saw a post that claims that STEM smart people are smarter than humanities smart people because “any math student who speaks english can flip through an english book and understand it, but i’d like to see an english student do college math.” i have to say 1. holy disingenuous comparison batman, and 2. as someone who ta’d the english side of an english/biology fusion class, no the fuck they cannot. forget a collegiate level, we were struggling to teach these STEM major upperclassmen how to identify what’s on the page and articulate the themes on a high school level. the course texts were two YA novels and a handful of short stories. meanwhile all the humanities students were chugging through the biochemistry at what my colleague reported was an extremely respectable level. turns out that understanding what you’re reading is a skill just like any other, AND one with transferable applications

ah shoot the post i dashed off in a moment of annoyance is getting notes. i want to CLARIFY that none of the STEM students i taught were bad people. by and large they were all bright and dedicated students who just had lost some of the skills the hadn’t had reason to exercise since high school. i’m a huge fan of interdisciplinary study, among other reasons because it was only through this interdisciplinary course that these STEM students were able to relearn how to write a five paragraph essay and these humanities students were able to relearn the function of ATP—our skills atrophy when we don’t use them, and often we don’t have reason to use them unless we can approach it through a language of learning we already know and like. the answer is more communication and more study, from all backgrounds to all backgrounds. it’s certainly not more enemies

Something that I get chills about is the fact that the oldest story told made by the oldest civilization opens with "In those days, in those distant days, in those ancient nights."

This confirms that there is a civilization older than the Sumerians that we have yet to find

Some people get existential dread from this

Me? I think it's fucking awesome it shows just how much of this world we have yet to discover and that is just fascinating

@makaeru peer review cos this made me check when the Sumerians happened and I forget how recent history is for every other continent. 7000 - 8000 years ago just isn't that long when you're in Australia, and the amount of detailed history we have access to here is wonderful and should be recognised more internationally

Source (non Aboriginal)

And a quote I picked out from a longer interview with an Aboriginal local elder about the area where he touched on the history

Source (the rest of the interview is really interesting and all transcribed, have a look if you're curious)

This is part of my Ancient Civilizations class that I teach, which does a whole week about Australia and the Torres Strait Islands because I was sick of never seeing them represented in USAmerican history contexts. With the help of @micewithknives and @acearchaeologist I've learned so many incredible things about Australia's past and it's been incredibly rewarding to share them with students.

My favorite fact about Aboriginal oral history is the fact that we pretty recently discovered that the Aboriginal myth of the 7 Sisters, an origin story for the Pleiades star cluster, accurately reflects a point TEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO when two stars in the constellation got close enough together to no longer be distinguishable by the naked eye.

The story? 6 sisters running from something that took their 7th sister.

as a gilgar gunditj woman, i was not expecting to see my culture on my dash.

thank you for spreading our words and treating our culture with respect.

Boosting signal.

Echoes from the ancient human past, wonderful.

Their oral history also contains stories about hunting prehistoric megafauna too. Native Australians are the oldest existing culture on earth, which is even more amazing considering how hard the british tried to wipe it out.

Budji Bim volcano.

I actually looked up the story of The Seven Sisters / Pleiades on Wikipedia, the other day, 'cause I woke up from a dream that mentioned how ancient that story was. And I wanted to check how much of that was invented in-dream, and how much I was remembering something I learned while I was awake.

According to that article, some astronomers think that story is not ten thousand years old; they believe it to be a Hundred Thousand years old.

in the contemporary world, the most fundamental human right - and, it often seems, the least protected one - is "being both Allowed and Able to go Somewhere Else." the rest is commentary.

the torments of prison are predicated on Not Letting You Leave. the most terrifying and degrading aspects of childhood are predicated on Not Letting You Leave. misogynists wail and moan and fearmonger about divorce and equal opportunity employment because they Allow Wife To Leave. borders and immigration restrictions exist, in no small part, to Prevent People From Leaving countries where they will be exploited and/or oppressed. fuck you for trying to leave. fuck you for exerting any control over your life whatsoever. that makes you the one at fault, actually.

I think about this a lot when poor and homeless people can't take the bus or get kicked off when they can't pay the fare.

Public transport should be free

There are ten trillion pictures of flowering trees to the point where they sometimes seem trite and overdone. But then you see a tree in full flower and go holy shit this rules and I've gotta show this to everyone so they can experience the same magic and wonder and there are ten trillion and one pictures of flowering trees

I have a question

I have one subscriber on beehiiv and it tells me the clicks I get so I know nobody is as invested in this as I am BUT STILL we have to proceed as if it is so or we die. Here's a relevant sample.

Oh, uh, I should probably say, Harry and Ellis is a m/m romance set in early eighteenth-century Britain between Ellis, an Irish Traveller in exile who has taken to the London underworld as gangleader, thief, and highwayman and Harry, an English orphan who knows he is worth more than the brutal apprenticeship he fled. Both are determined to get what's owed them from the world, and England will regret these two little hooligans falling in love.

snoopy of the day

this is my favorite 'snoopy of the day' i've ever posted

from the names project's aids memorial quilt demonstration, october 10, 1992.

not mine. found on reddit, but my god scam bots on ao3 are both embarrassing and hilarious 😭 I was told their usual goal was to either get users’ personal informations/money through fake commissions or get them to delete their fics so that these bots could ‘safely steal their works to train their ai without writers being able to claim ownerships of their own works since the original sources were deleted’ but I don’t even know what the point of this is. just to scare people for fun? because some people might unfortunately believe them. just to troll?

I was also told that if they were commenting as a guest comment, they sometimes used the urls of random innocent and legit users (since anyone can use any name they want if they’re commenting as a guest user), which is just bad for the innocent users who were impersonated by these losers.

anyway, if you got a comment like this, report them for scam.

it’s also important now more than ever for us all to leave nice comments on the fics we like. with the rise of scam bots plaguing ao3’s comments section, getting a genuine, nice comment from a real person means so much to writers who gave us these wonderful fics to enjoy for free.

Elizabeth encounters something unexpected and shocking in the gardens of Pemberley

Inspired by this post and made for @janeuary-month Day 1: Garden. This one is slightly less stupid than the Darcy version I made, but still very silly. Enjoy!

for once it's better to watch this one without sound first

I love this blog so much for basically being an enormous library of interior background references but MAN. There is something Vile and Poetic about that saying being painted on the wall of one of the bleakest-looking school hallways I've seen in a long time. It's like that poem about the stars being painted over in landlord white. Incredible.

Commission of Frank Mildmay for @clove-pinks !!! Thank youuuu