#the dark ages history

[lionofchaeronea]

Brooch (the so-called "Hanney brooch") of Anglo-Saxon (Kentish) manufacture, decorated with garnets set in bosses of a white material, perhaps shell. Made in the 7th century, the brooch was found in the grave of a woman between 20 and 25 years of age and would have been worn on her left shoulder. From Oxfordshire, England, UK; now in the British Museum. Photo credit: Ian R. Cartwright/The Portable Antiquities Scheme/The Trustees of the British Museum.

[littleacebee]

This time together with my Comedy podcasts appreciation-recommendation zine I prepared Comedy (and comedy adjacent) Podcasts Bingo!

Reblog and mark which podcasts have you listened to, take a recommendation and share new podcasts with me!

[shellsnroses]

Comic for “The Ruin” a poem written by an unknown author in the 8th or 9th century

How wondrous, this wall stone,

Shattered by fate.

Castles are smashed,

The work of giants, crumbled.

Ruined are the roofs,

Tumbled the towers.

Broken the barred gates.

Frost in the plaster,

Ceilings a-gaping.

Torn away, fallen,

Eaten by age.

[stormingfrost]

Kinda obsessed with the historical context of Rise of the Guardians. Pitch wanting the Dark Ages to come back, which historically was the decline of culture and records. The Guardians rose at the same time as the Renaissance with the rise of culture, knowledge, and science. (Tooth in particular mentions that she hasn’t been out in the field for 440 years, give or take, which would put that smack dab in the middle of the Renaissance) 

The way Pitch doesn’t want the world to change, the way the Guardians change in tune with the world. The way Jack, who lived in has a human in the 17th or 18th century, who lived in the time after the Renaissance and lived witnessing the world all the way to the modern era, is there to show the Guardians how much they missed and how they can further change and improve for the more modern world. These characters are immortal beings who have so much power over the world, it makes so much sense that when they fall and rise in power it impacts the world that they want to influence, for better or for worse. 

[literaryvein-reblogs]

I have no clue if you've done this already, but I would love some royal-related vocabulary!! I write about a royal family (one in the middle ages) and it gets tiring looking for all the correct terms😅

Some Medieval Vocabulary

Amercement - financial penalty imposed by the King or his justices for various minor offences. The word comes from the fact that the offender is said to be ‘in mercy’.

Assize - meeting of feudal vassals with the King, and the edicts issued from it. It comes to have a legal context of court; but then in the early days the king’s court was just that – a place where law was made and justice executed. Hence the double meaning of the word court.

Borough - town with the right of self government granted by royal charter

Chamber - the financial office of the royal household

Chamberlain - officer of the royal household, responsible for the Chamber. He was therefore responsible for administration of the household and the private estates of the King.

Chancellor - officer of the Royal Household who originally served as the monarch’s secretary or notary, managing the Chancery, filled with clerks who produced writs and written instructions and records.

Chivalry - the knightly class of feudal times. The primary sense of the term in Europe in the Middle Ages is “knights,” or “fully armed and mounted fighting men.” Thence the term came to mean the gallantry and honour expected of knights. Later the word came to be used in its general sense of “courtesy.”

Constable - the title of an officer given command in an army or an important garrison. Also the High Constable was the officer who commanded in the King’s absence and commanded the King's army.

Destrier - warhorse; so called because it would be led using the right hand

Diadem - a royal crown

Eyre - the king and his justices would traditionally travel through the kingdom to deliver justice. As the king became more centred at Westminster, justices would continue to travel – and were called Justices in Eyre. From the French errer, "to travel".

Heir apparent - the declared heir to the throne, normally the king’s eldest son

Heir presumptive - the presumed heir to the throne in the event of the king dying without an heir apparent

Justiciar - head of the royal judicial system and the King’s viceroy during his absence from the country

League - somewhere between 1½ to 3 miles. Traditionally, the distance a person or horse can walk in one hour.

Mark - money, worth thirteen shillings and four pence, i.e. two thirds of £1

Mead hall - in the Middle Ages in Northern Europe and Scandinavia, a large building with just one room that was used as a central place for entertainment and as a living place for a lord/king

Minstrel - a traveling musician and singer common between the 11th and 15th centuries

Ordeal - a method of trial in which the accused was given a physical test which could be met successfully only if they were innocent (e.g., ordeal by fire)

Purveyance or prise - in early medieval days, the lord had the right to be entertained by his followers, at their expense. And of course this applied to the greatest lord of all – the king. Over time, the king travelled less, but still wanted the benefit of being able to have him and his household live at someone else's expense – and so he exercised the right to take goods and food in lieu of being there. It was the policy to pay – but payment was often small and late.

Saga - a long story about Scandinavian history, written in the Old Norse language in the Middle Ages, mainly in Iceland

Steward - man responsible for running the day to day affairs of the manor or castle in absence of the lord

Subinfeudation - in medieval Europe, the process by which a vassal (i.e., a man who lived on land given to him by a powerful land owner in exchange for agreeing to fight for him) allowed someone else to use or live on part of their land

Sumpter - packhorse, pony, mule or other animal

Thegn - military companion to the king

Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6

Here's what I found for you. Hope this helps! Would love to read your work if it does—sounds like the kind of writing I enjoy :)

More: Medieval-Related Vocabulary ⚜ Word Lists

[edwardian-girl-next-door]

~ Florence Harrison "Oh why does yon pale face look at me from out the golden cloth" from Early Poems of William Morris

via internet archive

[virgocurator]

Memento Mori

Gold pendant,

1500s, France

[joelchaimholtzman]

This is a painting (top) I made a few years ago as a tribute to John William Waterhouse's work named ''The Magic Circle'' (bottom).

The mood, stortytelling and simplicity of the scene really caught my attention, and I wanted to take those elements and add more dynamicism to it when working on my interpretation.

I hope you like it!

Best,

JCH

[quietchanges]

illuminated manuscripts & puerh tea📜🫖

[whereserpentswalk]

I hate a lot of the historical misconceptions surrounding our ideas of how people lived in the past. There seems to be so much of a desire to paint our ansestors as gross or dirty so we can try to pretend our own society is more enlightened.

No, people in the past didn't just not bathe. Not even peasants. People have literally always had ways to clean themselves, it came free with human nature.

No, people in the past didn't just live with human waste in the streets. They had things like cespits, even in the dark ages. Because people really don't want to live near where they put their waste, instinctively.

Same goes with the idea that people would rarely make it to thirty in the past. That's just statistics being thrown off by infant mortality.

Seriously, stop learning your medieval history from Victorian sources meant to slander the middle ages.

[useless-catalanfacts]

A page in the Book of the Eramprunyà Barony showing the donzel* Eimeric de Cunit paying homage to Jaume Marc, baron and lord of the Castle of Eramprunyà (Gavà, Barcelona Metropolitan Ambit, Catalonia).

One of the other documents in this book was written by Jaume Marc himself, narrating in first person and with all kinds of details how he was invested as a knight by the king Peter the Cerimonious in the Pedralbes Monastery (Barcelona, Catalonia) in presence of the queen Elisenda de Montcada on December 8th 1360. He explains the process and the ceremony, which took place in the church and palace of the monastery.

*A donzel is the son of a noble family who has not yet been armed as a knight.

Source: Centre d'Història de la Ciutat de Gavà / Monestir de Pedralbes.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The internet is not a (link)dump truck

Monday (October 2), I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab. On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

The second decade of the 21st century is truly a bounteous time. My backyard has produced a bumper crop of an invasive species of mosquito that is genuinely innovative: rather than confining itself to biting in the dusk and dawn golden hours, these stinging clouds of flying vampires bite at every hour that God sends:

https://themagnet.substack.com/p/the-magnet-081-war-with-mosquitoes

Here in the twilight of capitalism's planet-devouring, half-century orgy of wanton destruction, there's more news every day than I can possibly write a full blog post about every day, and as with many weeks, I have arrived at Saturday with a substantial backlog of links that didn't fit into the week's "Hey look at this" linkdumps.

Thus, the eighth installment in my ongoing, semiregular series of Saturday linkdumps:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

This week, the miscellany begins with the first hesitant signs of an emerging, post-neoliberal order. The FTC, under direction of the force-of-nature that is Lina Khan, has brought its long-awaited case antitrust case against Amazon. I am very excited about this. Disoriented, even.

When was the last time you greeted every day with a warm feeling because high officials in the US government were working for the betterment of every person in the land? It's enough to make one giddy. Plus, the New York Times let me call Amazon "the apex predator of our platform era"! Now that it's in the "paper of record," it's official:

https://pluralistic.net/ApexPredator

Now, lefties have been predicting capitalism's imminent demise since The Communist Manifesto, but any fule kno that the capitalist word for "crisis" also translates as "opportunity." Like the bedbugs that mutated to thrive in clouds of post-war DDT, capitalism has adapted to each crisis, emerging in a new, more virulent form:

https://boingboing.net/2023/09/30/bedbugs-take-paris.html

But "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop" (Stein's Law). Perhaps our mistake was in waiting for capitalism to give way to socialism, rather than serving as a transitional phase between feudalism and…feudalism.

What's the difference between feudalism and capitalism? According to Yanis Varoufakis, it comes down to whether we value rents (income you get from owning things) over profits (income you get from doing things):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

By that metric, the FTC's case against Amazon is really a case against feudalism. Through predatory pricing and acquisitions, Amazon has turned itself into a chokepoint that every merchant, writer and publisher has to pass through in order to reach their customers. Amazon charges a fortune to traverse that chokepoint (estimates range from 45% to 51% of gross revenues) and then forces sellers to raise their prices everywhere else when they hike their Amazon prices so they can afford Amazon's tolls. It's "an economy-wide hidden tax":

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-ftc-sues-to-break-up-amazon-over

Now, feudalism isn't a straightforward proposition. Like, are you sure you mean feudalism? Maybe you mean "manorialism" (they're easy to mix up):

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

Plus, much of what we know about the "Dark Ages" comes from grifter doofuses like Voltaire, a man who was capable of dismissing the 800 year Holy Roman Empire with a single quip ("neither holy, roman, nor an empire"). But the reality is a lot more complicated, gnarly and interesting.

That's where medievalist Eleanor Janeaga comes in, and her "Against Voltaire, or, the shortest possible introduction to the Holy Roman Empire" is a banger:

https://going-medieval.com/2023/09/29/against-voltaire-or-the-shortest-possible-introduction-to-the-holy-roman-empire/

Now, while it's true that Enlightenment thinkers gave medieval times a bum rap, it's likewise true that a key element of Enlightenment justice is transparency: justice being done, and being seen to be done. One way to distinguish "modern" justice from "medieval" trials is to ask whether the public is allowed to watch the trial, see the evidence, and understand the conclusion.

Here again, there is evidence that capitalism was a transitional phase between feudalism and feudalism. The Amazon trial has already been poisoned by farcical redactions, in which every key figure is blacked out of the public record:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-09-27-redacted-case-against-amazon/

This is part of a trend. The other gigantic antitrust case underway right now, against Google, has turned into a star chamber as well, with Judge Amit P Mehta largely deferring to Google's frequent demands to close the court and seal the exhibits:

https://usvgoogle.org/trial-update-9-22

Google's rationale for this is darkly hilarious: if the public is allowed to know what's happening in its trial, this will be converted into "clickbait," which is to say, "The public is interested in this case, and if they are informed of the evidence against us, that information will be spread widely because it is so interesting":

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/secrecy-is-systemic

Thankfully, this secrecy is struggling to survive the public outrage it prompted. While the court's Zoom feed has been shuttered and while Judge Mehta is still all-too-willing to clear the courtroom during key testimony, at least the DoJ's exhibits aren't being sealed at the same clip as before:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/27/23892215/google-search-antitrust-trial-documents-public-again-judge-mehta-rules

In 2023, the world comes at you fast. There's an epic struggle over the future of corporate dominance playing out all around us. I mean, there are French antitrust enforcers kicking down doors of giant tech companies and ransacking their offices for evidence of nefarious anticompetitive plots:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/28/23894863/nvidia-offices-raided-french-competition-authority

As ever, the question is "socialism or barbarism." But don't say that too loud: in America, socialism is a slur, one that dates back to the Reconstruction era, when pro-slavery factions called Black voting "socialism in South Carolina."

Ever since, white nationalists used "socialism" make Americans believe that "socialism" was an "extremist" view, so they'd stand by while everyone from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump smeared their opponents as "Marxists":

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4066499-trump-paints-2024-campaign-as-righteous-crusade/

As Heather Cox Richardson puts it for The Atlantic, "There is a long-standing fight over whether support for the modern-day right is about taxes or race. The key is that it is about taxes and race at the same time":

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/american-socialism-racist-origins/675453/

The cruelty isn't the point, in other words. Cruelty is the tactic. The point is power. Remember, no war but class war. All of this is in service to paying workers less so that bosses and investors can have more.

Take "essential workers," everyone from teachers to zookeepers, nurses to librarians, EMTs to daycare workers. All of these "caring" professions are paid sub-living wages, and all of these workers are told that "they matter too much to earn a living wage":

https://www.okdoomer.io/praise-doesnt-pay/

The "you matter too much to pay" mind-zap is called "vocational awe," a crucial term introduced by Ettarh Fobazi in her 2018 paper:

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

Vocational awe is how creative workers – like the writers who just won their strike and the actors who are still fighting – are conned into working at starvation wages. As the old joke goes, "What, and give up show-business?"

https://ask.metafilter.com/117904/Whats-the-joke-thas-hase-the-punchline-what-and-give-up-show-business

In this moment of Big Tech-driven, AI-based wage suppression, mass surveillance, corruption and inequality, perhaps we should take a moment to remind ourselves that cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion. Or, more to the point, the warning was about high-tech corporate takeover of our lives, and the suggestion was that we could seize the means of computation (a synonym for William Gibson's "the street finds its own use for things"):

http://www.seizethemeansofcomputation.org/

We are living in a lopsided cyberpunk future, long on high-tech corporate takeover, short of computation seizing. This point is made sharply in JWZ's "Dispatch From The Cyberpunk City," which is beautifully packaged as a Hypercard stack that you run on an in-browser Mac Plus emulator from the Internet Archive:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/neuroblast-dispatch-from-the-cyberpunk-city/

Cast your gaze ahead, to the near future: Public space has all but disappeared. Corporate landlords use AI-powered robots to harass the homeless. The robots, built slick and white with an R2-D2 friendliness now most resemble giant butt plugs covered in graffiti and grime.

Science fiction doesn't have to be a warning. It can also be a wellspring of hope. That's what I tried to do with The Lost Cause, my forthcoming Green New Deal novel, which Bill McKibben called "The first great YIMBY novel":

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

Writing a hopeful novel of ecological, social and economic redemption, driven by solidarity, repair, and library socialism, was a powerful tonic against despair in this smoke-smothered, flooded, mosquito-bitten time. And while the book isn't out yet, there are early indications I succeeded, like Kim Stanley Robinson's reaction, "Along with the rush of adrenaline I felt a solid surge of hope. May it go like this."

And now, we have a concurring judgment from The Library Journal, who yesterday published their review, which concludes: "a thought-provoking story, with a message of hope in a near-future that looks increasingly bleak":

https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-lost-cause-2196385

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/30/mesclada/#melange

[littleacebee]

Let’s talk about comedy podcasts!

Some of the descriptions/part of them were taken from shows themselves or their descriptions. Please, ignore all the spelling mistakes.

IDs in alt texts and under the cut (I guess they might be especially needed here)

[ID: Front cover of a zine. There is big text: „Comedy podcasts appreciation-recommendation zine” and red heart below.

Page 1: Text: „Comedy podcasts don’t get enough love and attention. There are so many of them out there that are so so amazing. As a big comedy enjoyer I would like to show some appreciation them and at the same time share few recommendations with you!”

Page 2: At the top of the page there is text: „Period piece comedy” on a scroll. Below there four podcasts’ cover arts and descriptions. First podcast is Fawx & stallion and the text says: „Team from Baker Street. The other one.”. Second podcast is Victoriocity and the text says: „Inspector Fleet and Clara Entwhistle try to solve a murder in unending city.”. Third podcast is The Kingmaker Histories and the text says: “Colette Geise experience the worst migraine of her life.”. Fourth podcast is Cry Havoc! Ask Questions Later and the text says: “Nobody said that running Roman Republic would be easy”.

Page 3. There is title at the top of the page: “Workplace comedy”. There are three podcasts’ cover arts and descriptions. First belongs to Mission Rejected and the text says: “The story of world’s most secret agents - the backups.”. Second belongs to Super Suits and the text says: “How is it to be a lawyer in a world filled with of superpowers?”. Third one belongs to G.O.B.L.I.N.S and the text says: “Elizabeth’s only chance to survive is work with messy team of Goblins and elvish prince.”

Page 4: There is title at the top of the page: “There is a workplace and there is comedy”. Below there are three podcasts’ cover arts and descriptions. First belong to The Amelia Project and the text says: “Welcome to the best death-faking agency!”. Second belongs to Wooden Overcoats and the text says: “Rudyard Fun runs a funeral home. It used to be the only one. It isn’t anymore.” Third belong to Forgive me! and the text says: “Father Ben takes confessions of St. Patrick’s parishioners and deals with their interesting sins.”

Page 5: There is a title at the top of the page: “Sci-fi comedy”. Below there are three podcasts’ cover arts and descriptions. First one belongs to Stellar Firma and the text says: “listen how most luxurious planets are designed! If only designers knew what they were doing…”. Second belongs to Starship Q Star and the text says: “”First all woman and non-binary crew” becomes the last six humans in the universe.”. Third belongs to Oz9 and the text says: “Join the useless crew of Oz9as they limp around in space looking for a new home.”

Page 6: There is title at the top of the page: “Fantasy comedy”. There are three podcasts’ cover arts and descriptions. First belongs to Dark Ages and the text says: “Rivercliffe Museum staff has to survive Dark Lord, low attendance and each other.”. Second belongs to Wizard seeking wizard and the text says: “Matchmaking show for wizards! Find a wizard you need!”. Third belongs to Absolutely No Adventures and the text says: “Chosen one of every prophecy opens a bakery with one rule: absolutely no adventures”.

Page 7: Text: “All these short descriptions do not do justice to how amazing and funny all these podcasts are. Please go give them a chance, they are definitely worthy!”. At the bottom of the page there is text: “#fiction podcast zine event”.

[animefanboy48]

I just realised that the reason Tom Riddle wanted to be a DADA teacher because H¡tIer tried to be accepted at an ARTS school but failed.

That so obvious but I never thought about it;-;

[sayhoneysiren]

WHAT PLUTO ENTERING AQUARIUS MEANS FOR US

[lost-wits]

x