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Medieval kids’ doodles on birch bark

Here’s something very special. In the 1950s archeologists made a great discovery near the city of Novgorod, Russia: they dug up hundreds of pieces of birch bark with all sorts of texts written on them. The 915 items are mostly letters, notes and receipts, all written between the 11th and 15th century. Among the more notable scraps is a marriage proposal from a man called Mikita to his beloved Anna: “marry me - I want you and you want me, and the witness to that is Ignat Moiseev” (item 377).

The most special items, however, are the ones shown above, which are from a medieval classroom. In the 13th century, young schoolboys learning to write filled these scraps with alphabets and short texts. Bark was ideal material for writing down things with such a short half-life. Then the pupils got bored and started to doodle, as kids do: crude drawings of individuals with big hands, as well as a figure with a raised sword standing next to a defeated beast (lower image). The last one was drawn by Onfim, who put his name next to the victorious warrior. The snippets provide a delightful and most unusual peek into a 13th-century classroom, with kids learning to read - and getting bored in the process.

More information - On the scraps in general, see here. Here is a full inventory, in Russian. On the excavation, see here and here. More kids’ doodles here and here. Some letters in this Flickr stream. The Leiden scholar Jos Schaeken published a book in Dutch on this material, which can be downloaded for free here (English translation to follow next year). 

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A group of sasquatch is a sasquad.

Prove me wrong.

You can't.

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I know the birds outside my window are totally NOT offended by me singing Rockin' Robin to them...

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Will always reblog this

BRIDGERTON 2.03 "A Bee in Your Bonnet"

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JONATHAN BAILEY BRIDGERTON - Season 02

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Today, I would like to commemorate an event which has laid a very profound impact on the internet.

Ten years ago on this day (06/08/09), a forum website called SomethingAwful held a photoshop contest titled “create paranormal images”.  The contest would require participants to edit ordinary photographs into creepy-looking images, and then try to pass them off as authentic photos on other paranormal forums.

Two days later, on June 10th, a user by the name Victor Surge would find this thread, and become inspired.  He submitted the two pictures above, featuring a tall, faceless monster which would stalk children, who would then disappear.  He called his monster “the Slender Man”. After this initial post, Surge and others would expand on the character and the story, creating one of the internet’s most famous monsters.  The Slender Man proved to be popular enough to spread to other websites, with 4chan, Deviantart, and TV Tropes all having their own Slender-Mania. On June 20th of that same year, another user on the SomethingAwful forums found the Slender Man, and also wanted to contribute.  Noticing nobody had made any videos yet of the monster, he sat down with some of his friends and planned out a video webseries involving a former college film student discovering and unravelling the mysteries surrounding Slender Man; this would become Marble Hornets, one of the first horror-themed ARG’s of the internet.

That all happened ten years ago.  Ten years of haunting the darkest corners of the internet, and Slender Man has built up a surprisingly dense resume, for a fictional monster.  Several popular webseries, a couple hit games, at least two movies, even inspiring other characters in seperate series like the Silence in Dr Who and the Enderman in Minecraft.  And all this within a ten-year period.

I think this just attests to how much humans can be inspired by an idea.  From a small handful of edited photographs, we collectively constructed a new monster which lurks in our nightmares, and now it almost seems as natural as the horror mythos he was based on.  For better or worse, the Slender Man seems to be here to stay. Happy Birthday, Slendy!  Here’s to hoping you continue to be both terrifying and terrific!

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researching parrying daggers as a fun little treat and i'm delighted by how much every single one of these things looks like it's designed to be as annoying as possible

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please be patient with me im from the 1900s

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god created men, and as an apology, he gave us claudia jessie.

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Dutch artist, Redmer Hoekstra.

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i wish tumblr let you like replies. sometimes i don't have anything to say and how else are my beloved mutuals going to know i saw what they said if i can't leave a little virtual heart sticker on their forehead

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Don't you fucking love this awesome Pride flag created by Rachel Lense for NASA? It's specifically made up of NASA images as follows: White is Earth clouds, pink is aurora, blue is the Sun in a specific wavelength, brown is Jupiter clouds, black is the Hubble deep field, red is the top of sprites, orange is a Mars crater, yellow is the surface of Io, green is a lake with algae, blue is Neptune, and purple is the Crab Nebula in a specific wavelength. (c) NASA/Rachel Lense

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This was shared as a "bad" joke but I was so charmed by it I've been thinking about it for days.