Francis' place

Food Banks Exist For YOU!! I don't need one anymore but am so thankful for them. You may hesitate to go to them bc you don't think you need it as badly as others... but from someone who spent years with their dad going to several, the food is there and they want to help. It isn't embarrassing; the people who volunteer are doing it for a reason, and ime treat you as a shopper, not a charity case. There are sites to find food banks. If you go to one, they usually have pamphlets for all the ones in the area. We never had to prove income or anything like that. They want to help, I promise.

If there's a local farmer's market, check to see if they have a subsidy program for people on food stamps. Another thing my dad and I used. At two separate markets 5 hrs apart, both had a program where you could DOUBLE your food stamp money in farmer's market coupons. Healthy, fresh, local, ethically raised food for less than the grocery store

If you go to a store more than once in a blue moon get the discount/membership/whatever card. It's usually super easy and almost always saves you a LOT of money

When in a supermarket, look at price per ounce if comparing items. Do not look at total price vs visual package size. Companies are experts at packing less and less food into larger packages. Grocery stores with a price per oz on the tags are so so helpful, but if they don't, sometimes it honestly makes a difference to use your phone calculator

CHECK IF YOU HAVE AN ALDI IN YOUR AREA. They sell actual seriously good, usually healthy food way cheaper than crappy stuff at other stores. This is for a lot of reasons I won't get into. But, it's also just a more ethical system for their workers, who make well above minimum wage. Aldi is Life. Tip: if you don't have reusable bags, keep an eye out for empty boxes as you shop. They don't bag anything for you.

BIG LOTS or other similar clearance/discount stores. They get an ever-changing stock of things at deep discounts. Lots of nice luxury and/or healthy groceries at half price as well as your normal staples. Also my go-to for home items and pet supplies

Shop Sales. This one is obvious to some but others just aren't in the habit. I almost exclusively buy things on sales where I save at least 1/3, usually 1/2. You can have a fully stocked pantry and freezer and spend half as much as if you only buy things when you want to eat that particular thing. It does mean less fresh food, but y'know. Just develop a laser eye for a sale tag and know where the clearance section is. Second nature to people who grew up poor but I was amazed shopping with college friends who bought full price name brand food and had trouble paying rent

I haven't done this but my brother swears by it. He went in with a few friends on a communal Costco membership. Could also do this with Sam's Club. They shop together, and then split bulk items if there's a great deal on something one person couldn't eat on their own. Bulk is the way to go if you can find a way to have the up-front cash. Impossible for many which is why the communal thing is so genius!

If this helps even one person it was worth writing out! I've realized last year, I learned a Lot growing up under the poverty line. It doesn't just appear in your brain when you're 22 and can't pay your bills for the first time.

so his solution for this problem was… to solely read serial web novels in languages that (1) he did not speak, and (2) for which there was no actual translation, fan or otherwise

apparently, the combined forces of “trying to figure out WTF is going on via the power of Google Translate" + “cultural differences in storytelling conventions” + “the inherent randomness of where the hell amateur authors are gonna take their plots”—those all mashed up to make stories that were unpredictable enough to keep him guessing all the time

then he described to me this totally batshit-sounding Hungarian story he’d been obsessively reading once a week for years

It’s just like this:

I’ve seen similar points be raised about skeletal reconstructions for hippos if we use that same logic

we have this app called toogoodtogo where restaurants/cafes/bakeries/hotels and so on sell their leftovers for really cheap to reduce foodwaste

i got all of this for €4 from starbucks

I used to do community service at a community breakfast, we’d go to the local Safeway and get all their stale bread, the local bakery for their stale baked goods and whatnot.

The difference between bisexuality and pansexuality: a powerpoint guide. 

2. I like ponies. 

Lo street artist britannico Banksy finanzia una barca per salvare i rifugiati nel Mediterraneo >

La nave, chiamata Louise Michel in onore all'anarchica femminista francese, è partita in segreto il 18 agosto dal porto spagnolo di Burriana, vicino a Valencia, e giovedì ha salvato 89 persone nel Mediterraneo, comprese 14 donne e quattro bambini, informa il Guardian. Ora sarebbe alla ricerca di un porto sicuro per far sbarcare i passeggeri o per trasferirli su una nave della guardia costiera europea.

Con il suo scafo bianco e rosa brillante, decorato con un’opera d'arte di Banksy che raffigura una bambina con un giubbotto di salvataggio che sostiene un salvagente a forma di cuore, la Louise Michel è più piccola ma molto più veloce di altre navi di soccorso utilizzate delle ONG. Si tratta di uno yacht a motore di 31 metri, precedentemente di proprietà delle autorità doganali francesi, che batte bandiera tedesca.

L’equipaggio è composto da attivisti europei con una lunga esperienza nelle operazioni di ricerca e soccorso e la sua capitana, Pia Klemp, è stata alla guida di diverse navi di ONG e ha salvato la vita di migliaia di persone negli ultimi anni.

Quando l’anno scorso Klemp ha ricevuto una mail di Banksy, ha pensato si trattasse di uno scherzo. “Ciao Pia, ho letto di te sui giornali. Sembri una tipa tosta. Sono un artista britannico e ho fatto alcuni lavori sulla crisi dei migranti, ovviamente non posso tenere per me i soldi che ho guadagnato. Puoi usarli per comprare una barca o qualcosa del genere? Per piacere, fammi sapere. Complimenti! Banksy”.

La capitana è convinta di essere stata scelta dallo street artist per il suo impegno politico. "Non vedo il salvataggio in mare come un'azione umanitaria, ma come parte di una lotta antifascista", ha detto Klemp al Guardian.

I 10 membri dell'equipaggio si identificano tutti come attivisti antirazzisti e antifascisti a sostegno di un cambiamento politico radicale.

Lea Reisner, infermiera e coordinatrice della prima operazione di salvataggio, ha detto che si tratta di un progetto anarchico, che vuole riunire diverse lotte per la giustizia sociale, inclusi i diritti delle donne e del collettivo LGBTIQ, l'uguaglianza, i diritti dei migranti, l’ambientalismo e i diritti degli animali.

Secondo Claire Faggianelli, attivista che ha preparato la nave per la sua prima missione, questo progetto è un campanello d'allarme per l'Europa. “Vogliamo davvero provare a risvegliare la coscienza dell'Europa e dire: 'Guarda, ti stiamo urlando contro da anni ormai. C'è qualcosa che non dovrebbe accadere proprio ai confini dell'Europa, e chiudi gli occhi davanti a questo. Svegliati!'"

La pianificazione della loro prima missione si è svolta in segreto tra Londra, Berlino e Burriana. L'equipaggio temeva che se fosse circolata la voce che un progetto finanziato da Banksy sarebbe presto salpato verso il Mediterraneo per soccorrere i migranti, le autorità europee avrebbero potuto tentare di ostacolare la missione. Per questo motivo, hanno deciso di diffondere la notizia solo dopo aver effettuato il primo salvataggio in mare.

La Louise Michel è un progetto di membri della società civile per prevenire le morti nel Mediterraneo. Secondo l’International Organization for Migration, quest'anno più di 7.600 migranti sono stati intercettati nel Mediterraneo e riportati in Libia, con la complicità dell’Unione Europea. Spesso rinchiusi in campi non ufficiali, la situazione dei migranti in Libia è disperata, con atti di tortura sistematica e stupri documentati da tempo dalle organizzazioni per i diritti umani e dai media internazionali.

Fonte: The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/27/banksy-funds-refugee-rescue-boat-operating-in-mediterranean

Digital artist Daniel Voshart recreates the ‘real’ faces of Roman emperors thanks to machine learning. You can learn more about the process, discover more emperors or buy a poster here.

[Marcus Aurelius]

[Lucius Verus]

in Europe, ‘white’ isn’t a thing

in the sense that there are so many shades of white, it doesn’t really mean anything

like, Spanish white and Swedish white are different things, but we wouldn’t consider either ‘non-white’ or ‘whiter’

you can generally tell where someone’s from, but there are people who ‘look out of place’ a bit everywhere

either because recent or century-old migrations, or because of a previous population that lived there and then the borders moved or something

and: in a nutshell, Italian geography discourages friendships

that means that before the Romans came along, people generally kept to themselves, so there’s more genetic diversity the farther back you go

at some point in the Neolithic, there were non Indo-European tribes living in Italy, but we don’t know exactly where they came from

the Indo-European people, on the other hand, probably invaded from the North

except for the Etruscans, because as it turns out, Herodotus was right (AGAIN! HAHHAHAHAHAHA SUCK IT HATERS) and they actually came from somewhere in modern Turkey

which still doesn’t mean they weren’t white, btw

even today, there’s plenty of people in the Middle East who look like this:

[top to bottom: a Kurdish fighter; Iranian politician Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf; Syrian writer Samar Yazbek]

so the notion of ‘race’ as it’s understood in the US doesn’t really work elsewhere

if it even works in the US, that is

so anyway, from what we know from literary sources, the Romans weren’t incredibly dark

(btw people abroad, and especially Americans, tend to have a fixed idea of what Italians look like and act like)

(but most of the Italians who emigrated to the US came from four Southern regions - Campania, Puglia, Basilicata, Calabria, and Sicilia - and because Italy basically became a united country, like, 20 years ago, it’s still a very diverse nation)

(so what you think of as a ‘typical’ Italian is probably the great-grandnephew of a ‘typical’ resident of one small village in Sicily)

and the ‘typical’ Roman you often see in movies, with tanned skin, dark eyes and curly black hair, probably wasn’t a ‘typical’ Roman at all

those traits are way more common in some areas of the South - where about 37% of the population has Greek DNA because ancient colonies

so while blond hair probably wasn’t really common (we can tell because it was greatly admired and sought after, and people generally like what they don’t have), neither were darker skin and black hair

in fact, a lot of politicians and other VIPs are described in the texts as having light eyes (light blue, green and gray) and some had blond or red hair

others died their hair blond with pigeon poop, but that’s another story

so the bottom line is - like modern inhabitants of Italy, ancient Romans were white, but in many cases you could probably tell from where their family came from, and some were ‘whiter’ than others depending on their ancestry

that said, the European past was a lot more diverse than our instinctive perception of it

there was a lot of trade going on, slaves from conquered lands, wealthy and poor people roaming about, and units of foreign-born Roman soldiers in unlikely places, so that’s something to keep in mind.

As a bonus for reading this far, here is a smiling wolf.

Pertinax

Caracalla: (UL) Vatican Museum; (UR) Met, NYC; (LL) The Severan Tondo; (LR) Naples National Archaeological Museum

Philip the Arab: (L) Vatican Museum

244–249 (died aged 45 — Killed in the Battle of Verona by Decius

Quintillus [Marcus Aurelius Claudius Quintillus]

Florianus

Carinus

Numerian

To add to the commentary above, many of the greatest men in Roman history came from provinces outside of the Italian Peninsula, but they were and have since been considered Roman (examples: the emperor Trajan was from Hispania, and Septimus Severus was born in an African province).

Later in Roman history, under Caracalla (who was born in Gaul and of mixed Berber and Syrian descent, so another Roman figure not Italian-Roman) in 212 AD all free men in the entire Roman Empire was granted citizenship. That meant that any Germanics, Africans, Latins, Hispanics, Syrian, etc. were all considered Roman! Regardless of race.

This is what encompassed the Roman Empire:

So you can imagine the intermixing that went on at the time and how the concept or “white” the way America presents it is absolutely inconsequential for the time period we’re talking about.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, Commune cities formed, autonomous republic that survived exclusively on Marine trade with Spain, Africa, and East India. Amalfi, Gaeta and Venice in the 11th century were already autonomous maritime republics. Around 1100, Genoa, Pisa and Ancona emerged as independent maritime republics too.

now, my cousins (our fathers are brothers) have instead black hairs and eyes and and a nice olive skin. we all took from our fathers (my mother has black hair and dark brown eyes, although my sister could have inherited her traits from a very old genetic line of my mother. there should be a German somewhere in her genes), which are very similar in physical features, but not colors (both my uncle and father stay a lot under the sun, but my uncle is much more brownish than my father and their hair differ in gray gradient - that’s because my father was almost a read head when he was young. uncle had the same color he passed to my cousin).

if put side by side, nobody would tell my cousin and I are actually related.