#a history. vaguely

[thatneoncrisis]

can someone like. explain timebomb to me. as in the arcane ship. ive only seen the show once and i dont have netflix to go back and do detective work but the way people talk about it makes me GENUINELY feel like we watched a different show or i missed something

[doesnotloveyou]

i'm actually very okay with "there was no other way this could end" endings. if they gotta die, let them die. if they gotta break up or go the wrong way or lose something important, let'em. so long as it completes the story. only thing i dislike more than a forced happy ending is a forced bad ending

[fictionadventurer]

I love libraries.

I'm browsing the WWI shelves (as you do) and notice a very old book about the war. I glance at the first pages that talk about how one day the war will be over and we'll look at this place and not see any signs of the battlefield.

Then it hits me. And I check the publishing date.

This book was printed before the war's end. Not written. Printed. The physical object was created in 1918, while the war in question was raging and the end was as yet uncertain.

Now I'm standing on the other side of the apocalypse, with this physical link to that era in my hands. I'm living proof that the war did end and life did go on and we can all look at the end of the world as a long-ago memory.

Reading old books is cool enough, connecting our minds and hearts through the ideas of people who lived long ago, but there's something extra profound about holding a copy of the book that comes from the time that it was written. It's a physical link between the past and the present connecting me to those long-ago people. A piece of the past come into the future that gives me the chance to almost take the hand of some long-ago reader, to hold something they could have held, connecting not just mentally but physically to their era, a moment of connection across more than a century.

Excuse me while I go weep.

[canisalbus]

Hey, I’m new to Tumblr, but I’ve seen your characters around the internet and I love them so much!! Everyone has so much love for Machete and Vasco and your art is so cool to see! Do you have any tips for an aspiring artist and creative writer?

Hi! Welcome to tumblr! I'm glad to hear you like my dogs :]

I'm not really a writer, and I also completely lose my confidence when I'm trying to explain my art processes. So this is probably an obvious, unhelpful platitude at best, but one thing I've realized is that you should allow yourself to be self-indulgent. If you're the primary target audience of your own work, it generates passion and keeps you inspired and motivated. I like to believe that people who see your creations are more likely to respond to them positively if they can sense that you're putting your heart and soul to them.

[aceforwhatevenisthis]

shout out to the fact that both ghost files and puppet history have a higher IMDb score than both buzzfeed unsolved shows

[adiradirim]

Sephardic Jews from Thessaloniki in their traditional costumes, in the city’s old cemetery, before the war // a contemporary photo that shows where the destroyed cemetery once was, which is now Greece's largest university, built partially on top of and with land and materials (particularly tombstones) stolen from the razed site.

Thessaloniki or Salonika, once referred to as “the Jerusalem of the Balkans” due to its Ladino-speaking Jewish majority, saw roughly 96% of its Jewish population murdered during the Holocaust. This mass destruction extended to the city's Jewish cemetery, which had been the country's largest, established in the 15th century and housing hundreds of thousands of Jewish graves until its razing by city authorities who had long desired to repurpose the land and resented the inconvenience of Jewish presence. Despite its large-scale destruction during German occupation in 1942, which was initiated and carried out primarily by Thessaloniki authorities with Nazi consent and arrangement, some parts of the cemetery survived intact as late as 1947. Many tombstones were subsequently appropriated and used by city authorities and the Greek Orthodox Church. After the war, people were still carrying away Jewish gravestones each day and regularly looting the cemetery in search of valuables. The city's officials, led by their mayor, completed the cemetery's destruction and sold the tombstones to contractors for use as building materials in various projects; as such many were and are still found in various walls, roads, structures, and churches around the city. A 1992 commemorative book pictures Greek schoolgirls playing Hamlet with skulls and other bones they found in the cemetery.

“[T]he ‘rape’ of the cemetery escalated, marble flooded the market, and its price plummeted. Jewish tombstones were stacked up in mason’s yards and, with the permission of the director of antiquities of Macedonia and overseen by the metropolitan bishop and the municipality, used to pave roads, line latrines, and extend the sea walls; to construct pathways, patios, and walls in private and public spaces though out the city, in suburbs such as Panorama and Ampelokipi, and more than sixty kilometers away in beach towns in Halkidiki, where they decorated playgrounds, bars, and restaurants in hotels; to build a swimming pool – with Hebrew-letter inscription visible; to repair the St. Demetrius Church and other buildings...” Devin Naar, Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece

Most of the efforts to return found tombstones throughout the city are led by Jews, particularly Jacky Benmayor, the curator of the Jewish Museum and last Ladino speaker in Greece, who has personally recovered hundreds of tombstones including his own family's. Surviving Greek Jews never received compensation for the confiscation of the land under the destroyed cemetery, upon which now partially rests Greece's largest university, Aristotle University, which also used Jewish gravestones as building material for its long-coveted expansion finally made possible by the dispossession and annihilation of the city's Jews. In 2014, 72 years after the cemetery's destruction and appropriation, a small memorial was established on campus grounds to acknowledge the Jewish cemetery the school is built on and with; the ceremony just 10 years ago involved the first-ever acknowledgement of the atrocities and apology from a Thessaloniki mayor. The memorial has been vandalised multiple times since its establishment.

[enlitment]

Saint Sebastian? Oh, you mean the gateway drug to Catholicism?

(so sorry everyone but been reading a bit on Oscar Wilde recently)

[intermundia]

i think the reason that i find the tragedy of the prequels so compelling is that anakin is such a good tragic hero. he's shown to be an intelligent man with a mature understanding of the world, who made catastrophic choices on purpose because they were easier and more personally satisfying to him. when fans deny him that agency, i believe they misunderstand the story in important ways. one can say that he was manipulated and deceived, one can diagnose him with every mental illness in the DSM (and people in my notes often do), but one cannot say that he wasn't fast to toss aside his moral values to lash out and to get what he wanted.

the fact of the narrative is that anakin knew better, and he chose the easy option (with full knowledge that it was 'wrong'), because he refused to accept core limitations of reality, namely the inevitability of death. he thought that having special powers meant the rules didn't apply to him and those he loved, and that's how he ended up killing kids and serving as a fascist enforcer for decades. one can contort themselves into knots to try to excuse that, and there were indeed many contextual forces that gave him so much power in the first place, but there is no real excuse for what he chose to do with that power.

without anakin being that kind of moral agent, there is no tragedy. tragedy in an aristotelean sense is a narrative designed to elicit feelings of pity and fear, because we the audience know that we too are doomed to suffer and all too readily make easy, bad choices to avoid pain. none of us want to accept that some parts of life include losing, and require sacrifice. anakin's greed was his undoing, as it is all to often our own. refusing to accept that the tragedy of the prequels, explaining away and excusing the fall of the hero, means protecting ourselves from accepting the painful truth that we are just like him, and can and do make the same kind of mistakes.

[soath]

It is genuinely not surprising that Ashton has such a strong The Gods Are Going To Kill Us take on the situation, given what they specifically have seen and what they have to relate to. They're about two weeks out from 1.) getting done violence onto them by an angel and then 2.) being told they have a bit of a dead thing that the gods tried to kill inside them. Then they go and put a lot of effort into getting that dead scrap to wake up (with disastrous consequences illustrating how incredibly volatile its power is). Then they have their only religious friend blow up in front of them. Then they watch a movie trilogy where the only non-god main character is another earth genasi broken-walking-timebomb whose main purpose on the mission is to explode when the gods need him to. They don't see the Lawbearer weep for her son, they only see the Emissary, a child, crying because he's afraid to die. Then they go to Vasselheim, the city of the gods, and see the corpse of a Titan, the dead thing the gods killed, yanked out of the earth and puppeted by one wannabe god and now desecrated in death by the overconfident followers of all the others. They're making something beautiful out of it, they're living on it, and normally he'd be in favor of that but they don't even know its name. They're building new temples on the corpse of the old world, hollowing it out and starting fresh, and Ashton is a part of that old world. They cannot stop being connected to a power the gods seem to, at best, be willing to weaponize. That would make anyone paranoid; given their background it's impressive that he's not more combative, tbh.

[kittykatninja321]

Jason and Rose both refer to each other as their “ex situationship” and the “situation” in question is that one time they got drunk together after finishing up a case and there was a moment where they shared prolonged eye contact and kinda thought that they were about to kiss but then nothing happened and neither of them ever brought it up again

[persisting]

nah, kirk and spock have always had a father and son relationship. a sexual relationship between them would be super inappropriate because kirk is spock’s superior officer, which is like being his father. and spock canonically has a fiancée! if you’ve actually watched the show you’d see how kirk is always smiling at spock in this really loving paternal way, and spock always looks to him as the example of the man he wants to be. it’s just obvious. i didn’t know anyone ever saw it a different way. some people just really want to force gross ships on the world, huh?

[disniq]

Also appreciate these panels are back to back, because they feature my two favourite Jasons; Baby! and Threatening Void.

[llyfrenfys]

So I'm gonna come out and say I'm working on a Mari Lwyd related project right now. I have no idea how it's going to turn out but I'm having fun doing it!

Picture of a genuine horse skull I own for tax:

[cuddlytogas]

maybe it's just the Radical Rediker talking, but there's something pointed in the way that, say, popular pirate media like Pirates of the Caribbean dilutes the pirate's freedom to "bring me that horizon" as opposed to, say, "plenty and satiety, pleasure and ease, liberty and power" (Bartholomew Roberts).

broadly speaking, most pirates chose the life in order to escape and revenge the hard labour, corporal punishment, overworking, and unequal pay of merchant/navy/privateer ships; or the privations of their sudden unemployment once a war was over, ignored as soon as their ability to die for the state was unneeded. yes, many were thugs, but, consciously political or not, they were responding to a particular, material reality.

the pirate's desired freedom was from the effects of exploitative modes of statehood and capital production. but popular media usually shifts this into a general desire for freedom: freedom to roam, freedom to love (usually merely a cross-class white, heterosexual union), or freedom from the personal pressures of social norms. it's a vague, ahistorical, post-Enlightenment, libertarian ideal rather than a response to a real social and economic situation.

to be clear, this only really applies to specifically the late golden age of piracy, in the first quarter of the 18th century. earlier generations of pirates/buccaneers often displayed nationalist/religious motives, and were lauded, tolerated, or even encouraged by the French and English states for aiding their fights against the Spanish and Portuguese. only the last gasp of age of sail pirates had a truly anti-national energy, and both figured themselves, and were figured by the imperial powers, as the enemies of all nations.

but if we are to valourise the late golden age pirate, at his best, his ideals were for true democracy, and the abolition of nation, hierarchy, and labour exploitation; not "the horizon". he was striking out in response to specific political, social, and economic oppressions, rather than a general individual restlessness, and that reality - and its similarities to our own - are important.

I dunno, I just... have a lot of thoughts about the defanging of piracy in modern media. obviously there were a lot of things bad about them, too, and the level of egalitarianism varied between individual people and ships. but again, if we're going to be valourising them anyway... there were idealists. and they weren't subtle about they wanted.

"I shan't own myself guilty of any murder", said William Fly in 1726. "Our captain and his mate used us barbarously. We poor men can't have justice done us. There is nothing said to our commanders, let them never so much abuse us, and use us like dogs. But the poor sailors --"

[canisalbus]

My headcanon for Modern!Machete before he encounters (re-encounters?) Vasco is that he works in some high-powered but low-profile position for an influential and well-known multinational. Like a corporate lawyer or accountant for Apple or Volkswagon or Shell. He's very, very good at his job, his assistants and staff think he's a good boss, his boss thinks he's great, but half his colleagues can't stand him because they think he got promoted for sucking up to their boss instead of for his skills (it was for his skills). He's got exactly enough interpersonal skills to recognize the problem and not enough to fix it. He gets paid extremely well, well enough to mostly pretend that he's happy and fulfilled (he still ends up happier in the Modern!AU because his job only sucks a little instead of literally destroying him. Also because modern medicine means his medical situation is much better understood and controlled). Yes this is all just the modern equivalent to what canon!Machete's got going on but it's startling how much carries over with no changes.

Oh that's so well thought out actually, I love that.

[hussyknee]

[Video description: Dated black and white video of an interview between a man off-screen who speaks in an upper-crust English accent and a handsome brown man in his thirties seated at a table. He is lean with short curly dark hair, a very sixties moustache, and wearing a casual shirt with an open collar. The camera is zoomed in on him, leaning forward on his elbows, head low and tilted towards the interviewer, brow furrowed, and an intense gaze that flicks down at the table after each question in careful contemplation. He speaks with an Arab accent. The timer of the video recording ticks away at the top left of the frame.

Transcript:

Interviewer: "Why won't your organisation engage in peace talks with the Israelis?"

Ghassan Kanafani: "You don't mean exactly peace talks. You mean capitulation. Surrendering."

Interviewer: "Why not just talk?"

Ghassan: "Talk to whom?"

Interviewer: "Talk to the Israeli leaders."

Ghassan: "That's the kind of conversation between the sword and the neck, you mean."

Interviewer: "Well, if there's no swords or guns in the room you could still talk."

Ghassan: "No. I have never seen any talk between a colonialist case and a national liberation movement."

Interviewer: "But despite this, why not talk?"

Ghassan: "Talk about what?"

Interviewer: "Talk about the possibility of not fighting."

Ghassan: "Not fighting for what?"

Interviewer: "Not fighting at all, no matter what for."

Ghassan: "People usually fight for something, and they stop fighting for something so you can't even tell me speak about what—"

Interviewer: "—Stop fighting—"

Ghassan: "—Talk about stop fighting why?"

Interviewer: "Talk to stop fighting to stop the death and the misery, the destruction, the pain."

Ghassan: "The misery and the pain and the destruction and the death for whom?"

Interviewer: "Of Palestinians, of Israelis, of Arabs."

Ghassan: "Of the Palestinian people who are uprooted, thrown in the camps, living in starvation, killed for twenty years and forbidden to use even the name Palestinian?"

Interviewer: "Better that way than dead though."

Ghassan: "Maybe to you, but to us, it's not. To us, to liberate our country, to have dignity, to have respect, to have our mere human rights is something as essential as life itself."

Ghassan Kanafani is one of the heroes of the Palestinian liberation and celebrated in the canon of modern Arab literature. Forced out of his home with his family during the Nakba in 1948 at the age of ten, the shame of their surrender to Zionists moved him to devote his life to Arab nationalism, Marxist movements and Palestinian liberation through his career as a newspaper editor, journalist, novellist and non-combatant member of the armed resistance group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He coined the term "resistance literature" for the genre of his writing, that came to be instrumental in shaping the Palestinian national identity and ideology of its resistance. In 1972, he and his 17 year old niece were murdered in a car bomb by Mossad.

His obituary read:

"He was a commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ball-point pen, and his arena the newspaper pages."