The Bird Place That Was is redeeming itself a bit more today.

The Bird Place That Was is redeeming itself a bit more today.

here's a fun parchment fact for you re: reusing a surface: sheepskin was often used for legal documents because it's hard to scrape out a word and rewrite without it being obviously damaged, unlike good quality calfskin where it can be undetectable that something has been altered

this has a lot of potential for fiction tbh because you could have the success of a crime hinging on whether a particular charter was written on sheep or calfskin, and therefore impress all your readers with your knowledge of the relative qualities of different types of parchment

Your knowledge on parchment is truly some of the most useful information I've ever absorbed about the middle ages. I'm writing a medieval fantasy novel where the main characters are gathering information to make a compendium of sorts so there's a lot of writing and craft involved. I'm glad I know to do research on medieval writing practices, I wouldn't have thought to check that before!

lmao i'm glad my yelling is hopefully improving the quality of future historical and fantasy novels, even if only in regards to their codicology 😆

Being on your phone in bed at home during your free time: this sucks I'm wasting my life away what am I doing

Being on your phone at work:

what the fuck

#it’s NOT inexplicable#it’s bc someone based it on the unicode 6 yellow heart#which is colorless but shaded with halftone dots#and someone interpreted that like stubble#and drew this#which is SO FUCKING FUNNY via @animusbell

you gotta see it tho

list of mammals that are bugs

1. jerboa.

list of bugs that are mammals

1. acorn weevil

(source)

They trade places for a day like the prince and the pauper

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

Might I add:

The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child

The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship

The adventures of a space roomba

Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)

I don’t know a snappy description but the my nemesis cynthia story certainly lives in my head

hilariously, these are almost all in my fic tag. so, a compiled list from the notes (and some extras):

I am in love with you /p

What about the one with the princess locked in a tower learning to become a wizard? That’s lived in my mind for years and I haven’t seen it in a long time

Oh, love that story, adding it to the list: 20. Princess Talia and adding a few more contenders 21. Thyme 22. The Monster under the Bed 23. A Meaningful Death 24. Humans are unstoppable…until they aren’t 25. The Monster under the Fridge 26. Antler Guy 27. Cleric slamming healing spells

Adding a few more I remembered:  28. The Frog and the Scorpion 29. HSTHETE 30. The First Witch in the World 31. Imagine that Oceans were replaced by Forests  32. A Faerie taking a Name  33. The Dragon on the Farm  34. Synovus & Menace  35. Raising the Anti-Christ  36. Aliens vs. Flora & Fauna of Earth (pretty sure there are even more additions to the original post but I had this one saved)  37. Doctors without Borders…in Space!  38. The Villain-Wrangler  39. The Last Contact  40. The 100 Parent-Point Children  41. And the Heavens Wept  42. The Night Gentleman  43. The Serpent God and their Priestess 

44. No One Showed Up for the Last Storytime

I am once again thinking about digging holes

It's so fucked up that digging a bunch of holes works so well at reversing desertification

I hate that so much discourse into fighting climate change is talking about bioenginerring a special kind of seaweed that removes microplastics or whatever other venture-capital-viable startup idea when we have known for forever about shit like digging crescent shaped holes to catch rainwater and turning barren land hospitable

Reading a book about slavery in the middle-ages, and as the author sorts through different source materials from different eras, I am starting to understand why so many completely fantastical accounts of "faraway lands" went without as much as a shrug. The world is such a weird place that you can either refuse to believe any of it or just go "yeah that might as well happen" and carry on with your day.

There was this 10th century arab traveller who wrote into an account that the fine trade furs come from a land where the night only lasts one hour in the summer and the sun doesn't rise at all in the winter, people use dogs to travel, and where children have white hair. I don't think I'd believe something like that either if I didn't live here.

The last time we were on a long flight, my wife and I invented a game we call "Little Guy."

You start a game of Little Guy by saying, "I'm gonna hand you a little guy." The little guy is some kind of baby animal you are imagining. "Oh," she might say in response, "Okay," and hold out her hands for it. I will then mime handing her the animal. This provides some clues as to the little guy's size, weight, and general ungainliness.

She then gets to ask questions about what kind of little guy this is, BUT NO QUESTIONS ABOUT HIS ACTUAL APPEARANCE OR SPECIES ARE ALLOWED. Qualitative questions, or questions about his behavior, are the only ones permitted. She can ask "Is he soft?" or "Does he seem nervous about being held?" or "If I put him in the bathtub, does he seem okay with that?" or "Would he like a lil grape?" or "Is he the sort of little fellow who would wear a vest in a children's book?" but not "Does he have fur," "Is he a reptile," "Is he from Asia," etc. Some questions are in a grey area so you have to follow your heart, but the point is not to identify the animal as fast as possible: the point is to guess the animal purely based on vibes + how he would act if he were in your living room right now.

And I'm not limited to yes or no answers! If she asks, "Would it feel appropriate to see this little guy in a propeller hat?" I can reply, "Oh no, he has a gravity to him. A bowler hat would be a more appropriate hat." Or if she asks, "Does this little guy have protagonist energy?" I can say something like, "he probably wouldn't be the main character in a children's cartoon. He'd probably be the main character's ditzy best friend who's always eating sandwiches, or something."

We're big Twenty Questions to kill time in a waiting room people, but Little Guy is more about the journey than the destination. It's got a different kind of sauce that's nice if "killing time" and "lowering anxiety" need to happen hand in hand.

my absolute favourite thing about the kirk and spock dynamic is that the whole time you’re watching the show spock is gaslighting you into thinking that kirk is this loose canon and spock is paragon of logic keeping his captain on the straight and narrow when its very clearly the other way round. aside from the being turned on by everyone and fighting like an old-timey boxer…. kirk is just like.. quite a logical, stable guy. like yeah he rules with his emotions but he’s rarely reckless or erratic, even in situations of immense pressure he’s always calm and measured. sure kirk is unhinged and insane, but we knew that right off the bat. spock on the other hand tries to hide how insanely balls to the walls crazy he is by standing next to jim and hiding all his derangement with logic. i think the reason bones beefs with spock so much because he is the only one who has noticed that spock is an absolutely unhinged individual. (jim is too busy doodling <3 mr jim spock <3 all over his briefings to notice)

#kirk is like bones why did you pack the romeo and juliet death faking drug for mr. spock's wedding#and bones is like jim. it's spock. i packed every drug (via @maculategiraffe)

Absolutely wild that this is presented as something the drug companies are doing and not a law that the Biden admin passed.

The only reason they're doing this is that Biden threatened to seize their drug patents.