The Bronx Zoo has just released Flaco's necropsy results.

He was not thriving, as the people championing the ideal of "freedom" claimed.

He was poisoned.

He was sick.

He was suffering.

"Freedom" would have eventually killed him. A building just happened to do it first.

The naturalistic fallacy kills animals in horrible ways. The romanticism of what humans want to think of as a "free, wild, pure life" cannot be allowed supplant the reality of injury, sickness, and death. Releasing captive animals (or keeping them from being recaptured) because it's "better" for them to suffer untethered than live a healthy, safe, captive life is inhumane and horrific.

Flaco's life didn't have to end in pain, sickness, and suffering.

Flaco's death didn't have to be tragic.

But once the idea of "freedom" entered the chat, Flaco's fate was unavoidable.

Yeah!

Obvsl there are other ways to come to understand this, but I think if ppl understood more about "The History of Ideas" or Philosophical History, this might be a little bit more obvs than it seems.

Like: as @cryptotheism says here, most folks think of fascism as just, like, "Cruelty: the Philosophy", but its philosophical underpinnings lie in Romanticism(Yes: it was ALSO a political philosophy, or more accurately a FAMILY of political philosophies), and in particular the intersection of Romanticism and Nationalism(which overlap so heavily in 1800s Europe that they're practically a single line). There's also inherently a "magical" or "occult" element to this in how fascism conceives of the Body-Politic, in that it abstracts it through the singular person of The Leader as his magical ability to understand and speak for "The People". Like that's not a metaphor that's just literally what fascists think that "The Leader" had a supernatural connection to "The People" which makes democratic forms like "talking to each other" and "compromise" unnecessary.

Sorry for the tangent there. But, yeah, there's a strain in romanticism which is all about valuing emotion and emotional experience for its immediacy and power over the "cold" accuracy of empirical argument, and in fascism you see conservatives taking THIS, mixing it with the older "ultramontane" wholesale rejection of empiricism as an valid approach to knowledge and social organization in favor of Divine Hierarchy(the idea that authorities are Divinely Inspired), and taking the result of that to an absolutely vile extreme. Core to fascism is the idea that even TRYING to know things in an objective sense is a morally disgusting and "weak" act and that True Knowledge is a combination of Will and a very thinly secularized version of Divine Revelation, i.e., "I FEEL that this is True, and I WANT it to be True, and if I just insist it is hard enough it WILL be True."

— Mary Karr, The Liars’ Club (via 89words)

he tied himself to a mast in a storm??? for four hours???

this was so odysseus coded of him

I really dont think this story is complete without a picture of this guy

There were romantics, and then there were ROMANTICS!

Godspeed JMW Turner; we stan a Legend u_u u_u u_u

when internet people are like “i love gothic literature but i hate anything that discusses incest, sexual violence, oppression, misogyny, abuse, torture, gore, murder, or death”

no actually me and everyone else who’s ever watched crimson peak were brainwashed by guillermo del toro into believing that incest and violence are cool and awesome. sorry

a lot of victorians thought first-cousin marriage-- arranged by their parents--was good, actually, because the boy and girl already knew how to get along, neither party had to move too far away from their existing family, or move at all, and all the resources to inherit a business and set up a household were just, right there, in place. and the grandmother or -father of the family would definitely have good reason to approve of their grandkids staying put rather than marrying out or bringing anyone else in.

so, like, yeah, victorian literature and gothic literature has a lot to do with the ways the family unit can be imperiled, whether by rot from within or infection from without, and at the time that family unit probably had a significant amount of what we would now term incest. so like, ‘people can agree that’-- no. people are always going to disagree. sometimes because they lived a hundred and fifty years ago. sometimes because they live now and understand that cultures change over time and that nothing is ever simple and easy and universal and eternal. and sometimes because BAD THINGS CAN AND SHOULD BE DEPICTED IN FICTION BECAUSE THAT’S WHAT MAKES A STORY INTERESTING, BECKY.

Not to sound Romantic or anything, but I too have a striking fascination with the irrational, the demonic and the grotesque.

who else is in the mood to walk barefoot over the moors in a blood-red velvet ballgown w anguish in ur soul and wet leaves in ur hair while the wind blows moodily and dramatically?

can we all get mcdonalds afterwards

we all deserve it so yes absolutely. my treat

thamk kyuu

A Knight in shining armor is a man whose metal has never been tested.

Or one who regularly cleans it…but yeah, “Black Knights” were called so because their armor was in terrible condition, and they were usually much more experienced, so they usually won tournaments.

@we-are-knight Am I correct? Anything to add?

I’m curious mainly where you got this concept from…

“Black Knights” need to be distinguished by context. I’m on my phone right now so I can’t link you all the sources I’d like to use, so please pardon me for that.

So, the concept of “knight in shining armour” comes from the idea of the knight-errant in medieval fiction, the sort of person who is on a quest, is all shiny and new, ready to test themselves. It also is a nod to the maintenance of equipment, or the wealth of a Knight; in the late medieval and Renaissance periods, well-off knights might have a suit of armour for warfare, a suit for tournaments, and a suit for formal occasions. These being used for different things, they were meant to be maintained well and show status and wealth.

So, where does the concept of a black Knight actually come from?

Surprisingly, most cases come from the idea of the tournament. Knights were meant to display who they were, “show their colours” (ie, heraldry), and show off their skills in combat. But if course you had some knights who didn’t want to show who they were, who they were fighting for, or which lady they favoured, etc. This sounds like a chivalric fantasy, and honestly, that’s what tournaments really became as time went by and the events became more formal.

Now, early “black Knights” , were those who did not wear dark or black armour, but in fact those who did not use their own heraldry, disguising themselves. Again, they may do this for various reasons, but the concept is they hide their identity. Occasionally, they might actually paint their shields black.

We also have the examples from the hundred years war where French and English knights painted their armour different colours: black for the French, Red for the English.

Some knights actually WOULD favour black armour or heraldry to the point they got called “black Knights”, and not as a derogative. The Polish Knight, Zawisza Czarny (pronounced “Zah-vu-shah Shar-ny”, approximately) become known for his feats of arms, and by his dark armour.

Linking back to the original quote, a Knight in shining armour could well be a black knight, as such. But more commonly, it meant he was either wealthy, or highly skilled at arms.

Or both. :P

I’ve seen enough period art to convince me that “shining armour” was often a lot darker than the chrome-plated image which the term suggests.

I’ve also long thought that the whole business of “knights in shining armour” wasn’t a medieval concept at all, certainly not the default one, but was a Regency / early Victorian fictional conceit from Romance poets and Sir Walter Scott’s historical fiction. (About 10 years ago an actual expert said more or less the same thing, leaving actual amateur me feeling rather smug…) :->

This illumination features armour that’s black or dark blue in colour, but with the carefully-delineated highlights of a shiny surface. There are many other like it.

Armour was coloured for both decorative and practical purposes; chemical blueing with acid produces a very dark, lustrous and effectively rust-resistant finish like the one in the medieval illustration. I once had an Arms & Armor rapier with that finish on the hilt: it looked like this…

Heat-blueing, which was more blue than black, was a popular treatment for Greenwich armour of the Elizabethan period, as was browning and russetting (all of which were and are used on firearms), processes which used heat, chemicals or controlled “good rust” to create colour and also prevent uncontrolled “bad rust”.

Here’s the helmet of Sir James Scudamore’s Greenwich harness, which was once blued and gilt.

The image on the left is how it looks now, after being thoroughly scrubbed with wire wool, sand or other abrasives at some stage in the 19th century to make  it “shining armour”. The image on the right is a CGI restoration of its original appearance, based on still-visible traces of colour in the grooves beside the gold strapwork.

Here’s the browned and gilt “garniture” (armour with extra bits for different styles of combat, like a life-size action figure) of George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland. I don’t think grinding this beauty down to bright metal would be an improvement…

Henry VIII’s tonlet (skirted) armour for foot combat at the Field of the Cloth of Gold now looks like this:

Originally it would have been shiny black or dark blue with gilt details and the engraved panels picked out in coloured paint or enamelling - red Tudor Roses, green leaves etc., but that wasn’t “shining armour”, so…

This detail shot shows the fine score-marks left after it was sanded “clean”, with dark pigmentation in the grooves as a memorial of how it once looked.

This Renaissance painting, “Portrait of Warrior with Squire”, shows black armour on the warrior and bare-metal armour on his squire, so it’s clear that armour in art wasn’t painted black simply because artists couldn’t properly represent burnished steel.

In this article, Thom Richardson, Keeper of Armour at the Tower of London and Royal Armouries in Leeds (the actual expert I mentioned at the beginning) comes straight out and calls Scott responsible for “shining armour” vandalism:

Scott can also be blamed, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, for creating or at least popularising that clunky, inaccurate term “chain-mail”. It cites the first appearance in 1822 (recent when talking about mail) when a character in “The Fortunes of Nigel” says:

Plate armour was also painted, either crudely…

…or with much more care (this style is actually called black-and-white armour); since the paint was oil-based, it also had a rust-proofing effect…

I have a notion that the more white there was on black-and-white armour, and thus the more work (by servants, of course!) needed to keep it looking good, may have been an indication of rank, status or success. Just a guess…

Armour left rough from the hammer - therefore cheaper than armour polished smooth, since every stage of the process had to be paid for - was also treated with hot oil in the same way cast-iron cookware is seasoned, again to prevent rust.

There were terms for bright-metal armour - “alwyte harness” and “white armour” - but the existence of such terms suggests to me that they arose from a need to describe an armour finish which needed a tiresome amount of maintenance to keep it that way. I’m betting that the last stage of a clean-and-polish was a good layer of grease, or even a beeswax sealant like the coatings used by museums today.

White armour may have been a demonstration of wealth or conspicuous consumption in the same way as black or white clothes: one needed servants constantly busy with polishing-cloths, the others needed really good colour-fast dye or lots of laundering, and all of those cost money.

One thing is certain: a knight in shining armour wasn’t the one who sweated to keep it shining. That’s what squires were for…

I am a simple man: when Peter speaks, I listen.

Thomas Moran

Death of a Cyborg by Shorra.

I love this—the expectation that it’s an old master and then you look at the subject.

Cyber-romanticism

I love it

Heligoland in Moonlight, 1851, Christian Ernst Bernhard Morgenstern

okay so this post is wrong but what the heck it’s a Tumblr post, right, it’s mostly a joke, only it’s so perfectly echoing an idea I’ve seen elsewhere too, from actual paid critics and academic critiques, that Hugo “wasn’t writing for emotional teenagers”, that he’d be horrified by fandom, that he was too High and Erudite for the likes of  screaming theater kids and emotional teenagers

y’all. Y’all. 

Victor Hugo knew what fandom was.  And he absolutely LOVED it. 

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The Oracle by artist Giles Ketting.