drinking ectoplasm is better than HRT

(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!

number one check yourself. Number two comparing TMA/TME to anti-Blackness is a false dichotomy and I need white queer people to stop trying to compare themselves to Black people every single chance they get. oh my god

The two are NOT similar. If you really wanna play the game of equating race and gender, then the equivalent to “Black and nonblack” would be transfem/trans woman and non-transfem/trans woman, not TMA/TME. I can assure you that NO black person is going around saying “antiblack racism affected vs antiblack racism exempt.” Because That Is Stupid.

EVERYONE is affected by antiblackness, because of how deeply it’s ingrained into our entire societal structure. You cannot write off specific demographics as not being affected by certain forms of oppression or discrimination, because the nature of living in a white supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy is that ALL of these systems are INTRINSICALLY connected with each other, and affect EVERYONE to some degree. There are countless historical examples of antiblack legislation directly impacting poor communities of other racial groups- including white people. There are primary targets of discrimination, obviously, but nobody is truly “exempt” from any sort of oppressive system unless they are at the VERY top of the damn food chain.

In the same vein, the intersection of transphobia and misogyny is ALSO deeply ingrained into our society. And because of that, nobody is truly “transmisogyny-exempt.” Even people who aren’t the primary targets are still directly impacted and negatively affected by transmisogynistic systems. I find TMA/TME to be useless in terms of categorization because it directly posits that everyone who gets sorted into the latter group just doesn’t experience any oppression or discrimination derived from transmisogynistic bases at all, which is ridiculous, because that happens All the time.

A trans man or enby who’s mistaken for a trans woman and is assaulted for it, a cis man who’s belittled and attacked on the basis of being Too Feminine, a cis woman who’s publicly shamed, derided, and transvestigated for having testosterone levels that are “too high,” are all examples of non-transfem/trans woman groups being negatively affected on the basis of transmisogyny.

Poor white people being affected by legislation meant to target and attack Black populations and the massive trend of colorism throughout Asian communities are examples of nonblack groups being negatively affected on the basis of antiblackness.

You cannot sort people by what oppression they do and do not face, and attempts to do so are inherently exclusionary and are bound to lead back into denying people of their lived experiences, just because they don’t line up perfectly into these specific categories of “this genre of person goes through this” vs “this genre of person doesn’t go through that.”

I believe that TMA/TME was coined with the best intentions, but the problem is that it’s a clumsy dichotomy and the way a lot of people tend to use it ends up leading back into the same issues of being binary (“amab trans people experience this, afab trans people don’t experience that”) and then THAT leads back into a whole heaping mess in and of itself

Talking about the way transfeminized people are targeted by transmisogyny is not a bad thing in and of itself! But like, you can just say transfem/non-transfem- or even just “transfeminized” to describe the position oppressors will often place people into in order to enact transmisogynistic violence against them- instead of directly trying to state what different groups of people Do And Don’t Experience. you can say “primary targets of transmisogyny” without directly implying that certain groups are exempt from it all together.

I’m 33 now, and I still discover a new joke every time I reread it.

*starts thunderously knocking on the doors of heaven*

In the UK, the book of the peerage is called Burke’s Peerage. Burke sounds like berk, which means a silly/annoying person. So Terry took ‘twerp’, another word for a silly or annoying person, and replaced the e with u. 

Trans silvas very simply translated into german would be über den Wald

Trans silvas -> Transsilvanien -> Überwald

The Venturi Effect is a scientific term referring to the acceleration of a liquid through a narrow tube (like a jet).

Selachii is a classification of sharks. (I discovered this when my stepson got really into sharks)

The Malleus Maleficarum is a very real, very nasty and absolutely batshit insane book from late 15th-century Germany, basically laying out the procedure for catching, torturing, and executing witches. Its title translates to The Hammer of Witches. The other titles are Pratchett's inventions.

Soul Music, 100 pages later: It's been there the whole time! You just don't know Welsh.

Where is violently possessive Warfstache in discodoll?!? Where are the secret knives? The threats behind Ken’s back? The revealing his true nature to anyone that slightly upsets his beach boy himbo?!?!

Washington Post is paywalling the article but it looks like Taylor Farms — a consumer bagged salad brand that also supplies produce to grocers and fast food chains like Taco Bell, Walmart, McDonald's, Chipotle, Burger King, KFC, and Meijer —may be at least one of the sources of the current cyclosporiasis outbreak.

So the writer of this book isn't actually.... wrong, per se. In an age before they had clean, sanitary, safe drinking water, you probably DID get at MINIMUM awful diarrhea pretty regularly after drinking water. This is why so many people drank small-beer (very low alcohol content, but the fermentation process (and by some preparations, boiling the water) killed the dangerous microbes and made it safe to drink). The popularization of tea actually really cut down on cholera outbreaks and other water-related digestive troubles as well! not only because you have to boil the water, but the tannins in tea also kill off (at least some) bacteria.

And in case you cannot comprehend the state of how breathtakingly "they didn't fucking know" -- If you were really poor in London in the first half of the 19th century, you were often literally dipping a bucket into the nearest gutter, letting it sit for a day for the solids to separate out, and drinking what was left. Even the well-to-do houses with fancy newfangled running water were at risk of waterborne illnesses, because a lot of those water supply companies had intake pipes stuck into the fucking Thames (you know. the famously polluted river that all the sewers dumped into) and were so negligent about filtering it that people sometimes got live eels coming out of their faucets.

So yeah, drinking many glasses of water IS a potentially injurious one and DOES weaken digestive power -- IF you are unfortunate enough to live in the 19th century before public health became a government concern.

Barry is bi because his only reaction to waking up naked to two guys (and a walking talking mannequin) in his home was "WOW must've had a wild night lol better get dressed". No panicking over what this means for his sexuality, just calm acceptance and a request for the clothes Merle is holding.