside from those, there are also meta search engines you can use to ween yourself off Google and search for random, day to day stuff.

Qwant.com is my go-to here—it has its own index and pulls from Bing, has relatively little censorship, and is fairly private. This is the one I use on my phone for everyday stuff. [click here to go to Qwant].

Historically, DuckDuckGo has always been a go-to for those who want a search engine that respects your privacy and doesn't censor. Personally, I've never been a fan, and there have been a LOT of scandals in recent years. It supposedly has its own index and pulls from Bing, much like Qwant, but I don't know. I just don't like it. Still, I've added it here for completeness' sake.

If you have Firefox Mobile browser, you can set any of these search engines as your default search engine and you can also add the others as secondary search engines and switch quicky from the navigation bar. If you don't have firefox mobile though, what are you doing with your life??? Go get it!! It is So. Much. Better. You can have add blockers and watch YouTube add free, for free! You can have reader mode and dark mode add-ons! You can have the world oh my goshhhh, drop Chrome!!

4get.ca is my last recommendation: it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn't have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it's the best for reaserch, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can. It's also very privacy conscious, so that's an other plus, and it has that late 90s / early 2000s vibe that I totally dig. [click here to go to 4get]

If you wanna learn more about the topic, you can over to the Search Engine Map [click here] which shows you a bunch of Search Engines and how they relate to each other. Or you can also go over to this one dude's personal website whose done A Lot of reaserch into the topic (way more than me) and seems to be pretty legit, if a little extra. [click here to go to digdeeper.neocities.org] Hope this infodump is useful to someone =D

PS: here's to hoping all the links work!

EDIT: eliminated the "read more". Figured there are enough mega long posts in tumblr, one more won't make no difference lol (tho the version w the read more has been reblogged already, in case you'd rather)