#polynesian voyagers

[freehawaii]

DID POLYNESIAN VOYAGERS REACH THE AMERICAS BEFORE COLUMBUS?

History.com - May 25, 2023 According to science, voyagers from Moananuiākea reached America around 800 years ago. “A 2020 study found that Polynesians from multiple islands carry a small amount of DNA from indigenous South Americans, and that the moment of contact likely came some 800 years ago…” Polynesian voyagers sailed without a compass or any other nautical instruments. Yet by reading the stars, waves, currents, clouds, seaweed clumps and seabird flights, they managed to cross vast swaths of the Pacific Ocean and settle hundreds of islands, from Hawaii in the north to Easter Island in the southeast to New Zealand in the southwest. Evidence has mounted that they likewise reached mainland South America—and possibly North America as well—long before Christopher Columbus. “It’s one of the most remarkable colonization events of any time in history,” says Jennifer Kahn, an archeologist at the College of William & Mary, who specializes in Polynesia. “We’re talking about incredibly skilled navigators [discovering] some of the most remote places in the world.” Tracing Polynesian Ancestry Based on linguistic, genetic and archeological data, scientists believe that the ancestors of the Polynesians originated in Taiwan (and perhaps the nearby south China coast). From there, they purportedly traveled south into the Philippines and further on to New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, where they mixed with the local populace. By around 1300 B.C., a new culture had developed, the Lapita, known in part for their distinct pottery. These direct descendants of the Polynesians rapidly swept eastward, first to the Solomon Islands and then to uninhabited Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, and elsewhere. “The Lapita were the first ones to get into remote Oceania,” says Patrick V. Kirch, an anthropology professor at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, and author of On the Road of the Winds: An Archeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact. “It was really a blank slate as far as humans were concerned.” By the 9th century B.C., the Lapita had made it as far as Tonga and Samoa. But then a long pause ensued without further expansion. Researchers note that, beyond Tonga and Samoa, island chains are much further apart, separated in some cases by thousands of miles of open ocean, and that the winds and currents generally conspire against sailing east. Perhaps Lapita boats simply weren’t up to the task. Moreover, as Kirch points out, the closest coral atolls had not yet stabilized by that time. “It’s possible that there was some voyaging past Samoa,” he says, “but they would have found just coral reefs and not actual land they could settle.” Double-Hulled Canoes Accelerate Expansion During the long pause, a distinct Polynesian culture evolved on Tonga and Samoa, and voyagers there gradually honed their craft. In time, they invented double-hulled canoes, essentially early catamarans, lashing them together with coconut fiber rope and weaving sails from the leaves of pandanus trees. These vessels, up to roughly 60-feet long, could carry a couple dozen settlers each, along with their livestock—namely pigs, dogs and chickens—and crops for planting. “They now had the technological ability and the navigational ability to really get out there,” Kirch says. Though the exact timeline has long been disputed, it appears the great wave of Polynesian expansion began around A.D. 900 or 950. Voyagers, also called wayfinders, quickly discovered the Cook Islands, Society Islands (including Tahiti), and Marquesas Islands, and not long after arrived in the Hawaiian Islands. By 1250 or so, when they reached New Zealand, they had explored at least 10 million square miles of the Pacific Ocean and located over 1,000 islands. “You can fit all of the continents into the Pacific Ocean,” Kahn explains. “It’s a huge, huge space to traverse.” Even the tiniest and most remote islands, such as Pitcairn, did not escape their notice. As Kirch points out, no one else in the world was remotely capable of such a feat at that time. “Around 1000 A.D., what were Europeans doing?” Kirch says. “Not much in the way of sailing.” He adds that, as late as the 15th century, even the most accomplished European seamen, like Vasco da Gama, were merely hugging the coast. Easter Island Among Many Inhabited by Polynesian Voyagers The Polynesians did not have a system of writing to record their accomplishments. But they did pass down stories orally, which tell, for example, of how Hawaiian settlers came from Tahiti, more than 2,500 miles away. “Where the sun rises, in Hawaiian understanding anyway, is a place where the gods reside and our ancestors,” says Marques Hanalei Marzan, cultural advisor at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. “To get to that place is probably one of the reasons why the migration east continued.” (As an April 2023 study confirms, Polynesian voyagers sometimes sailed west as well into what’s commonly referred to as the Polynesian Outliers.) Each island chain developed its own unique characteristics. On Easter Island, for instance, the inhabitants constructed giant stone statues. Yet all Polynesians spoke related languages, worshipped a similar pantheon of gods, and built ritual sites with shared features, Kahn explains. The various islands also maintained at least some ties with each other, particularly during the heyday of Polynesian expansion. “It’s not just that they came from a place and left and never made their way back,” Marzan says. “They actually continued those relationships.” Evidence that Polynesian Sailors Reached Americas Most experts now believe the Polynesians crossed the entire Pacific to mainland South America, with Marzan saying it happened “without question.” Stanford University biologist Peter Vitousek has similarly told HISTORY that “we’re absolutely sure,” putting the odds of a South American landfall in the 99.9999 [percent] range.” For one thing, experts note that Easter Island (also known as Rapa Nui) lies only about 2,200 miles off the South American coast, and that Polynesian voyagers, capable of locating a speck of rock in the vast Pacific, could hardly have missed a giant continent. “Why would they have stopped?” Kahn says. “They would have kept going until they couldn’t find any more.” Genetic evidence backs up this assertion. A 2020 study found that Polynesians from multiple islands carry a small amount of DNA from indigenous South Americans, and that the moment of contact likely came some 800 years ago (not long after the Vikings, the best European sailors of their era, made landfall on the Atlantic coast of the Americas). Archeologists have likewise found the remains of bottle gourds and sweet potatoes, both South American plants, at pre-Columbian Polynesian sites. Some scientists speculate that the sweet potato could have dispersed naturally across the Pacific, but most agree that the Polynesians must have brought it back with them. “Try to take a sweet potato tuber and float it,” Kirch says. “I guarantee it won’t float very long. It will sink to the bottom of the ocean.” Poultry bones from Chile appear to show that Polynesians introduced chickens to South America prior to the arrival of Columbus, though some scientists have disputed these findings. Meanwhile, other researchers analyzing skulls on a Chilean island found them to be “very Polynesian in shape and form.” Less evidence ties the Polynesians to North America. Even so, some experts believe they landed there as well, pointing out, among other things, that the sewn-plank canoes used by the Chumash tribe of southern California resembled Polynesian vessels. What Happened to Polynesians in Americas? No Polynesian settlement has ever been unearthed in the Americas. It therefore remains unclear what happened upon arrival, particularly since, unlike the Pacific islands, these landmasses were already populated. Perhaps, Kahn says, “they got up and left and went back.” When Captain James Cook explored the Pacific in the late 1760s and 1770s, thus ushering in a wave of Western imperialism, he recognized the Polynesians’ exemplary sailing skills. “It is extraordinary that the same nation should have spread themselves over all the isles in this vast ocean, from New Zealand to [Easter Island], which is almost a fourth part of the circumference of the globe,” he wrote. Eventually, however, as they colonized the islands and suppressed native languages and cultures, Western powers began to downplay Polynesian achievements, according to Marzan, who says they assumed “that the people of the Pacific were less than.” Some falsely claimed, for instance, that Polynesian sailors had merely drifted along with the winds and currents. (It didn’t help that, at the time of European contact, many Pacific Islanders no longer used large, oceangoing canoes. Some, like those on Easter Island, had already chopped down all the tall trees needed to produce them.) Worst of all, European diseases decimated the Polynesian population. “It was this massive, devastating loss,” Kirch says. “And when you have that, your society really falls apart.” Before long, most remaining Polynesians began sailing with Western techniques. More recently, though, the old traditions have been revived, starting around 1976, when the Polynesian Voyaging Society sailed, without instruments, from Hawaii to Tahiti. They have since embarked on numerous other expeditions, including a worldwide voyage from 2013 to 2017. “The Polynesian Voyaging Society has really inspired many cultures across the Pacific to reconnect with their traditional practices,” Marzan says. Once again, double-hulled canoes are plying the ocean.

[encantobrainrot365]

These four movies were peak disney/pixar animation. The storytelling, magical realism, and cultural exploration of diversity was everything!

so i really love disney/pixar + intergenerational healing

[existentialterror]

The Moananuiākea voyage starts on 6/15

The Hōkūleʻa, a traditional-style double-hulled oceanfaring canoe, is about to start a 4-year circumnavigation of the Pacific Ocean! They've been sailing around Alaska lately, where they're going to start the official journey on 6/15.

(Map from this announcement post [link]) The journey is planned by the Polynesian Voyaging Society [link], which is keeping alive Polynesian wayfinding (navigating on the ocean without instruments) and voyaging. They're super cool, check out their website. They have a bunch of neat videos about the journey so far on their Youtube channel [link]. Here's one with some absolutely gorgeous shots of this giant double-hulled Polynesian canoe hanging out around glaciers and huge snowy mountains.

I'm really excited to keep an eye on this.

[zegoldensombrero]

Another spot we finally got to visit on a trip to Denver was ADRIFT🗿 In contrast to Hell or High Water, ADRIFT is going for a more classic (but definitely elevated) Polynesian Pop dining experience in the vein of Trader Vic’s, and manages to do a lot with a fairly small location! The food we had was great, there was a good mix of classic tiki drinks & new school cocktails and they even served the drinks in tiki mugs, which is always a plus to me.

This spot has a two-hour visit limit & I would love to visit again, just sit at the bar & try a couple more of their cocktails! 🍹🍹🍹

[krusaderman]

Worldwide Voyage: History of Hokule’a and Polynesian Voyaging

[lucybellwood]

YES!!!!! Thank you so much for writing this up, @jinlinli. I've been obsessed with this story for years and every time I buttonhole unsuspecting friends and acquaintances and bellow

"OKAY BUT DID YOU KNOW MOANA IS PRACTICALLY A TRUE STORY?"

in the most normal way possible, none of them know about it. It baffles me! It ASTOUNDS me! I want everyone to know!

I so appreciate that you collected all these names in one place and gave credit to the lineage of seafarers who shaped so much of the Second Hawaiian Renaissance.

Also: the crew of Hōkūleʻa have been doing a great job documenting her current circumnavigation on their blog if you wanna get teary-eyed about the power of seafaring and community. I managed to catch a glimpse of her in Juneau before she left and it was a bucket list-level item for sure.

The Hawaiian History Behind Moana

Buckle in kids, this is going to be a long one.

So the story of Moana fits very very neatly with the Disney formula for coming of age stories, and it’s drawn some flak for that. But I would argue that it’s a very Polynesian story. True, the story only really has figures and elements of the traditional myths of Polynesia’s oral history. And true, the directors ultimately chose not to use Taika Waititi’s early script and instead chose to write their own. However, that still doesn’t mean that Moana isn’t a Polynesian story because I believe it very much is. A very specific one in fact.

Keep reading

[aucklandexpat]

Purple Kumara end being grown near our window sill. Kumara or sweet potato has a fascinating history in New Zealand. Not native to New Zealand or Polynesia, where Maori voyagers originated, its from South America. Hence, historians believe Maori ancestors voyaged to South America from Polynesia and returned with the tuber. Across vast oceans without modern navigational tools. This occurred in the 13th century! #foodhistory #kumara #sweetpotato #aotearoa #nz #newzealand #maori #polynesian #polynesia #southamerica #voyage #growth #plants #tuber #history #newzealandhistory #garden #gardening #photosynthesis https://www.instagram.com/p/CoiDpz4Sdlo/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[criphd]

At the outset of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), Wells asks his English readers to compare the Martian invasion of Earth with the Europeans’ genocidal invasion of the Tasmanians, thus demanding that the colonizers imagine themselves as the colonized, or the about-to-be-colonized. But in Wells this reversal of perspective entails something more, because the analogy rests on the logic prevalent in contemporary anthropology that the indigenous, primitive other’s present is the colonizer’s own past. Wells’s Martians invading England are like Europeans in Tasmania not just because they are arrogant colonialists invading a technologically inferior civilization, but also because, with their hypertrophied brains and prosthetic machines, they are a version of the human race’s own future.

The confrontation of humans and Martians is thus a kind of anachronism, an incongruous co-habitation of the same moment by people and artifacts from different times. But this anachronism is the mark of anthropological difference, that is, the way late-nineteenth-century anthropology conceptualized the play of identity and difference between the scientific observer and the anthropological subject-both human, but inhabiting different moments in the history of civilization. As George Stocking puts it in his intellectual history of Victorian anthropology, Victorian anthropologists, while expressing shock at the devastating effects of European contact on the Tasmanians, were able to adopt an apologetic tone about it because they understood the Tasmanians as “living representatives of the early Stone Age,” and thus their “extinction was simply a matter of … placing the Tasmanians back into the dead prehistoric world where they belonged” (282-83). The trope of the savage as a remnant of the past unites such authoritative and influential works as Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877), where the kinship structures of contemporaneous American Indians and Polynesian islanders are read as evidence of “our” past, with Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913), where the sexual practices of “primitive” societies are interpreted as developmental stages leading to the mature sexuality of the West. Johannes Fabian has argued that the repression or denial of the real contemporaneity of so-called savage cultures with that of Western explorers, colonizers, and settlers is one of the pervasive, foundational assumptions of modern anthropology in general. The way colonialism made space into time gave the globe a geography not just of climates and cultures but of stages of human development that could confront and evaluate one another.

The anachronistic structure of anthropological difference is one of the key features that links emergent science fiction to colonialism. The crucial point is the way it sets into motion a vacillation between fantastic desires and critical estrangement that corresponds to the double-edged effects of the exotic. Robert Stafford, in an excellent essay on “Scientific Exploration and Empire” in the Oxford History of the British Empire, writes that, by the last decades of the century, “absorption in overseas wilderness represented a form of time travel” for the British explorer and, more to the point, for the reading public who seized upon the primitive, abundant, unzoned spaces described in the narratives of exploration as a veritable “fiefdom, calling new worlds into being to redress the balance of the old” (313, 315). Thus when Verne, Wells, and others wrote of voyages underground, under the sea, and into the heavens for the readers of the age of imperialism, the otherworldliness of the colonies provided a new kind of legibility and significance to an ancient plot. Colonial commerce and imperial politics often turned the marvelous voyage into a fantasy of appropriation alluding to real objects and real effects that pervaded and transformed life in the homelands. At the same time, the strange destinations of such voyages now also referred to a centuries-old project of cognitive appropriation, a reading of the exotic other that made possible, and perhaps even necessary, a rereading of oneself.

John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction

[tanadrin]

The European approach to ocean exploration was brute force: building ships bigger and bigger, scaling up the Mediterranean and coast-hugging ships of prior eras. This made sense for the things these ships were used for: bulk long-distance trade, as the scale and complexity of medieval trade grew; and warfare, where it turns out putting cannons on a boat makes you one of the deadliest things on the ocean.

But there is something that feels much more romantic and elegant about the Austronesian outrigger canoes and the Polynesian catamarans. These don't require massive expenditure of resources and manpower to build, which your society, being smaller in population, doesn't have anyway. You can equip them for long voyages still--Polynesian navigators crossed similar distances as the European navigators. They're fast. And you can still conduct trade with them, although at a smaller scale--which again makes sense, since the Pacific is more lightly populated than the important coastal regions of Afro-Eurasia, and you're trading on behalf of, like, small island polities and not large empires.

The Atlantic has many fewer small island chains, but it still did develop a culture with similar naval technology--the Norse! What was the longship but a war-canoe with a sail? And it served a similar economic function--a platform for small-scale entrepreneurs, generally from small polities (including small island polities like the Faroes and Iceland), also capable of managing transoceanic distances.

[glutenfreehimbo]

Website: “here we have some staples of hawaiian cuisine. First: Fruits! Second: SPAM!”

God it sucks when i wanna look up stuff about hawaiian culture and i get this white washed tourist shit

[familyabolisher]

At the outset of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898), Wells asks his English readers to compare the Martian invasion of Earth with the Europeans' genocidal invasion of the Tasmanians, thus demanding that the colonizers imagine themselves as the colonized, or the about-to-be-colonized. But in Wells this reversal of perspective entails something more, because the analogy rests on the logic prevalent in contemporary anthropology that the indigenous, primitive other's present is the colonizer's own past. Wells's Martians invading England are like Europeans in Tasmania not just because they are arrogant colonialists invading a technologically inferior civilization, but also because, with their hypertrophied brains and prosthetic machines, they are a version of the human race's own future.

The confrontation of humans and Martians is thus a kind of anachronism, an incongruous co-habitation of the same moment by people and artifacts from different times. But this anachronism is the mark of anthropological difference, that is, the way late-nineteenth-century anthropology conceptualized the play of identity and difference between the scientific observer and the anthropological subject-both human, but inhabiting different moments in the history of civilization. As George Stocking puts it in his intellectual history of Victorian anthropology, Victorian anthropologists, while expressing shock at the devastating effects of European contact on the Tasmanians, were able to adopt an apologetic tone about it because they understood the Tasmanians as "living representatives of the early Stone Age," and thus their "extinction was simply a matter of … placing the Tasmanians back into the dead prehistoric world where they belonged" (282-83). The trope of the savage as a remnant of the past unites such authoritative and influential works as Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society (1877), where the kinship structures of contemporaneous American Indians and Polynesian islanders are read as evidence of "our" past, with Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo (1913), where the sexual practices of "primitive" societies are interpreted as developmental stages leading to the mature sexuality of the West. Johannes Fabian has argued that the repression or denial of the real contemporaneity of so-called savage cultures with that of Western explorers, colonizers, and settlers is one of the pervasive, foundational assumptions of modern anthropology in general. The way colonialism made space into time gave the globe a geography not just of climates and cultures but of stages of human development that could confront and evaluate one another.

The anachronistic structure of anthropological difference is one of the key features that links emergent science fiction to colonialism. The crucial point is the way it sets into motion a vacillation between fantastic desires and critical estrangement that corresponds to the double-edged effects of the exotic. Robert Stafford, in an excellent essay on "Scientific Exploration and Empire" in the Oxford History of the British Empire, writes that, by the last decades of the century, "absorption in overseas wilderness represented a form of time travel" for the British explorer and, more to the point, for the reading public who seized upon the primitive, abundant, unzoned spaces described in the narratives of exploration as a veritable "fiefdom, calling new worlds into being to redress the balance of the old" (313, 315). Thus when Verne, Wells, and others wrote of voyages underground, under the sea, and into the heavens for the readers of the age of imperialism, the otherworldliness of the colonies provided a new kind of legibility and significance to an ancient plot. Colonial commerce and imperial politics often turned the marvelous voyage into a fantasy of appropriation alluding to real objects and real effects that pervaded and transformed life in the homelands. At the same time, the strange destinations of such voyages now also referred to a centuries-old project of cognitive appropriation, a reading of the exotic other that made possible, and perhaps even necessary, a rereading of oneself.

John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction

[whencyclopedia]

Polynesian Navigation & Settlement of the Pacific

Polynesian navigation of the Pacific Ocean and its settlement began thousands of years ago. The inhabitants of the Pacific islands had been voyaging across vast expanses of ocean water sailing in double canoes or outriggers using nothing more than their knowledge of the stars and observations of sea and wind patterns to guide them.

The Pacific Ocean is one-third of the earth's surface and its remote islands were the last to be reached by humans. These islands are scattered across an ocean that covers 165.25 million square kilometres (63.8 million square miles). The ancestors of the Polynesians, the Lapita people, set out from Taiwan and settled Remote Oceania between 1100-900 BCE, although there is evidence of Lapita settlements in the Bismarck Archipelago as early as 2000 BCE. The Lapita and their ancestors were skilled seafarers who memorised navigational instructions and passed their knowledge down through folklore, cultural heroes, and simple oral stories.

The Polynesian's highly developed navigation system impressed the first European explorers of the Pacific and since then scholars have been debating several questions:

was the migration and settlement of the Pacific islands and into Remote Oceania accidental or intentional?

what were the specific maritime and navigational skills of these ancient seafarers?

why has a large body of indigenous navigational knowledge been lost and what can be done to preserve what remains?

what type of sailing vessels and sails were used to cross an open ocean?

Ancient Voyaging & Settlement of the Pacific

By at least 10,000 years ago, humans had migrated to most of the habitable lands that could be reached on foot. What remained was the last frontier – the myriad islands of the Pacific Ocean that required boat technology and navigational methods be developed that were capable of long-range ocean voyaging. Near Oceania, which consists of mainland New Guinea and its surrounding islands, the Bismarck Archipelago, the Admiralty Islands, and the Solomon Islands was settled in an out-of-Africa migration c. 50,000 years ago during the Pleistocene period. These first settlers of the Pacific are the ancestors of Melanesians and Australian Aboriginals. The small distances between the islands in Near Oceania meant that people could island-hop using rudimentary ocean-going craft.

The so-called second wave of migration into Remote Oceania has been an intensely debated scholarly topic. Remote Oceania is the islands to the east of the Solomon Islands group such as Vanuatu, Fiji, Tonga, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Society Islands, Easter Island, and the Marquesas. What is debated is the origins of the first people who settled in this region between 1500-1300 BCE, although there is general agreement that the ancestral homeland was Taiwan. A dissenting view has been that of Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl (1914-2002 CE) who set out in 1947 CE on a balsa raft called Kon-Tiki that he hoped would prove a South American origin for Pacific islanders. Archaeological and DNA evidence, however, points strongly to a southeast Asian origin and seafarers who spoke a related group of languages known as Austronesian who reached Fiji in 1300 BCE and Samoa c. 1100 BCE. All modern Polynesian languages belong to the Austronesian language family.

Collectively, these people are called the Lapita and were the ancestors of the Polynesians, including Maori, although archaeologists use the term Lapita Cultural Complex because the Lapita were not a homogenous group. They were, however, skilled seafarers who introduced outriggers and double canoes, which made longer voyages across the Pacific possible, and their distinctive pottery – Lapita ware – appeared in the Bismarck Archipelago as early as 2000 BCE. Lapita pottery included bowls and dishes with complex geometric patterns impressed into clay by small toothed stamps.

Between c. 1100-900 BCE, there was a rapid expansion of Lapita culture in a south-east direction across the Pacific, and this raises the question of intentional migration.

Continue reading...

[queen-breha-organa]

You guys remember that scene in Mando Season 3 where the New Mandalorians call the traditional Mandalorian Clan (the one that still has influences from Temuera’s culture/portrayal) “primitive” and then 0.5 seconds later after the blatant disrespect, a near exact recreation of a double hauled Polynesian voyaging canoe flies out of the water only to get exploded. Did you guys see that shit, what the fuck was that-

[wyvernquill]

what are your top 5 armandaniel moments from the show? :D

Ah, thank you very much for the ask! Let's see...

#1 - s2ep2, The Lestat-as-co-founder-of-the-Theatre reveal moment, with Daniel putting on the telenovela music and Armand listing some of his other 'conquests' - they're totally messing with each other here, it's petty and weird and theatrical and I grin every time. Honorable mention to the potential for "you shared a boyfriend!" to get very ironic if more Armand/Daniel happened in the past, and also Louis sitting there going "...did you!?" at Armand's story about "Now, Voyager". I don't know, it's just very funny, says a lot about both of them really, and I like it when a ship does A Bit, either together or, like here, *against* each other.

#2 - s2ep6, The argument over the San Francisco memories. As opposed to my #1, this one's raw and bitter and tense (they're still messing with each other, but the stakes are higher and the attacks more vicious...), and I love it very much. "I didn't forgive you" and "why did I owe ~YOU~ my one act of cowardice?" are lines that hit very hard, I enjoy how Daniel keeps not buying the excuses even as Louis begins wavering, even though Armand directed most of them at Daniel to start with... it's a very interesting and powerful scene showcasing the shifting dynamics of these three, and I once more like the potential for recontextualisation if Armand and Daniel have more history than previously advertised.

#3 - s2ep5, All of it, really. Obvious choice maybe, but oh well. I love the juxtaposition of the dramatic past and Louis and Daniel putting their feet into the rock garden in the present, the new angles we see of the characters in a memory of the past that *isn't* very carefully curated for interview purposes, and, I mean, "I could be on my knees in a second" - >small nod to force him to his knees<...

#4 - s1ep7, The reveal, particularly Armand floating so Daniel has to stare up at him. It's a nice mirror to the power dynamic and positioning we see in s2ep5, and overall just a wonderfully dramatic scene with Armand removing his disguise in the back while Daniel is ripping into Louis. The theatralics of it all are very *Armand,* and Daniel being struck nearly speechless by surprise (and maybe awe? something else?) for once is also great, though we all know he's just gearing up to tear into Armand too in s2.

#5 - s1ep6, Daniel dreaming of first meeting Louis in Polynesian Mary's... but, gasp! Inexplicably, 'Rashid' is there, too! And meanwhile, in the waking world, 'Rashid' is probably busy tucking a blanket over Daniel while he sleeps. Honestly I just love the flashback, Daniel and Louis' semi-flirting, the way it sets up the reveal in the next episode, and, well. I do like to imagine that the blanket-tucking was done by Armand and was oddly tender. I just think the whole thing's neat.

I probably forgot a number of moments I really enjoyed, but, well, these were the first five I could think of! Louis has snuck into a lot of them, but that is unsurprising, at least in s1 and s2 all three of them are very tangled up in each other, and it's difficult to pick a moment with two of them that doesn't involve the third somehow (except maybe the Loumand scenes in the past, but they narrate those to Daniel, so...) Looking forward to seeing those dynamics shaken up in s3, I suppose! (also, Devil's Minion in the past, pls? Chase, pls? Pls?)

[equatorjournal]

"In 1947, Norwegian archaeologist and anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl travelled 8,000km from Peru to the Polynesian islands on a boat emulating prehistoric designs. His mission was to prove that the original inhabitants of such faraway lands could have migrated from South America. He went on to carry out myriad other experiments in ancient travel from Morocco to South America, and Iraq to Djibouti seeking to better understand routes of cultural exchange." "...Heyerdahl believed that ancient cultures' understanding of the ocean remained a far "truer one than ours". From "Voyages of The Sun" by Thor Heyerdahl. Courtesy of Atelier Editions. https://www.instagram.com/p/CpdXHQkNOO7/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[iantimony]

duesday

listening: idk, stuff on my phone on shuffle. some more coral bones youthemism i guess. friends at the table sangfielle, episode 3; i might not actually relisten to the rest of the arcs i already did and just skim the transcripts.

no children (ska remix) by sad snack: im back in my ska era. really funny song to have an upbeat ska tone.

the mountain goats deserters fan album: have not listened to the whole album yet but god, what a cool and unique thing that i don't think could really exist for most other bands. Five Fucking Hours

reading: Polynesian Tattooing Tools, linked from Fairhaven comic

why gen z is obsessed with point-and-shoot digital cameras: it's funny because a few months ago i was considering getting a cheap point-and-shoot to fuck around with. looks like i am not the only one who was thinkin about it.

i'm working my way through le guin's 'the left hand of darkness'! i bounced off it the first time i tried reading it a few years ago but last year i read a le guin short story anthology that had some stories set on karhide and i think that gave me a good enough primer on the world/her writing style to get it to stick this time. i'm enjoying it! it's a good book!

watching: mina le - booktok & the hotgirlification of reading: some good background video for crochet etc. bernadette banner - hand sewing regency stays should be quick...right?: oughhhhh so pretty. bernadette banner - this regency court gown is probably my favorite project ever: i won't lie i got a little misty-eyed at the artisans getting to sign their names on the robe.

rewatched the gay and wondrous life of caleb gallo. i forgot how good it is, it really holds up and is still funny

also, continued doctor who watch/rewatch. i'm ngl i think the way rory and amy were shoved off screen was...really stupid. "he can't go back to that specific year in ny :(" ok, before amy gets zapped back you just go "yo go to new jersey in a few days" and go pick them up. really silly imo

playing: fallow. did buy miserichord, omori, and slay the princess in the steam summer sale. i have signalis, voyager 19, and a short hike in my cart as we speak. more games that i haven't played to feed the steam library let's goooo

making: crocheted some granny squares.

pattern for the yellow one is this lantana square...if anyone has any interesting looking granny square patterns that would be good in one solid color send em my way!

thinking of getting this pattern too.

i realized this past week that my urge to Make has been very stale and derivative the past few years, if that makes sense. like i don't feel Creative, i see something and mimic it - i do paintings based on photos i took, i follow knitting patterns, i come across something ceramic and decide to make one of my own, i find reference images to copy. but no actual, like, Inventing on my own end. i think that's why i haven't done a lot of fanart or fanfiction as well, just no ideas. i know that's just part of the cycle of creativity and i'm just in a "hunter-gatherer" period of amassing skills and references but idk. i'm tired of it. i want to create more meaningful things but i have no actual ideas, the well feels dry, and i'm not sure how to fix that.

eating: fallow

misc: stares at my mom and brother doing politics doomerism re: supereme court ruling in the family group chat. looks away. chants 'nothing ever happens' to myself like a mantra.