#presented by COLONY

[thethirdbear]

[archiesoniconline]

We've got one final gift for the Year of Shadow: a warm season's greeting from Shadow and Maria, along with the rest of us at ASO! Enjoy however you spend today as fearless as the ultimate lifeform! And remember, a shadow can show you where to find the light.

Art by Teirusuki

[autismmydearwatson]

Still more important is the realization that all those generations of British people (largely men), who were educated in the classics, were being taught to understand and sympathize with the Greeks and Romans. When thinking of the long confrontation between the Celts and Romans, therefore they instinctively sided with the Romans. They would have all read Tacitus' warning: "Remember, they are barbarians..." For the Romans were seen as the bearers of civilization and the ancient Britons as the uncivilized.....

All manner of pressure was brought to bear to ensure that British schoolboys empathized with Rome. From the sixteenth century to the mid-twentieth, every educated person was required to learn Latin. Caesar and Tacitus were among the very first authors which all those pupils were obliged to read. Yet no one taught them anything about the Celts, let alone a Celtic language. Even today, when the teaching of classics in the United Kingdom has sharply declined and Celtic studies receive a measure of official support, for every British schoolchild that learns even a little about the native Celtic heritage, there are a hundred that still learn about the heritage of Rome.

A whole literary genre was devoted to strengthening the bond of identity between the modern Britons and the Ancient Romans. Any number of books and poems have been written to invite the reader to stand in Roman shoes, to put oneself shoulder to shoulder with the legions in the eternal struggle of civilization against barbarity.

-Norman Davies, The Isles

[asmiraofsheba]

"Why are Irish people so quick to defend the Palestinians and to call out Israel?"

This is a list of what the British authorities were allowed to do to the local Irish population in Northern Ireland:

This Act was only repealed in the 1970s.

Violence, oppression, and discrimination against the Irish is not ancient history. Many Irish people are still feeling the effects today. Northern Ireland has one of the highest rates of PTSD in the world. It has some of the worst mental health statistics in general. It's still plagued by political dysfunction, which is a direct result of Britain's colonial activity in Ireland.

So why do the Irish support Palestine?

It's because many of us have lived through very similar things to what they are going through.

[fatehbaz]

Because tuatara are very long lived - between 100 and 200 years by most estimates […] - the founding of Aotearoa/New Zealand as a modern nation and the unfolding of settler-wrought changes to its environment have transpired over the course of the lives of perhaps just two tuatara [...].

---

[T]he tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) [...] [is] the sole surviving representative of an order of reptiles that pre-dates the dinosaurs. [...] [T]he tuatara is of immense global and local significance and its story is pre-eminently one of deep timescales, of life-in-place [...]. Epithets abound for the unique and ancient biodiversity found in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Prized as “Ghosts of Gondwana” (Gibbs 2008), or as denizens of “Moa’s Ark” (Bellamy et al. 1990) or “The Southern Ark” (Andrews 1986), the country’s faunal species invoke fascination and inspire strong language [...]. In rounded terms, it [has been] [...] just 250 years since James Cook made landfall; just 200 years since the founding of the handful of [...] settlements that instigated agricultural transformation of the land [...]. European newcomers [...] were disconcerted by the biota [...]: the country was seen to “lack” terrestrial mammals; many of its birds were flightless and/or songless; its bats crawled through leaf-litter; its penguins inhabited forests; its parrots were mountain-dwellers; its frogs laid eggs that hatched miniature frogs rather than tadpoles [...].

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Despite having met a reassuringly temperate climate [mild, oceanic, comparable to western Europe], too, the newcomers nevertheless sought to make adjustments to that climate, and it was clear to them that profits beckoned. Surveying the towering lowland forests from the deck of HMS Endeavour in 1769, and perceiving scope for expansion of the fenland drainage schemes being undertaken at that time in England and across swathes of Europe, Joseph Banks [botanist on Cook's voyage] reported on “swamps which might doubtless Easily be drained” [...]. Almost a century later, in New Zealand or Zealandia, the Britain of the South, [...] Hursthouse offered a fuller explication of this ethos: The cultivation of a new country materially improves its climate. Damp and dripping forests, exhaling pestilent vapours from rank and rotten vegetation, fall before the axe [...]. Fen and march and swamp, the bittern’s dank domain, fertile only in miasma, are drained; and the plough converts them into wholesome plains of fruit, and grain, and grass. [...]

[The British administrators] duly set about felling the ancient forests of Aotearoa/New Zealand, draining the country’s swamps [...]. They also began importing and acclimatising a vast array of exotic (predominantly northern-world) species [sheep, cattle, rodents, weasels, cats, crops, English pasture grasses, etc.] [...]. [T]hey constructed the seemingly ordinary agronomic patchwork of Aotearoa/New Zealand's productive, workaday landscapes [...]. This is effected through and/or accompanied by drastic deforestation, alteration of the water table and the flow of waterways, displacement and decline of endemic species, re-organisation of predation chains and pollination sequences and so on [...]. Aotearoa/New Zealand was founded in and through climate crisis [...]. Climate crisis is not a disastrous event waiting to happen in the future in this part of the world; rather, it has been with us for two centuries already [...].

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[T]he crest formed by the twinned themes of absence and exceptionalism [...] has shaped this creature's niche in the western imagination. As one of the very oldest species on earth, tuatara have come to be recognised [in Euro-American scientific schemas] [...] as an evolutionary and biodiversity treasure [...]. In 1867, [...] Gunther [...] pronounced that it was not a lizard at all [...] [and] placed the tuatara [...] in a new order, Rhynchocephalia, [...] igniting a frenzy of scientific interest worldwide. Specifically, the tuatara was seen to afford opportunities for "astonished witnessing" [...], for "the excitement of having the chance to see, to study, to observe a true saurian of Mesozoic times in the flesh, still living, but only on this tiny speck of the earth [...], while all its ancestors [...] died about one hundred and thirty-five million years ago" [...]. Tuatara have, however, long held special status as a taonga or treasured species in Māori epistemologies, featuring in a range of [...] stories where [...] [they] are described by different climates and archaeologies of knowledge [...] (see Waitangi Tribunal 2011, p. 134). [...]

While unconfirmed sightings in the Wellington district were reported in the nineteenth century, tuatara currently survive only in actively managed - that is, monitored and pest-controlled - areas on scattered offshore islands, as well as in mainland zoo and sanctuary populations. As this confinement suggests, tuatara are functionally “extinct” in almost all of their former wild ranges. [...] [Italicized text in the heading of this post originally situated here in Boswell's article.] [...] In the remaining areas of Aotearoa/New Zealand where this species does now live [...], tuatara may in some cases be the oldest living inhabitants. Yet [...] if the tuatara is a creature of long memory, this memory is at risk of elimination or erasure. [...] [T]uatara expose and complicate the [...] machineries of public memory [...] and attendant environmental ideologies and management paradigms [...].

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All text above by: Anna Boswell. "Climates of Change: A Tuatara's-Eye View". Humanities, 2020, Volume 9, Issue 2, 38. Published 1 May 2020. This article belongs to the Special Issue Environmental Humanities Approaches to Climate Change. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Text within brackets added by me for clarity. The first paragraph/heading in this post, with text in italics, are also the words of Boswell from this same article. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[hussyknee]

[daincrediblegg]

Maybe it’s just the fact that I spotted him in iwtv season 2 but I think I’ve really warmed up to hodgeson

[to-survive-a-highschool]

How does the Canadian schooling system work? Are you more like Aussies with primary and high school or Americans with middleschool

we have elementary (kindergarten [junior and senior] to grade 8], high school [grade 9-12] and i have no idea about college/uni. being colonized by britain tends to do that to your schooling system /j

[likealittleheartbeat]

“QUEERNESS IS NOT yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there. Some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for the minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present.“

José Esteban Muñoz, “Feeling Utopia” in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

[rolledspinepodcasts]

Dark Horse Presents

Aliens vs. Predator 2

Dark Horse Comics #25 (1994)

Aliens vs. Predator: Duel #1-2 (1995)

Aliens vs. Predator: War #1-4 (1995)

Aliens: Booty #1 (1996)

[muirneach]

idk how annoying ass ppl on here can be “All Old Country Is Good And Leftist” and also “All Westerns Are Racist” and also “All Cowboys Ever Were Latino/Black” and also “All People In The Country Are Conservative” simultaneously like this shit doesnt add up

[scarletiswailing347]

i cant find it anymore but this one post i read about zam caring about lifesteal for lifesteals sake while nobody else really does that inspired an au for me lol

[dykesynthezoid]

One of the topic choices for a big final essay I have to write by Monday is comparing how Alexandra Kollontai and Frantz Fanon depict the role of women in revolution and I’m like yayyyy nobody will escape my criticism yayyy!!!

[frereamour]

fascinating experience when another portuguese person says they hate the country and its culture (understandable) and then in alternative talk about places like the UK and northern europe... ok so what you hate is that we don't have a bigger slice of the imperialist pie

[storm-of-feathers]

I'm 99% about to get hung drawn and quartered on isq

[theultimatekamehamehavoc]

Made a silly little template i guess. can use for whatever. cus it's silly and monokuma is presenting some important information, guys! also, since i made the template, i will go first with it's usage