The Pandamonium

The owner of the drone was so impressed by the brilliant attack that he suggested organizing a competition for bringing down “dragons” with short spears next year.

On the seventh day of May in the year of 2016 on hither spot the mighty warrior Ulf hath slain a dragon with his spear.

If you want to study ancient history (let’s say 300 CE on down), start learning French and German yesterday. And when you’ve done that, get comfortable with academic French and German from the 18th c through present.

If you study an ancient field at an advanced level (MA+), your knowledge of the field is a given. What’s important is your knowledge of the literature; in history this is called the historiography. Advanced work in these fields is about knowledge; demonstrating your ability to understand how your field’s knowledge was built, how it was constructed, is absolutely vital to your success as an academic. This is why scholars keep very outdated but foundational works in print: because it’s part of the history of their field, and part of the foundation upon which their branch of study is built.

For very ancient history, a lot of that foundational scholarship was carried out by French and German individuals, or by individuals working in those languages. No matter how messy and shadowed by imperialism that scholarship is, it still forms the foundation of the field. That foundation has been gutted and replaced and few times, but serious scholars still have to know it.

Moreover, PhD students will not pass their oral exams/comps if they don’t have a detailed, intimate understanding of that scholarship.

https://wheelofnames.com/uh3-8jf

The announcement post, at the time I reblogged it, had around

2k comments

24k reblogs

13k likes

When I came back to Tumblr a little while later, the announcement post's notes had dropped significantly:

While my reblog of that post, now has its own notes AND comment section, completely separate from the OG post:

This means that the new feature is active at this very moment and that this is how it works. And it sucks.

This new reblog system GUTS original posts. Interactions and engagements can no longer be properly tracked. If an original post breaches containment, it REALLY breaches containment. Unless you feverishly check every reblog of a reblog of a reblog of a reblog manually, you won't know how your post is received.

This especially hurts creatives, who rely on engagement and numbers for the art, photos, videos, whatever else they post. They NEED to be a part of this, Tumblr, you can't bar the original poster from their own post's growth. It's disrespectful. It makes no sense.

If you disagree with Tumblr's decision to ruin creatives' post engagements and reason to post on this site, reblog the original post (linked far above), comment on it. Don't threaten, but be clear about why you disagree. Also send them your feedback through their support. Be loud about this.

Edit:

@changes blog <- Only comment on and/or reblog Changes's reposts about this new feature! The engineers won't otherwise see or read what you have to say.

I never really thought about it before but busses are one of the safest ways to commute to work I can imagine. I’m not ever worried when I take the train but if I had to pick which I’d feel more safe on it would be the bus.

I used to travel between towns late at night when I was a teenager/young adult woman and it would be straight up cozy and a nice way to end my day.

That really happened, in the US. Only instead of the villain being an evil cartoon posing as a judge, the villain was General Motors and Ford and all the big car companies. They bought public transit lines and dismantled them. They lobbied congress to fund the interstate highway system and they CONTINUE to lobby the us govt to keep trains and public transit from having any money, while making sure the roads get lots of it. They are responsible not only for the dismantling of public transit but also the public's perception that public transit is bad and even dangerous.

A new research group used machine learning to track color changes in common materials and items, below is their findings for all color changes over time, they used 7000+ items from the 1800s to now to determine color changes in the most common items.

Below are the colors of cars by year, notice how the majority of cars are grey, white, or black compared to twenty years ago.

These aren't data points, but they are comparisons between the 'modern' homes of the 70s and 80s compared to the modern homes of today.

Carpets have equally had the same treatment of grey added to them! The most common color of carpet is now grey or beige.

Even locations that used to scream with color for decades have now modernized to becoming boring minimalist (and I love minimalism) personality-less locations.

The world is becoming colorless, why?

the problem is that we aren’t actually allowed to belong to the places we live. houses and entire towns are shells meant to be as plain as possible for the next renter, buyer, or investor. the more generic it is, the more consumers it can be sold to. And when you have a country that’s biggest population doesn’t have a distinct sense of cultural identity it will be reflected and mass produced without much complaint