Psychotic Viking

So there’s a known thing in the study of human psychology/sociology/what-have-you where men are known to, on average, rely entirely on their female romantic partner for emotional support. Bonding with other men is done at a more superficial level involving fun group activities and conversations about general subjects but rarely involves actually leaning on other men or being really honest about emotional problems. Men use alcohol to be able to lower their inhibitions enough to expose themselves emotionally to other men, but if you can’t get emotional support unless you’re drunk, you have a problem.

So men need to have a woman in their lives to have anyone they can share their emotional needs and vulnerabilities with. However, since women are not socialized to fear sharing these things, women’s friendships with other women are heavily based on emotional support. If you can’t lean on her when you’re weak, she’s not your friend. To women, what friendship is is someone who listens to all your problems and keeps you company.

So this disconnect men are suffering from is that they think that only a person who is having sex with you will share their emotions and expect support. That’s what a romantic partner does. But women think that’s what a friend does. So women do it for their romantic partners and their friends and expect a male friend to do it for them the same as a female friend would. This fools the male friend into thinking there must be something romantic there when there is not.

This here is an example of patriarchy hurting everyone. Women have a much healthier approach to emotional support – they don’t die when widowed at nearly the rate that widowers die and they don’t suffer emotionally from divorce nearly as much even though they suffer much more financially, and this is because women don’t put all their emotional needs on one person. Women have a support network of other women. But men are trained to never share their emotions except with their wife or girlfriend, because that isn’t manly. So when she dies or leaves them, they have no one to turn to to help with the grief, causing higher rates of death, depression, alcoholism and general awfulness upon losing a romantic partner. 

So men suffer terribly from being trained in this way. But women suffer in that they can’t reach out to male friends for basic friendship. I am not sure any man can comprehend how heartbreaking it is to realize that a guy you thought was your friend was really just trying to get into your pants. Friendship is real. It’s emotional, it’s important to us. We lean on our friends. Knowing that your friend was secretly seething with resentment when you were opening up to him and sharing your problems because he felt like he shouldn’t have to do that kind of emotional work for anyone not having sex with him, and he felt used by you for that reason, is horrible. And the fact that men can’t share emotional needs with other men means that lots of men who can’t get a girlfriend end up turning into horrible misogynistic people who think the world owes them the love of a woman, like it’s a commodity… because no one will die without sex. Masturbation exists. But people will die or suffer deep emotional trauma from having no one they can lean on emotionally. And men who are suffering deep emotional trauma, and have been trained to channel their personal trauma into rage because they can’t share it, become mass shooters, or rapists, or simply horrible misogynists.

DNA proves fearsome Viking warrior was a woman

A 10th century Viking unearthed in the 1880s was like a figure from Richard Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries: an elite warrior buried with a sword, an ax, a spear, arrows, a knife, two shields, and a pair of warhorses. And like a mythical valkyrie (depicted above in a 19th century painting), a new study published today in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology finds that the warrior was a woman—the first high-status female Viking warrior to be identified.

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.

Everyone I Love Is Dead

The English Have Stolen All My Sheep

You Want To Be My Boyfriend? First You Must Answer These Riddles Three

The Protestants Have Stolen All My Sheep

I Love You A Lot But You’ve Left Me And It’s Raining [fiddle solo]

The Sea Is Treacherous, Just Like The English

One Time Bonnie Prince Charlie Punched Me In The Face And It Was Awesome

* Everyone I Love Is An Allegorical Representation of Ireland

* The English Stole My Farm And Put Sheep On It

* You Were My Boyfriend But Now You Won’t Even Come To The Window To Look Upon Me And Our Dead Infant Child (In The Rain)

* Whack Fol Too La Roo Umptytiddly Good They’ve Stopped Listening Now Let’s Talk About Revolution

genres include:

I Left Everyone I Love Back Home In The Holler To Be With This Guy Who Doesn’t Wear Shoes Or Have Teeth But He Plays A Mean Jug

The English Told Us Not To Move West Yet, We Ignored Them, My Entire Family Was Killed

You Were My Boyfriend But You Tied A Sack Of Rocks To My Petticoats And Threw Me In The Creek (And My Baby Too)

Mama Loves All 14 Of Us A Lot But She’s Weary Of Our Shit And Now She’s Dyin’ (Gather Round)

The McCleans Stole A Firewood Log From Our Pile So We Won’t Rest Until The Last Of Their Male Kin Is Laid In The Cold Ground

We Knew The River Would Rise But We Still Didn’t Fix The Levee 

The River Rose, The Levee Broke, Everyone Died, It Was Just As We Reckoned (dulcimer twang-a-lang) 

When The Rebels Come A-Marchin’ I’m A Southern Man And I Feed Their Horses My Best, When The Yankees Come A-Marchin’ I’m A Northern Man And I Feed Their Horses What The Rebels Left

I think someone needs to put in a word for the English folk tradition though:

I Met a Girl and We Went Hunting (It Was a Metaphor for Sex)

I Met a Girl and We Caught Some Birds (It Was a Metaphor for Sex)

I Met a Girl and We Found Her Lost Pet (It Was a Metaphor for Sex)

I Met a Girl By Staying At Her Parents’ House and She Made My Bed (It Was an Especially Thinly-Veiled Metaphor for Sex)

I Am a Girl and I Regret Engaging In Metaphors for Sex Because Now I’m Pregnant

I Met a Girl and Bribed Her Into Sex But She Stole My Horse and Ran Away With It

I Met a Girl At an Inn and We Had Non-Metaphorical Sex But She Stole My Stuff The Next Morning and Now I Have Syphilis

Your Fiance Died Either at Trafalgar or Waterloo, Let’s Get Married, I’m Glad You Said No Because I’m Really Him In Disguise

Lord Nelson Sure Was Awesome

The Press-Gang Dragged Off All the Important Men in My Life (And Now They Are Dead)

Farm Laborers Are The Salt of the Earth And Are Never Grindingly Poor

I Went Out Riding and Noticed Mongolia

We Fought a Bunch of Guys (On Horseback)

Witness My Many Ungulates

(While On a Horse) I Met a Hot Girl Who Reminded Me of a Plant

On Three, Say What That Terrain Feature Looks Like to You (One, Two, Three, A Horse)

Witness My Many Ancestors’ Many Ungulates

I Also Enjoy Heavy Metal, Especially If It’s Made of Horseshoes

Oooorrrrweeeeuuurrrreeeeuuuuwwwwwrrrrrrrr (Is Tuvan for “Horse”)

• Don’t go there, there’s elves.

• Damn you went there now your wife is dead.

• Damn you went there, now you’re dead.

• Don’t refuse the eleven quee- oh, you’re dead.

• That one time Norway beat the invading Scots, it was awesome so we all sing a song about it (it is he same song).

• There was a clever woman and she outsmarted the men (there was no sex).

• There was a clever woman and she had seven boyfriends, they were all useless until she found a bard (every DnD session ever).

• There were elves, but Christian IV beat their butts.

• There were elves, I went there, now am fucked.

* King Christian IV fan-club

* Strong Independent Women ™ Who Don’t Need No Elf. Or Man.

* I saw a banging honey on the moor. Oh shit, nope it was an elf.

This is incredibly cool!

Scientists need to stop underestimating these brilliant corvids.

Ravens Surprise Scientists By Showing They Can Plan

As recently as 10 years ago, humans were thought to be the only species with the ability to plan.

Recent studies on great apes showed the ability is not uniquely human. Now, scientists in Sweden have come to the surprising conclusion that ravens can also deliberately prepare for future events.

“It is conservative to conclude that ravens perform similarly to great apes and young children,” the researchers write. However, monkeys have failed similar experiments.

We’ve known that ravens, and other members of the corvid family, are smart. Previously, they were shown to think ahead by caching food to eat later.

But some scientists argued that food caching was not proof of an ability to plan because the birds could simply be biologically wired to do so, cognitive zoologist Can Kabadayi from Lund University tells The Two-Way.

So, Kabadayi and co-author Mathias Osvath set up a series of experiments to see if five ravens could flexibly plan during tasks that they don’t do in the wild: using tools and bartering. These are similar to studies done on great apes. Their findings were published today in the journal Science.

Across from the the crustacean tank was a small octopus tank. This little fucker squeezed out of a tiny hole at the top of his tank, walk across the hall, and get into the crustacean tank. He would then hunt and eat. After he was done, he crawled back out and get back in his tank

Octopus Escapes from Tank to Prowl on its Neighbors

Octopus Escape — 600-pound (272-kilogram) octopus wriggles through a passageway the size of a quarter

Legging It: Evasive Octopus Has Been Allowed to Look for Love

(via ScienceAlert (@sciencealert) • Instagram photos and videos)