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attack: 100% damage: 0%

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German hobo signs / thieves’ cant code, 1540

A very early depiction of hobo signs, the earliest I’ve ever seen for sure, from a little book written by a German judge somewhere in Werse (North Rhine-Westphalia today). It’s rogue literature but in the sense of “beware of rogues!”, not rogues are cool or anything. The hobo signs are called Zeichen in the book (which just means “signs”, in general), but by the 18th century they would be known by the cant term Zinken.

So who used them, exactly? Who were these rogues and vagabonds who communicated in secret code? The book calls them Brenner (literally “burners”) or Mordtbrenner (arson AND murder!), and it’s a bit above my pay grade to give you specifics with any certainty. But from what I gather, it’s a mishmash of people on the road due to their profession (tinkers, peddlers, etc), beggars, mercenaries or ex-soldiers left to their own devices, fugitives (I’m guessing that Läufer, literally “runner”, means on the lam), and various itinerant groups.

May or may not be relevant: the Yenish people, who emerged as a distinct itinerant group in Germany and neighbouring regions in the 19th century, are theorised to have “descended from members of the marginalized and vagrant poor classes of society of the early modern period”. And their language is cant-adjacent: “Yenish speakers generally speak their local German dialect, enriched by the Yeniche vocabulary, which is derived in part from Rotwelsch, with influences from Yiddish, Romani, and other minority languages of the region.” (Rotwelsch is basically the German thieves’ cant.)

The book translates the “signs and secret codes”, and also gives a list of known vagrants, which I find chilling. This isn’t a description of a criminal class, it’s criminalisation in action, of an already marginal class. The list includes names, descriptions (a lot of them have red beards, for some reason), occupations (beggar, carter, traveller, soldier), and comments like “wicked man”.

I don’t actually speak German, so if anyone wants to give it a go and translate any of this to English, it would be fantastic (for background, this may help).  

Source: Der Mordtbrenner Zeichen vnd Losunge, etwa bey Dreyhundert vnd Viertzig, ausgeschickt, by Ambrosius Trota, published in 1540 in Wittenberg. You can download it as a PDF, no OCR though.

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Louise Bourgeois

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everyone in the world is either a democrat or a republican. everyone in the whole wide world is a democrat and a republican and america is the largest and most populous country in the world and america is easily the most culturally diverse country in the world because the middle class white people in my state (like a little country) are very different than the middle class white people over there (another little country, once more called a "state") and you could never understand how bad it is in america, the main country in the world. where are you from again? it's bad in america and america is bad but the way that america is run is the only way a country could possibly be run unfortunately. i don't like it but it's the only right way for a country to be run and you don't get it because the main victims of the main country are all here and you aren't. where are you from again? they never told me about that place. i don't think you get that real people live in america. probably because you're a republican. real people live in america and real people are hurt by america but what can you do? god said america has to be like this. god said this because god is real so god is american. you don't get it because you're over there and we're all here in america, the realest country in the world. where are you from again? how can you talk like this with what's happening in america? you're a democrat, right? where are you from again? my country is so large it stretches over yours and presses down hard. it's not my fault that they never told me about that place. my country covers the world. you don't understand how bad this will be for real people in the real world, the first world, the only world. they never told me—where in america are you from again?

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I know it's unfair vilification and stuff but it's also a lot of fun to see old media and stuff where people were SO scared of big animals like lions, sharks, crocodiles and wolves were fully expected to just come and eat you the moment you stepped into their territory. In older media we also made that assumption about gorillas and in still older we thought it'd be whales. But some animals that will actually fuck you up got left behind. Boars will kill you and eat you. They're way more likely to do so than any of those other things actually. Hippos, obviously, got off like bandits always being depicted as cute and dopey. And then there's the squids. Not giant kraken size squids. The eight foot squids that hunt in packs and will fuck you up if you fall in the water at night. I can't BELIEVE people slept on that. It's like all they cared about were the huge deep sea ones we never see. The medium size wolf pack squids were right there.

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Voidness soul 🐱👅

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local woman who claimed she will "cross that bridge when she comes to it" arrives at said bridge

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Cuddling. don’t mind the claws of the beast

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Not a tail but a pillow

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My husband plays this game he calls “king of the cats” where he tries to hold all 3 of our boys at once… today he was successful

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we deserve every bomb that gets dropped on us

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I just discovered foodtimeline.org, which is exactly what it sounds like: centuries worth of information about FOOD.  If you are writing something historical and you want a starting point for figuring out what people should be eating, this might be a good place?

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if you’re white and wanna write a poc character and feel awkward about it i implore you to ignore any twitblr stuff treating it as a massive ethical burden and instead come in more with the same mindset you’d have if you wanted to write about idk firefighters but didn’t know anything about firefighters so you do... research. Like fuck off with the weird kinda creepy calls for spiritual introspection you’re not writing about god damn space aliens you’re writing about humans and if you think you need more perspective of different life experiences just read?

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idk who needs to hear this but jane austen is genuinely really funny. people who think she writes boring books where nothing happens, i get why you think that because society has told you that but please enjoy this banger from just the first couple of chapters of pride & prejudice:

“How pleasant it is to spend an evening this way. I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading. How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book. When I have a house of my own I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” No one made any reply. She then yawned again, threw aside her book, and cast her eyes around the room in quest for some amusement.

this is funny! we all know people who are like this!

anyway look up pride and prejudice read by elizabeth klett, she does an incredible job and it’s free!