Love you science fiction best genre of all time that also sucks so bad

Water is pretty nice to drink despite how horribly it treated the crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald

when gerard way sings "the broken, the beaten, and the damned" and when kermit the frog sings "the lovers, the dreamers, and me" they're talking about the same people btw

so sick and tired of people pitting two bad bitches (art nouveau and art deco) against each other. yes, they answer the same question (i.e., how can art respond to the industrial revolution?) in fundamentally different ways (i.e., by returning to nature / by embracing technology), but the difference is, to some extent, only superficial. art nouveau didn''t reject modernity, it very much looked at the present and the future while striving to find a balance between art and craftmanship and industrialization. similarly, art deco didn't reject the past but, rather, held on to many art nouveau concepts while also being inspired by ancient civilizations (e.g., egyptian and aztec) reinterpreting them in its celebration of modern technology. as a result, both art nouveau and art deco engage with the concerns of their time and reflect on the culture of industrialization and come to the same conclusion: in order to oppose the qualitative decline of art and craftmanship in a highly industrialized world, the gap between architecture, design, and art must be bridged

So Gregor Mendel (yes, the guy with the pea plants) wrote down that he wanted to be given a thorough autopsy after he died. The year he died was 1884. Autopsies were increasingly common at the time, but Mendel was an Augustinian friar and the arguments preventing donating your body to science for teaching autopsies, research, etc. were theological. The “ethical” source of teaching cadavers for doctors to autopsy was (in many places) the bodies of executed criminals, as a sort of post-mortem punishment.  Mendel became a monk specifically because he couldn’t afford to study otherwise, even after one of his sisters donated her dowry to the cause. He did too well as a monk to continue his work as long as he wanted: he got promoted to Abbott and the last sixteen years of his life were spent doing administrative work, and his experiments weren’t properly replicated, or examined as a viable alternative to then current theories on inheritance, until 1900. But he chose to donate his body to science (which he loved) and be of material benefit to the field of medicine, which he didn’t practice but two of his nephews did.  There’s just something beautiful about a guy who lived through the era where having your body dissected was the height of dishonor, in an institution that had advocated against the practice, deciding that anything that helps humanity as a whole was worth doing. There’s something just as beautiful about the fact that he was exhumed for genetic sequencing on his 200th birthday - usually we don’t just dig people up and grab their genes as a surprise party, because in addition to it being a lot of work we can’t assume they would have appreciated it, but Mendel? He would have been jazzed. 

Astonishing that one small country should within less than a century produce both Dickens and Wodehouse, the two undisputed titans of literature about aunts. Never have aunts been so clearly realized. I know many aunts who still strive to live up to the standard.

Super fucked up that I can’t be a master-level expert in knitting AND woodworking AND silversmithing AND embroidery AND soap making AND spinning AND -

“Who would ever want to be immortal? Can you imagine the loneliness, knowing that there’s no one else like you, cursed to outlive -” shut up!! Some of us have shit to do and aren’t cowards!!