Chaotic Gritty (Deep fried version)
Mike Driver
art blog(derogatory)

Cosmic Funnies
AnasAbdin
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda

if i look back, i am lost

@theartofmadeline
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"

izzy's playlists!
Jules of Nature
$LAYYYTER
KIROKAZE
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

JVL
Three Goblin Art
tumblr dot com

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
todays bird

seen from Türkiye

seen from Brazil

seen from United Kingdom

seen from United States

seen from Türkiye

seen from Netherlands
seen from Malaysia

seen from Sweden

seen from Australia

seen from United States

seen from Singapore

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United Kingdom

seen from Australia
seen from Malaysia

seen from Singapore
@arojerk
Chaotic Gritty (Deep fried version)

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
“Humans are inherently selfish--" Then why do so many cultures value hospitality, to the point of dictating it in their religions? Why is it so common for hosts to offer their visitors their best food, and as much of it as they can? At some point, multiple cultures decided that they knew what it felt like to be alone and vulnerable, and promised each other to never let those who stay with them feel that way. That doesn't sound very "inherently selfish" to me.
"humans are the plague"
No. Humans are animals as much as the fish and the bear. We are pack animals who have survived by strong bonds and community.
Do not buy the lie that humans are inherently evil. Societies can trick you into believing this, but it's not the truth of humanity.
Humans crave being together, sharing together, and thriving together.
Capitalism just wants you to believe we're destined for selfishness.
linked tree (includes options to donate to Ghanaian projects)
petition to show support
Jeremy Hansen is wearing a patch designed by Indigenous artist during Artemis II mission
Jeremy Hansen's Artemis II Mission patch, graciously created by Anishinaabe artist Henry Guimond with the contribution of Dave Courchene III (Sabe), Leader of the Turtle Lodge in Sagkeeng First Nation (Manitoba), recognizes the importance of traditional knowledge and Indigenous Peoples in Canada.
This particular article contains much more information - the symbolism of the patch, which includes the Goddess Artemis, the Big Dipper and the North Star, and the Seven Sacred Laws, represented by seven animals - but tumblr won't make a nice link like the one above:
https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/missions/artemis-ii/jeremy-hansen-patch.asp

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Jeremy Hansen is wearing a patch designed by Indigenous artist during Artemis II mission
Jeremy Hansen's Artemis II Mission patch, graciously created by Anishinaabe artist Henry Guimond with the contribution of Dave Courchene III (Sabe), Leader of the Turtle Lodge in Sagkeeng First Nation (Manitoba), recognizes the importance of traditional knowledge and Indigenous Peoples in Canada.
This particular article contains much more information - the symbolism of the patch, which includes the Goddess Artemis, the Big Dipper and the North Star, and the Seven Sacred Laws, represented by seven animals - but tumblr won't make a nice link like the one above:
https://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/missions/artemis-ii/jeremy-hansen-patch.asp
if you are a parent, or may become one, or you are otherwise likely to arrive in the situation of caring for a child while they eat, promise me this: if a child doesn't like a certain food or food group, you will ask them WHY. and specifically, you will pay attention to either confirming or ruling out "it makes my mouth itch" or "it makes my stomach hurt," both of which are medically important info that children may not provide unprompted. which i know because this PSA has been brought to you by "i spent my entire childhood and much of my early teens eating peas and lentils while wondering why everyone else liked the Violently Itchy Mouth Sensation so much, like were they a bunch of legume masochists or something, before i finally realized that Violently Itchy Mouth Sensation was in fact a sinister demon appearing only to me, and her true demonic name was: Legume Allergy"
with nothing but affection and care for many of you reporting itchy mouths and "spicy" foods in the notes:
Learn more about oral allergy syndrome, an allergic reaction to certain foods, including fruits, vegetables and nuts.
[ID: edited conversation screenshot:
Blue: what are u trying to say
Yellow: (image of the Cleveland Clinic's Oral Allergy Syndrome article) go here
Blue: in the oral allergy syndrome information ?
Yellow: go in the OAS information
End ID.]
Talking to friends with inept parents is crazy. No wonder they’re like this if their parents kept fumbling
“I’m having trouble adapting to my adult responsibilities” well no wonder, nobody raised you 😭😭😭
Hot tip for future parents: you actually have to guide your kid to adulthood. Feeding them and waiting for them to grow up is not enough since they are not house plants. A little more thought and care is required.
for those lacking certain "adulting" skills, especially things around the house, check out:
mom, how do i...?
and dad, how do i...?
^ there are tons of other resources but these two will teach you some personal hygiene, home or apartment repairs, easy recipes and basic cleaning techniques, even how to schedule doctor's appointments
if youre a renter i cannot recommend the trans handyma'am enough, mercury is a lifesaver, and her channel and accounts are always accepting new questions
there are so many resources, a lot that you dont have to even ask for, just know how to look 🩷 much love
She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.
Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.
Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.
The record label will never put her name on the album.
Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.
The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.
Carol could do it on the first try.
She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.
But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.
That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.
She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.
Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.
She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.
The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.
For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.
Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.
And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.
But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.
Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.
And the world didn’t know her name.
She was admitted to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2025 but refused, fuck yeah, Carol. Her official website is incredible.
The Owls Club was a black women’s softball team formed the late 1930s in Seattle. The Owls won the first women’s Washington State Softball Championship in 1938. The team, renamed the Brown Bombers, won the championship again in 1939.

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
#my wife is on the SOR for being gay #no joke #she hit on a girl in a straight bar once #in 1997 #and while the girl was into it #the off duty cop sitting nearby was not #and so he arrested her for ‘soliciting homosexual activity’ #which in our state was still a felony #in 1997 (and would remain so until Lawrence v Texas in 2003) #and since ‘soliciting homosexual activity’ was a felony and a sex crime #she got put on The List #she is still on there to this day #because it costs MONEY to ask a judge to take you off #and she has tried four times#since 2003 #to get taken off the SOR #but every time the judge has said something like ‘no you pled guilty to the crime i can’t possibly take you off the sex offender registry’ #with no acknowledgement of what the actual crime was #(the crime of being a butch lesbian hitting on a cute girl who was into it) #(in 1997)
Reposting these tags with consent from the person that wrote them. The post about the Sex Offenders Registry is locked, but these tags are too important to go unnoticed.
Younger queer people need to realize that the SOR being used against queer people simply for being queer isn’t some ancient history thing. It still impacts queer people today. And it can quite easily be used that way again.
Listen!
When you hear people throwing around the talking point of “well there’s a high rate of sex offenders in the trans/queer community”, this has to do with why.
Being on the sex offender registry isn’t inherently equivalent to whatever horrific sex crime you’re meant to think of when it’s mentioned. It evokes imagery of pedophilia and rape, but there is a lot that can get you put on it and not a lot you can do to be taken off of it.
Public crossdressing used to be able to get you put on the sex offender registry (and by used to I mean as recently as 2011).
Public urination (you know, the literal only option for someone who’s homeless and doesn’t have access to public bathrooms, a venn diagram where trans people are more likely to rest in the meeting zone) can get you put on the sex offender registry.
Sex work is pretty much an automatic way to end up on the sex offender registry if you’re caught. (This is especially weaponized against black trans women who do sex work)
“Deviant Sexual Intercourse” (aka literally any sexual activity aside from penis-in-vagina penetration) could get you on the sex offender registry as recently as the early 2000s. That effectively impacts the entire queer community in one way or another.
The sex offender registry is, first and foremost, useless. It tells you nothing about what someone did. It’s mentioned to quickly associate a person or a group of people with the worst possible crimes imaginable.
It has been used against us time after time and it will continue to be used for that.
And this is where the push of purity discourse in fandom shows its fetid, fascist underbelly.
This is why they are making being trans in public a felony in some states.
When you decide that people who commit a certain crime or category of crime should legally lose their humanity, you create incentive for more people to be charged with that crime.
So many of these are really good
I was positive that was a fake story but. Looks like there was just straight up a sniper in Brooklyn for a few months
you were positive it was fake bc you’re not from here
“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”
What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us
I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.
I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.
And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.
We gotta do something about ecoableism, guys, I can't keep seeing people confidently assure everyone that their ideal world is one where disabled people with specific needs don't get to be alive.
The most insidious thing about eugenics is that society is so ableist the majority of people do actually think eugenics would work and disabled people are better off dead, they just tack on an assumption that while yes eugenics works it's still bad because disabled people dying for being disabled is morally wrong. But they never actually think it's scientifically or medically wrong. We're just civilized enough we've decided to politely pretend the science isn't right because social justice.
It's like how a bunch of celebs were big on body positivity and fat liberation...until Ozempic dropped and it turns out no, none of them ever believed any of that! They just pretended to bcs up until now healthy, long term weight loss was impossible so they had no choice but to cope by learning to love themselves no matter how they looked...but now that it's here we can go back to the truth! Being fat is ugly and gross and unhealthy and you should starve yourself and take experimental meds right now so you can be skinny which is what ALL humans are clearly supposed to be!! Yeah that body positivity stuff was fun, but come on. We know you actually just wanna be skinny and think being fat is a fate worse than death.
That's what it feels like to me. Every single time. Honestly in a lot of other areas too, one of the big issues with the left is that they really do seem to think that Republicans are right about how things work and should work but we just pretend otherwise because it's the right thing to do and it reduces suffering. Which seems fine, but you cannot be an effective leftist like this. You do actually have to deconstruct your beliefs and biases and world systems, you can't go around like "well yeah we aren't gonna kill disabled people that's eugenics and it's wrong" when you clearly don't actually think it's wrong. You think eugenics would work but implementing it would be uncivilized, and it shows. You have to actually understand that racism and ableism and all other forms of bigotry are not just cruel, but entirely incorrect.
Idk if this makes sense but yeah. We gotta do something about this.
This is what Into the Woods meant when it said nice is different than good.
This is also how you get people being like "I'm not an ableist! I love disabled people!" after making a joke about Trump wearing diapers or not being able to walk down a ramp. They don't think ableism is wrong, they just think it's right but impolite, so only okay aimed at those who deserve to be insulted.
Absolutely part of why shit sucks so much rn.
Ngl I'm glad I figured out how to word this, bcs trying to articulate it as "you don't actually think bigotry is wrong you just think the target should be someone else" always felt incomplete! I now know what I meant was "you don't think bigotry is wrong you just think it's impolite and that's different" that's what I needed. You just think bigotry is being mean to a marginalized person who, crucially, has done nothing to deserve it. The second they do tho? Anything is fair game.
Yeesh. What a rancid ass way to view the world.
I think it has to do with how powerless everyone is and feels these days
Yeah there's a reason this stuff kicks up whenever the world is going to shit, these people are angry and know their anger cannot fully reach the people who are making things suck, so to make the anger feel good they shit talk Trump and his goons with inflammatory language. Calling him a "morbidly obsese malignant and manic narcissistic adderall addict who wears adult diapers bcs he shits himself all the time and only likes to eat mcdonalds" feels better than saying he's a fascist, even if the first option is wildly insensitive and harms disabled people without doing anything to Trump and the latter is the truth and the thing we should actually be fucking talking about.
They've spent so long avoiding being ableist or bigoted because they know it's rude, but with Trump, well he's evil so it's fine! They can say all of those horrible things and feel great about it. It doesn't make them an ableist because ableism is being mean or rude to disabled people who haven't done anything wrong, but Trump's done everything wrong so it's not ableism anymore. (Or, in the worst cases, they know it's ableist and don't care.) For a lot of them there really is this like...glee? with which they say this shit, really gives off 10 y/o who's mom said they can say fuck once. Like they've always wanted to say this and are SO jazzed they can now. Betrays a very immature understanding of sociao justice and politics.
And ofc all that is also how they reconcile Trump's ableism being wrong while their's is right, even if they're basically saying the exact same things. Trump is evil and talking about innocent disabled people, so what he says is bad. But if you're talking about Trump, well he's evil, so it's fine.
Salt was hugely important before refrigeration, and one of the ways of getting salt was from the sea or from brine springs. There were a few ways of doing this, which depended on the natural resources available in the area. You could put the saltwater into a large, flat pool and wait on dry air and the sun to do evaporation until there was no water left and you just had the salt, or you could boil saltwater using enormous quantities of fuel to get rid of the water.
But in places where big pools weren't feasible, they did everything in their power to reduce the amount of fuel required for the production of salt, because fuel takes a lot of time and effort to collect and drives up costs.
Enter the graduation tower!
The idea is that you take some source of salty water, pump it up to the top of a wooden tower filled with brushwood (typically blackthorn), then let it trickle down, which greatly increases evaporation by maximizing surface area and exposing the water to the wind along the way. When the saltwater reaches the bottom, it's saltier than it was, and you can send it through again until it's reached the point of saturation. If you do this with ocean water, you can reduce the amount of fuel needed by a factor of ten.
Plus it looks and sounds awesome - these were sometimes called thorn towers.
And at the start of the 20th century, when other forms of salt production had skyrocketed in efficiency, the graduation towers began to be used for healthcare, because as you might imagine, the air next to the graduation tower is very salty, more than it is next to the seaside. From what I can find it seems like the main thing it does is thin mucus, though there are a lot of other health claims.
There are still a few working thorn towers that you can go visit, mostly in Germany or Poland, but they're either historical curiosities keeping a tradition alive, or health and wellness centers, distilling down a brine spring for supposed special properties.
materialist-scumbag
reblogged from [op] — on graduation towers, salt, fuel, and the Bad-prefix town
Yes, all of this is correct and I want to add a thing, which is that the fuel side of the salt industry is genuinely the part of the story that breaks open if you push on it. Salt-making in pre-modern Europe was, for most of the medieval and early modern period, the single largest industrial consumer of firewood on the continent. The salt-makers ate forests. They ate forests at a rate that beat shipbuilding, beat iron smelting, beat glass furnaces, beat domestic heating in any one region you'd care to name. The salt pans of Lüneburg — which produced something like 40,000 tonnes of salt a year at peak in the 16th century — went through fuel at a pace that essentially deforested an enormous radius around the town and then kept going, importing wood from further and further out as the nearby supply collapsed.
The Bad Reichenhall saltworks in Bavaria, which are the oldest continuously operating inland salt works in Europe (first written mention 696 AD, when the Bavarian Duke Theodor II gave the bishop of Salzburg twenty brine pans), spent literal centuries chasing the forest line backwards into the Alps. By the early 19th century they had to commission a guy named Georg von Reichenbach to build a brine PIPELINE — like, a literal pumped pipeline (completed around 1816) going over Alpine elevation changes — to move the brine itself to where the wood still was, which is a kind of insane engineering project to undertake for what is, again, table salt.
(That's the kind of thing that drives the graduation-tower invention. Reichenbach's brine pipeline is from 1816. The graduation towers in Reichenhall are 16th century. The reason you build a graduation tower is exactly the same reason you eventually build a 20km brine pipeline: you've run out of nearby trees and the option of relocating the saltworks is off the table because the brine springs are where the brine springs are, geologically, and they're not moving.)
So when you say "fuel takes a lot of time and effort to collect, drives up costs," what's actually happening on the ground is that the salt industry is in a permanent slow-motion race against its own appetite. Every saltworks of any scale eats through the wood available within economic transport distance, and then it has to either (a) get more efficient, (b) reach further for wood, or (c) die. The graduation tower is option (a). The Reichenbach pipeline is a particularly insane version of (b). And there are SO MANY salt works that went with (c) — abandoned medieval salt towns are a thing, you can find them all over central Europe, places that had a brine spring and a thousand people and a church and then ran out of nearby wood and just… wound down.
A separate but related thing the OP isn't quite getting at: the demand side of pre-refrigeration salt economics is overwhelmingly about one particular preserved-fish trade, which is salted herring from the Baltic and the North Sea. The herring shoals would show up seasonally in massive numbers off Scania (now southern Sweden) and the Baltic coast, you'd haul them in by the millions, you'd salt them in barrels, and then you'd ship the barrels everywhere across northern Europe because they kept basically indefinitely and Catholic Europe needed protein on Fridays and during Lent and there were a LOT of Catholics and a LOT of Fridays.
This is why Lüneburg, an otherwise unremarkable town in Lower Saxony, becomes one of the wealthiest cities in medieval Germany. It sits on a colossal salt deposit. Lübeck, which is the actual port city, controls the trade route. Lüneburg salt goes to Lübeck. Lübeck ships it to Scania. The fishermen salt the herring. The herring goes back through Lübeck and out to Cologne and Bruges and Bergen and Novgorod and everywhere. The whole Hanseatic League is, to a pretty significant degree, a salt-and-fish cartel running on a single chemical transformation: chloride ion plus protein equals food that doesn't rot.
Lüneburg's salt works, the Saline Lüneburg, was the largest industrial operation in medieval Europe by some metrics. Over a thousand years of continuous operation, depending on which century of monastic-era boiling you want to start counting from. The town minted its own coins, kept its own army, negotiated as a peer with kings.
And the buildings in Lüneburg today lean.
They lean because the salt mine ran underneath the town for centuries and the ground gave out. Subsidence. The medieval city center is gorgeous and it is also visibly buckled — gabled facades that slump in the middle, towers that aren't quite vertical, doorways that aren't quite square. The whole town is sitting on a thousand years of hollowed-out salt and gradually settling into the cavity. Which, like, what a perfect physical record of where the wealth came from — the town that the salt built is collapsing into the hole the salt left behind.
The fuel problem is what kills Lüneburg, eventually. Well, the fuel problem and competition from French and Portuguese sea salt, which the Hanseatic League couldn't keep out forever, because solar-evaporated sea salt produced in places like Setúbal didn't need fuel AT ALL, which meant it could be made cheaper than anything you could boil in Lower Saxony no matter how much your graduation towers helped. By the 16th and 17th centuries the Atlantic sea salt is coming in by the shipload and the boiled-brine economies of northern Europe are in slow decline. Not gone — Lüneburg keeps boiling salt until 1980, which is its own incredible story — but no longer dominant.
(The 1980 closure date for Saline Lüneburg, by the way. Eight hundred and some years of continuous industrial salt production at one site, finally shut down inside the lifetimes of people still walking around there. We tend to think of medieval industries as having ended at some clean historical break point and they basically never did — most of them limped along for centuries in increasingly marginal forms until something specific finally killed them in living memory.)
OK so the OP's actual question, which is about the second life of graduation towers as healthcare facilities. This is also where it gets more interesting than "they noticed the air was nice."
The 19th century in Germany is the absolute peak of a particular institutional form, which is the spa town — the Kurbad or Bad — and the political-economic role of the spa town is to take a body of bourgeois and aristocratic visitors with non-specific health complaints (stomach troubles, "nerves," respiratory issues, gout, syphilis they can't talk about) and give them a structured environment with a doctor's supervision, a mineral water source, a set of physical activities, a defined social calendar, and — crucially — a duration of stay measured in WEEKS rather than days. Six weeks at the spa was the normal prescription. You'd go through a full season of treatment.
The German spa towns — and there are dozens of them, the "Bad" prefix means they're officially recognized as one — are basically nineteenth-century wellness corporations operating under royal patent. The Prussian state regulates which springs count, which doctors can practice there, what claims can be made, who can build a hotel, what the bathing schedules look like. It's a real industry. It supports its own architecture (the neoclassical Kurhaus, the colonnaded pump room), its own medical literature, its own social rituals (the daily walk, the brine inhalation, the regulated diet), and its own resort towns that are economically dependent on the annual influx of Berlin civil servants and their wives coming to take the cure.
So when a salt-works town like Bad Reichenhall or Bad Kissingen finds itself with obsolete industrial infrastructure in the 1850s-1890s — when modern salt mining and solar evaporation and rail freight have made the local salt-boiling business uneconomical — what they have on hand is (a) a town with the existing infrastructure for visitors, because saltworks workers needed places to live and eat, (b) a brine source still flowing, (c) a giant wooden structure that produces salty air, and (d) a state apparatus actively LOOKING for new spa towns to certify, because the Prussian and Bavarian and Saxon governments understood that spa tourism was a significant source of regional revenue and tax base.
The standard story you'll see about this is "they noticed the workers were healthier and started inviting visitors." What actually happened: the salt economy died, the town needed a new economy, the spa-town industrial pattern was the obvious one to pivot into, and the graduation tower was the asset that justified the pivot. Same with every Bad-prefix town in Germany. The brine spring became "healing waters." The wooden tower for industrial concentration became an "open-air inhalation chamber." The salt-boiling house became a thermal bath. The salt master's office became a doctor's consulting room. The entire former salt industry got rebadged as health infrastructure within about a generation, because there was a state-backed industry actively seeking exactly that kind of asset and the towns with the assets were happy to oblige.
(This is the same move you see at basically every other obsolete extractive site in 19th century Europe, by the way. The mines became "deep mineral spas." The iron springs became "ferruginous tonic waters." The coal towns with bad ventilation became respiratory wellness destinations. The waste heat from blast furnaces became "warm springs." The 19th century basically inherited the entire pre-industrial extractive infrastructure of central Europe and figured out how to monetize the byproducts as health goods. You can read this charitably as adaptive reuse or cynically as a kind of medical-tourism asset stripping. Both readings are correct.)
The Polish ones at Ciechocinek and Inowrocław are an interesting variant on this because Poland during the 19th century is partitioned and doesn't have a German-style coordinated state spa industry — Ciechocinek's spa development happens under Russian rule, starting in the 1830s, and the graduation tower there gets built on a much larger scale than the German ones precisely because it's being designed FROM THE START as a spa attraction rather than an industrial facility that pivoted. The Ciechocinek towers are like 1,700 meters long, which is on an order beyond any of the German ones, and they're built that way because the brine concentration is a secondary concern; the primary function is to produce a long impressive promenade-able salt-fog environment for the visiting bourgeoisie of Warsaw and Łódź to walk along on doctor's orders.
(Bad Salzuflen in Germany also has a 300m+ tower for similar reasons. The really big towers are post-industrial. The original 16th-17th century graduation towers were smaller and uglier, built as industrial equipment with no thought given to how they looked.)
The mucus thing is real, by the way. Inhaling fine-particle salt mist does thin respiratory mucus, which can provide genuine relief for people with chronic obstructive conditions, asthma, post-viral congestion, and so on. There's a study from the Paracelsus Private Medical University in Salzburg that worked with the Bad Reichenhall clinic showing measurable effects. So the wellness claims aren't ALL bullshit. But the historical structure of the claim is interesting because what got medicalized was a thing that happened to exist because of an entirely different economic process, and the medicalization was driven by the need to find a use for the existing infrastructure, and the population that benefited was very specifically the population that could afford a six-week stay at a Kurbad in the 1880s.
The contemporary version is mostly Polish and German pensioners and people on insurance-subsidized rehabilitation stays. The economic model is national health insurance plus aging-population wellness tourism. The structural pattern hasn't changed since 1880 — find a state-backed reimbursement scheme for non-specific health-adjacent activities, locate it in a town that needs revenue, build the patient flow around the legacy industrial infrastructure of a vanished extractive economy. The asset that was originally a 17th century answer to "how do we boil less wood" became a 19th century answer to "what do we tell the bourgeoisie they need" and then a 21st century answer to "how does a small Saxon town stay solvent."
Same as it ever was.
The thorn trees, incidentally, get replaced every 5-10 years as they get encrusted with mineral deposits — the calcium and magnesium and iron compounds that aren't sodium chloride precipitate onto the wood as the brine concentrates, and the encrustation eventually clogs the airflow and reduces evaporation efficiency. The replaced thorn bundles are full of a hard greyish-white mineral concretion the Germans call "Dornstein" or thornstone, which is one of those gorgeous accidental side products that nobody knew they were making until they were stuck with tons of it. The thornstone has some use as a soil amendment but mostly it just piles up around the saltworks as a kind of geological record of which minerals were in the brine and how dry the summers were when the bundles were last replaced.
If you ever go to Bad Kösen there's a thornstone exhibit. It looks like coral.
#salt #materialist scumbag #amhist #infrastructure #the bad prefix #white gold #hanseatic league #graduation towers #thornstone #lüneburg

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Herculine Barbin’s life is often introduced as a “case” — a nineteenth-century medico-legal puzzle that forced doctors and judges to decide
Herculine Barbin’s life is often introduced as a “case” — a nineteenth-century medico-legal puzzle that forced doctors and judges to decide what, exactly, made a person male or female. Born in 1838 in France and raised as a girl within Catholic schools and convents, Barbin would soon become the subject of medical examinations, legal judgments, and public scandals aimed at determining her “true sex.” The historical significance of her life, however, is not just tied to the ambiguity of her physical body but also to the extraordinary paper trail she managed to leave behind. Indeed, much of what we know about Barbin comes from her autobiographical memoir, written near the end of her life and after her legal sex reclassification–a groundbreaking text shaped by both hindsight and a need to justify a life that had been made publicly scandalous. This written work survived alongside a dense archive of medical, legal, and journalistic records, offering a rare first-person account of how sex was defined, enforced, and punished in the nineteenth century. Collectively, these materials reveal how Barbin’s personal experience was subordinated to institutional authority, as well as how the modern demand for a single, fixed sex could transform an individual’s life into a problem that needed to be corrected.
As someone who collects a LOT of physical media but doesn’t make a lot of money, I want to share the rule that keeps my wallet from crying out in despair every time I enter a store. I don’t remember who I got this from, but thank you whoever you are because it has been a game-changer when it comes to building a large collection without breaking the bank.
The $1 per hour rule. It’s exactly what it says on the tin. If I’m purchasing physical media, I consider it good value if I can expect to get at least one hour of enjoyment for every dollar I spend on it.
I don’t remember what I spent on BG3, but I know it was a good deal because I’ve logged 600 hours in it. Hades II costs $30, and I was more than happy to pay that because I know I’ll play it for at least 30 hours. When I add books to my library, I almost exclusively buy used books that cost under $5 because 5 hours is a good average estimate for how long it takes me to finish a novel.
Will there be a treat you splurge on every now and then? Of course, but $1 per hour is a good standard to stick to if you want to responsibly build a dragon's hoard of physical media.
This is a way better way of expressing it than I've seen before. It's mathy, it's clear, it's easy to remember.
Anyway we took way longer to say something similar in this one: Ask the Bitches: How Can I Absolve Myself of Financial Guilt Over My Pricey PS4?