woke up this morning, rolled over, and very confidently tried to blow out my alarm clock like a candle. absolutely no precedent for that.
Ebeneezer in 1742 wakes with a start as for some reason he has put out his guttering candle by slapping atop it ith the palm of his hand. His hand is burned and his nightgown and cap are spattered with hot wax.
Fascinated by the perceived necessity of an Equivalent Exchange
Constructing geographic edifices that challenge the boundaries of hilldom and devising exciting new dooms to meet upon them.
Best way I’ve ever seen academia described.
Fandom, academia, and Minecraft.
"hephaistion made this" in a beautiful trompe-l'oeil piece of paper half unstuck by the wind still some of the rawest stuff ever put in a mosaic (2nd century bc, pergamon)
Everyone say Thank you Ao3 volunteer, we appreciate your work. Do it Right Now
Thank you AO3 volunteers I appreciate your work
☝️❤️
A declassified World War II-era government guide to “simple sabotage” is currently one of the most popular open source books on the internet. The book, called “Simple Sabotage Field Manual,” was declassified in 2008 by the CIA and “describes ways to train normal people to be purposefully annoying telephone operators, dysfunctional train conductors, befuddling middle managers, blundering factory workers, unruly movie theater patrons, and so on. In other words, teaching people to do their jobs badly.”
Over the last week, the guide has surged to become the 5th-most-accessed book on Project Gutenberg, an open source repository of free and public domain ebooks. It is also the fifth most popular ebook on the site over the last 30 days, having been accessed nearly 60,000 times over the last month (just behind Romeo and Juliet).
Link to the Guide at Project Gutenberg can be found here
its so sad when a fanfic trope initially centered around noncon/dubcon gets popular enough that it turns into a watered down extremely consensual healthy-relationship version of it
as retribution i think i'm going to start taking vanilla tropes and making them noncon. the barista is putting roofies in the coffee. there's only one bed and the other guy is getting chained to the radiator. there's no social or legal protections for assault within soulmate matches
When I was about to go to college my dad, who is a thoracic surgeon specialized in lung cancer, sat me down and told me I could be a stoner, but absolutely not a cigarette smoker
His logic was:
@buticaaba you are absolutely correct! My dad hates vapes. He says the lungs of cig smokers look black and kind of like asphalt, and that the lungs of vape smokers retain their pink color but are covered in burn like blisters. He participated in a double lung transplant on a 20 year old vape smoker and has done multiple drainings of vape smoker lungs that filled with fluids because they’re absolutely full of blisters.
When you smoke cigs you’re clogging your lungs with tar and other nasty stuff, but when you hit a vape you’re quite literally giving your lungs chemical burns.
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 :)
