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Ok I reblogged this with a long talk in tags recently but this is for all you fuckers in the notes, as a librarian whose library has gone fine-free since the last time I reblogged this post:
YES, going fine-free encourages returns. I can tell you that from my own experience at the check-in desk. In the weeks after we went fine-free, we got SO MANY returns on books that were hella overdue.
YES, library fines disproportionately impact poor people. Here's how it works: you're a single mom who checks out 10 picture books for your kid. For whatever reason, you're unable to return those 10 books on time. In fact, you're unable to return them for a long time. Each of those books hits the maximum fine. In my system, this was $5. When you return the books, you owe $50. If you can pay off the $50, fine. If you can't, then you feel like you're fucked. Maybe you've had a bad experience with owing money before. Maybe you've had a bad experience with an incompetent or bigoted librarian. Either way, you don't feel like you can deal with the cost of returning the books. But eventually the books go into billing, and now you're on the hook for the full price of each book. Even if you return them, you still owe $50. An account with $50 or more in fines/fees is considered delinquent, meaning you can't even use the computer or printing services, let alone check out books. So now you're stuck with these books and these fines and no library access and you're fucked. It doesn't matter how you got here. Rich and poor people alike wind up here. What matters is that for rich people it's not a big deal, and for poor people it's a REALLY big deal.
YES, libraries do everything we can to avoid this situation. We send reminder emails. We offer payment plans. We cap fines at $50. This prevents MANY people from ending up in this situation, but it doesn't prevent EVERYONE from winding up here. Libraries serve a LOT of people!
NO, fine free doesn't look the same everywhere. In my library system, we've eliminated late fines on every type of item, but we still charge replacement fees for books that are very long overdue (60 days I think). The replacement fee is cleared if the book is returned. But if you look at the notes, you'll see other libraries using different fine-free systems. This is because every library is different and has to work within its own context. Which brings me to..
YES, libraries need the money they get from late fines. HOWEVER! Fine free IS possible for every library, if their parent organization chooses to fund it! Libraries are government entities. They exist to provide services, not to make money. The last time I reblogged this post, I didn't believe my library would be able to go fine free for a very long time. Then, we made a proposal to the government we work for to use a special fund to replace what we typically collect in late fines. We were able to go fine free because we got the funding from our parent organization - you know, the guys who collect taxes and fund social services with the taxes they collect (at least in theory).
THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE MEAN WHEN THEY SAY DEFUND THE POLICE.
(That's right motherfucker this was an anti-cop rant all along!)
City and county budgets are finite, but they CAN fund fine-free libraries. The question is always, what funds are going to be used? What might they have funded instead?
When people call to defund the police, it is in part because police are funded by public money. (It's mostly because the police are an inherently oppressive and racist institution, but bear with me here.) The exact same money that arms and empowers police officers is money that could be used for fine-free libraries, fare-free buses, or better supplied classrooms. It's money that could go to health departments or senior centers or parks. NONE OF THESE ENTITIES EXIST TO MAKE MONEY, but some of us have to because we're underfunded by our municipality's budget.
UNDER-FUNDING SOCIAL SERVICES IS A GRIFT. It directly displaces the cost of living in a society from rich people (homeowners and landlords who pay property taxes) onto poor people (the single mom in our thought experiment above, or someone who can't afford a car so they pay but fare, or the kids whose classroom doesn't have pencils).
If you're unhappy with social services where you live, look at your city and county budgets. Find out how much money your local governments have and where it's going. If you want to agitate, agitate. If you want to run for office, run for office. If you want to take direct action, then I would certainly never advocate for anything illegal hahahaha
TL;DR Fine free is great, it's in line with libraries' mission of public service, and it is doable, but only if governments choose to fund it. If they say they can't, look at where their money is coming from and where it's going.
I suppose itâs a testament to Tolkienâs economy of language that the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy â interminable preamble and endless appendices and all â has a smaller total page count than the individual books of your average modern doorstopper fantasy series, yet manages to pack in such a high density of worldbuilding detail that reading it feels like it takes about a thousand years.
(For those expressing incredulity at the idea of Tolkien being an economical storyteller, one must understand that the ability to communicate a great deal of information very efficiently is a totally separate skill from the ability to get to the damn point.)
The day I found out the Twilight series has a higher word count (587,246 words across four books) than LotR (481,103 words across three books) was a dark day.
#thanks I wish I didnât know this#itâs not the word count that matters itâs the Information Density#physically twilight might be longer#but itâs the lettuce of fiction#lotr is like being hit in the face by a produce truckÂ
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4th:Â PRIDE AND PREJUDICEÂ (2005) dir. Joe Wright
Snuffbox
c.1740
France
MFA Boston
I have never in my life seen an objet d'art that qualified for the Tiffany Paradox, but here we are. It looks like it fell off a middle school girls bedroom desk circa 1987.
I love this.
also I went and looked it up on the MFA website and as I suspected, itâs made of mother-of-pearl! the rainbow parts are probably from iridescent blacklip shells, and the rest is carved white oyster shell.
There are some Chinese porcelains which are definitely worthy of the Tiffany paradox - I mean, sure, it was made in the 1300s but itâs a lemon yellow tea bowl - but honestly this one really epitomizes the matter.
Youâre the most recognised and internationally praised superhero, but you donât fight any crime. Instead, you use your powers over stone and metal to repair the damage caused by the catastrophic fights other heroes get into.
They didnât call you a superhero when you started. You didnât claim to be one, either.Â
You didnât have a costume or a sponsor or training or anything like that. You were just a kid who had just seen your entire world knocked down. So, in a moment of childish determination and belief, you thought you could fix it all.Â
The first emergence of your powers wasnât a huge triumphal moment. Moving stone and earth and steel doesnât matter if you donât know anything about how to stack things up so they donât fall back over again.Â
Your first attempts crashed right back down again. That was your first lesson.Â
â
Even when you got good at what you did, they didnât call you a superhero.Â
You still didnât have a costume, but youâd gotten your hands on every architectural diagram you could and done plenty of practice. Then you started to show up to the aftermath of battles and put them quietly together again.Â
But it still wasnât right. You couldnât do much if you didnât have the diagrams for the buildings demolishedâif the city planners didnât let you have them.
So you stitched together a costume, something bright and colorful that would grab the attention of the cameras on the scene afterward as you tried to work.Â
âLook! Someoneâs putting those houses back together!âÂ
The effect was instantaneous. The moment youâd grabbed public attention, there were requests for interviews, think piecesâeach giving you a platform to ask for the help you needed.Â
This was your second lesson.Â
â
You didnât call yourself a superhero, or come up with the name yourself. You were never really good about all of those things. But once the attention was on you, you got offers from managers and sponsors. One, a blonde with perfect hair who introduced herself as âjust SandyâÂ
âI donât have any money.â
âThatâs alright,â she said, her grin showing spectacularly white teeth. âAll I need is for you to take on some gigs and give me a cut.âÂ
Sandy set you up. She got you the costume people would know you for, gave you the name, managed all of the PR and set up interviews. Your fame skyrocketed, and soon you were seeing yourself on billboards.Â
Soon you had access to hundreds of city plans and blueprints. After enough attacks happened, you learned them well enough to hardly need to reference them. After a few years, you could rebuild a tower in a matter of minutes, and cities in a matter of days.Â
Your powers evolved as your understanding did. Soon, you could read the entire layout of a building just from touching. Then, just from touching the ruins. You no longer need blueprints, thenâjust your own hands on the metal.
The gigs were simple, tooâjust fixing up hero bases after theyâd gotten wrecked in attacks. Feel good work that paid well.Â
With the help of many people, you do more. Thatâs the third lesson.
â
The problems started with the homeless thing.Â
You were in between projects and itching to use your skills more. Creating homes for the homeless seemed like the perfect, feel good project to flex on.Â
It was, for the first few weeks. Then came the backlash. City dwellers crying foul, saying they hadnât agreed to an enormous den of undesirables in their backyards. There were protests, white suburban moms holding up signs about drug dealers and rapists and criminals.Â
It wasnât your choice in the end. Eventually the city mandated that you deconstruct your shelter, or they would do it the hard way.Â
Regretfully, you took it down. You did not look in the eyes of the people that had sheltered there as they had to go on their way.
It was the same story in every area you tried to build shelters in afterwards.
â
âCan we just buy the land to build them houses?â you asked Sandy.Â
She clicked her perfect teeth. âSorry, there are laws against building new things in the city. You need mayoral approval to start a new construction project.â
âWhy?â
âWell, there are already too many empty houses,â she said matter of factly.Â
You stared. âWhat? Then letâs just buy those and put people in them!â
âYou donât have that much money,â she pointed out. âNot when youâve been giving it away every year. Also, it wouldnât do as much good as you think. Just think of the effect on the marketââ
This is not why you fired Sandy. But it was the first time you thought of it.
â
Opinion started to turn against you when you began using your interviews and platform to talk about this problem, to demand permission to build or otherwise help. Exasperation turned to hostility when you started to reshape the landscape to be softer to the unhoused, anywayâwhen you created caves in parks where people could easily shelter, or made every bench large and soft so that anyone could have a place to sleep.
Laws and ordinances passed, all regulating the amount of alterations one was allowed to make to public property. About how many changes you were allowed to make as you were reconstructing a city. The fines for altering things started to heap up.Â
Firing Sandy didnât help. Your good reputation was always as much her work as yours, but after what she said aboutâyou couldnât.Â
You couldnât.Â
You learned not to read the scathing opinion pieces on you. That was the hardest lesson yet.
â
Of course, shit really hit the fan when you were contracted to rebuild another base.
It was a simple enough decision for you. You found out they had been building drones and firing them on civilians. That at this base Techno has been building surveillance technology that would be able to monitor every single person in the country at every moment, and be able to fire upon them with impunity the moment suspicious activity was detected.Â
It made you rethink every base you had built in the past.
âNo,â you told them.Â
âYou already signed your contractââ
Instead of dignifying that with an answer, you transmuted the entire area into the rockiest, most impossible terrain you could. Every trick you had learned to make land easier to build onâyou reversed it, turning what had once been the base into a precarious canyon of jagged, diamond-hard steel, nearly impossible to remove or build on.
âI said no.âÂ
â
Stopping the construction of the stadium was the next kicker.Â
âYouâre insane!â said the heroes who came to remove you.
âThey evicted a hundred families for this!â you spat. âThose were peopleâs homes. Itâs disgusting that itâs allowed for the government to do thatâmuch less to do it for-for a stadium? For entertainment?âÂ
And so you stood there for the next 48 hours, deconstructing every single thing they tried to put on their ill-gotten land.Â
Then, they sent the heroes to stop you. You were never the best at fighting, so they knocked you out quickly.
â
They donât call you a superhero now. Behind bars, you glance over every thinkpiece and profile about the worldâs most beloved hero fell. You read speculation about evil, greed, madness. All things youâve heard about âvillainsâ who came before you.Â
It makes you wonder about those people. If maybe you had misjudged them, too.
But thatâs alright, you realize after the sting of it fades away. That was the second lesson, after allâmore than anything, you need people to be talking. And for all the bitterness in these words, you realize grimly that people will never stop talking.
Once youâve thought things through, you decide youâre ready. The steel of your cell melts away. After all, there is no prison that can contain you. No earth or stone or metal can withstand your will.Â
Your legacy as the worldâs greatest supervillain begins with a left turn down the hallway, right to where the other villains are kept.
Brilliant. Positively Brilliant.
So a lot of people think cut/fresh flowers are really expensive or decadent, and that itâs not worth buying them when theyâre at a reduced price because theyâll die within about a day and itâs still Too Expensive and like I just. I need to let you know that it isnât true and unless itâs a super special occasion and youâre going to an actual florist for an actual special bouquet you donât have to, nay shouldnât, pay full price for flowers ever. I mean I can only really speak for the UK where you can get flowers in the grocery store which is naturally cheaper than a florist, and also where I always get mine, but the techniques apply to âanywhere one can obtain a bunch of flowersâ If you take care of your cut flowers - which donât worry isnât hard - the slightly sad looking slightly wilty half price ones will STILL last you two weeks. Observe:
Everything in that vase except the dark red flowers and the ivory roses was purchased, half wilted, in the reduced bucket an ENTIRE WEEK ago. The dark reds and ivories? TWO WEEKSÂ (I donât normally premade bouquets because they end up in the reduced less often and even when they do theyâre still more expensive than getting a few bunches of different types of flowers) TWO. WEEKS. From a wilted half price âwe are become deathâ state. Hereâs what it looked like a whole entire week ago when I put the new flowers in:
(the big yellow bastard in the bottom left is also from the previous week) I mean theyâve still âhardly wiltedâ now and if I was so inclined I could leave it another couple of days, but this is normally the point at which I remove them and put new flowers in the gaps. Also, cut off the heads and keep them for a bath. Youâll feel So Fucking Fancy and it cost you nothing. So how do you revive sad looking cut flowers, cheat the system, and have a permanent display of vibrant colourful BUT ULTIMATELY CHEAP AS SHIT flowers in your home? 1. Remove the leaves. You can remove all of them if you like but the most important thing is removing leaves along the length of the stem which will be in water. If leaves are submerged they will begin to rot and just kill everything. You can keep the ones that poke out above the vase for bulk and Oooh Pretty Green if you want, or not. 2. Trim the stems with SHARP and CLEAN (preferably steralised by dunking in some boiling water) scissors or a SHARP and CLEAN knife. Do so at an angle. Chances are you need to shorten the stems so they fit in your vase properly anyway, but doing this allows for better uptake of water and nutrients. 3. Use a CLEAN container. If thereâs a bit of grossness hanging around from previous flowers, scrub that shit out. 4. Give them cool water. I live in an area with very soft water so I donât have to do anything, but if you donât then either filtering it or letting it stand for a few hours first will help. 5. Use flower feed! Most bunches, at least over here, come with a wee sachet of flower food. If you DONâT get a sachet of feed you can MAKE YOUR OWN. Itâs super easy. You need 2 tablespoons of lemon juice, 1 tablespoon of regular white sugar and half a teaspoon of bleach (yes really) per 1 litre (quart) of water. You wonât need a whole litre, obviously, but you can keep it in the cupboard in a bottle or just scale down the recipe. Put a teaspoon (or two if you have a big pitcher style vase) in your water. Different flower types optimally need different levels of sugar and you can totally look up what that ratio is if you only have one kind (like all roses or something) but 1 tablespoon: 1 litre works well enough. Now that your flowers are back to life, you can keep them looking good for a decent long while 1. Remove dead/wilted heads either as and when you see them or just like once a week (Iâm lazy, I just do it once a week) 2. Remove any leaves that are going the same way 3. Once a week, change out the water. Fish out any plant material that may have fallen in, rinse the container, put in new water and feed. 4. When youâre doing the water change, give the stems another small trim. Only 1cm (half an inch) or so, unless the bottom of the stem is going pale and a bit limp looking, in which case lop off as much of that part as you can whilst still being able to fit them in the vase properly. If they end up noticably shorter than the others, just keep those ones to the outside of the arrangement OR put them in the middle and use the other flowers to keep them propped up within the water so they appear the same height. 5. Replace removed dead flowers with ones from your next cut-price bunch. That way youâre a) keeping a perpetual but ever-changing bouquet and b) need to buy less flowers at once than just waiting for everything to die off and replacing the whole thing. Cut flowers make me happy. Iâm sure having a nice beautiful bunch of colourful flowers in your room makes you happy too, and you absolutely donât need to spend a fortune to make that happen.
Canât believe this has over 1000 notes anyway hereâs my current âdyingâ flowers
Just saw a TikTok where this bi woman was like,
âIâm a woman-leaning bisexual and you know what pisses me off? The fact that Iâm dating a skinny white man and I love him and Iâm happy, like what the fuck.â
And I just have to say. What pisses me off as a bisexual woman is that TikTok.
This is the Woke version of âmy wife is the olâ ball and chain, doesnât it suck to be married,â jokes. Itâs not funny. Your queerness is not negated or tarnished by opposite-gender attraction, dating men isnât inherently worse than dating women.
Love your partner.
Cherish them.
For fucks sake.
So much this. Iâve had a rant building for a while and it looks like todayâs the day.
Iâm getting REAL SICK of that âbisexual means Iâm attracted to all women and two menâ joke. Iâm getting equally sick of the implication, in a thousand ways, that men are bad and itâs inherently worse to be attracted to them. If youâre a woman or woman-adjacent and you fall in love with a man, thereâs this horrible and easy-to-internalize idea that youâre taking the lesser option.
Like yâall. Yâall? You know thatâs gender essentialist radfem bullshit, right?
If you didnât, Iâd like to gently suggest you consider the idea that âMen are problematic (read: sinful) and violent, women are pure, beautiful and lovingâ is just conservative Christian ideology in a gay hat. We are not advancing towards equality for all genders by flipping which end of the scale is The Bad One â˘.
Iâm bisexual. I make a point of talking about being queer (because itâs my identity and culture, and thatâs important to me), and I present mostly in the androgynous area of the spectrum. People often assume Iâm only/mostly interested in women.
Thatâs actually not true. I like all genders, but when it comes to specific people, Iâm most often attracted to men. And it makes me sad â really, genuinely sad â how many times Iâve felt ashamed to talk about that. Even though Iâm not a woman, liking a man has made me feel ânot queer enough.â Hell, some days it still does.
Iâm gonna say this, even though I know a lot of people wonât like it. And I will also say in advance that I am not accepting criticism and I donât argue on the internet as a personal mental health policy.
That said, here is the statement: This too is a closet.
Anytime youâre ashamed to admit to liking someone because theyâre the âwrongâ gender, anytime falling in love is treated like a disappointment instead of a celebration, I donât care who you are or who your partner is, that is a FUCKING CLOSET. And I would appreciate it if we could STOP PUTTING PEOPLE IN THOSE.
Honestly, shit like that should be seen for the relationship red flag it is.
If youâre a man, absolutely do not date someone who thinks their attraction or affection for you is something they ought to be ashamed of.
And regardless of your gender, avoid women who subscribe to the idea that women can do no wrong and are inherently pure and safe because holy fuck is that an easy and gaslighty shield to hide behind for abusers. Iâve heard a variation of that story too many times to think thereâs not a correlation there.
Amen to that. And âitâs a jokeâ isnât the excuse people think it is.
ppl be acting like being attracted to men is a disease
Hi I used to make these jokes too and itâs absolutely because of how fucking shitty the lgbtqia community has been towards bi women. I felt like I HAD to downplay my attraction to men in order to reassure people that Iâm not straight.
Thatâs fucked up. Y'all need to observe your behavior and wonder if youâre contributing to the shit that makes bi women feel like theyâre not good enough.

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Fun little thing about medieval medicine.
So thereâs this old German remedy for getting rid of boils. A mix of eggshells, egg whites, and sulfur rubbed into the boil while reciting the incantation and saying five Paternosters. And according to my profâs friend (a doctor), itâs all very sensible. The eggshells abrade the skin so the sulfur can sink in and fry the boil. The egg white forms a flexible protective barrier. The incantation and prayers are important because you need to rub it in for a certain amount of time.
Itâs easy to take the magic words as superstition, but theyâre important.
The length of time it takes to say a paternoster was a typical method of reckoning time in the Middle Ages. Itâs likely that whoever wrote this remedy down was thinking of it both as a prayer and a timespan and that whoever read it would have understood it the same way.
I wonder if this shows up in other historical areas besides medicine?
I ask because I have a very Italian, very Catholic friend who was once describing how she makes pizzelles. Theyâre cooked in a specific press, similar to a waffle iron, long enough to get light and crispy but not burnt, and in her own words: âI donât know the exact time it takes to cook them in seconds, but I usually do either two Hail Maryâs or an Our Father and a Glory Be.â
I would be extremely surprised if medieval people didnât use prayers while cooking. You donât want to roast an egg for too long, have it explode, and get hot yolk in your eye. :PÂ
I know that church bells were definitely used as timekeepers.Â
Before oven thermometers existed, one way to check the temperature of your oven was to stick your hand inside and recite an Our Father. The length of time before you snatch your hand out was timed by how far youâd gotten in the prayer. The shorter the time, the hotter the oven. So you knew that if you wanted a hot oven to bake bread, you wanted your hand out by âkingdomâ (for example) but to slow cook a stew, you might want the oven cool enough to get to âtrespassesâ.
This popped up in âNanny Oggâs Cookbookâ as well, though there the timing method wasnât prayer but X verses of âWhere Has All The Custard Gone?â
Other timing methods are âa whileâ (approx. 35 mins) and âa good whileâ (variable, up to 10 years, which the book suggests is a bit long to let batter rest before making pancakesâŚ)
All absolutely standard, and also varied from region to region. The use of prayer was more common than most, since the Catholic church had a monopoly on⌠well, pretty much everything. And all the prayers were in Latin, and at a specific cadence, so the effect is similar to watching the second hand on a clock today.
itâs important to note that to the medieval people the prayers were important because of timekeeping AND god. like, i think as modern people we do tend to want it to be âjust timekeeping, they werenât just superstitious idiots, they had a good reasonable scientific reason!â but itâs also important to remember just how culturally steeped in a mystical religion they were, a relationship with christianity entirely unlike the modern relationship found in modern american culture even amongst the most religious people. i have no doubt that in the medieval mind, they were aware of the prayer being the time it took but also if there had BEEN another way to measure that time, the prayer would have been held to be preferable and important in its own right because of the importance of spiritual assistance in worldly things like bread-baking
Definitely, this is a great point! I was talking to somebody in the comments who was saying that medieval medicine was mostly bunkum because it involves spirituality, supposedly meaning it couldnât also have logical basis behind it. But thatâs a really modern way to see it. To the medieval worldview, those things arenât contradictory. Theyâre part of each other. Think about how many medieval Christian scientists were monks, nuns, and priests.
*INHUMAN SCREECHING*
M YÂ Â T I M EÂ Â H A SÂ Â C O M E
You guys donât understand how excited it made me to read this post, I literally wrote my masterâs thesis on this exact topic.
STORY TIME
Sometime in the 10th century in Anglo-Saxon England (for context, this is before the Norman Conquest and near-ish to the reign of Alfred the Great), a dude named Bald asked another dude name Cild to write a book. Not just any book. A leechbook, which was essentially the medieval version of WebMD for practicing doctors. BUT NOT JUST A LEECHBOOK. This leechbook was gonna be the damn Lamborghini of leechbooks. This thing was going to be split into two parts, the first dealing with external medicine and the second dealing with internal medicineâsomething that was unheard of at the time. It was going to be organized (head to toe, like all the good leechbooks were). It was gonna be nice (leather and vellum). It was gonna use all the best ideas (from all over the known world). And the whole thing was going to be written in Anglo-Saxon. Now, a few medical books had been compiled in Anglo-Saxon before, but none like this. This one was going to be EPIC. And it wasâand still is.
Baldâs Leechbook (also goes by the more boring but more informative MS Royal 12 D XVIII over in the British Library) contains a lot of medical remedies. A lot of them rely on things like prayers and chants and odd charms, like one for a headache, which recommends plucking the eyes off a living crab, letting the crab back into the water, and wearing the eyes about your neck in a little sack until you feel better. However, itâs worth pointing out that the really wild remedies, the stuff that makes absolutely no freakinâ sense, is most often recommended to treat ailments that are hard to treat even todayâmigraines, toothaches, cancer. These things are really painful or deadly and, without modern medicine, almost impossible to treat. So are you going to make up some nonsense to make your client at least feel like theyâre doing something, and hey, if it sort of works, it works? Of course you are. You want to help people. Even if it sounds crazy, what else are you going to do? You have to try something, and the people who are suffering are willing to try anything.
But thereâs also things that make complete sense. To echo concepts that have been mentioned by commentators above, there is a recipe that calls for the recitation of the paternoster while boiling a honey-based salve meant to treat carbuncle. The book instructs the physician to bring it to a boil, and sing the paternoster three times, and remove it from the fire, and sing nine paternosters, and to repeat this process two more times. A century ago, historians read the use of the paternoster as a magical incantation, but today, most agree that in lieu of a stopwatch, the paternoster is just meant to make sure you donât burn the honey.
BUT THAT ISNâT NEAR THE COOLEST THING.
Now, this book was compiled by a master physician (we donât know if it was Cild himself or if Cild was the scribe for an unnamed author) who was compiling recipes that had been written down for some time, and had, as many things do, gone through various permutations over the years. Many came from Greece or the western Mediterranean, and had been adapted for local English horticulture and herbs. Some came from around what is now Germany, and some ideas came from farther away in the Middle East (King Alfred was a sickly king; some scholars believe that he had his physicians seek out cures from all over the world in an attempt to treat himself). But there is one recipe that has only ever been identified in England. Not only has this recipe only ever been identified in England, itâs only ever been identified in this one manuscript. When translated into modern English, it reads as follows:
Work an eyesalve for a wen [stye], take cropleek and garlic, of both equal quantities, pound them well together, take wine and bullocks gall, of both equal quantities, mix with the leek, put this then into a brazen vessel, let it stand nine days in the brass vessel, wring out through a cloth and clear it well, put it into a horn, and about night time, apply it with a feather to the eye; the best leechdom.
For those who donât know and/or are lucky enough to have never had one, a âwenâ or a stye is a bacterial infection that manifests like a boil or a cyst that on the eyelid. They hurt something awful, and can cause larger infections of the eye. They are usually caused by Staphylococcus aureus.Â
With me? Okay. Fast-forward to 1988. A former biologist turned historian called M.L. Cameron decides to take a look at this old medical leechbook to see what he can see. He takes a good look and says âLads I do believe these Anglo-Saxon leeches werenât nearly so daft as we thought they wereâ (he did not and probably would never actually say that, Iâm paraphrasing). Cameron was particularly interested in the recipe above. As a scientist, he knew a few things:
Garlic and cropleek (leek or onion, or another related plant) have been known to have antibacterial qualities for centuries.
Wine (alcohol) also has antibacterial qualities.
Bullocks gall (literally bile taken from a bull) is known to have detergent properties, and has long been used as an additive to soap for particularly tough stains.
A brazen vessel, or a vessel made of brass, contains a good amount of copper in it. And that copper, when left to sit around for, I donât know, about nine days, would have plenty of time to react with the acids in the onion and garlic and the tartarates in the wine to create copper salts.Â
Coppers salts, as it happens, are cytotoxic, meaning they kill everything: tissue and bacteria.
What an interesting find.
Fast-forward again to 2015. A paper is published by a team from the University of Nottingham, whoâve been working on an âAncientbioticsâ project to investigate ancient medical remedies and see if they actually work. Theyâve turned their sights to the Anglo-Saxons, and are, as was Cameron, particularly interested in this recipe for an eye salve. Without boring you with the finer details of the experiment and its various trials (read it yourself!) I will spoil the ending by telling you that they discovered a few things:
This recipe, which was over 1,000 years old when they tested it, worked.
It worked well.
It worked extremely well.Â
So well, in fact, that (in a lab setting) they even got it to kill Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or as itâs more commonly known, MRSA. MRSA is a modern superbug that has built up a resistance to the antibiotic Methicillin. And this goddamn Anglo-Saxon witchesâ brew freakin murdered it.
Now, as an advocate for modern medicine and sound scientific method, Iâm not about to say that we should go throwing this salve on everything in 2019, because it is, if anything, just a starting point for modern scientists. This salve is still incredibly crude by modern standards and comes with a lot of potential problems. But as a historian⌠it works, you guys, it really works.
Medieval physicians were not idiots. They believed in magic, they believed in all things supernatural, they believed in all those things that are âunreasonableâ or unpopular today, and they practiced them too. But they also interacted with the real world with brains and intellects as sharp if not sharper than yours and mine. They were smart, they studied, they talked to each other in Latin and Greek and Arabic and Anglo Saxon. They made old recipes better and came up with brand new ones. They tried dumb stuff and they tried smart stuff. They didnât have access to even the smallest fraction of the information we have at our fingertips today, and yet they created things like this.Â
To this day, no one knows who created the eyesalve recipe. And no one truly understands why this is the only copy of it. If it worked so well, why isnât it plastered to the headings of every medical textbook from Alfred to Victoria? Speaking personally, I would argue that it has to do with language. Not so long after Baldâs Leechbook was written, the French invaded England and took over. Latin and French became the language of the court, and while Anglo-Saxon lived on throughout the country, and certainly lay doctors would have used Anglo-Saxon books daily, the language of formal English medical education was Latin. Oxford and Cambridge were late to the medical ed game after Salerno, Bologna, Paris, and Montpellier, and naturally fell in step with continental schools as a result, using Latin almost exclusively, and sometimes Greek or Arabic.Â
Point being, by the time medical licenses and medical college degrees are a thing in England, not only does almost no one of university-eligible class speak Anglo-Saxon anymore, no one has use for those Old English texts, because they donât get you your degree, and you canât make a living as a doctor without a degree and doctorâs license. And no oneâs going to translate an old Anglo Saxon text into Latin when Avicennaâs newest old hit, now in Latin, is fresh off the boat from France.
All that to say: Never write something off because itâs old. 1,000 years is a long time ago, but human ingenuity and intelligence are hardly modern inventions. The science of the world hasnât changed; only our tools and our perspective.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk
Further reading:
The 2015 Ancientbiotics report:Â A 1,000-Year-Old Antimicrobial Remedy with Antistaphylococcal Activity
NPR: âAncientbioticsâ Researchers Look For Old Fixes To Modern Ailments
Mental Floss: 20 Anglo-Saxon Remedies from Baldâs Leechbook
Read a paper about how scholars are building on the work of the Ancientbiotics project to better understand how to apply ancient ideas effectively to modern medicine.
Look through Royal 12 D XVIII for yourself! Baldâs eyesalve recipe is on f. 12v and looks like this:
*stifles a sob* oh my god. This spoke to me in a way nothing else has.
@appears I fucking love your writing. âĽď¸
Utterly accurate.
reblogging again because when the neilman says it too it feels extra supportive
[image description: a printed out flyer with the picture of a sleeping grey tabby cat on it. It has text on it that reads:
Muffin disclaimer
So youâve ordered a muffin! We hope youâre up for a challenge.
Our wobbly tabby cat Bea REALLY likes muffins so there are a few things to be aware of if you have a muffin in the cat area.
- She WILL climb you to try and get your muffin - She is not very good at climbing so she will claw her way up your body - It WILL hurt - She WILL NOT give up - She may try to eat the muffin right out of your mouth - She is not allowed to eat muffins
You may pick her up / move her away if needed and if youâre really struggling, come and talk to us and we will help. No matter how much she wants to, it is still very important that you donât let her eat any muffin as it will make her sick.
Good luck and we hope you enjoy your muffin experience!
She may look sweet and innocent but we promise you sheâs not
/end image description]
I feel like there is this mentality that people arent allowed to miss content they used to love when it turns out that the person making it was shitty and thatâŚisnât good imo.
Like when Bon Appetit and Harry Potter had their big(and justified) cancel this year a lot of people were saying stuff like âI always knew it was badâ or âlol I canât believe people actually liked this crap anywayâ or some other variation of âI was woke enough to realise this media was problematic before it was cool and now Iâm gonna make fun of those who didnâtâ and not only does that read as performative as HELL(social justice has very much become a clout game) it also ignores the fact that we live in a deeply shit ass society and itâs okay to be upset when something that made your life worth living gets ruined for you.
Maybe you werenât on twitter or didnât get the memo about Rowling or missed the dog whistles and now you have to grapple with something that brought you joy being vilified while the narrative around the discourse is full of people calling you terrible for liking it in the first place(I see you people who make jokes about adults caring about their Hogwarts houses and I am not impressed). Maybe BA was just something you switched on for a quick laugh and you were too tired to be on guard for the signs of problems. Maybe you didnât know what copoganda was or never had all the different antisemitic dogwhistles explained to you or were too happy with representation to think too hard about itâs effects. Thatâs okay. No one is perfect. Every day there are 10,000 people just finding out about something everyone else knew, statistically youâre gonna end up in that group at some point. Do not shame yourself for not being versed in every type of issue from the start.
And when you do learn Itâs perfectly okay to mourn the media that helped you get through another day in this hellscape of a society. Really, itâs natural to be upset.
Cuz I think weâve all been there(and if havent your lying) and this purity culture idea that the only way to be truly woke is to have never liked the Bad thing in the first place and then openly tear it to shreds as soon as doing so will get you clout is so flawed and unrealistic.
I mean, for example, my freshman year of highschool was rough. I had just moved across the country away from my whole family and had no friends and was living in a studio apartment with my drug addicted neglectful dad and ngl, I probably wouldnt have survived if I didnât have Hetalia. I know now that itâs problematic as hell and I do occasionally wish I had seen the issues sooner but I was also an emotionally abused lonely 15 year old and to this day I canât get on the hate bandwagon because any time I do see the mocking I think of that terrified teenager just trying to get though another lonely day with only US/UK fanfiction to look forward to and I just canât hate the thing that helped her survive.
And so if Harry Potter or BA or Voltron or whatever other problematic thing was your lifeline itâs okay to be upset that it was yanked away from you by bigoted creators and racist corporations and bad writing. Itâs okay to mourn that thing, to miss the joy it brought you, to think back on the good memories you had of it, to not want to jump on the hate bandwagon, to be upset when people mock the people like you who cared about it.
Do not be ashamed of the life-raft that got you through the storm. Be critical, do not let itâs problems alter your perception of reality, and cast it aside if it comes to that, but do not be ashamed to have needed it, and do not feel bad for mourning itâs absence.
And if youâre on the other side, if you see someone who is sad that a thing was ruined for them, maybe consider that they donât have malicious intent, that their ignorance was not on purpose, that maybe that thing was the only thing keeping them going. Consider how youâd feel if you had your lifeline snatched away from you, and maybe direct your hate elsewhere. Attacking random people who loved Harry Potter isnât gonna change the world anyway, trust me there are better ways you could spend your time.
Bringing this back in the wake of the banjo player from Mumford and Sons revealing heâs a fascist cuz I already see people falling back on this mentality and itâs pissing me off.
I agree; falling back on the âyour favorite thing was always shit anyway so you shouldnât careâ doesnât make your argument sound better. If you think that people should stop engaging with a work because of the creatorâs problems, thatâs fine, thatâs your prerogative, but if so, you should feel comfortable saying that they should do so even if it was the greatest thing ever made. Saying âit was never good to begin withâ just causes people to go on the defensive over something subjective that doesnât need to be a part of the argument in the first place. Youâll still look like an asshole, sure, but a consistent asshole with a straightforward opinion.
(I would also go into how the âHarry Potter is just a shitty old childrenâs bookâ argument ignores how it was both compelling enough and marketing savvy enough to completely dominate pop culture for almost two decades but thatâs another rant for another day)
Hilarious, because 1984 is absolutely *Anti-Authoritarian*
It makes sense that both the US and USSR would hate it.

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Supernatural is a weird, clunky pile of assorted ideas of variable quality where every single concept with a good potential gets inevitably undeveloped, which makes it perfect because itâs like a giant sandbox. The writers never ever brought to fulfillment a single thing, including the entire show itself, and that makes the material extremely elastic and malleable. This is why Supernatural is so successful in terms of fandom. Itâs a brainstorming session chalkboard with a list of interesting ideas on it. That, and Jensen Ackles.
#this is why every time iâm on tumblr i think that this show looks absolutely fascinating. so many ideas and issues to get into #and then when i watch an episode (have now seen a whole 5 eps) iâm like: wow this is so boring i can barely look at it #groups of men stand in badly lit rooms and talk to each other. for 15 years #thank god tumblr is here to colour correct the gifsets & examine the themes of interest. anyway am i in this fandom? i literally donât know (x)
DONâT LET THIS HAPPEN TO CEREAL!!!
Listen in the past the poor have had to improvise cheap food the rich never wanted as a means to survive. And over the many years of innovation made the food taste good until eventually the rich where like: âOh hay you actually like that garbage? Why on earth would you like it?â Then they try it, love it, start buying it, and then drive the price up so much it becomes a luxury good.
They do this and its devastating, the food typically never becomes affordable again. It donât matter how cheap the foo dis to produce, it doesnât matter if there is almost no meat on the bone or its super difficult to eat and messy. Once the poor discover how to make some bit of cheap food taste good, the rich take it away via driving the price of it up.
THEY DID THIS TO RIBS.
Ribs were garage meat. Just look at them, there is hardly any meat on the bone, you have to eat them by hand usually, and they are messy. They where an undesirable cheap source of junk meat. But the poor being the poor made them taste good. (Because they donât have much to choose from.) The rich discovered the meals the poor made with them and decided they liked ribs too. People discovered they could sell a few ribs to rich people and make way more money then selling lots of ribs to poor people and the price was driven up.
DONâT LET THIS HAPPEN TO CEREAL!!!
They did the same to brisket. You used to be able to get brisket for less than a dollar a pound, which meant you could get a twenty pound brisket fairly cheaply. And then you smoked it, sliced it, and had meat for weeks if not a full month. And it was tasty. I grew up eating brisket at least once a month because my family could afford it.
It was a cheap meat because no rich person looks at the dangly part of the neck of a cow and goes âooh, that looks tasty!â.
But then Food Network started showcasing things like barbecued brisket. Rich people started showing up at places that werenât just Rib Crib to get their barbeque. And the price of brisket went up. A lot.
I regularly see it for over five dollars a pound in stores now. And while yeah, that might not seem like a lot when youâre talking only a pound or two of meat, brisket is normally sold in ten to twenty pound sizes. Itâs become completely unaffordable to the people that made it delicious.
Sushi used to be really cheap, too, until it became âtrendyâ. Guess why youâre now paying twelve dollars for your order of California rolls? Because rich people discovered something that poor people had been eating for ages.
Noticed the prices of fajita meat, chicken thighs, or ham hocks has gone up recently? You guessed it. Rich people are taking our food and now weâre scrambling to afford the things that we grew up eating.
Lobster is a perfect example of this phenomenon. For hundreds of years, lobster was regarded as a sort of insect larvae from the depth of the sea. It had zero appeal as a âluxury foodâ until people living in NY and Boston developed a taste for it. Before the 19th century, it was considered a âpoverty foodâ or used as fertilizer and bait - some household servants specified in employment agreements that they would not eat lobster more than twice a week. It was also commonly served at prisons, which tells you something about prison food.
Only by cleverly marketing lobster as an indulgence for the privileged made it cost so much. It became a vehicle for enormous profit spawning a multi-billion dollar global industry in the process. This mythical affection for lobster flesh - not its practical value in terms of taste, nutrition, or any other reasonable consideration - drives its value.
LMAO. Wait.
Anyone elseâs eye twitchin?
Food gentrification is a long standing practice and itâs some of the most evil shit I can think of. Itâs why I refuse for example as someone living in the US to buy things with Quinoa in them. It is specifically pricing an indigenous population out of their prime staple food. Itâs a horrific invasion of one of the final requirements of staying alive.
Oysters were another too poor to be eaten food, they were almost a waste product of the river pearl industry and were sold in London as cheap as it got, in the winter months oysters were one of the main sources of protein in workhouses. Now theyâre a âdelicacyâ