my best friend and i, talking about dnd
best friend: centaurs should have horse heads
me: absolutely not. why do you want me terrified that they'll eat my fingers?
Look I just think centaurs should be more visibly horrific and wrong! Their rib cages are a nightmare and I hate it, so let’s just pile on the problems
my best friend and i, talking about dnd
best friend: centaurs should have horse heads
me: absolutely not. why do you want me terrified that they'll eat my fingers?
THIS STUFF IS SOOO IMPORTANT TO KNOW. Seriously. It’s saved my ass before.
The POC’s Bill of Rights when it comes to the Police. Remember. These are your rights.
The 5 things you gotta know before you let that cop into your house
FLEXYOURRIGHTS.ORG is one of the most informational websites. The videos are extremely enlightening.
Please read and know these things!
^^^ !!!!!!
hey i just wanted to put a quick post up for people that may not know, cuz i certainly didnt until a couple years ago, but the whole prescription glasses industry is a massive racket, and i wanted to let people know about the more affordable options for buying or replacing glasses
when you go to an optometrist to get your eyes tested, they take a lot of measurements and will give you a prescription that lists things like how near or farsighted each eye is, spherical and cylindrical measurements for astigmatism, etc, but one measure they almost always leave out of the portion they give you is your interpupillary distance, that is, the distance between your pupils, measured in millimeters
the reason they leave that out is because if you have your full prescription, including the interpupillary distance, you can just go online and buy glasses from a place like zenni optical for less than $20 USD. and if you go and buy them online, thats ~$200 they dont get to bilk from you
so, you have two options, you can either request your interpupillary distance number when you get your eyes tested, which they cant legally withhold from you because its medical information
This Is Specifically Enforced By The Federal Trade Commission!
they dont get to withhold this! a lot of them will lie to you, or try to skirt around it, because they want your money. raise a fucking stink. this is an argument you can win.
the other option is to measure your interpupillary distance at home, using either a ruler and a mirror, or a phone app which is made for this purpose
https://www.zennioptical.com/measuring-pd-infographic
once you have your full prescription information, you can buy glasses online, made to your specific prescription, for well under a TENTH the cost of ones you would buy at a brick and mortar store
here are some other options for cheaper glasses! DO NOT LET YOURSELF BE SCAMMED BY LUXOTTICA if you live in the US or canada!! places like bon look (canadian) and warby parker (american) will give you paperwork to get reimbursed by your insurance plan, as well.
Holy shit this got really funny to really sad really quick
rebump
oh my god it’s the real one. I’m so used to the stupid Skyrim edit.
Not to sound like an old fart here but my philosophy about video games is like. A kid living out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere with no internet access for miles should be able to purchase a game from walmart, take that game home, put it in their console, and play the whole game with all of its features and the only thing lack of internet affects is the inability to play online with others. Nothing else. They shouldn’t be missing entire chunks of the game becuase they can’t download a patch. The game shouldn’t be borderline empty or unplayable without a patch.
I guess it makes no difference if I reblog this now but our friend here said a normal, objectively correct thing about video games and somehow this post still blew up with some goofy as hell disagreements. Sorry but most video game studios these days are pushing out lazy products and it is not normal for a game you buy to need DLC or patching to work; the PSX and the N64 and the original Xbox all got by without that shit being routine.
Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?
Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"
Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.
Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/
Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain. You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.
It is free.
It is legal.
I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.
I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this. I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this. Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this. When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here. It’s a great resource.
Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!
If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!
And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!
I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!
Anonymous asked:
What's the harm if we call historical people Trans or Queer. So what if they didn't have the language, we do now and they would probably have used it if they were living today. Isn't it better to call them Trans or Queer even if it might be incorrect, instead of staying with the safe labels but probably erasing their Queerness. We're here we're Queer and we have been here for a long time!
thatlittleegyptologist answered:
Are you asking scientifically or for your own personal headcanon? If you feel a particular affinity for a historical figure who is queer or gnc, and you want to use modern labels that’s fine. The problem comes when people insist on definitively labelling someone scientifically is that that person doesn’t know those terms, they have different words that we may or may not have discovered yet, and even if you could explain those terms to that person they may not identify that way or feel that it fits them even if you personally think that it should. By insisting you know better than someone’s lived experience, you actively erase that lived experience. This is why we tend to use more general terms like queer/gnc/mlm/wlw etc when discussing queer people in history, because it correctly identifies their queerness but doesn’t force their identity to conform to our modern ideas of it. In Ancient Egypt in particular, categorisation based on sexuality is simply not a thing, and thus they do not have words for it, so we have to use our words for it carefully.
I refer you to @lost-in-the-land-of-stories who is an expert on sex and gender in Ancient Egypt, and this article by Deborah Sweeney who is an expert of the same:
Just click the button that says ‘pdf e-scholarship’ and you’ll have it.
eta: if any queer historians can elaborate on this further please feel free to do so. I’m mostly over here with a sign that says ‘I don’t go here, but I support you wholeheartedly and this topic is very complicated’
Hi there, queer historical professional speaking! The example that I’m going to give doesn’t relate to Ancient Egypt, but hopefully it can serve to illustrate the point we’re trying to make.
Love stories documents the development of the concept of homosexuality through legal documents, newspapers, and the writings of Walt Whitman beginning in the 1840s and continuing through the rest of the 19th century. It is an excellent book with solid historical evidence, and I would highly recommend checking it out.
The full title of the book is Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality, and this is important, because at this point, the concept of men who only have sex with men does not exist. While there are certainly men who only really want to have sex with other men, most “sodomites” of the 1840s also engage in sex with women. Importantly, sodomy is seen as so dangerous because any man can be tempted into having sex with other men.
Would the sodomites of the 1840s feel represented by the word gay, or even bisexual? We can’t know because we can’t ask them, and to apply those labels to them in retrospect erases the nuances of their identities formed in an entirely different cultural era. Let’s take another example:
Abraham Lincoln had what was, by all accounts, a romantic relationship with another man. It is the focus of one of the first chapters in Love Stories. However, at the time that this relationship is taking place, the concepts of sex and romance are not culturally linked. One can feel romantic love for another person without wanting to have sex with them. This is the kind of relationship that Lincoln—and many other men—had. The label gay or bisexual doesn’t apply because both terms apply to the concept of having a romantic and sexual relationship with the same person*. Lincoln might even object to the MLM label because even that assumes sexual attraction.
The book also investigates men who dressed as women for the purposes of engaging in sexual encounters with other men. In this case study, the outrage generated by the discovery of this practice had less to do with the sex of the individual than it did with their race. Again, this is because during this time and culture, any man can be tempted to have sex with other men, just as he can be tempted to have sex with women.
Would this historical person who dressed in women’s clothing feel represented by the word trans/transgender/trans woman? Was her gender identity as tied up with their appearance and presentation as ours is today? How did they feel about dressing and living as a man for some of the time? We can’t know because we can’t ask, and we cannot presume that our own notions of sex and gender apply to all people across all time.
*There are, of course, people who do not fit into this most common definition, but modern people who love differently than what is encompassed in the widely accepted definitions of sexual orientations might also feel similarly misrepresented by these labels. It’s an individual thing, and we can’t know historical people about the way a label applies to them like we can with living people.
TL;DR modern concepts like gay, trans, or queer can only be applied to people living in the culture in which those words were developed. To superimpose our current cultural understanding onto people of the past is to erase the many nuances those people would have experienced during their lifetimes.
Hi yeah I would love to add to this, @chaotic-archaeologist thanks for the book rec btw because I totally need to be reading that.
Anyway, the entire point is kind of that when we are researching sexuality, gender, and queerness in the ancient world we want to actually be looking at and perceiving the full diversity of the past, instead of just placing it in our modern containers - saying we try not to use the word homosexual or heterosexual does not mean we consider the past cishet, far from it in fact. If anything I think the past is far more queer than most people consider it to be.
I actually really like using ‘queer’ because it’s a more broad term and also within academic discourse has a history that makes it particularly useful when looking at these kinds of marginalised communities, but even that comes with like, difficulties.
The thing is like, that terms like hetero/homosexual, and cis/trans are inherently very western* terms in and of themselves, even in the current world not everyone uses them or likes using them. There are so many communities in our world that use other terms and concepts to understand their own identities, and there is a very inherent western-centric thing about just applying ‘western’ identifyers to everyone in both past and present. You could look for example at the kothi and hijra in India, who do not simply match western identity labels, but are very much their own. The past is much the same, often specific terms for specific types of queer relationships or persons existed, and the more we find those, and use them, the more we can understand queer history.
There have always been people that didn’t fit within their societies gendered standards, just like there have always been people with sexual identities that did not match the norm. This has never not been true. But what those people are called is up to them to decide, not for us to impose upon them.
All this is to say, that to be careful with what terms we use to describe people is actually a way in which historians, archaeologists, and other researchers who are working in good faith try to make sure we don’t erase people from the past and their lived experiences; their queerness. The past is infinitely diverse, just as the present is, and we should try to respect it for what it was in its entirety. On top of that there is also the fact that sometimes by oversimplifying we are both glorifying and white-washing certain aspects of past cultures, not only in colour but also in how gruesome or fucked up some stuff in the past was.
Now of course, none of this means we shouldn’t be super clear about the fact that the past is super diverse and not cishet, and that we should highlight stories, people, and objects that make that clear.
It’s just that I think we should be doing that without oversimplifying something that deserves to be seen in all its vibrant colours of the historical rainbow.
There are certainly people who do try to erase these kinds of things when they talk about the past. But that does not mean we should be oversimplifying things simply to counter that, if anything it makes being intellectually honest all the more important because it’s a far better way (in my opinion) to shut those kinds of people up.
I also want to be super clear though that here too context matters - there are certainly situations in which I will use a modern label as shorthand, and I think that there are moments where this is necessary and fine, such as in for example museum catalogues. Because if I’m searching for ancient representation, I don’t want to be learning 5000 words. I just want my museum catalogue to give me what I need if I were to use the searchterm “queer” or “lgbt”, and the fact that this is not yet always possible is certainly a problem. But it’s a far different problem from what I as a researcher should be doing when I’m engaging with the past.
*mind you, the term “western” is also super complicated but I’m not getting into that right this second.
moving this to my actual egypt blog sdfdsf
kawaiibarbariansublime