its incredible that there are people in this world who are rude on purpose. i’m rude on accident and 6 years later i’ll still be thinking about it with my heart beating so fast it feels like i’m going to pass out and my hands sweating and the sickness and the sickness and th
They should add “On Horseback” option to Google Maps. For writers.
“Hevoslinja” (Trans-Horse) is a European art project started in 2014 by Finnish artist Eero Yli-Vakkuri - according to his own words ‘skilless in riding and afraid of animals’ at the start.
The aim of the project was to travel 270 km / 168 miles between Helsinki and Turku in Finland, and to highlight the possibility of horse travel in modern society. Since then they’ve took to promoting horseback efforts in urban landscapes with several European collaborators and artists.
Yli-Vakkuri and collaborators first spent eight months practicing riding to become safely self-sufficient in saddle, and bought a Finnhorse gelding Toivottu Poika ('Awaited Son’). The route followed, as closely as possible, the old coastal royal country road of the premodern era, Kuninkaantie/Suuri Rantatie, and took 9 days.
Toivottu Poika is a very average example of his breed, standing at some 155 cm / 15.1 hh tall. The Finnhorse is a relative of for example the North-Norwegian Lyngshest breed, the Icelandic horse, the Swedish Gotlandsruss pony and the Estonian landrace horse and Tori horse breed. It is a mid-sized light draught and trotter, a sensibly realistic mediaeval country travel horse equivalent.
For more hardcore short-term treks, looking into competitive endurance riding can be helpful. Mongol Derby might be one of the most intense races, as it recreates the Chinggis Khan era postal system of swapping horses continuously over a 1000 km / 620 mile route.
By only including skilled endurance riders, keeping up a constant fast speed and swapping horses every 40 km / 25 mil, the Mongol Derby route only takes 10 days even though it’s several times the length of the Trans-Horse project. This is the speed of highly organised imperial messengers with the supporting cultural infrastructure, professional marathon runners where Yli-Vakkuri and Toivottu poika were leisure hikers.
The Mongolian landrace horse is a very distant relative of the breeds above, but much lighter and smaller than the agriculturally focused modern Finnhorse - typicaly standing at 142 cm / 14 hh at most. (This would’ve also been common for Finnhorses before the 19th century.) What really differentiates them from Western breeds, however, is the way they’re trained and raised in semi-feral herds, and it’s said that while the rider may decide where the pair is headed, the horse is the one to decide how to get there.
also it’s not quite google maps, but there is a lovely site called Viabundus!
the last i checked, the map of roads stretches from Calais, France to Moscow, Russia west to east and from Košice, Slovakia to Tornio, Finland south to north. it doesn’t cover all of Europe, for example Sweden and Norway are empty at the moment, but it is quite extensive and still being worked on! in addition to showing the old roads, you can calculate the distance and travel time from one city to another, and there are a lot of options:
and that’s not all! here’s a description from the site itself (emphasis mine):
“Viabundus is a freely accessible online street map of late medieval and early modern northern Europe (1350-1650). Originally conceived as the digitisation of Friedrich Bruns and Hugo Weczerka’s Hansische Handelsstraßen (1962) atlas of land roads in the Hanseatic area, the Viabundus map moves beyond that. It includes among others: a database with information about settlements, towns, tolls, staple markets and other information relevant for the pre-modern traveller; a route calculator; a calendar of fairs; and additional land routes as well as water ways.”
it’s quite neat and also free! i hope someone else finds it as fascinating and cool as i did :)
Claudette Colvin, whose 1955 arrest for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated Montgomery bus helped spark the modern civil rights movement, has died. She was 86.
Her death was announced Tuesday by the Claudette Colvin Legacy Foundation. Ashley D. Roseboro of the organization confirmed she died in Texas.
Colvin was arrested months before Rosa Parks gained international fame before refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus.
“so i think he, even though he didn’t say it first, he made that cottage a home for ilya to be able to say it” …the screen is blurry because of my tears
at some point in your life you will be boiling fruit, water, sugar, and lemon juice in a pot to make a syrup or jam. the instructions will tell you to simmer for a certain amt of time. your timer will go off and you will look at the pot and go, “hm, this doesn’t look thick enough. maybe i’ll let it go for another 10 minutes.” this is the devil speaking. it’s only so liquid right now because it is at boiling point. it will thicken when it cools down. learn from the follies of my youth and do not let this happen to you
at some point in your life you will be making a sauce or a stew in which you need to add cornstarch to thicken it. and you will prepare a slurry of starch in cold water and think “this looks like way too little starch to thicken this amount of liquid.” this is the devil speaking. cornstarch instantly polymerizes at 95°C and if you add too much it will turn into an impossibly thick goop.
it’s kind of crazy climate change has occurred at such a remarkable pace that I and everyone else around my age can remember a completely different climate in our childhoods. I truly watched winter gradually disappear in my life.
“You’re too young to remember this, but there used to be so many insects outside that you would have to clean them off the windshield after a long car ride” is the kind of sentence that would have been in a cheesy scifi short story earlier in my life, perhaps submitted to a literary magazine and accepted to show support for its environmentalist message - now it’s something I’ve said in earnest.
I bring sort of a ‘peasants of the past were not as debased,uneducated and dirty as a lot of pesudo-medieval fiction makes them out to be but this new wave of attempting to sweep the very real indentured servitude, corporal ownership, poverty and lack of basic human rights under the rug isn’t achieving what you think it’s achieving’ vibe to the party that people don’t really like
Also can i say that i think the elevation of Svetlana’s inclusion in the show was so fantastic not just because Ilya needed another character in his life to bounce off of dialogue wise but also because it showed how he behaves when he’s comfortable. He’s always laying in her lap and getting pet, joking around with silly voices, he likes to play and rough house and we see glimpses of that with Svet because she’s his childhood friend, so slowly seeing those behaviors come out as he gets more settled with Shane was so incredibly sweet and rewarding.
ilya constantly jealousybaiting shane is one of my top five favorite things about him, especially before he finally cracks & tells shane that he loves him . he’s like a big fluffy cat showing you his belly like :) so soft :) i kiss you so gentle & tease you & look after you :) & then shane reaches for the belly with fascinated reluctance & ilya goes SCRATCH >:3 what if i greencard marry my old friend i used to fuck more often than you >:3 & shane’s eyes go so wet & shiny & his jaw is clenched . & some raw, young part of ilya heaves a big sigh of relief to know that even if he can’t make shane love him, at least he can affect him . & then as soon as he learns that shane has turned the precise, devoted attention that makes him a legendary hockey player onto ilya he has that flash of holy shit . he is going to love me forever in a way that no one but my mother has ever loved me & i am never going to be the same . & every ounce of tension in his body just evaporates & he melts into a puddle under shane’s hands .
it’s like no one gets me1 garrus and it’s so annoying to me. i love this mid-twenties spitfire who worries so much about justice and making a difference that he overlooks nuance. who’s so young and full of zeal and pent-up frustration over trying and failing to make a difference. who will go against his father’s wishes as well as simply ignore decades’ worth of turian-human conflict to do something he thinks he has to—but who will also listen to the words of a trusted mentor and truly reflect on his actions when prompted. who just cares so much and wants to know so much and wants to do so much that he comes across as abrasive at times even when he’s trying very hard to be polite. i just think he’s neat
