Ameliandil

Dark Teyvat

on survival

There are 760,000 Australians on the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the system that - if they feel like it and your personalised plan says you get to have it - provides funding for everything from personal hygiene care to support workers to therapies to assistive technology. It's already very hard for disabled people to get on the NDIS, regardless of your disability. It's near impossible to access most support and equipment without being on the NDIS. And the government has announced that they want that number to drop to 600,000 in four years. 160,000 of us cut off the Scheme - and countless more denied access. This will cause deaths. People will die and people will suffer because there is no safety net. The NDIS is the only option for most of us. Even private health insurance doesn't cover most of these things. Nobody will swoop in to save us.

The bill wants to give the (non disabled!) NDIS minister basically unlimited power to cut our funding. They're already planning what they'd do with that power. What rights they'll strip from us. What dignity and freedom they'll remove to make their budget look better.

The bill wants to force people to try every treatment out there before they're allowed to be on the NDIS. Including if the treatment is literally impossible to access. There’s a lot of us living in regional areas or out bush who can't just pop to the capital cities for specialists. This will especially hurt disabled First Nations people in regional and remote communities, who already experience limited access to healthcare.

If you're australian and worried, the ABC did a good breakdown of the proposed changes.

I know australia stuff doesn't really pop up on the radar on this site, but I want everyone to know what's going on. What we're fighting for here. Your australian disabled friends might be NDIS participants fearing for their life, rights, and freedom. They might not be a participant and afraid these changes mean they never will have access. We deserve better. The government built a system with no backup plan, and now they want hundreds of thousands of disabled people to pay the price for their bad planning.

this is my best friend, the dipylon oinochoe. its a beautiful little wine jug from the late geometric period. 22cm tall. you may know it from such hits as “paper talking about the early greek alphabet,” or “paper talking about the early greek alphabet,” etc etc. i’ve been researching him for a project lately. and i think i’m the only one who understands him now.

anyways it’s one of the oldest longer inscriptions we have from the late 8th/early 7th cent BCE. everyone and their mother wants to translate this little guy. they’re all reading it and going “oh wow! its got a perfect hexameter at the start! ‘whoever of the dancers dances most delicately!’" and then they all go "Wait What Do Those Last Signs Mean.”

there are 24 different interpretations. but thats fine. whatever. beef over the last signs seems normal enough. you see that a lot. personally i think its too broken to really tell for certain (those fractures are a bit unfortunately placed tbh) but i fear i am also just a very skeptical guy when it comes to definitive translations so my take on that should be considered with a grain of salt.

but because im researching this oinochoe, i'm reading all these articles arguing over what it Means and what the Implications Are. and you would think… its 2025… we’ve kinda all agreed “pots aren’t people” for several decades… surely there’s an analysis somewhere that focuses Solely On This Pot’s Context... idk like trying not to focus solely on its inscription for once???

but no. no, this is too much to ask for apparently. everyone’s going “well it must've belonged to a dancer! lets talk about dance competitions and homer and the gymnasium how this is all reflected in this one jug!” someone even dropped this one line theorizing it was “passed around at a party,” like it has just been consistently assigned as belonging to a dancer you cannot escape this idea. i tried to find any different ideas. i could not.

so i’m stuck here going “Where Is The Context” because it seems to be, uh, Not Discussed Anywhere. every article is citing back towards stephanos koumanoudes (the guy who purchased it in 1880) but they are Also saying “yeah it was found in 1871! source: koumanoudes!” But He’s Not The Guy That Excavated It, Guys, Where Is It From? nobody is giving me the answer. my favorite one is culhed, he just says “under obscure circumstances,” which is quite possibly the least helpful way to describe this somehow nebulous provenance. but then culhed offhandedly cites someone else. just in the footnotes, as you do. and that someone is yannis galanakis, my new hero.

now yannis galanakis (2011) does not give a single flying fuck about the dipylon oinochoe. he is here for one thing and one thing only: an unpublished stirrup jar that was bought by a totally different guy. most of his article is just concerned about this stirrup jar, how it was sold with a skull (??), and Who Sold That Skull. but galanakis’ stirrup jar is, coincidentally, from this same excavation in 1871. so in his article, where he’s referencing all these people associated with private excavations northeast of the dipylon gate (around modern-day plateia eleutherias), galanakis casually drops the line “among the finds associated with these excavations are some of the most important examples of late geometric pottery, like the dipylon oinochoe.” this is 1) more than Literally Everyone Else I Have Been Reading has been saying and 2) PROVIDING PRIMARY SOURCES FOR THIS DIG?

and these sources.... these primary sources have never been mentioned in Any Other Publications re: the dipylon oinochoe??? except MAYBE one from 2013 (coulié) thats in french, apparently only available in print, and the nearest copy is a library 2hrs away from me (so i cant actually verify what she says yet). but every other article about the dipylon oinochoe is basically like “yeah, see powell 1988” -> “yeah, see koumanoudes 1880” -> “i bought this from some guy named ioannes, lol” and its just created this Massive Echo Chamber where the provenance is "Koumanoudes" and the context is "Dancer." when... we have... two publications... written by people who were actually involved in this private excavation (which to be clear here was very much illegal at some points, but ioannes palaiologos do not care abt the government saying Stop Excavating Please). these two sources are hirschfeld (1872) and rayet (1888).

the provenance that these 1870s/80s accounts are providing isnt Actually That Detailed, but there are parts that line up pretty well (ie, swords/spears/knives being found in the graves, murex on top, several layers of successive tombs) which are Totally Absent from later articles talking about the purpose of this vessel, of its inscription, and of its owner/transcriber (which i dont think can be determined Anyways [cf Arrington 2024, this is just a Normal Take i think] but like whatever i guess Pots Are People Now, according to Powell 1988+Binek 2017+Osborne 2006). i phrased it in my paper and my presentation as “its like this oinochoe been totally disconnected from its context” and its to the point where its so egregious that someone will, in one article, drop a reference to galanakis’ research on the excavation of 1871 (where he cites two eyewitness accounts) and not. Not Once have they looked into it.

because if they had. and this is the fucking crazy part ok this is where i Lost My Shit For A Solid Week. there is, in hirschfeld 1872, an identical oinochoe (number 48, page 147 in this journal) with the same damn height (22.5cm; powell 1988 says the dipylon oinochoe is about 23cm) and decoration (a grazing deer) and concentric lines its a goddamn identical piece just judging from the description of it (and hirschfeld very unhelpfully did Not include this jug among his plates). deers grazing arent very common in late geometric pottery, its mostly just the dipylon workshop cranking them out AND theres only a few oinochoe attributed to dipylon workshop so This Is Quite Possibly The Same Vessel (or so i thought, we'll get to that). the one problem is that this vessel is just NOT from dipylon??? its from the old military hospital in athens??? which was built south of the acropolis in 1834??? and they found roman mosaics during that construction??? so this mentioned vessel could actually have been found in the 1830s??? and again nobody has said jack fucking shit about this connection, afaik i am the only one who has ever actually sat down with these Implications all lined up in a row, so i had to try and disprove myself on my own like it was 5d chess. i was the “I Want To Believe” meme but if it was about the dipylon oinochoe being from somewhere near dipylon.

and i'm digging through as many sources as i possibly can find to prove there's a mysterious second jug that might be from this hospital area (which, granted, was still a funerary space during the geometric period). i went through all of hirschfeld's references to alexander conze's plates showing pottery shapes, but they just ended up also being oinochoe, which made me lose my mind even more. hirschfeld would be like "yeah this deer was in this position from conze taf VII-2" and you go "ok so whats conze taf vii-2 look like? oh my fucking god its a GRAZING ANIMAL AGAIN." at some point i ended up reading a phd dissertation from the national and kapodistrian univerisity of athens to know more about this military hospital?? and then i switched gears and went searching through coldstream 1968’s list of geometric pottery (it might be outdated now, but it was the only thorough source i could find atp) and went through Every Single Oinochoe from the dipylon workshop and almost every single one was totally different. like they just could not be this mystery oinochoe (in which case, I Would Have Some Really Bad News About The Dipylon Oinochoe).

until i found my second best friend. munich CVA 3 taf 112. who literally nobody except me gives a shit about. its taf description is 2 paragraphs long. its the exact same height as these two aforementioned oinochoe. it has the exact same deer grazing motif. fuck it, its even got an unknown provenance because it was acquired from Some Guy Named Paul in 1907 (who also has connections to people like furtwängler [most unfortunate last name ever], another guy who wrote about the dipylon oinochoe in 1881). so in my quest to achieve some sort of emotional resolution here i possibly found a sister vessel to the dipylon oinochoe??? and maybe even that jug's provenance. who knows. i dont wanna say anything definitive yet. also if anyone has access to paul julius arndt's personal papers and especially his financial records, hit me up, because where the fuck did he get this identical looking jug.

however. most modern scholarship about the dipylon oinochoe does not care about munich cva 3 taf 112 (and its similarities to the dipylon oinochoe), or the few references to the 1871 excavations at palatia eleutherias several blocks northeast of the dipylon gate (and what little context/descriptions they provide of funerary remains), because they do not care about the dipylon oinochoe. they care about the letters inscribed on it, and they want to debate the meanings of those letters in a self-inflicted vacuum devoid of all other evidence beyond 35 legible signs and 11 fragmentary/illegible ones.

Tucker has seen him missing a good chunk of his shoulder. Sam's stitched up his wounds; jutting slashes of his stomach before finals. Jazz has seen the worst— the wounds inflicted by their parents— and her fingers only shook minorly while applying ecto-burn cream.

No one outside of their friend group really notices. Long-sleeved shirts are shields and his reputation is his wielded weapon.

He just... kinda assumes it's the same everywhere as it is in Amity Park.

When Danny is forced into a Wayne gala as a begrudging plus-one to Vlad, and Sam weasels into joining them through pure spite and manipulation.

It's downright miserable, especially since he and Vlad had duked it out barely minutes before they stepped through the extravagant doors. Their usual spat made him feel weak and his hands and arms were stinging like crazy, even in human form.

Sam drags him into an empty room the moment she sees him, and only then did Danny notice that he's bleeding. His clenched fists had hid it initially, but now there's red and green tinged blood spreading and smearing on his hands.

"Where am I bleeding now?" Danny questions, almost sounding like he's whining. It's deeply resigned, exasperated, and definitely frustrated.

It's not the first time where he has millions of cuts or injuries and he doesn't know where he's bleeding from.

He instinctually removes his scratchy dress shirt to see if there's more damage on his arms. Scars criss-cross around his entire upper body, and there's more serious burns and cuts than he'd assumed from the fight with Vlad, but neither of the fifteen-year-olds are disturbed.

Why would they be? He's Phantom, and they've done patch-ups everywhere, dozens of times.

Dpxdc

When Danny transferred to Gotham University after finally solving the whole ghost problem back in Amity Park, he had big dreams for his new, totally normal life. You know — good grades, a decent job, maybe some hobbies, and actual friends who didn’t try to exorcise him.

He nailed almost all of it. Grades? Great. Job? Got one. Hobbies? Sure. Friends? …Yeah, about that.

Apparently, “making friends” in Gotham was harder than fighting a ghost invasion. So Danny, in a stroke of questionable genius, decided to just gaslight people into being his friends. Step one: convince them they’d met before. Step two: keep acting like they were old pals until they actually became friends. Easy.

Meanwhile, somewhere across campus, Tim and Duke were losing their minds trying to figure out why neither of them remembered their best friend. Because clearly, they must’ve accidentally messed with the timeline again — there was no other explanation.

———————-

Danny’s plan started on a Tuesday. Because, in his experience, disasters had a thing for weekends — Tuesdays felt statistically safer.

He was hauling a stack of textbooks across the quad when he collided, hard, with someone coming around the corner. Books went flying. So did his soul — almost literally.

“Oh man, sorry—!” He dropped to help pick them up, then froze. “Wait. Tim? Dude! Long time no see!”

The guy blinked, all sharp eyes and caffeine exhaustion. “…I’m sorry, who?”

Danny laughed, easy and bright. “Oh, come on, you’re still doing that bit? Pretending we’ve never met? You haven’t changed a bit.”

The stranger — Tim, apparently not in on the joke — frowned slightly, like he was trying to scan Danny’s face for a memory that wasn’t there.

Before he could say anything, another guy showed up. “Hey, Tim, everything good?”

Danny lit up instantly. “Duke! Wow, both of you? This is déjà vu squared. What, did you plan this little act together?”

Duke blinked. “Uh—”

“Wow, you’re even doing the confused faces,” Danny said, shaking his head with mock admiration. “You guys really committed this time.”

The two exchanged a look — one of those silent conversations where entire theories were forming without a single word.

Danny could practically feel the gears turning. He recognized that face — the “there’s something bigger going on here” look. He’d seen it a hundred times from people who’d stumbled into ghost business. Except this time, he wasn’t the weird one. Technically.

He smiled wider, pretending not to notice their suspicion. “Anyway, it’s good seeing you again. You two still hang out at that café on Fifth, right? The one with the bad espresso?”

Tim’s eyes narrowed a fraction. “You know that place?”

Danny shrugged, casual. “Sure. I used to third-wheel you guys there all the time. Guess some things never change.”

A pause. Both of them were staring at him now, still saying nothing — just watching, analyzing, wondering.

Danny clapped his hands together. “So! Coffee? My treat. It’ll come back to you once the caffeine hits, promise.”

Neither agreed, but somehow, five minutes later, they were all sitting at a café table. Danny stirred his drink, perfectly at ease, while Tim and Duke kept stealing glances like they were trying to solve an equation that refused to add up.

Danny smiled into his cup.

“Man,” he said softly, “it’s really good to see you guys again.”

Vampirism. Lycanthropy. Cheap spells gone wrong. A woman brought in for her prenatal has to be told her baby is a lindworm. Someone is literally being followed by the anthropomorphic personification of the Black Death.