sola-invinctus

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leave your laundry on the floor for them

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You guys rlly don't realise how much knowledge is still not committed to the internet. I find books all the time with stuff that is impossible to find through a search engine- most people do not put their magnum opus research online for free and the more niche a skill is the less likely you are to have people who will leak those books online. (Nevermind all the books written prior to the internet that have knowledge that is not considered "relevant" enough to digitise).

Whenever people say that we r growing up with all the world's knowledge at our fingertips...it's not necessarily true. Is the amount of knowledge online potentially infinite? Yes. Is it all knowledge? No. You will be surprised at the niche things you can discover at a local archive or library.

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“You look at trees and called them ‘trees,’ and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a ‘star,’ and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, ‘tree,’ ‘star,’ were (in their original forms) names given to these objects by people with very different views from yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of ‘trees’ and ‘stars’ saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jeweled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come. To them, the whole of creation was ‘myth-woven and elf patterned’.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien, from ‘Mythopoeia’ (via sempiternele)

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“Poetry is not about an event. It is the event. Art is the resistance of complacency: It always stands in opposition to numbness. That is why it just doesn’t die, poetry—despite so many death notices. It is always there, waking us up when we get numb, poking us in the eye.”

—Ilya Kaminsky, in Garth Greenwell’s “Still Dancing” interview in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine (2019)

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Yusef Komunyakaa, from "The Cage Walker", Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems [ID in ALT]

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fun musical bit about this scene!:

the piece that the car is playing (the "classical music that stays classical music") is a tone poem, saint-saëns' danse macabre. it's a super famous piece that you've probably heard before and is associated with all things spooky. but it's not just spooky bc it sounds spooky: it's spooky bc it tells a story! a tone poem is a piece of music evokes a poem, short story, landscape, etc. in short, it's a piece of music that's describing or outlining something.

danse macabre tells the story of the devil, who every year on the stroke of midnight on halloween plays his fiddle to raise the dead. the dead dance for him until the following dawn, where they return to their graves until the next year. (musically it does a lot of cool things to reflect this: there's 12 notes at the beginning representing the 12 strokes of midnight, and the frequent use of a specific musical interval called the tritone. in the medieval period the tritone was also called diabolus in musica, literally meaning "the devil in music" bc of how dissonant it sounded to listeners at the time. it also quotes the dies irae chant as well!)

so the fact that it's what the car chose to play is SUPER cute. bc it's classical (technically it's from the romantic period, but w/e), like aziraphale wants, but it's also reminiscent of crowley. bc i bet the car knows just how much aziraphale loves crowley, too. it's a really subtle nudge that the car knows both of them and it's like the car is finding a musical middle for them both, almost.

it's also a subtly brilliant choice bc in the flashback prior, aziraphale said that crowley asked to meet aziraphale in the graveyard at midnight. just like the devil met the dead on halloween.

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Every night my cat will leave her throne (fluffy pink pillow on my bed) and begin her lamentation shift, during which she will wander throughout the house wailing about the horrors and how unloved she is and the injustice of it all. After about 10 minutes of this I will call her name and she will come slowly back into my room and crawl up the bed to gently headbutt me, meowing excitedly at the return of her loving mother who, it must be stressed, never moved.

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the way i read the iliad at the tender age of 17 to get achilles' grieving scenes which like SURE but 17 year old me should have been reading the táin.

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You know what, fuck it, I don't *want* some frivolous, artisanal, lighter-than-air computer with no customizability, no upgradeability, no reparability, no ports, and a lifetime of *maybe* 3 years if you're lucky. I want a fucking great BEAST of a computer that's designed to last a minimum of 50 years, with ports up the wazoo and optional drives for every kind of media! I want modular components that you can drop in a bog for a year, dry them off, and have them still work fine! I want them to make a noise like "ker-chunk!" when you slide them into place! I want a switch that you pull to turn it on! And I don't want software that constantly forces you to get a pointless, cosmetic "upgrade" every few months either! I want durability! I want longevity! I want satisfying haptics! I want Silicon Valley to go fuck itself!

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When Cleopatra welcomed Mark Antony to her bedroom, the floor was covered in a foot and a half of such petals. Did they use the floor, and make love in a swamp of soft, fragrant, shimmying petals? Or did they use the bed, as if they were on a raft floating in a scented ocean?

Cleopatra knew her guest. Few people have been as obsessed with roses as the ancient Romans. Roses were strewn at public ceremonies and banquets; rose water bubbled through the emperor’s fountains and the public baths surged with it; in the public amphitheaters, crowds sat under sun awnings steeped in rose perfume; rose petals were used as pillow stuffings; people wore garlands of roses in their hair; they ate rose pudding; their medicines, love potions, and aphrodisiacs all contained roses. No bacchanalia, the Romans’ official orgy, was complete without an excess of roses. They created a holiday, Rosalia, to formally consummate their passion for the flower. At one banquet, Nero had silver pipes installed under each plate, so that guests could be spritzed with scent between courses. They could admire a ceiling painted to resemble the celestial heavens, which would open up and shower them in a continuous rain of perfume and flowers. At another, he spent the equivalent of $160,000 just on roses—and one of his guests smothered to death under a shower of rose petals.

— Diane Ackerman, ‘Smell: Roses’ A Natural History of the Senses

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not caring if people think you're stupid is a life hack. recognising that you are kind of stupid is an even bigger life hack. we build entire societies to take care of each other bc we're all kind of stupid. it's fine.

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Oh to be a little brass madonna in the shipwreck museum

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some pdfs are dusty. this is a fact despite their lack of physicality. you understand

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we gotta bring back sacred groves