AUNVYL

My new special interest has landed. Normally I'm not one for cryptids perse, but the legend of the Leap Castle Elemental stuck out to me.

It's referred to as an "elemental" because it's believed to be a natural spirit, tied to the land itself and not the ghost of a deceased human.

Despite that, it does take on a very human shape. It's described as being the size of a sheep, and walks on all fours- but in the way a human being would walk on all fours. It has a human face with loose, dribbly lips, hole-like eyes and a rotten empty pit for a nose. It reeks of rot and sulphur and is usually smelled before it is seen, though when it is seen it is described as blueish grey in color and covered in shaggy hair, with the limbs and skin being similar in texture to cotton wool.

(Cylinder seal of First Dynasty of Ur Queen Puabi, found in her tomb, dated circa 2600 BC, with modern impression. Inscription: 𒅤𒀜 𒎏 - Pu3-abi(AD) Nin - Queen Pu-abi. Nicked straight off Wikipedia as it's a fab comparison of seal / relief.)

In the British Museum you can find "Lady Layard's jewellery". Austin Henry Layard is a guy whose academic efforts I'm admittedly very indebted to. He was passionate about Venetian and Roman glass and did a great job re-popularising both styles in the UK, but more importantly he was the assyriologist who excavated Nineveh and the Library of Ashurbanipal—where we've found the majority of the Gilgamesh tablets. Pioneer figure in terms of Near Eastern archaeology... but check this out:

This is a necklace Layard had made for his wife. It uses real cylinder seals.

To quote the British Museum's entry on the item: One cylinder seal is Akkadian (about 2200 BC) and four belong to the second millennium BC, but eight are late Assyrian (about 1000-612 BC). Late Babylonian and Achaemenid stamp seals (about 600-350 BC) are used for the pendants and clasp.

Enid later wrote in her diary that, when they dined with Queen Victoria in 1873, it was 'much admired'.

Ancient Near Eastern artefacts, repurposed as jewellery in a set that doesn't give a single fuck about accurately dating them, let alone treating them with the sort of respect you might perhaps expect of items over four thousand years old. Instead they've become a mark of elite colonial status, an Oriental curiosity utterly separated from their historical context. They're 'old'. They're non-descriptly 'other'. Time and place dissolve into an attractive and vague exoticism.

All while the place these seals have been appropriated from is busy being exploited by the very empire this "jewellery" is being shown off to!

It never should have been done like this, because it voids the seals of all meaning and turns them into a curiosity, but at least there's no significant damage to be expected and it retains the original intention to some degree.

Meanwhile, the medaillons Zendaya wore are, if I remember correctly, usually meant to be stitched to fabric or nailed to wood (you can see the holes intended for their application to something slightly to the viewer-left of the place the earring is attached). They're thin sheet metal and won't hold up well to hanging freely, attached only to a small point at the very edge of the disk, not to speak of the damage the attachment itself is bound to do.

So while Lady Layard's jewellery is in bad taste and undeniably orientalist, the damage done to the artefacts is likely minimal, while Zendaya's earrings actively altered the artifacts beyond their intended use and likely damaged them in the process.

[ ArtFight 2026 ] [8] Doomsday Fih

my cat doesn't like it when I play this game and tries to get between me and my computer

This 1850s stunner was a very kind gift from my mother when my family was visiting at the beginning of the month, and I just got it back from being resized today. I mostly want to show it off because of the way the stone is set, although I love the whole thing (pardon my inelegant hand there)

Do you see how there's a band of silver around the central stone? That's a formerly common technique for setting diamonds to make them look bigger, called an "illusion setting." Since the stones are rare, or were before the advent of lab-grown diamonds, and therefore used to be expensive for reasons besides "DeBeers wants even more money," jewelers employed clever methods to make them look larger at a distance via the setting

While this can clearly be seen pretty far back, it had something of a golden age in the mid 20th century. Which makes sense – during or after a depression, a world war, etc., people were probably looking to save money wherever they could. But they still wanted pretty things, because they were human beings and human beings like adornment

... also by this point DeBeers had started the whole "engagement ring has to be a diamond" racket

1950s

1940s

1940s

it's a clever trick to get the most bang for your buck with a small stone

also, when my ring was made, they used a closed setting with a layer of metal foil at the back, to increase sparkle (a technique dating back to Minoan times at least). later in the 19th century, open-backed settings became more popular, on the principle that they let more light in to refract off the stone. but you can still buy foil-backed craft gems today!

What's the first "big news story" you remember from when you were a kid?

It's something I love to ask mixed-aged groups sometimes because I think it's really interesting to see the responses. I've gotten answers from the Olympics of [whatever year] to Watergate to more recent stuff from my niblings.