Wibbly-Wobbly Ramblings

Well I would give a medieval peasant some spaghetti.

1. They don’t have forks. I would hand them a fork with it and see what they do.

2. They don’t have tomatoes. This is something they can never experience again

3. I would let them keep the plate because it’s a nice plate and I think they’d like it

i love it when a post comes with its own FAQs

what the fuck do you mean they didn't have tomatoes

Tomatoes are not native to Afroeurasia and generally wouldn’t have been available on that continent before the Colombian exchange. When we refer to medieval peasants we’re usually referring to the poor of Europe and west Asia between the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of what we now call the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods. A time before the so-called age of exploration and colonization brought food such as tomatoes, maize, and potatoes to Afroeurasia and domesticated animals such as pigs and chickens to the Americas. European cuisine of the poor and rich alike before the Colombian exchange would still have been tasty with their wide selection of game meat, herbs, vegetables, and grains, but tomatoes would not have been available to them and that’s why I want to give a medieval peasant a plate of Italian-American style spaghetti with marinara sauce just like dad used to make

wait so. italy? i guess it’s not called afroeurasitaly, but…so “italian” food used to not have tomatoes? until they came from the americas? and they they what, decided “hey let’s just rebuild our national identity around these tasty christmas tree ornaments”? centuries of italy were lasagna-free and i’m just supposed to accept this

They had lasagna. It just didn’t look like what we think of lasagna today. It was more like layers of flat noodles with spices and cheese on a plate that you ate with your hands rather than a baked dish.

If you look at ancient Roman food there’s certain things we’d recognize as “Italian” like olive oil or fermented fish sauce or cheese but the flavor profile is completely different and pasta isn’t anywhere to be found. They also had herbs and spices that have since become unpopular or even gone extinct.

A lot of things we view as unmovable and unchanging about certain culture’s cuisines are incredibly recent developments. Modern Indian cuisine for example can be traced back to a singular guy in the 16th century. And these days lard is considered to be integral to making tamales but that wasn’t used until the Spanish brought over pigs and cows.

Food culture is something that can change very rapidly. Sometimes within a single generation. People generally use what they have available and what’s available can change at a moment’s notice.

This feels like watching a clown get questioned by the crowd before they pull out a history textbook and proceed to whack the audience repeatedly with it

That sums up pretty well what it’s like to be me yeah

When I grow up I wanna be upper middle class.

I want like… a condo. And enough money to go on vacation sometimes. And maybe a mug.

bro look at thrift stores or garage sale for mugs

i once got a set of four cat mugs for a dollar. one of the best days of my life so far

Maybe I’m tired of going to thrift stores for mugs. Maybe I’m tired of the $5 target mugs. Maybe I want a really nice mug. Not like five hundred nice mugs. Just like… one or two would be nice. You know? Maybe I’d hang one on my wall. I think I’d like that. Owning a wall.

@what-even-is-thiss

Go to any streets that close for art events, you’ll find at least 1 good potter selling their wares there

I got the cup I use for my bathroom at Las Olas, Florida for their art fair a few years back, it was like $15ish but the potter had a set all in the same color combo of a bowl, 2 sized plates and 2 different mugs. I just wanted the one small cup but I’ve got the card somewhere

At the same art fair a year or two later a different potter was there selling his stuff and that’s who I got one of my tea mugs from for like again $15isb

Again, people are misunderstanding my actual desires represented by the mug.

There you go.

Every time we go into a Big Fancy Houseware shop just to browse, I stare wistful at the mugs. “We have enough mugs” I will say. But I know I my heart that all the mugs at home are mismatched and old, or secret Santa gifts from across the years. None of them have been purchased solely for the joy of buying a fancy new mug.

Like you could even go to the clearance aisle for mugs. The change of seasons always brings new and interesting things. OR A GOODWILL TRIP? Holy shit this person is going on and on about expensive ass mugs when what you really need in life is to not fall into the trap that capitalism has inevitably laid for all of us that makes us believe wholeheartedly that the only happiness we will find in life is the ability to purchase expensive things and to own expensive things

Go green and try to re-thrift for shit that’s so trivial it takes one slip of the hand to watch it completely fall to pieces

I made this post over a year ago now and inevitably whenever it gains more traction someone will pop up completely misunderstanding me, not understanding that I’d just like to be comfortable. I don’t actually want advice on how to acquire mugs. I own a couple of mugs. I’d just like to be able to have some security. Maybe a pool. Maybe I’d like to own a small amount of property. A condo, maybe. I’d like to be able to travel. You’ll notice that nobody here is giving advice on how to acquire a condo or a vacation. They’re just taking the mug part seriously. All I wanted to do was fantasize about a world where I don’t live in a studio apartment that takes up half of my paycheck in rent alone and maybe I have a stupid white dad device mounted on the wall to showcase my mug collection. Can everyone just shut the hell up about telling me how to acquire mugs? I don’t care about the traps of consumerism! I just wanna be able to afford to visit my aunts sometimes! And so what if I do want an expensive mug? That’s my goddamn business.

This is a perfect summary of what it’s like for try to communicate any idea that can’t fit neatly into a single sentence on Tumblr Dot Com.

Those “curtains were just blue” memes did irreparable damage to society.

Not missing the meta-textual irony that this has exactly recreated the conversations that happen at society-level where someone from the Younger Generation says “I would just like financial stability. I would just like simple pleasures in life without the vice-grip of financial strain limiting every decision” and the Older Generation think pieces come pouring out like “Oh just make your coffee at home to save $4 :) Oh just limit yourself to one tv streaming service to save $10 a month :) Oh just don’t get the expensive avocado toast they charge $3 for the avocado you know :)”

It’s not about the mug it’s not about the coffee it’s not about the avocado toast. It never was and never will be. It will always be about being able to live a nice life.

If you think people used to willingly stare off into the distance before smartphones, my dad told me he had this psychology assignment when he was in college in the 80s which was basically

Go to a restaraunt by yourself and eat a meal without a newspaper or journal or anything else to keep you occupied and then write a report about it

Which tells me that this was a way for a professor to inflict psychological torture on their students and that people used to bring little things with them to keep them entertained. Shown by those old pictures of everyone in a trolley reading a newspaper with one hand.

Frankly I think that the human brain has been craving smart phone forever. Perhaps we use it too much at times but if this was 1985 we also wouldn’t be talking to people. We’d just be looking at newspaper or drawing stuff on notepad instead. And the old people would all be shaking their fists about how kids spend too much time looking at that damn TV because yes this discourse has been going on long before smart phone

i bet cavemen were feeling this too. grug eating mammoth bone stew all alone and looking at a bug he put in a cup for this exact purpose

[ID: Two 3D figures carrying another figure on a stretcher. Text over one figure reads, “what happened to him?” Text over the other reads, “he ate without youtube”. / END ID]

Grug eating his stew and listening to his friend tell a story that’s been passed down and altered over generations. Watching dances. Listening to drums. Absentmindedly chipping away at a stick or making an arrowhead.

Boredom and the mind’s desire to reduce boredom is a feature, not a bug.

People often ask me about accessibility stuff when it comes to walkable cities so I’m gonna highlight some stuff I find to be cool

Raised intersections! These are intersections where the road gently rises to the level of the sidewalk, acting as slight speed bumps for cars and eliminating the need for going up and down ramps with mobility aids or carts

Level train platforms and user operated bus ramps! Ramps operated by external buttons and level platforms make it so that wheelchair and walker users don’t need to speak to a driver to access transit

Moped cars/micro cars! Miniature cars often used by people who can’t use bikes. Many of them are so small that they fit in bike lanes

Frequent bench placement! A walkable street is one with places to rest.

Air conditioned bus stops! In places where it often gets super hot frequent bus stop placement combined with air conditioning can make transit safer and more accessible to more people

Cargo bikes! Who needs a car when you can haul your stuff and/or dogs around in a bike?

Hey idiot that tagged this as radfem safe. I’m transgender. Mitts off.

You know, museums lend exhibits to each other all the time so it's not like the British museum would be completely without exhibits from other cultures if they returned the stuff people are asking for. Unless they've made so many enemies that nobody wants to lend them exhibits I guess.

I recently went to an exhibit on loan from Japan here in the US. Nobody stole anything and I got to see some really old Japanese art in person. I've also seen plenty of art from various local tribes and other countries everywhere over the years freely gifted or sold to universities and museums. There's also legal ways to obtain things personally. Like sometimes people are fine with certain artifacts not being housed in their country. They'd just prefer you didn't steal it.

You know, museums lend exhibits to each other all the time so it's not like the British museum would be completely without exhibits from other cultures if they returned the stuff people are asking for. Unless they've made so many enemies that nobody wants to lend them exhibits I guess.

I recently went to an exhibit on loan from Japan here in the US. Nobody stole anything and I got to see some really old Japanese art in person. I've also seen plenty of art from various local tribes and other countries everywhere over the years freely gifted or sold to universities and museums. There's also legal ways to obtain things personally. Like sometimes people are fine with certain artifacts not being housed in their country. They'd just prefer you didn't steal it.

So here’s how laws work in the US. The federal government can’t tell the states what to make their drinking age but they can tell the states that if they don’t make the drinking age 21 then they’ll take away all of their money for highways. So the federal drinking age is not 21 but the drinking age is 21 in all 50 states. But not the territories. Because they follow different rules.

The federal government can tell the states to make marijuana illegal however but the states in return can say “lol no” and for the most part the federal government just can’t be assed to enforce this so a bunch of states have made recreational marijuana legal in varying capacities. But the businesses that sell weed can’t use federally backed banks because what they’re doing is still illegal even though it’s legal and that’s why the IRS has regulations for taxing illegal businesses.

No I’m not attracted to you. Quit your evil putting your finger under my chin to make me look up at you. I know I’m your nemesis and all but we really need to set some boundaries when you’ve got me tied up like this.

No look I get it. You’ve got your evil plan, you’ve gotta get me out of the way but you also want to see me suffer as I watch the world burn, I know. But like, I’m not into this. Sexually or otherwise. Wait, you thought I was doing this because I liked you? I’m trying to stop you from using a death laser. No I don’t think death lasers are sexy what on earth are you talking about

Wait. That’s why you dress like that? I thought that armor was impractical. No I don’t find our relationship to be homoerotic I find it to be tedious. Look, man. We all keep trying to get you into therapy. No I’m not kink shaming you I’m saying you’ve completely misinterpreted this relationship. I actually do think you should answer for your war crimes. Yes, really. No you’re the one not listening to me in this situation. Yes that is the alarm the others will have cut all your wires and called in the fbi by now.

What do you mean you thought we had something special? I have other enemies. You’re not the only one. No I’m not doing kinky things with them either I blow up their nefarious devices. Speaking of which, you might want to move like… ten feet to your right.

No, enemies to enemies. And then still enemies.

Cannot stress enough how lovers will never be part of this equation even a little bit

The henchmen in the tags who have been assuring the villain since the beginning that “of course he likes you back, why else would he keep coming to destroy your death lasers”

The henchmen have been reading too many romance novels.

Awfully defensive are we? I think the henchmen are onto something.

You know I didn’t intend for this character I made up to be aromantic but this whole post has turned into being arospec at a family reunion simulator

Well I would give a medieval peasant some spaghetti.

1. They don’t have forks. I would hand them a fork with it and see what they do.

2. They don’t have tomatoes. This is something they can never experience again

3. I would let them keep the plate because it’s a nice plate and I think they’d like it

i love it when a post comes with its own FAQs

what the fuck do you mean they didn't have tomatoes

Tomatoes are not native to Afroeurasia and generally wouldn’t have been available on that continent before the Colombian exchange. When we refer to medieval peasants we’re usually referring to the poor of Europe and west Asia between the fall of the Roman Empire and the beginning of what we now call the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods. A time before the so-called age of exploration and colonization brought food such as tomatoes, maize, and potatoes to Afroeurasia and domesticated animals such as pigs and chickens to the Americas. European cuisine of the poor and rich alike before the Colombian exchange would still have been tasty with their wide selection of game meat, herbs, vegetables, and grains, but tomatoes would not have been available to them and that’s why I want to give a medieval peasant a plate of Italian-American style spaghetti with marinara sauce just like dad used to make

wait so. italy? i guess it’s not called afroeurasitaly, but…so “italian” food used to not have tomatoes? until they came from the americas? and they they what, decided “hey let’s just rebuild our national identity around these tasty christmas tree ornaments”? centuries of italy were lasagna-free and i’m just supposed to accept this

They had lasagna. It just didn’t look like what we think of lasagna today. It was more like layers of flat noodles with spices and cheese on a plate that you ate with your hands rather than a baked dish.

If you look at ancient Roman food there’s certain things we’d recognize as “Italian” like olive oil or fermented fish sauce or cheese but the flavor profile is completely different and pasta isn’t anywhere to be found. They also had herbs and spices that have since become unpopular or even gone extinct.

A lot of things we view as unmovable and unchanging about certain culture’s cuisines are incredibly recent developments. Modern Indian cuisine for example can be traced back to a singular guy in the 16th century. And these days lard is considered to be integral to making tamales but that wasn’t used until the Spanish brought over pigs and cows.

Food culture is something that can change very rapidly. Sometimes within a single generation. People generally use what they have available and what’s available can change at a moment’s notice.

I’ve never understood live fast and die young mentalities. Mostly because I’ve met a bunch of old people who never stopped living fast.

Why try to die young when you can be an old man at a rave?

The world needs more old women in denim dresses doing shots at the family picnic. You’d deprive us all of that? You’d just let your chaotic personality go to waste? I just can’t wrap my head around that.

You’ve gotta think long term. When I’m a fat old man I’m gonna start wearing a wizard hat and collect vaguely orb shaped paperweights.

Live fast die old surrounded by weird stuff from the experiences that brought you joy

As a middle-aged person getting weirder by the day? This shit fucks so hard.

Plus, you gotta stick around long enough to annoy people by still being around. I'm gonna be annoying y'all for a fucking while yet.

So at a party it is socially acceptable to just silently join a circle of people talking and contribute to the conversation when you feel like it as if you already know everyone in the circle, btw.

If you want to know people’s names at some point saying “Sorry, did I catch your name?” or “Sorry, what was your name again?” like you’ve briefly been introduced before is a good move.

Conversation openers for starting a conversation with a random person next to you:

Fr? On god? Just like that?

Yeah, just act like you’ve been there the whole time.

I have social anxiety and discovered this by trial and error despite my fears. I took on this burden for all of you so you don’t have to. Trust me. Just stand in the gap in the circle. It’s waiting for you. It’s an event where people are expecting to meet other people. It’s not creepy or weird. They’re there to talk to strangers and friends alike. Just step into the circle.

You shouldn’t date or become serious friends/partners with someone if you can’t stomach the thought of being stuck in a car or train with them for 16 hours.

Here’s my logic:

These tags are hilarious even though I don’t think you intended them to be.

*pulls European closer* The most populous countries in the world are China, India, the United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Brazil in that order, with these seven nations alone making up 48.16% of the world population. You may note with the aid of a map that many of these nations are quite large, and would take several days of travel to go across either in cars or on boats. Almost half of the world's population lives in places where you can travel in a cramped vehicle for days and still be within the country. Your worldview is limited and Europe is a tiny outlier in travel time and standards for international relations.

You shouldn’t date or become serious friends/partners with someone if you can’t stomach the thought of being stuck in a car or train with them for 16 hours.

Here’s my logic:

These tags are hilarious even though I don’t think you intended them to be.

*pulls European closer* The most populous countries in the world are China, India, the United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Brazil in that order, with these seven nations alone making up 48.16% of the world population. You may note with the aid of a map that many of these nations are quite large, and would take several days of travel to go across either in cars or on boats. Almost half of the world's population lives in places where you can travel in a cramped vehicle for days and still be within the country. Your worldview is limited and Europe is a tiny outlier in travel time and standards for international relations.

Living alone leads to habits that you don’t realize are weird until you stay with someone else and have to suppress them.

I’m staying with family right now and I can’t just go “AUGH” like a peanuts character in the middle of the night just because I feel like it. I also can’t lick cooking utensils anymore because other people are gonna be eating that. And I can’t rant to my Swedish horse because I left that at home and also ranting to an inanimate object in the middle of the house would make me look insane.

I was talking to my aunt about this because she also lives alone and we agree that when you start living alone you need to start making more noises when you do things like grunting when you get up and yelling at annoying inanimate objects because you need to fill the space somehow. But when suddenly other people are around you’re now in the habit of whistling whenever you open a cabinet and people who have never lived alone don’t understand what you’re doing.

If you ever stay with somebody who lives alone for a few days and they start randomly doing squats in the middle of the kitchen and clicking their teeth or making noises at birds outside, just let them. Believe it or not those are methods of preserving sanity. Shaking the fridge and demanding it give you answers is a shield against the impeding darkness.

Hello internet user whose entire concept of feminism comes from tiktok. In front of you are three ancient myths about women. You have five minutes to figure out which one of them was made up in the 1970s. If you choose wrong, you will be ripped to pieces by Maenads.

Okay since everyone wants the test, instead of giving you three myths here’s several myths. One of them is a real Greek myth with sources of it from ancient times and the rest of them are fake. One of the misconceptions was specifically invented in the 70s.

1. In every version of the myth, Medusa is born a human and Athena turns her into a monster

2. Hestia, goddess of the hearth and family, willingly gave up her place as the 12th Olympian to make room for Dionysus

3. Persephone chose Hades and wandered into the underworld of her own free will

4. Pandora didn’t know what was in her jar and unleashed evils on humanity by accident

5. During the voyage of the Argonauts the huntress Atalanta beat the hero Peleus the father of Achilles in a wrestling match

6. King Midas of Phrygia decided to give up his golden touch after turning his daughter to gold

7. Aphrodite was widely worshipped as a war goddess in Greece

lmao I promise you that only one of these is real.

Hiding the answers under a cut in case you wanna guess on your own.

Explanations for all of them, again under a cut.

Guys this post isn't about neo-pagans and a lot of you are reading this as me hating new retellings or something. I have nothing against any of these stories. I just get frustrated when people "well actually" me about the "original" version of a myth when they have no sources for what they're saying. These stories not being exactly the way you thought they were doesn't have to mean anything. It's fine.

"modern writers" no we know specifically who invented that. Robert Graves. This JSTOR article seems to require an institutional login, not just a JSTOR account, but if the DuckDuckGo preview says in context what it looks like it says, someone called him on having no sources for Hestia stepping down in favor of Dionysos, in 1955.

Thanks, I’d forgotten the name of the guy and was too preoccupied to go digging for him.

Psst, you can read that whole article with a free account. We just checked.

Whenever someone (especially a bigot) says something like they want the world to be like a Norman Rockwell painting or use Norman Rockwell paintings as some sort of shining example of a perfect world I’m reminded that he also painted this:

Learning that certain things that you thought were widely accepted at the time actually had a lot of pushback kind of shakes up your perception of the world a little.

Like for example when a lot of people in the 1400s and 1500s read the Malleus Maleficarum, basically the book that set off the trend of witch trials in Europe, they knew it was bad and even called it unethical. And before 1400 most people in Europe didn’t even believe that witches existed. Because most Christians before the 1400s didn’t even believe that magic existed. Because “magic” was thought to come from pagan gods, and, you will note, most monotheists don’t believe that other gods exist. So witches weren’t even something that people thought about.

And when Christopher Columbus was off committing crimes against humanity a bunch of people were like “Hey, this guy is committing crimes against humanity. Someone stop him.” And eventually they did, even if they did stop him far too late. He was fired from his position as governor. He was arrested and banished from Spain. And there were people, both native South Americans and Spaniards, who actively opposed the colonization efforts while they were happening.

The book How to Plan a Crusade goes into detail about how much propaganda and recruiting efforts were needed for each crusade because people didn’t just abandon their lives and ride off into the desert without incentive or convincing, and even then plenty of people thought it was a waste of manpower or (often rightfully!) considered crusaders to be bandits not to be trusted.

When I was growing up in Virginia it was heavily implied that the abolitionist movement was a fringe thing in some Northern states up until just before the Civil war, but no. Apparently it was so large that when Jefferson bought the Louisiana territories there was a push by abolitionist lawmakers to immediately end slavery and provide all freedmen the means to found their own communities in the new territories as a form of reparations, since one of the southern arguments for the continuation of slavery was basically “Well, we’ve treated them so poorly that if we freed them then the damage we did to race relations is so great that coexistence is impossible.”

there have always been, in past times as today, a range of people in every society, some of whom were even then fighting for a more just and compassionate accord with their fellow man and some of whom let their greeds and hatreds rule them to the worst allowable excesses. the goal of classics and history education is to teach you enough context to discern between the two, not only in the past but in the present