#there were thoughts

[littlesparklight]

Still (as always) thinking about slaves in Greek myth. Specifically, the different threads and attitudes made clear between the institution of slavery as such, represented by the "common"/"real" if you will, slave, and the unjustness of slavery, represented by enslaved, formerly free royalty.

As an illustration of the former:

Fr. 8 "Slaves who are fond of their masters' class arouse much hostility from their own kind."

Fr. 12: "You are indeed wise, Priam, but I am telling you: there is no bigger burden than a slave having a higher opinion of himself than he should, nor a possession more spiteful or worthless for a household."

Fr. 23: "I have put it to the test: so base is the class of slaves; mere bellies and they think of nothing further than that." (These fragments have been taken from Ioanna Karamanou's book on Euripides' Alexandros play, and I think she uses a slightly different numbering system to the fragments, just for knowledge's sake.)

And this is Eumaios in the Odyssey:

"since this is the lot of slaves, ever in fear when over them as lords their masters hold sway—young masters such as ours." (Book 14, the Odyssey)

He never comes any closer than this, aside from remarking on his general misfortune, to express any sense of his situation as a slave being unjust. In fact, he makes much of how "kind" of a master Odysseus has been. But, Eumaios isn't quite a common slave - he is, like so many others, enslaved royalty (though he's been enslaved since he was a child), and I don't know if it means anything, but Eumaios is the one who gets to express a hope of being given possessions and a house and a wife, if not quite hoping for freedom. Eurykleia voices nothing such, and she has no notable ancestry.

What makes these two "good" slaves is that they are hard-working and useful, as well as loyal to their owners. Loyal enough they will do things like sell out and help kill those slaves in the household who attempted to get something for themselves. (Refer to fragments 12 and 23 above.) Being loyal to those who "rightfully" owns them is all that matters. This makes them worthy of kindness and some generosity. But even Eurykleia isn't free from the threat of violence, since, no matter how loyal, she gets threatened with death if she should give Odysseus away before he's ready.

The same ideas of what a good and "useful" slave is is reflected throughout what we have of Euripides (and probably Sophocles') Alexandros play. There are fragments from it that, when Paris wins the funeral games, switches and flirts with the possibility that nobility and other such good traits are found in everyone, no matter their birth. The irony here, of course, is that the slave who has won is not "really" a slave, but of noble lineage, and this then, when the reveal happens, proves his worth and right to have won. Not because all people are equal, but, again, because those of noble blood are "better"; the order Hecuba and Deiphobos feared disturbed by the slave's victory has been restored instead.

And then we have the enslaved noble women of Troy, whose tragic and unjust situation does not come from slavery as such, but because they are better than and should thus, not, have to be enslaved:

"I whose father was lord [350] of all the Phrygians, my chiefest pride in life. Then I was nursed on fair hopes to be a bride for kings, the center of keen jealousy among suitors, to see whose home I would make my own; and over each lady of Ida I was queen; [355] ah me! admired among maidens, equal to a goddess, save for death alone, but now I am a slave! That name first makes me long for death, so strange it sounds; [...] while some slave, bought I know not where, will taint my bed, once deemed worthy of royalty." (Hecuba, Euripides)

Polyxena, though now, in theory, no different from a slave "bought I know not where", will still have her bed "tainted" by this common slave if he should sleep with her. And much like with Eumaios above, who expresses no complaints about slavery as such, this servant in the Andromache play still considers Andromache more than her, though they are both the same, now:

"Mistress, I do not shrink from calling you this name since it was the name I thought proper in your house when we lived in the land of Troy. I was well disposed toward you there and to your husband while he lived, [60]" (Andromache, Euripides)

What's the irony in all this - and I wonder whether it was an irony the Greek audience would have noted, or found amusing, or... well, something - is that even as these "barbarians" get to hold this view, for a moment embodying ideals and a nobility of tragedy, for the Greeks themselves, barbarians were "naturally" slaves. You see something of it both in the Andromache and the post-sack plays, where Andromache or Hecuba will make such comments as (paraphrased) "even we, as barbarians, find this outrageous, the way you Greeks are behaving". In the works of Classical Greece and forward, the Trojans do not get to embody the nobility of... well, free nobility, without noting that they were still other.

That they were still:

"[1400] And it is right, mother, that Hellenes should rule barbarians, but not barbarians Hellenes, those being slaves, while these are free." (Iphigenia in Aulis, Euripides)

[foolfortune]

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

girl why the hell WEREN'T you at the devil's sacrament 👀 that's three sacraments in a row you've missed 👀 👀 👀

[tawnysoup]

Finally now that the comic is fully public on comicfury, I get to share it with all of you here, too <3

If you enjoyed, please consider supporting by buying a PDF of the comic on itch.io: https://tawnysoup.itch.io/home-in-the-woods

[problemnyatic]

the steven universe hate is insane bc people are (or at least were) more upset that fictional war criminals got fictional hugs than they recognize that it singlehandedly advanced queer rep in children's media by lightyears and then straight up ate heavy retaliation for the nerve.

It does have real flaws that are worth discussing, but it also put their male protagonist in dresses and skirts and played it straight and even empowering, they aired a lesbian wedding on television, it was a genuinely queer, genuinely diverse piece of media through and through. It did a lot of real good for the real world.

But also the fictional characters caused fictional harm to other fictional characters, and didn't get an onscreen firing squad sentence. So, you know, it's basically ontologically evil in real life.

[fanaticalthings]

Bruce Wayne except he texts like an ominous boomer

wdym you can't tell if he's threatening them?

Based on this post by @mysterycitrus :)

<- Prev Masterlist Next ->

Bonus:

Happy birthday, Tim 🥰

[freddiecorleone]

I don't care how gay the wicked movie is or whatever this site can't gaslight me into taking ariana grande seriously all of a sudden

[technikki]

if there's anything i've learned from the current state of social media it's that this is one of the worst possible notifications you can receive upon opening an app

[paintedcrows]

Nooo little Stanley watch out! Your striped shirt, bandage, and sad backstory are too Fallen Human Coded!! The Undertale narrative is going to get you!!!

[carbonateds-oda]

fake ass idgafer. I saw you gazing off into the distance like you were looking at something far away, something no one else could see but you

[knightofleo]

A Hand-Muppet Great Potoo Getting Snacks

[itsscaredycat]

the hex girls!!! it’s spooky season 💚❤️💜

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[kedreeva]

There's some dude (derogatory) on FB who is PISSED people are pricing their farm fresh eggs at $2 and $3 a dozen instead of $4+, saying it's "disrespectful" and "undignified" and "I'm trying to feed my kids" like Sir, you are on a Facebook group page bitching about your neighbors egg prices because your pet chickens aren't earning you a living wage and you think it's your neighbors' fault, you do not have a leg to stand on here wrt dignity.

Also half the answers are like "I give them to friends and family free" or "I donate them to food banks" or "I'm making them affordable to folks who might not otherwise be able to get them now that they're so expensive in the store" and "if you think you're going to turn a profit keeping backyard chickens you have been wildly misled" and so on, and so forth, and I'm so living for it.

and I can tell you right now, he did NOT like my answer of "if you're trying to feed your kids, I hear eggs are edible."

[detentiontrack]

When Mabel comes out to Stan, she’s really scared that he’s going to reject her and have an issue with it, so she’s emotional and asks him if he still loves and supports her and he’s just like “??? Kid I’ve been telling you all summer I’m one of the LBTGs” and then it’s her turn to be like “wait what??” because she thinks he had never mentioned a sexuality before, and it turns out Stan had been constantly telling the kids that he’s “ambidextrous” because he thought it meant the same thing as bisexual.

[markscherz]

Meet the seven new frog species we just named after iconic Star Trek captains!

Artwork by A. Petzold, CC BY-ND 4.0

At the right time of year along rushing streams in the humid rainforests that stretch the length of Madagascar's eastern and northern mountain ridges, otherworldly trills of piercing whistles can be heard.

Are they birds? Insects? Communicator beeps? Tricorder noises?

No, they're little treefrogs!

Boophis janewayae. Photo by M. Vences, CC BY-SA 4.0

Until recently, we thought all of the populations of these little brown frogs across the island were one widespread species, Boophis marojezensis, described in 1994. But genetics in the early 2000s and 2010s showed that there were several species here, not just one.

Now my colleagues and I have shown that they are in fact eight separate species, each with unique calls!

These whistling sounds reminded us so much of Star Trek sound effects that we decided to name the seven new species after Star Trek captains: Boophis kirki, B. picardi, B. janewayae, B. siskoi, B. pikei, B. archeri, and B. burnhamae.

Photos of all new species described by Vences et al. 2024. CC BY-SA 4.0

I subtly and not-so-subtly built some Star Trek references into the paper, but probably the best one is this one:

'Finding these frogs sometimes requires considerable trekking; pursuing strange new calls, to seek out new frogs in new forests; boldly going where no herpetologist has gone before.'

— Vences et al. 2024

There’s a real sense of scientific discovery and exploration here, which we think is in the spirit of Star Trek.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that there are at least two Trekkies amongst the authors (including yours truly). As fans of Star Trek, we are also just pleased to dedicate these new species to the characters who have inspired and entertained us over the decades.

On a personal note, this marks a milestone for me, as it means I have now described over 100 frog species! I am very pleased that the 100th is Captain Janeway's Bright-eyed Frog, Boophis janewayae (if you count them in order of appearance in the paper)—she is probably my favourite captain, and I really love Star Trek: Voyager.

You can read more about the discovery of these new species on my website! You can also read the Open Access paper published in Vertebrate Zoology here.