From Consulting the Genius of the Place by Wes Jackson:
"If nature is our standard of measure for sustainable agriculture, then we should expect a mosaic of agronomic arrangements across our land."
Mosaic...
That word keeps popping up in sources that appear unrelated. First it was William Cronon describing Native American land management techniques. Then it was a book on forest gardening. Now it's this guy writing about how to make agriculture more sustainable...
Posting all of the pills that make you green comics here now, enjoy? I guess?
regret rates
proof
talking points
you problem
owned
modern invention
unethical experiments
typology
think of the children
side effects
facts
making sense
rushing
drawings
research
this rocks
valid
1 reblog = 1 communism 🙏
I hate the “Thoreau’s mom did his laundry” criticism so much, it drives me crazy.
Henry Thoreau did not go to Walden Pond because he thought it would be a fun adventure. He went into the woods because he was deeply depressed and burnt out. He was running from the horror of his brother and best friend recently dying in his arms, and the haunting memory of causing the Fairhaven Bay fire. His friend Ellery Channing literally gave him the ultimatum of either taking some time off to write and think, or else be institutionalized.
I think Thoreau’s mother saw her depressed son choosing to retreat into a small cabin in the woods, and was worried about him. Of course she did his laundry - just as Ralph Waldo Emerson probably brought him firewood and bread. These were not chores of obligation to support a “great” man, but services of love to help their deeply depressed 28yo son and friend.
And if you ask me, there’s a lesson in that - to “suck out the marrow of life” and “live deliberately,” one must also accept help offered from the people in your life who love you. There is no true transcendentalism or individualism without love and friendship behind it.
Your animal is ladybirds (or ladybugs, for USAmericans)
Ladybirds are roundly regarded as good luck omens. The deeper red a ladybird is, the more luck it will bring. You might have heard the rhyme "Ladybird ladybird fly away home; your house is on fire and your children will burn" – this has two uses. In the first, it's used to gently coax away a ladybird, as brushing it off is seen as the wrong thing to do (presumably this will bring bad luck). In the second, you use the rhyme to offset any bad luck that comes from accidentally killing a ladybird; you bury the ladybird, then stamp on its grave three times while reciting the rhyme.
They also have some truly wonderful names, many of which connect the beetle with cows for some reason: "God's Almighty cow", "Cow of Moses our Teacher" and "Indra's Cowherd" (English, Jewish and Indian names respectively). In the Middle Ages a ladybird was called "Beetle of Our Lady" in reference to Mary, because she was often depicted wearing red clothing.
do you guys know about an unauthorised fan treatise.
okay an unauthorised fan treatise is a mystery that makes you feel like a fly on the wall to the world's most batshit fandom drama. the whole thing is told through blog posts from the perspective of gottie, a fan attempting to prove that two of the lead actors in her favorite show are dating, as she uncovers far far more than a relationship
it's got everything: fictitious comment sections full of frighteningly realistic discourse, commentary on invasive and parasocial fan relationships, Ye Olde Flame Wars, fanfic of a show that doesn't exist, and a twist that made me scream irl. i want to study gottie under a microscope
What I think is really interesting about the papyrus account of the workers building the tomb of Rameses III going on strike to demand better wages is really fascinating to me because if you look at the description given by the royal scribe you see that there was an attempt to satisfy the workers by bringing a large amount of food at once but that was rebuffed by the workers who declared that it wasn’t just that they were hungry at the moment but had serious charges to bring that “something bad had been done in this place of Pharoah” (is poor wages and mistreatment). They understood themselves as having long term economic interests as a -class- and organized together knowing that by doing so they could put forward their demands collectively. It so strongly flies in the face of narratives that are like “in this Time and Place people were happy to be serve because they believed in the God-King and maybe you get some intellectual outliers but certainly no common person questioned that”. If historical sources might paint that sorta picture of cultural homogeneity it is because those sources sought not to describe something true but invent a myth for the stability of a regime.
Since this is getting notes here’s a link to a translation of the papyrus scroll and here’s an article that gets further into the economic situation surrounding the strike and giving an explanation of the events. The workers didnt just refuse to construct Rameses III’s future tomb, they actually occupied the Valley of the Kings and were preventing anyone from entering to perform rituals or funerals. Basically they set up the first ever recorded picket line
Again the workers went on strike, this time taking over and blocking all access to the Valley of the Kings. The significance of this act was that no priests or family members of the deceased were able to enter with food and drink offerings for the dead and this was considered a serious offense to the memory of those who had passed on to the afterlife. When officials appeared with armed guards and threatened to remove the men by force, a striker responded that he would damage the royal tombs before they could move against him and so the two sides were stalemated.
Eventually the tomb workers were able to win the day and acquire their demands and actually set a precedent for organized labor and strikes in Egyptian society that continued for a long time
The jubilee in 1156 BCE was a great success and, as at all festivals, the participants forgot about their daily troubles with dancing and drink. The problem did not go away, however, and the workers continued their strikes and their struggle for fair payment in the following months. At last some sort of resolution seems to have been reached whereby officials were able to make payments to the workers on time but the dynamic of the relationship between temple officials and workers had changed – as had the practical application of the concept of ma’at – and these would never really revert to their former understandings again. Ma’at was the responsibility of the pharaoh to oversee and maintain, not the workers; and yet the men of Deir el-Medina had taken it upon themselves to correct what they saw as a breach in the policies which helped to maintain essential harmony and balance. The common people had been forced to assume the responsibilities of the king.
[…]
The success of the tomb-worker/artisan strikes inspired others to do the same. Just as the official records of the battle with the Sea Peoples never recorded the Egyptian losses in the land battle, neither do they record any mention of the strikes. The record of the strike comes from a papyrus scroll discovered at Deir el-Medina and most probably written by the scribe Amennakht. The precedent of workers walking away from their jobs was set by these events and, although there are no extant official reports of other similar events, workers now understood they had more power than previously thought. Strikes are mentioned in the latter part of the New Kingdom and Late Period and there is no doubt the practice began with the workers at Deir el-Medina in the time of Ramesses III.
There was also a strike at one point where construction workers refused to continue until they were given sufficient “cosmetics.”
This was thought a highly strange thing until somebody deciphered the recipe for the “cosmetics” the workers were demanding and recreated it.
It was sunscreen. Sunscreen.
Making that the first recorded strike over occupational safety.
Turin Strike Papyrus? I love the Turin Strike Papyrus! However, there’s a fair bit of misunderstanding about what the papyrus actually says, the context in which the strike happened, and some modern bias which is distorting what the Egyptians are actually telling us.
Firstly, it wasn’t sunscreen. It was cooking oils. The TSP contains the only recorded strikes in Ancient Egypt, and it doesn’t mention anything about sunscreen. They say:
iw Dd n=sn i-ir.t pH nA r HA.t Hqr r HA.t ibw mk=n n Hbsw mk=n n sqnn mk=n n rm mk=n n symw hAb n pr-aA pAy=n nb nfr Hr r-r=sn mtw=tn hAb n TAty pAy=n Hry-tp iry.n=n an anx iry Hr xA n=sn dy n Abd 5 m pA hrw
‘They said to them “We have come because of hunger and thirst. Look we have no clothing. No oil. No fish. No vegetables. Send to Pharaoh our good lord about it and send for the Vizier, our superior, so that sustenance is provided for us.” And the rations of the fifth month were issued to them on this date’
The word we need here is ‘sqnn’ which is a misspelling of ‘sgnn’ or 'tallow/oil’ (following Faulkner’s MEg dictionary). For those who don’t know, tallow is animal fat and it’s not being used in 'sunscreen’ it’s being used by the Egyptians in their cooking.
So, now we’ve got that out of the way, I can explain where the discrepancies/misunderstandings happen in the rest of post.
Ancient Egypt is a non monetary economy. They don’t have money or coins until much later periods. What they do is work on a barter system of goods and services, using weights as a measure of whether something is a fair 'price’. Workers are paid in grains, beer, oils, and meat. This is completely normal. So the workers in the TSP are not striking for 'better wages’ and the bringing of food and grain isn’t an insult. This is a misunderstanding. They’re striking to be paid in the first place, and the offering of grain and food is an attempt at part payment of what they’re owed.
Basically, from the first entry they’re saying 'it has been 18 Days in the month and we are hungry’. A week in Ancient Egypt is 10 days, so these workers haven’t been paid in nearly two weeks, and this means the 'payment’ (which is food stuffs) of previous weeks has almost run out and they’re going hungry. This is where the second misunderstanding of the posts above comes in, because it lacks context. At this point in the reign of Ramesses III, and technically previous kings too, there’s a famine. The harvests have been very poor, due to the Egyptian calendar 'slipping’ and the seasons moving out of alignment. This is because the calendar is only 360 days long, and doesn’t account for the leap year. So over the centuries the timings of things have slipped out of order. They’re striking for a very good reason, they haven’t been paid, but conversely they haven’t been paid because the granaries are empty and there’s nothing to pay them with.
Coincidentally, this economic crisis, alongside subsequent weak and short lived leadership, is what caused the collapse of the Egyptian 'New Kingdom’. It also spurred the Egyptians to start robbing their own tombs, which, by this point in Egyptian history they were already doing but it increased markedly from this point onwards.
Anyway, the post above says that the offer of this food was 'rebuffed because the workers said they weren’t hungry and evil had been done in this place of Pharaoh’ and that’s also a misunderstanding. OP conflates the original strike (Year 29, month 4, day 10), in which the workers were offered food and this was accepted, with another incident (Year 29, Month 7, no day recorded) in which they said they were on strike because of the 'evil done in this place of Pharaoh.’ Two separate incidents 3 months apart and not connected. The 'month 7’ strike was because of action taken during a strike a few days earlier when the workers sat in the necropolis and the Artisan Mose son of Aanakht said something and was beaten for it. Basically, what he said is a complex idiom, and from what we’ve been able to work out so far it’s an sacrilegious insult towards the King or a god so the Medjay beat him for it. The workers are protesting the beating on the following days. That is the 'evil’ done.
I’d take some issue with the 'They understood themselves as having long term economic interests as a -class- and organized together knowing that by doing so they could put forward their demands collectively.’ part because that’s placing a modern viewpoint onto the ancient record and distorts the narrative. We cannot possibly know what they understood by striking, and they don’t understand the 'class’ system the in the same way we do. I had to do a section on this for my thesis, and it’s impossible to show a class system within Ancient Egypt, except the models we force onto their culture, because their definitions of where someone is in society isn’t based on money but a complex system of 'where you come after the Gods and whether or not you can read’. Der König als Sonnenpriester (The King as Sun Priest) is a good example of this, which has 12 sections of people divided into two groups of six and it’s Complicated™. That text is also heavily biased towards the state’s view of society, so, y'know, we’re really no closer to understanding how the Egyptians saw themselves as a society. Talking about things like 'god-kings’ is redundant for a text like this, as 'god-kings’ are a 1000 year old relic by the time these strikes occurred. The workers striking wouldn’t have thought of Ramesses III as a god they had to please. If people know anything about the Ancient World at all, outside of NatGeo/History Channel documentaries, they’d know that any text we read has to be taken with a side eye towards potential bias, and that ancient societies are not homogenous little 'we love the king and doing hard work for him’ parties. Propagandistic bias is present in all texts written for the King, which you’d think would be super effective, until you remember that 98% of people can’t read so these texts have no effect on their lives.
The article cited, and quoted, is wrong on a number of accounts. The workers don’t block entry to the Valley of the Kings. What they do is go and do sit ins in the mortuary temples of various kings. Here’s a list of places they protest based on the names within the papyrus:
So, it’s quite clear they’re not blocking the Valley of the Kings. They’re sitting in the mortuary temples of previous kings. This prevents offerings being given to those kings, which the article says but misinterprets it as 'they need to go to the tombs’ and they don’t. Mortuary temples, because king’s tombs were sealed unlike most people’s tombs, function as the place to sustain the Ka’s of the previous Kings. It’s a ballsy move. The comment about the 'threatened to destroy a tomb’ is the complex idiom I mentioned before, and it cannot be definitely said to mean that.
What follows in the quoted section is, to put it nicely, quite romanticised and more than a little a fantastical. I wouldn’t even remotely say the relationship 'changed’, because you’d have to prove that no strikes occurred before this point and you can’t. It also flies against the point that was already trying to be made; that workers aren’t 'happy little people who love their god king’. This event didn’t change that much in Egyptian history. The Egyptian people already knew their local governments were useless and would have to take matters into their own hands. They were already robbing tombs to be able to buy more food because the economic situation was so dire. These aren’t the actions of people who think their government is competent. I’ve no idea why Ma'at is brought up here. Ma'at is 'cosmic order’ and it was King’s job to maintain a balance in the world to make sure everything was done correctly; this much is true. However, that’s a very myopic view of things. The people would already have long been aware that 99% of this management was delegated to various officials and not the responsibility of the King. These events also take place after the Amarna Period, in which Akhenaten very much messed up the governance of the country and people’s trust in the royal institution. Their 'belief’ in the King is already long dead, and these strikes didn’t do anything further to that.
The whole quoted last paragraph is funny. Starts romanticising about how this inspired further strikes and then says 'there are no other extant examples’, which is academic speak for 'we don’t have any other examples of this’. Really cool of these workers to inspire strikes which we have no evidence for. Did other strikes likely occur? Of course. Did the strikes in the TSP inspire them? Doubt.jpg. Ramesses III is already the latter part of the New Kingdom because there’s only around a century between him and the end of the New Kingdom but we end with Ramesses XI. That should tell you something about how bad the economic situation was at the time…and how old all Ramesess II’s children were.
Sorry for the long post, but this is my trap card lmao
Sources:
Edgerton, W. 1951, The Strikes in Ramses III’s Twenty-Ninth Year. JEA 10. 137-145
Frandsen J. 1990, 'Editing Reality: The Turin Strike Papyrus’, in S. Israelit-Groll (ed.), Studies in Egyptology Presented to Miriam Lichtheim
Gardiner, A. 1948, Ramesside Administrative Documents. Oxford. OUP.
“Body Horror,” as an official designation, is a term that comes from horror cinema but its literary origins can be traced back as far as Frankenstein. It is a trope that springs from primal fears—from the knowledge of oneself as a physical object and the consciousness of pain—and its roots wind through the Gothic, to the fin de siècle and the birth of science fiction. As a sub-genre, it broadly encompasses the concept of bodily violation, whether that be via mutilation, zombification, possession, or disease, but arguably one of its most pervasive themes is that of transformation. From Ovid to Cronenberg, transformation occupies an anxious corner in so much of film and literature that it more or less forms a tradition all its own. Folklore and myth are littered with metamorphosis—Daphne twisting into a bay tree, Alice in Wonderland with her Eat Me’s and Drink Me’s—and its impact is frequently an unsettling one. It is a fairy-tale punishment, a warning to naughty children, a reminder of the body’s unreliability.
[…] I think that writing about women goes hand in hand with horror writing. The female body is a nexus of pain almost by design, but it is also potentially monstrous—an object traditionally subjugated, both for its presumed weakness and its perceived threat. The mutations and transformations of horror writing are uniquely qualified to evoke this: the difficulty and unreliability of the female body, its duality as an object both to be feared for and to fear.
When Daphne transforms into a bay tree, the moment is one of both horror and deliverance. She is no longer what she once was, but the metamorphosis frees her from the unwanted attention of Apollo. This duality of horror and emancipation sits, I think, at the core of female transformation. Within the horror genre (and arguably everywhere else), bodies read as female are always subject to pain, and to the threat of violation. Becoming something else—a tree, a freak, a monster—preempts this pain and reduces the risk of harm. It may even, if the transformation is the right one, allow you to cause harm in return.
— Julia Armfield, “On Body Horror and the Female Body”
I grew up in citrus farming country, and had orange and lemon trees. And I saw a post today about how people in the US have gotten so used to everything being always availible that when they walk into a grocery store in January to buy a lemon, they expect the lemon to be there, and they never even consider how unnatural it is that we have lemons in January.
And this is so completely not the point of that post, which is why I'm making my own post, but this example really really bothers me, because as I said I grew up in citrus country, and citrus are winter fruits, and January is lemon season.
Which ultimately goes to prove the point of that post, that we are so used to this kind of constant availability, that most people don't even know what season is lemon season.
I’m not a classicist, but I suspect one of the reasons so many of the Greek gods are portrayed so unflatteringly was less because they were seen as villains than because they represented their domains. Of course Zeus sometimes misuses his power, that’s what a king does. Of course Artemis’s wrath is wild and painful, that’s what nature can be. Of course Hades snatched away a young girl from her mother’s arms, that’s what death does. This is one of the reasons callout posts for some gods comparing them negatively to ‘nicer’ gods are kind of missing the point.
as someone who is partially a classicist, this is a better analysis of Greek mythology as a whole than 99.95% of the takes I’ve seen on here (and a substantial number of the takes I’ve seen in ~academia~)
I can hardly believe it, but at least half of the pavement plants are still alive. Some of the ones that have been in their pots longest (5 days or so) have grown whole new pairs of leaves.
The sycamore (??) seedlings I was sure were dead, because the heat wave scorched their leaves, but it appears only maybe two of them actually are dead. The others are still spry and springy this evening, and are generating tiny new leaves.
They say transplanting is so risky, but I think these little guys are just like "Oh, thank GOD i'm no longer living in literal pavement!"
also, i keep thinking about that artist who lost an arm and she made self-portraits and of course they depicted herself without an arm, and people were like why do you keep marking art about the loss of your arm, and she was like i don’t. i’m making art about myself and i only have one arm.
while a lot of people write poetry about their own pain, sometimes personal poetry is just a reflection of who they are, and who they are is shaped by traumatic events and other things that you may find upsetting.
penis people are and have always been the oppressor class. stop bootlicking and grow some goddamn class solidarity
Do we know for sure that Batman has a penis? I know nothing about DC universe
I am drawing a Creature.
What does it need? I am opening the floor to suggestions.
All excellent suggestions! It is big on the display structures huh...what now?
For your consideration...
I hope this is a satisfactory amount of wings
Your suggestions have been heard
This one goes out to the person who said “big smile.” He is doing his best to reassure you by smiling, a very friendly human thing to do,
Hi, I say this with absolutely no joking tone, how the fuck did you find one of my childhood nightmare creatures, like, legitimately no joke you’ve got it down to the fucking shade of blue in the eyes and the number of wings, like what the fuck
you got the antlers and the fucking teeth and the floaty neck ring with the eyes, literally the only thing missing is the second ring of eyes
Well...I crowdsourced him.
being an animist is great and fun
I always see a lot of discussion about working with spirits but you also do not have to "work with" a spirit in order to acknowledge and connect with it. Not every interaction with a spirit has to be deeply significant and ritualized and about some named entity reaching out to you personally. Spirits are a part of the world all around you and sometimes it's good and ok to just Be. It's ok to just acknowledge.
I say "hey" to a lot of stuff. Hey trees, I see you. Notice the great blue heron going over. Always look down to see the water as I drive over my river. Hey.
Being an animist is great because literally everything is a potential friend you can say "hey" to.
anyone remember the Guinness books of world records and all the fucked up shit that was in them?
In I think the 2010 one there was something about the first man legally to give birth and it showed a photo of a pregnant trans guy, at which 10 year old me was like “Oh, you can do that? Makes sense I guess.”
I’m pretty sure that was my introduction to the idea of trans people, and I think it should be everyone’s, because I think even the most ridiculously old fashioned of people would find a trans person living their life to be a cool, entirely normal, everyday thing after looking at the horrifying full page spread of the person with the world record longest fingernails like 2 pages before it. perspective is cure
Most of the section about people was always interesting, because it really highlighted human diversity and how many people who fall waaay outside what’s considered “normal,” and who are just...doing their thing. It’s considered such a death sentence to be Odd, and yet there’s got to be some kind of serenity on the other side, where you can have a photo of you put in a book where you’re proudly holding a certificate that says you have the world’s largest ears.
And it also highlighted how many people devote huge parts of their lives to conditioning their bodies for activities that I’m not sure how someone came up with in the first place. There was a guy that pulled a semi-truck using his eye sockets or something.
But the fingernails. The fingernails have scarred the tissue of my brain for life.
I feel like I must add that for a long time I thought that “bottom surgery” worked like an organ transplant where some person just like,,,donated their genitals to another.
I’m not sure if I was envisioning that two trans people would decide to swap or what. How weird would it be to have that connection.
“Oh hey, that’s Greg!”
“Oh, where do you know him from?”
“Oh yeah, he gave me my genitalia. I wonder how mine’s doing...”
