#but I love history

[aroacenezhaanddainsleif]

STEP ASIDE AJAW, I WANNA LISTEN TO ENJOU RAMBLE ABOUT HISTORY

[akindplace]

29 and 34!

29: Someone who is calm, confident, more relaxed too!

34: I was always inspired by Audrey Hepburn, she is known for her acting but she was also a dancer who faced a lot during ww2, and she was working with unicef until before she died. She inspires me because she overcame a lot and managed to give back. I’m not sure she qualifies as a historical figure, so the ones I will mention now are the ones that I find very interesting, Cleopatra, Marie Antoinette and Getúlio Vargas (president of Brazil in the 30s and 50s). They were all very complex people in power who all had turbulent lives and that makes it very interesting to study. They were all human, they were all very flawed, they were all trying to survive while still maintaining power, and they died for that power. They are not very inspiring in a positive way, they seem somewhat tragic, but their own stories show that humans are nuanced, that history itself is complex because people are complex.

[doctorsiren]

Day 20 of Sirentober / Doctober

Hands / Journal

You can tell who never made a deal

Available as a print on my Etsy Shop

[sukinapan]

[crowkip]

yeehaw, baby!

[prokopetz]

It's a rough world out there for people who were teenagers during the exact slice of gaming history where indie video games had become feasible to develop and distribute globally, but the definition of "indie" didn't yet encompass corporate studios and million-dollar budgets. They'll tell you their favourite game when they were a kid was, like, a point-and-click visual novel whose protagonist dreams they're a vast formless sea monster that learns about the concept of colours after finding a discarded helium balloon, or a hypertext fiction/precision platformer hybrid exploring gender as a mechanism of social control, and you think they're either being pretentious or deliberately fucking with you, but no, that's just what the indie gaming scene was like for a couple of years there. The sea monster thing got a front-page feature on the same site that made Bloons Tower Defense a household name – it was literally played by millions of people.

[fandolion]

Incredible artist Julia Stoess makes these giant 100:1 insect models, I have never seen something more beautiful !

Definition of mastering your craft, they are PERFECT

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[historical-kitten]

This is perfection, op.

Though they would have said uncia and unciae, a measurement that is almost 25 mm and like .97 inches of our measurements today.

But an uncia was 1/12 of a Roman foot or pes.

Sorry to nerdify this meme.

... I feel like Cato at a party.

Octavian: I hate you with every inch of my being! Mark Antony: That’s not a lot of inches.

[cryptocism]

"just as I did, in 1983."

you'd never know my favourite parts of the show are the fucked up insane bits when my first instinct is to draw the cheesiest thing imaginable

[marzipanandminutiae]

it cracks me up that there was a secret society of American journalists who, from 1965 to 2006, slipped the phrase "it was as if some occult hand..." into articles

this all started when one guy used the phrase in an article and his friends thought it was so hilariously out of place that they all started using it

it drove their editors crazy but they kept doing it

that was like. the whole thing. they called it the Order of the Occult Hand and all it did was put a random metaphor into as many news articles as possible

they picked a new phrase in the early 00s, which has not been revealed yet- to my knowledge

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

zany to me how these um actually nihilists like to pretend that "um actually love/friendship/cooperation/kindness isn't real bc we evolved that way to benefit ourselves as a species..." um YES? that's also where tool use comes from? that's where cooking comes from? am i supposed to think social bonds & tool use & cooking aren't "real" because they evolved over time instead of appearing fully formed from the ether?

sorry u can't enjoy things. im a superior being twirling a fork in my bowl of delicious noodles whilst staring in adoration at the world

[crowleys-right-eyeball]

i lied abt only posting abt this situation once, i just saw this lovely person’s comment!! passing it on to tumblr 🫡

edit: SOMEONEE changed the password and ruined it for everybody :/ pls try this version instead!!

edit 2: WATCHER POSTED AN UPDATE

[ther0sesared3ad]

The urge to learn every language and play every instrument and travel the world and live through every historical time period and be a writer and a poet and an actor and

[bruciemilf]

Bruce being so smiley and happy around Robin! Jason shatters me so intimately. Soft as hell if this continues when Jason’s red hood, too.

“Robin,” Bruce calls him that out of habit and isn’t at all surprised when Jason swiftly punches his arm, only to rub the place a moment later, even if Bruce barely notices. “This is not the time for jokes.”

“ Three o’clock is always the time for jokes. You scheduled it.”

“Nightwing was turned into a rabbit. And you’re laughing.”

“Have you seen the guy’s Tik Toks? This is as dignified as he’ll ever be.”

Jason is very sure Dick can understand them, because he’s biting hard through his boots. Even harder when Bruce snorts and presses his lips in a white line.

Don’t get me wrong, thought, it’s vice versa.

“I think we’re gonna have to kill this guy, B.” Talking about a guy who cut the line in Batburger while Cass was trying to order.

Bruce, in his Batman voice, “fuck!”

Jason has one of those laughing fits where you get on the floor, breathless and limp. “This brings up memories.”

“ROBIN.”

[weirdsociology]

hey writers we have to talk.

if you've read any romance or fanfic in the past twenty years (i know you have), you know that there are a certain number of scents associated with hot dudes. you can probably recite the list of Things Men in Fic smell like in your sleep: leather, black pepper, pine, sandalwood, "something uniquely him", clean sweat, and if the character has ever fucking been within 50 yards of a firearm, something called "cordite".

here's the thing.

NO ONE SMELLS LIKE CORDITE.

cordite was a highly specific type of smokeless gunpowder developed in the 1890s by england specifically and used mostly in wwi.

if your good-smelling guy is not (a) english (b) using a very specific type of british rifle (c) dying in a trench in flanders, he does not smell like cordite. technically even if he does meet all those conditions he still doesn't smell like cordite because he smells like trenchfoot.

the point is, cordite is so far from universal that no one but the most hardcore gun nerds give a single shit about it. making your Sexy Hero smell like cordite is like naming a cassette-only bootleg live recording from the 1970s as your favorite grateful dead album. everyone at the party hates you immediately and knows you're doing it for clout. also, it's just factually... wrong. please stop. i know everyone else is doing it, but you can do the right thing here, i believe in you.

so what do people who are using guns smell like?

well if your story is set before the late 1880s, the smell of a fired gun is black powder, which, unfortunately, smells like seventeen flatulent cows have been shoved in a tire factory. trust me, you do not want your Hot Dude to smell like black powder. it's b a d.

if your story is set after the late 1880s, guns are using some variety of modern 'smokeless' powder - which speaking broadly doesn't really have a ton of scent when used. it does have some, but it's sort of non-descript: the best way i can describe it is the sweet, ozone, hot-plate smell of popping your car hood with a warm engine.

people who use guns a lot don't smell like fired guns all the time anyway, so while those scents might work in a fight scene, they're not realistic all the time. but there are some things that your Sexy Shootist will smell like basically 24/7 and that's metal and gun oil. metal you can go and sniff (i recommend non-stainless steel), but if you want a reference, most gun oils have a sharp, organic smell that's not dissimilar to canola oil but muskier and with a tang overtop. it's not unlikely leather is in the mix as well due to routine handling of leather equipment and gear. modern gear also tends to have a certain smell although it varies by production country and storage conditions - lots of opportunities there.

in conclusion: gunslingers and hired killers and military folks can be sexy and smell great on page, but i am begging you not to say "cordite" when you mean "gunpowder" ever again. we can do this. we are writers and therefore pedants. i believe in us!