bandagedbouquets - Tumblr blog

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can't stop thinking about this chappell photoshoot from 2022

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Don't look away from us. Don't ignore the Oklahoman queer community. Don't ignore the indigiqueer community. Don't forget Nex Benedict and the future they should have been entitled to.

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all these videos of people in california walking around playing in flood waters noooooooooooo you don’t enter flood water for the same reason you don’t breathe in wildfire smoke: you don’t know what’s in there but trust that it’s everything it could find before it got to you

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Divination table utilising geomantic methods, made by Muhammad ibn Khutlukh al-Mawsili in Mesopotamia, 1241-1242. Description from the British Museum’s page:

Copper alloy geomantic instrument inlaid with gold and silver in four main pieces: front plate, back plate, frame, and suspensory device (kursi). Smaller parts include 20 circular dials and four semi-circular sliding arcs attached to the back of the front plate. The front plate is recessed into the frame in the manner of a picture frame. The back plate sits within the back of the frame and is held in place by two small pins. The front plate has several inscriptions and geomantic figures. The frame is inscribed with a poem and decorated with a stem and trefoil pattern on the front. The suspensory device is triangular and in the form of an elaborate vegetal pattern with an incised ring. The back plate is bordered by an inscription with a vegetal and arabesque background. The centre of the black plate has an intertwined band filled with a vegetal motif overlaid with a diamond shaped inscription.

Inscription Translation Reading from right to left:

The house of soul and life The house of property and wages The house of brothers and sisters The house of fathers and mothers The house of offspring and children The house of illness and disease The house of women and sexual matters The house of slaughter and death The house of movement and changes The house of power and glory The house of hope and expectations The house of emenies and envious people The house of the questioner The house of the object of the inquiry The house of the result The house of the result of the result

***

From my intricacies there comes about insight superior to books concerned with the study of the art.

***

I am the possessor of eloquence and the silent speaker and through my speech [arise] desires and fears. The judicious one hides his secret thoughts, but I disclose them, just as if hears were created as my parts.

*** I am the revealer of secrets; in me are marvels of wisdom and strange and hidden things. But I have spread out the surface of my fave out of humility, and have prepared it as a substitute for earth.

*** Examine the tablet and memorize it, for in it There is meaning from the tablet [of God in Heaven] when it was marked with the pen. It shows hidden secrets of the unseen which were determined from time immemorial. It agrees with geomancy in meaning but differs from it because it generates the figures from nothing. The tablets of Moses were made valuable by what wisdom and authority God gave them. But it is sufficient honour for it that a hand touched it which is superior to the hands of men in strength and nobleness of character.

*** We have established this circle so that you might learn from it the correspondences of the forms of the figures with the forms of the lunar mansions, rising and setting. Thereupon the power to interpret might belong to it, but God knows best.

*** Dedications to owner:

Everlasting glory, continual and abiding prosperity, constant power, supreme peace, perpetual well-being, increasing good fortune, favourable fate, a comfortable manner of life, sufficient satisfaction, peace of mind, blessing, compassion, support and success.

Everlasting glory, a long unimpaired life, outstanding character, efficacious power, fortunate omens, complete honour, a pure manner of life, support and victory over the enemies for its owner.

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WHAT is wrong with you. It is so attractive

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Remember if you’re out at a store and someone says “This is a robbery” you can say “no it’s not” and then the robber will leave because theyre a robber and this is no longer a robbery .

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“I want to kiss you. Not on your mouth, but on your most secret scars, your ashy black & journeyed knees, your ring finger, the trigger finger, those hands the world fears so much.”

— Danez Smith, “king the color of space/tower of molasses & marrow”

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Bark Europa

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Would like to remind y'all I also love Higurashi. She's doing her biggest, happiest "Nippaahh!!". Rika deserves the world.

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I OWE RAIKU MY LIFE

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❓

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Watch "뾱❤️" on YouTube

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can you come collect your freak of a man please. He’s doing things

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Can you talk more about height and combat? Like for example a taller woman fighting a shorter man? I usually see the opposite (and the woman having all of the disadvantages) but how would it look the other way around? Assuming neither is skinny.

In most circumstances, height is less important than a lower center of gravity. Height can be useful in some situations, such as being able to see over obstructing obstacles. Reach is very useful, though overall height results in a negligible increase to reach.

So, generally speaking, any object with a lower center of gravity will be more stable than one with a higher center of gravity. Obviously, when we're talking about inanimate objects, you can get some weird examples where this isn't the case, but when you're talking about your normal, roughly humanoid object, a lower center of gravity will be more stable than a higher one.

This leads into another general statement that won't be true in every possible case, but is important to be aware of, if someone says that women have, “all of the disadvantages,” in a match-up, they don't know what they're talking about. The low hanging fruit is that women are more resistant to exertion and exhaustion than men, and that will become important in a prolonged fight. As mentioned earlier, they have a lower center of gravity (in most cases), meaning that they'll be more stable than a male foe.

If you've ever watched Judo videos of a five-foot-nothing girl casually tossing a massive guy around, what you're seeing is a practical consequence of that lower center of gravity. This is just a practical application of basic physics. If your center of gravity is below your opponent's it is far easier to leverage them off the ground and deposit them in a tangled pile of limbs at the location of your choosing.

Beyond that, while getting into ground fighting can be very dangerous for the smaller fighter (regardless of their sex), being able to put your foe on the ground before getting dragged down yourself, does open the door to some options for ending the fight, if you have the stomach for it.

A taller woman versus a shorter man will narrow the difference between their respective centers of gravity, and may make it possible for the man to get his center of gravity lower than his foe, but it depends on the relative height difference, and you'd be looking at some pretty extreme differences before this starts to become a realistic possibility.

In the grand scheme of things, the total amount of mass is less important than where that mass is located. This is why ground fighting, that is to say, when both combatants have already fallen over, and are continuing to fight without getting back on their feet, can be very hazardous. At that point, both participants are about as stable as they'll ever be, and sheer volume of mass can be used effectively. When you're standing, not so much. Also, yes, there is a window in the transition to ground fighting where one combatant has gone down, and does have a stability advantage. Some martial arts (again, Judo comes to mind) specifically train to act in this window. You're not going to fall over again, so you may as well take the opportunity to maneuver and drag your foe down, with an eye for making their trip to the ground less pleasant than yours.

Something we've said, many, many, times is that reach is very important, and this is true. So, it would follow that a shorter person would have less reach, which is also true. On average, your arm-span should be roughly equivalent to your height. So, if you're 6ft, you should have a 6ft armspan. If you're 5ft8in, you should have a 5'8” arm span. (There's some slight variation based on gender here, which has more to do with the length of your individual arms. The average arm length for an adult male is ~14.5”, while the average arm length for an adult female is ~13.5”, even though the average height difference is ~5”.) However, in most combat situations, when we're talking about the importance of reach, we're talking about a difference measured in multiple feet. Someone armed with a 4” dagger is going to have a difficult time countering someone armed with a 60” greatsword, for example. However, when you're talking about a difference in a few inches, that's not nearly as decisive. Unless your shorter character is dramatically shorter, they shouldn't have any difficulty reaching their opponent, so while reach is an exceptionally important consideration in armed combat, gender isn't likely to be an important factor when calculating overall reach.

The big thing to understand about height, and this is very true when looking at authors interpreting its importance in writing, is the factor of intimidation. A taller person will generally feel more intimidating up front, and a lot of visual narratives use this as a cue to show that a character is at a disadvantage. Adventure fiction, like Indiana Jones for example, uses this to great effect and so do most martial arts action movies. When someone is talking about the importance of size, that's usually what they're referencing. When you see a massive person walking on screen or popping up in your favorite anime, your brain mentally checks itself and goes, “oh. Oh no.” This, of course, has nothing to do with reality, it's just our brains interpreting danger.

We say this a lot on the blog, but really, you learn to fight with the body you have. Men and women fight the way they're trained to fight, so they don't have intrinsically gendered fighting styles after release into the real world. The concept of gendered fighting styles really comes from anime and other fighting games or as a reaction against socially constructed systems such as 'fight like a girl!'

If you ask Michi, who grew up doing martial arts, what it looks like when a tall woman fights a short guy, her reaction is to shrug and say, “it looks like two people fighting.” There just isn't a discernible difference outside of personal, stylistic preferences.

-Starke

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