Deer Duck Dragon

1) take yourself. Remove all good qualities. Make all bad qualities worse. This is your main character. Its still you though so even if she is terrible you will still unconsciously depict her sympathetically but shes flawed enough now to avoid her being called a Mary Sue

2) think of some weird situation thats funny in a randomcore sort of way. Tell audience about this scene then do a record scratch and back up to show how you got there from where you left them last time. Then just show the basic transition of here to there but throw in as many random hijinks and pop culture references as you can think of

3) if all else fails make someone grab a titty. Could be their own titty. Could be a friends titty. Always spices things up

But yeah, maybe my favorite part of how this keeps happening is that some earlier researchers actually found it easier to believe that all the adults buried at a given place must have been high status men. (Maybe that earlier society was even more backwards, and didn’t bury women at all? Maybe those women were really immortal? Who knows. They didn’t have any graves.)

Rather than even starting to question their own assumptions around findings like not nearly as much variation in people’s heights and grave goods–and access to resources in general–as they would expect based on their own society at the time. When yes, it turned out to be a fairly even mix after all.

I am very sorry about all this stuff. IT IS A ROCKY FUCKING RIDE.

We have to differentiate between Vikings and the Norse. Everyone has heard of Vikings, and we have a really clear idea about who the Vikings were and what they did, so “Viking” is used to refer to seafaring Norse culture (and that’s fine - language evolves, and if you say “Viking” you can IMMEDIATELY communicate what you’re talking about.) However, “Viking” is more of a professional term than the name of a culture - going viking is kind of like going hiking, or biking, but with more quaffing and stabbing. There were NOT entire civilizations consisting entirely of male berserker warriors pillaging their heads off, with maybe one or two shieldmaidens and a drippy ethereal blonde waiting nonspecifically back home, and if you think about it for about five seconds, you will see that this is a silly idea. After all, what’s the point of pillaging and conquering and raiding the locals in soft green fertile countries if you don’t… settle in the nice soft fertile area you have just conquered, and colonize it and keep it? 

So while there were Vikings crashing around Europe/Africa/North America, frightening the livestock, their families also existed, and they were just plain Norse people. The Norse invaded and settled in plenty of places, and while we all prefer the sensational headline (”THE VIKINGS INVADED BRITAIN”) there is also the historical truth (”Norse families settled down and farmed in close-knit British communities for many generations, and practiced extensive trade along their famous sea routes.”) The 2011 paper this headline appears to be based on is not about Vikings, it’s about Norse migrants. It’s called Warriors and women: the sex ratio of Norse migrants to eastern England up to 900 ad and it basically says “Yes, the Norse people who seized Eastern England were a balanced mix of men and women, BECAUSE THAT IS HOW HUMAN COLONIES USUALLY WORK.”

Now that being said, we do have to recognize that our concept of Vikings = warriors = men is false, because evidence suggests that even the original campaigns to conquer eastern England had a balanced mix of male and female people from the very beginning. And presumably they had a fair mix of farmers/crafters/diplomats/holy people/healers as well, on account of how they then proceeded to establish English colonies that traded and thrived for generations. But there was no reason to ever think otherwise, apart from our own weird beliefs that colonizing is an exclusively militaristic and violent enterprise, which can ONLY ever be done by warriors, who can ONLY ever be men. And that is a weird, convoluted, and frankly inefficient train of thought. Like clatterbane says, we’re just riffing off some of the silliest assumptions you can make about cultures. Think about it for five seconds. WHY WOULD YOU THINK THIS? DO ROLEPLAYING PARTIES EVER CONSIST ENTIRELY OF BERSERKERS? HOW WOULD THAT EVEN WORK? HOW WOULD THIS WAR PARTY THEN POPULATE AND INFLUENCE AN ENTIRE NATION? FOR GOD’S SAKE. “Ooh, I found a skeleton with a Nordic sword in England, ooh, he must have been a ferocious Viking who pillaged and raped his way here and was killed in battle” OR MAYBE IT WAS A NICE NORSE MATRIARCH WHO LIVED HERE ON PURPOSE, SHE ONCE CUT A ROBBER’S HEAD OFF IN HER YOUTH BUT WAS LATER KICKED IN THE HEAD BY HER OWN COW. GOODNESS GRACIOUS ME.

I should demand to be buried in a bathtub in Kirkwall, wearing a bulletproof vest, with the skeleton of Myrtle the Fruit Bat clutched in my hands so that future anthropologists can be like “Oooh yes this is the famous Batman we’ve heard so much about, half man, half bat. He colonized the Orkneys in his famous porcelain boat and practiced a vampiric religion. He was a famous warrior who did a lot of nonconsensual pillaging, and that’s why everyone in Scotland is so grim and dark. Preps stared at him, that’s why he’s putting up his middle fingers”

ANYWAY

that leads me to

Sexing from graves is not super reliable. So the paper that explains how Norse migrants included women did so by examining the bones of Norse graves. They concluded that many of the skeletons were female, rather than male, as had been previously assumed as the default. (NB: MOST OF THESE WERE NOT WARRIOR GRAVES - THEY WERE THE GRAVES OF NORSE MIGRANTS IN GENERAL. THERE WERE SOME MIXED GRAVE GOODS BUT NOTHING PARTICULARLY SUGGESTIVE OF GENDER, EVEN IF YOU BELIEVE THAT GENDER IS STRICTLY DETERMINED BY MALE SKELETONS HOLDING SWORDS AND FEMALE SKELETONS HOLDING, IDK, FRYING PANS. TO COOK PANCAKES FOR THE DEAD. LIKE WOMEN DO.) Like Clatterbane says above, we are FAR too used to making ridiculous assumptions just because we found some skeletons. “ooh, these were high-status men from a fierce and amoral warrior culture that reproduced by kidnapping native women, and all the women and female children of the population were removed by evaporation. You can tell because the skeletons were buried with clothes on, and looked kinda cool.” Because sexing from grave goods is just a series of foolish, unfounded decisions. If you assume a skeleton is male because it was buried with weapons and armor, you are not making publication-worthy decisions. Many of these “X skeleton discovered to be female!” papers are based on osteological sexing, in which people with training in forensics or anthropology actually looked at the skeleton and went “Hey wait, these are lady bones.” Which is what this paper is about - examining the bones and seeing that they are a balanced mix of male and female bones. But that is in ITSELF problematic because…

Sexing from bones is hard work. Osteological sexing is just not as clear cut as it sounds on CSI, or in archaeology, where people declare with total certainty that a rotting skeleton is a young white female, by holding up a fragment of bone and squinting at it. (Trans and intersex people will also argue that sexing humans from our squishy flesh bodies, with genitals attached to them, is also unreliable. They are correct.) The only real areas in which gender can be suggested from bones is the chin sort of area (unreliable) and the pelvis. The pelvis usually wins. You can get a PERFECT male skull on a skeleton with a TEXTBOOK female pelvis, and in that case you would probably call your skeleton a female. She probably had a fierce strong chin in life, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

The thing that you are looking for in the hips is the characteristic wider bowl shape of the pelvis, that allows most cis women to give birth via the vagina. Men’s pelvic bones theoretically make a circular hole, and womens’ are supposed to suggest more of an oval. Men should have a pointier bit like a v-neck sweater where the bones join in front, and women should have more of a scoop neck. And while the difference looks clear when you’re looking at the Textbook Examples in Gray’s Anatomy…

Figure 1. “ooh, this is easy! the male is on the left. You can tell because the textbook says the male one is on the left.”

… The real world is often not quite so obliging. After all, plenty of the women you know don’t have curvy hourglass figures, with textbook female hips that are as broad as their shoulders. There are definitely women with “masculine” builds - and men with wide hips, too! There are slim, snake-hipped women whose narrow “male” hips were historically associated with complications in childbirth, but women with that bone structure still exist today. In great numbers. Which we know because female pelvic bones are of IMMENSE interest in the field of… 

OBSTETRICS. Childbirth. The whole “ooh the female pelvis is DESIGNED by NATURE to be the PERFECT BABY DELIVERY CHUTE” that skeleton-measurers will try to sell you? “Oh this was definitely a lady skeleton because of the thing and the widget, which are Designed that way Because Childbirth.” Well, that does not stand up well against the filthy reality of childbirth. If you study obstetrics, or are carrying a fetus, you don’t get the cutesy Male And Female pelvises. You get handed the Four Pelvic Types (“Good luck, bitch”) and if the screaming pregnant lady in front of you has an Android (male) pelvis, then this is going to be A Fun Experience for all.

Figure 2. “Fuck me. Sorry, Ms Viking Lady, we haven’t invented c-sections yet so my book says you’re fucked. I … don’t suppose it will cheer you up to know that you’ve secretly been a man all along? I mean, when we bury you tomorrow, your skeleton will really confuse future historians. WHOA PUT THE SWORD DOWN”

This is called the Caldwell-Moloy Classification and you are welcome to google it. In the 1930s up until very recently, this chart was used to suggest whether a woman should have a C-section (we use ultrasounds for that now.) Only about half of women are said to be gynecoid (female) in shape, but I would LOOK THAT UP before quoting it. It’s just something that stuck firmly in my head in college ten years ago, and I remember it clearly because I went and measured my hips in anxiety.* If you really want to get to grips with “how many women have textbook male pelves” then…. 

HEY GUESS WHAT KIDS, GET READY FOR RACIAL DIFFERENCES because you’re going to see casually mentioned things like “Oh yes, about 30% of white women have male pelves. And half of WoC have anthropoid pelves.” And you’ll be like SHIT WHAT?! DOES THIS… DO PEOPLE KNOW? And then there will be some throwaway fact like “Oh, BTW, with an anthropoid pelvis, people just won’t be able to achieve a flat butt and stomach with dieting or whatever, the bones just won’t allow that look. The female skeleton can really only get that ‘ideal’ modern model figure with an android pelvis - it’s fairly common in white women, presents a challenge in childbirth, and the skeleton looks male. Anyway, moving on -” And you’re still going WAIT WHAT, GO BACK. DOESN’T THIS CHANGE, IDK, ALL OF DIETING? ANTHROPOLOGY? HISTORY? FORENSICS? HELP? DO THE PEOPLE IN CHARGE KNOW THIS?

How many men have “female” (or anthropoid, or platypelloid) pelves? Well, traditionally cis men do not go through childbirth, so they’re less interesting, so… I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. I have no fucking idea. Go find out and then tell me.

How many skeletons that we pronounced female were male all along? Who knows. How many skeletons assumed male are actually female? Who fucking knows.

Because childbirth isn’t actually very interesting to most people, it’s hard to work out exactly what the fuck is going on, but apparently in 2015 researchers published a paper called Female pelvic shape: Distinct types or nebulous cloud? in which they concluded that female pelves are actually a nebulous cloud. A NEBULOUS CLOUD. FORGET THE NEAT AND TIDY LITTLE GRAY’S ANATOMY DRAWING, WE HAVE OFFICIALLY ENTERED THE REALM OF THE NEBULOUS FUCKING CLOUD. These researchers argue that Caldwell-Moloy is way too simplistic to be practical, and rather than clustering conveniently as obviously masculine, obviously feminine and ‘other’, all female pelves actually exist on a nebulous spectrum across all of the four pelvic types. There’s no point in trying to sort women’s pelvic bones into ‘male’ and ‘female’ categories, these researchers say - women’s pelves are unique and unknowable, combining features from all of the known types in an “amorphous, cloudy continuum of shape variation.” OH GOOD. THAT’S GOOD. THAT’S A DIRECT QUOTE FROM THE ABSTRACT. I’M SO GLAD THAT WE ARE IN COMPLETE CONTROL AND KNOW EXACTLY WHAT IS GOING ON

Anyway. It isn’t super easy to sex skeletons by their pelvic bones. It’s a best guess sort of thing.

Maybe the only way you can identify a skeleton as female with 100% certainty is if its pelvic area is not a textbook ‘female’ shape but a NEBULOUS FUCKING CLOUD.

So if you would like to re-write this headline to accurate reflect the findings of the paper, it should read

“Some Norse colonists in England had pelvic bones, and the rest had nebulous clouds. Nobody is driving this fucking bus and we should all be TERRIFIED”

 * I can relax - I have Official Childbearing Hips, and my midwife agrees! ** Anthropologists will enjoy my skeleton, but the makers of jeans believe I don’t exist. Isn’t that weird that forensics people and historians are convinced that 100% of women have splendidly gynecoid hips, while jeans manufacturers think that 0% of women do? 

Guards! Guards! has one of the first Big Deal Discworld moments for me, and I’m not very good at articulating what that means.

The moment I’m thinking of is the dragon’s speech to Wonse – “we were supposed to be cruel, cunning, heartless and terrible. But…we never burned and tortured and ripped one another apart and called it morality.” That’s a passage that always makes me stop and reread it a couple of times. And it’s a small moment – it’s the only time we hear the dragon speak at all, and it’s a speech that has no bearing on the rest of the story. It could have been taken out of the book entirely and nothing would feel like it was missing. But the fact that it’s there is a Big Deal moment. The great big monstrous antagonist’s judgment of humanity is unavoidable in its accuracy.

And the Discworld series is full of moments like that. Sometimes it’s just one line, sometimes it’s a full scene, and most of the book is so full of shenanigans coming so quickly one after another that you don’t always see the Big Deal moments coming. We think of Pratchett as a humor/satire writer and yes, the books are hilarious, but in between the jokes are these Big Deal moments that casually rearrange our perspective and stick with us even after we think we’ve forgotten.

I think my favorite one changes, but right now it’s in Feet of Clay:

The vampire looked from the golem to Vimes.

“You gave one of them a voice?” he said.

“Yes,” said Dorfl. He reached down and picked up the vampire in one hand. “I Could Kill You,” he said. “This Is An Option Available To Me As A Free-Thinking Individual But I Will Not Do So Because I Own Myself And I Have Made A Moral Choice.”

“Oh, gods,” murmured Vimes under his breath.

“That’s blasphemy,” said the vampire.

Vorbis demands that Didactylos recant his claim that the world travels through space on the backs of four elephants who stand on the back of a giant turtle (which in Discworld is true). Vorbis insists that Didactylos agree that it is a sphere, as the Great God Om intended.

To all appearances, Didactylos easily and happily recants, saying something like “Sure, let it be a sphere” and Vorbis – for whom this is as much about humiliating Didactylos as it is about what’s “true” – decides to let him go. Didactylos gets all the way to the doorway before he turns, throws the lantern he carries into Vorbis’s face, and yells “NEVERTHELESS…THE TURTLE MOVES!” before legging it. 

“But what’s worth more than gold?“ “Practically everything. You, for example. Gold is heavy. Your weight in gold is not very much gold at all. Aren’t you worth more than that?”

When you get your head around the idea that something’s worth is based on a subjectively agreed upon set of standards, it can rock your capitalist-based worldview right to the core.

He was also the first character to articulate what has kind of become a guiding philosophy for me:

The bit where Moist literally throws himself under a train to save a pair of children had me in absolute tears.

‘What was it Granny Weatherwax had said once? ‘Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.“

But of course it’s also in this conversation in Carpe Jugulum

Granny Weatherwax: “…And that’s what your holy men discuss, is it?” 
Mightily Oats: “Not usually. There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment on the nature of sin. for example.” 
Granny Weatherwax: “And what do they think? Against it, are they?” 
Mightily Oats: “It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.” 
Granny Weatherwax:“Nope.” 
Mightily Oats: “Pardon?” 
Granny Weatherwax: “There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” 
Mightily Oats: “It’s a lot more complicated than that–” 
Granny Weatherwax: “No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.” 
Mightily Oats: “Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes–”
 Granny Weatherwax: “But they starts with thinking about people as things…”

Aries:

Taurus:

Gemini:

Cancer:

Leo:

Virgo:

Libra:

Scorpio:

Sagittarius:

Capricorn:

Aquarius:

Pisces:

STICKERS LIST JANUARY 27, 2017 / heart / sunglasses / the eyes of dr. coppy / fancy advertisement / terrible scream / tumblr brand / speech bubble / slime bubble / thought bubble / “cringe” / “feeling this” / “feels” / “no” / “omg” / “?” / “same” / “the real me” / “us” / “what is reality” / “yes” / alien friend  / corgi dog / cat / jellyfish / tall fish / long fish / alien eyes / pretty hair / pretty eyes / cat ears / golden ring / satan cones / fancy bow / powdered wig / tall-hat / sobby eyes / drug glasses / vr helmet / friendly drone / secret file  / falling graph / rising graph / accusation / snow home  / chakra man / money stack / assorted moons / palm frond / eye of providence / rainbow / scented candle / spacetime continuum / garbage holder / webring / yin-yang / tombstone / banana / coffee cup / pizza slice / sushi roll / ramen bowl / food box / long bread / cupcake / egg / sparkling water / teapot / zodiacs of the sun / sky flare / geode flare / swimming pool flare / dreamer flare / rainbow flare / southwestern flare / red objects / blue objects / violet objects / yellow objects / aqua glow / indigo glow / ruby red glow / salmon glow / lemon glow / slime glow / charcoal glow / confetti (diagonal thrust) / confetti (vertical thrust) / web of ectoplasm / victory pennant / defeat pennant / math tunnel / wobble grid / impossible box / bubbles / FOR PHOTOS, FOR GIFS, FOR EVERYONE