spaceship made of dreams

An open-air museum this month! The oldest one in Germany, according to themselves, which I am not sure how reliable that claim is; I haven't fact-checked.

Three 17th century buildings, all taken from their original places and re-built in the Heinrich-Heine-Park in Rudolstadt, Thüringen. Obviously not enough for a real museum village, but a lovely little 3-sided farm complex with 2 houses and a barn.

All 3 beautiful timber frame houses

It's tiny, but I was very surprised by how well-curated the whole thing was. Often, with things like this, the buildings are overstuffed, there's just lots of vaguely historical-looking objects thrown in, yk? Here, the rooms really looked like someone might love there; not bare, but also not messy.

Time-wise, objects were kind of all over the place, but I feel that is authentic for this kind of historical farm.

Old farm furniture is often richly painted; you can find historical closets like this at antique shops sometimes, often they will have the names or initials of the owners, and the year they were made.

Closet bed!

The best tiled stove I have ever seen in my life, I want this in my house so had.

A wedding chest. The brides trousseau would be packed in here. Also often used to show off a family's wealth.

I just love how detailed everything was. Aesthetics are one of the fundamental things that make us human. Throughout history, it was never enough for things to be just functional, they must be beautiful as well.

The highlight of the whole thing was this recreation of an apothecary. I just love old shop furniture like this, the dozens of tiny drawers, all neatly labeled, the counter, the scales. I also learned something about traveling pharmacists! Which apparently were a thing that existed, and they were respected too, they had certificates and everything. Idk why I never considered that this was an occupation, but it makes sense. This area used to be very rural and isolated; of course there'd be all sorts of traveling craftsmen and merchants.

Of course there also was a spinning/weaving room, but unfortunately, I could only look in through the door. Would have loved a closer look at that loom.

Look at this yarn winder with a built-in measuring function! It's so clever, and I want something like this so bad.

Cake! It looked very nice, but unfortunately was mediocre at best.

Some more impressions:

In theory this will turn into a full comic but I got...distracted lmao

We're back! And it's something I have been looking forward to for months: The special exhibit about the Shaman of Bad Dürrenberg in Halle/Saale.

She's a Mesolithic burial that was first discovered in the 1930s. Here's the wikipedia article on her. The museum also did a series of Youtube videos on her; a few years old at this point, but contains most of the important info. The videos are in German but English subtitles are available.

She's a fascinating find, absolutely unique, you'd be hard-pressed to find any burial from the time that has as many and as varied grave-goods as she does, certainly not in the region. She was buried with an infant under a year old and the remains of two other children (more on that later). There was a stone axe, flintstone blades, lots of animal parts - antlers, turtle shells, teeth and tusks, feathers. Pollen suggests she was buried with flowers. You probably know this illustration:

But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

I actually went last Friday (17th) but I procrastinated the writeup. Forgive me.

Also, before we proceed: CW for human remains. This is an archaeology museum.

The special exhibit was divided in two parts. The first was on shamanism in general, what it is and how it was/is practiced. Calling her a shaman at all is controversial, as there is, of course, no real way to know what religious practices 10,000 years ago in middle Europe were like, what a religious/political leader figure would have looked like, or hell, even why exactly this woman was so important in the first place.

But there are guesses. And while this burial is unique, there's enough similarities with other finds and even documented religious practice, that it is possible to make connections.

The exhibit focused on extant shaman garb, mainly from Siberia, as that is the region in Europe that was colonized very late, and where indigenous religious practices survived a long time. A shaman was/is someone who is able to transcend consciousness, and commune with spirits; they work with their own spirits for guidance. The clothes a shaman wears are very important; the exhibit compared them to a space suit, a special getup that provides protection from malignant forces and is an essential tool in their craft. Often the face is hidden, the shaman is adorned with trinkets, animal parts, and other symbols, and the clothes themselves distort and obscure the shape of the body.

This 18th century attire is one of the oldest still surviving. Notice how the fringe makes is difficult to see where the wearer's body begins or ends. Imagine them moving in that, in a poorly lit environment, while chanting or drumming to put themselves in trance.

Yes that is a human vertebrae on this one. Keep that in mind, it will become important later.

Love the spikes on this one, imagine the sounds!

Drum beaters, richly decorated

Headdress with face-obscuring fringe. Notice the embroidered ears, nose and eyes!

Dolls like these were used to banish illness. The idea is that the illness is caused by a spirit; the doll provides the spirit with a new body to live in, so that it will leave the body of the patient. The one on the right is for painful joints.

There were also some parallels drawn to finds closer in age to the shaman. One was a woman buried in Skateholm, Sweden, some 7,000 years ago. She was buried sitting on a throne made of antlers and they had this incredible reconstruction of her.

Like "our" shaman, she was dark-skinned, dark-haired and blue (or green) eyed.

These two people were buried in Brittany in a rock-lined grave, covered with antlers, and wearing intricate necklaces.

But that's not what we were here for, was it? Here she is.

Apologies for this abysmal photograph, unfortunately it's the only one I took.

Aside from her numerous and unique grave goods, she also had a few physical differences that lead scientists to the shaman-hypothesis. She had a deformity in her skull and top vertebrae that would have meant tilting her head all the way back would have restricted blood flow to her brain; this may have enabled her to put herself in trance. She was so important that even centuries later she wasn't forgotten; two antler masks were found buried close to her, but 200-700 years after she died. Imagine being so important that a nomadic society, centuries after you died, still remembers your grave and brings you gifts.

Imagine digging up a God.

Look how great her teeth are! It's not visible here, but her two upper front teeth have deep holes that reach into the nerve canal. Whether those were inflicted deliberately or the result of wear is unclear, but they must have been made relatively quickly. They were probably painful, but the woman must have known how to take care of her dental health, because there's no damage to the bone that would suggest a bad infection.

And I learned something new about her. Remember how I said she was buried with the remains of three children? In addition to the infant, there were also thoracic vertebrae of two children aged about 6. One was distantly related to her, as was the infant.

The other was the infant's twin brother.

Imagine that! It has been theorized that she and the baby dies closely together, that maybe she tried to heal him and died in the process, but that can't be true. He must have been dead for years before she died, and his (likely) mummified remains were placed in her grave. Personally, I believe all three children died years before her, but of course there's no way to tell for sure.

What's the deal with these children? Why were their remains so important? What's the story there, what did these people believe, what did they do to their dead, I want to knoooow and I'll never have answers.

But isn't it amazing how we have the technology to know any of this at all, from a gravesite that was practically destroyed by idiot Nazis who had no idea what they were even looking at. How we know all this in spite of them.

Anyway. This post is long enough already, so let me wrap up. The permanent exhibit is very cool as well! Lots of fun stuff about the ice age, neanderthals, early humans. First farmers, the Bronze age, Romans, and even the middle ages. It's the best archaeology museum I have ever been too, it really tries to create an immersive experience. You can tell that the state pumped a lot of money into this institution, and they put all of this to good use.

And of course, if you ever have the chance, you really should go see the Nebra sky disk.

Here's some more pictures (restraining myself from posting the details for everything, but ask if you're interested)

Landesmuseum für Vorgeschichte, Richard-Wagner-Straße 9, 06114 Halle an der Saale, open Tuesday-Friday 09:00-17:00, Weekends and Holidays 10:00-18:00

These changes from comics canon contain some of the things about the character that were compelling, and also the things MCU had no idea what to do with in later installments

In the winter soldier comics, (which are themselves a violent re-invention of the character, he was raised on a military base and became Steve's sidekick after Steve had become Captain America, kind of a darker figure willing to do dirty work that Cap couldn't be seen doing

in the movie, he's Steve's closest childhood friend. They only end up paired up and fighting together because Steve goes on a desperate mission to save his life

in the winter soldier comics, he is something like 7 or 8 years younger than Steve and they still have a mentor/sidekick type of relationship

in the movie they are the same age and steve is no longer a "mentor" figure, that dynamic is eliminated

in the winter soldier comics Bucky loses all his prior memories after his apparent death, making him a blank slate to be groomed into a soviet super-assassin. There is no brainwashing.

in the movie they deliberately erase his memories by strapping him into this scary device that fries his brain with electricity. It's clearly torture: he is shown hyperventilating as the restraints close onto his limbs and then screaming in agony as the device activates.

in the winter soldier comics Bucky as the Winter Soldier is capable of independent thought and snark, and is shown questioning and mouthing off at his superiors

in the movie, Bucky is completely passive. He barely speaks at all; when he does, he is almost childlike, meek and quiet in his interactions with the Hydra characters, stubborn and confused in his fight with Steve. The main antagonist slaps him across the face for not answering a question and he doesn't retaliate at all even though he can obviously kill everyone in the room in the blink of an eye. In the same scene he also lets the scientists manhandle him and eagerly opens his mouth for the mouthguard even as his heart rate is spiking on the monitor and he's starting to hyperventilate because he KNOWS the pain is coming.

(side note: he is shirtless in this scene for no reason)

(second side note: the line "who the hell is Bucky?" is in the movie because it's iconic from the comics, but it's arguably super OOC for mcu!bucky)

The long hair and cyborg arm are straight from the comics, but the most striking change to his appearance is his mask: in the comics, he's wearing a domino mask over his eyes, but in the film, he has an opaque black mask covering his nose and mouth that takes away much of his ability to emote and looks strikingly like a muzzle. The comics mask evokes mysterious wiles; the film's mask evokes dehumanization.

basically the films gave him a much deeper and more intimate connection to Steve while putting the two of them on even footing as friends and partners, and changed him from a morally gray character who indifferently kills people and regrets and becomes angsty once his memories are restored, to a tortured and dehumanized human weapon who obeys despite not understanding anything that's going on because he knows nothing but pain and punishment.

The film's version is really much more interesting. Snarky antiheroes who kill indifferently are a dime a dozen; a character who is palpably, terrifyingly dominating and powerful yet completely powerless in the hands of those who control him, who is hollowed out of all personal identity and who has no agency or control over his own body as it is mutilated, reconstructed and wielded as a weapon, is something much more delicious and fascinating.

We watch this guy slaughter people effortlessly with an apex predator swagger that projects pure dominance and prowess, then we watch him meekly accept abuse and torture with soft, confused eyes.

The rest of the MCU portrayal of Bucky though after that? Clearly no idea what they fuck they had on their hands or what the fuck they were doing with it.

Flattening his character out into "morally gray depression man and he has Gun." And essentially making his story about shouldering responsibility for what he did as the Winter Soldier. A very flat, "guy did bad thing and now he's angsty and guilty about it and trying to redeem himself" (boring) instead of like. the gut wrenching horror of having your memories burned away and your name taken from you and your body reconstructed without your consent and used against your will.

We could be telling the most brilliant stories about The Bucky, if we all understood the essential principles (that stories are not Owned by anyone, but become Alive when they are told, in the hearts of the teller and the listener, and to listen to a story gives the gift of the power to tell it again)

And if we could all defeat our enemy, the Cringe (which is to say, that which cringes at sincerity)

God, the writers you put on this earth to write Buckyfic are trying to create something "Original" instead

The broad consensus in modern western media seems to be that Torture Is Basically Fine. It works. Torture is an effective way of extracting accurate information. And because that alone isn't enough to make it seem legitimate, there's another failsafe: Torture works only on bad people. Villains crack under torture, and heroes don't.

This is how media creates a culture that finds torture justifiable. Especially media that is largely sponsored by the US military, of course, who in a post-Abu Ghraib, post-Guantanamo, post-CIA papers world has an interest in creating public indifference (or straight up support) for torture, but there's torture in animated movies for children, too. It's ubiquitous.

In real life, torture is horrific violence inflicted on our fellow human beings, that traumatizes both the victim and the torturer, creates heaps of false information, and has no discernible benefits. It doesn't work.

But in fiction, it must work, every time, because if it doesn't, then that collapses the entire structure, doesn't it?

In comes Bucky in TWS.

He's a character who is tortured into complete submission. Who is given electric shocks to the brain to erase his memory, but he still holds onto his own humanity. He is tortured into doing horrible things - the torture works - but it doesn't work completely. He breaks through it. He's beaten, abused, violated on screen, but - and this is important! - because he overcomes in the end, he's not the villain. His story evokes pity and sympathy, not suspicion.

With hindsight, it is clear to me that the mind wipe scene was meant to inspire disgust in the audience. Bucky's terror without fighting back, his defeated acceptance of the inevitable, the slow, lingering pan up his unclothed body. This is emasculating; at the time a lot of meta has been written about how Bucky is shot like a woman in a rape scene.

He submits. This is meant to be suspicious.

But it completely backfires, because what is shown and what follows is the story of a victim of unspeakable abuse finally breaking free from his abuser in a show of awe-inspiring mental strength.

(and also through the power of gay love but let's not get into that)

That's a problem. By complete accident, the film ends up saying Hey, torture is maybe sometimes bad? And that cannot be allowed. There is a more conventional torture scene in the film, where Steve and Sam throw a guy off a roof to get information out of him, but that almost doesn't matter. This is the one instance that makes the whole house of cards come crumbling down. If Bucky is a victim, then torture is both bad and does not work.

It is obvious to me that what followed TWS didn't know how to reconcile that. CA:CW felt extremely jarring because it treats Bucky with so much suspicion; it even retcons in the trigger word nonsense to justify that suspicion. Bucky has to earn trust. He has to redeem himself. From what? Not being able to withstand seven decades of torture?

Well, yes, the film says. Torture only works on bad guys. Bucky allowed the torture to work on him, and so, has proven himself to be untrustworthy. The abuse he suffered sullied him. He has to earn back his moral righteousness.

I want to stress that I do not think any of this is intentional. I don't think there was a meeting in the writer's room where they talked about how they accidentally made it seem like Torture Is Bad Maybe, and how they could reconcile that. If that had been the case, CW would have been a more honest movie. But looking back, it is clear in how the directors talked about the characters after CW came out, and in the baffling writing choices they made, that they were trying to breach this disconnect, without being aware that this is what they were doing.

For the fan spaces I hung around in at the time, where cis men were a minority, this was baffling. There's a reason post-TWS fic almost exclusively talked about Bucky's recovery, not his redemption. There simply was, in fandom's eyes, nothing to redeem him from. CW made clear that w completely misinterpreted TWS.

I'd love to go back in time to observe what the fallout from TWS and CW was in male-dominated fan spaces; how they talked about Bucky in 2015 and 2017.

Anyhow. With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious to me that no one involved in the writing of CW and what came after took a moment to actually think about the themes and motives of the movies beyond the shallowest surface, and not just with regards to Bucky.

to make an incredibly long story short, and to use the words of magyar péter, the reason they won with a landslide is because they put in the work.

for months prior to the election, the party (which btw was an insignificant party until mere two years ago when magyar joined) with magyar péter as their main guy, toured the country to an unprecedented degree. they went to small cities and places which have been neglected by all sides for decades, with magyar always giving a speech. and, perhaps most importantly, talking to and with the people there directly.

people have been wanting a new approach, new people for years and they utilized this well: they involved the public in their operations and nominee selections via social media/apps, and formed a strong team made up of actual experts of various fields, some known some unknown, but all fresh faces. they also spoke against fidesz while explicitly being against blaming fidesz voters.

in 2022 we did have a "vote x no matter who" moment, where the campaign of the (coalition party!) opposition did not do the above listed crucial strategic points, and fidesz won with the most votes they've ever gotten.

the moral of the story should be that everyday people, regardless of their political views, need to feel heard, seen and involved. and they need to be talked to as people, even if their views are misinformed, hateful, or straight up unacceptable. the far right knows this, which is why they can gain popularity time and time again.

I need to know the thought procces that led to this

​What do you mean? Did I not make it clear enough in the drawings? Do you need a photo of all 23 waistcoats currently in my closet?

I have made videos on sewing several of the things in this picture! Here's a link to my youtube channel.

Though I'm not sure if I'd call them beginner friendly. I go over every technique VERY thoroughly, but I mostly do 18th century or 18th century inspired stuff, which includes a lot of hand sewing and completely different tailoring techniques from what you'll find in modern waistcoats.

The first of the 3 leaf boleros I make in this one is pretty simple though, so that ought to be fairly beginner friendly. (The light green one)

You could make a super basic waistcoat with the same sewing and turning method and just add some buttons & holes. (I have tutorials for covered buttons and buttonholes too if you want to do those by hand.)

OH also! That brown monster print waistcoat in the closet picture is a print I designed that's available on Spoonflower.

That one's got more machine sewing than the brocade one in the first video, but I haven't made a video about that method yet. My most recent leaf one is machine sewn and turned, but hasn't got any pockets.