The Mortal Temples

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
thesaltofcarthage
teashoesandhair

Fresh new sitcom idea: a spinoff of Modern Family but it's 1536 and the dissolution of the monasteries is in full swing. The patriarch is a secret Catholic and is hiding this from his long suffering wife and children. The guilt is eating him alive but he puts a brave face on things and has a reputation for being a total lad, a real joker, a good-time guy. Spoiler alert: they're all secretly Catholic but hiding it from the others. The family is tearing itself apart at the seams. Secrecy lurks beneath every punchline. It's a fun-filled series of heartwarming, wacky japes, set during the reign of terror of Henry VIII.

teashoesandhair

Me: makes a post which I'm pretty pleased with, solely on a lololol level

@rubiscothegeek: just casually adds the funniest fucking thing I've ever read as a reply

a screenshot of a comment by Tumblr user rubiscothegeek which reads: three separate priests are hidden in the walls by three different family members and there's a running subplot about how they all accidentally avoid discovery by each otherALT
thesaltofcarthage

Working title Mass Appeal

antiquariansam-blog

Anonymous asked:

In your honest opinion, what does it mean to be human?

soracities answered:

image
onvelvet

“It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.” — Anne Lamott

short-blonde-andaverage

image

To Noise Making, by Hozier

mirage358

#slam that reblog button

starfoozle
grison-in-space

Disability has numerous implications. One can live a long while recognizing only some of them. In the 1950s my parents couldn’t imagine a future for me if I presented as blind. They forcefully encouraged me to do absolutely everything sighted children did, minus any acknowledgment of my difference. In the spring of 1961 my mother signed me up for the Durham, New Hampshire, Cub Scout troop and bought me a uniform and a flag. I marched in the Memorial Day parade, stepping in time to Boy Scout drummers. I held that flag straight before me and walked in a gorgeous gold mist, which was how my brand of blindness transmitted the world. I was legally blind. I saw colors and shapes.
“Who am I?” should always be answered by acknowledging physical life as much as say, knowing one’s ancestry. But in 1961 a Boy Scout parade wasn’t the place to learn about disability dignity and pedigree. The scouts’ handbook didn’t have a chapter about successful blind people.
I found it was best to not think about blunted sight—that’s how it was. And I had help with my repression. None of the grown-ups in my life admitted disability. They’d come of age in the 1940s watching newsreels. In a famous (or infamous) short produced by the March of Dimes called The Crippler unsuspecting children were abducted by polio, who lurked as a menacing shadow—infantile paralysis was a molester at the playground’s edge. My parents thought disabled kids were victims of a nearly unimaginable fate, a predatory darkness. Against this tragedy stood only human will.

Steven Kuusisto, Have Dog Will Travel (2018).

Emphasis mine. The parallels to many disabled experiences, particularly for people who are born disabled, are crystal clear--even though blindness is one of those disabilities that many of us tend to think of as an agreed-upon "real" disability that is quickly identified and accommodated today.

(Hell, Kuusisto is a glasses user, and glasses are one of the few pieces of visible accommodation he is allowed as a child--and still he is explicitly trained to be ashamed of his lack of vision and to hide it from anyone finding out. That's something of a complication for the contention that, say, myopia is not a disability because our social environment proactively accepts and provides the expectation of accommodation for myopic people. It's unclear exactly what the nature of Kuusisto's vision problems are, but contextually extreme myopia is certainly an aspect of the issue.)

disability have dog will travel kuusisto sounds very interesting ❤️
petermorwood
coldalbion
Terry Pratchett estate backs Jack Monroe’s idea for ‘Vimes Boots’ poverty index
Campaigner has used the idea drawn from Discworld novels to register the disproportionate effect price rises have on the lower paid
the Guardian

""The index, Monroe said, is named in honour of Pratchett’s creation Sam Vimes, who in the Discworld novel Men at Arms lays out the “Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness”.

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money,” wrote Pratchett. “Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”

The Pratchett estate has authorised the use of the name, tweeting its own Pratchett quote in support of Monroe’s campaign. “Sometimes it’s better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness,” wrote the late Discworld author in Men at Arms.

Rhianna Pratchett said: “My father used his anger about inequality, classism, xenophobia and bigotry to help power the moral core of his work. One of his most famous lightning-rods for this was Commander Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch - a cynical, but likable, man who attempts to better himself whilst railing against the injustices around him. Some of which he’s had a hand in perpetrating in the past.

“Vimes’s musing on how expensive it is to be poor via the cost of boots was a razor-sharp evaluation of socio-economic unfairness. And one that’s all too pertinent today, where our most vulnerable so often bear the brunt of austerity measures and are cast adrift from protection and empathy. Whilst we don’t have Vimes any more, we do have Jack and Dad would be proud to see his work used in such a way.”

llywela13

This campaign came about because the current poverty index tends to look at mid-range luxury items, the price of which is often less affected by inflation, rather than the bottom-of-the-range necessities that the poorest in society actually rely on, and which have been massively hit by inflation.

gnu terry pratchett sam vimes “boots” theory The Vines Boots Index
headspace-hotel
macleans.ca

Yes, climate change can be beaten by 2050. Here's how.

A carbon-free world can be a reality. What would that mean for our jobs, homes and lives?
thehopefuljournalist

“Is it possible to turn things around by 2050? The answer is absolutely yes,” says Kai Chan, a professor at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia.

Many scientists have been telling us how the world will look like, if we don’t act now. However, others, like Chan, are tracking what success might look like.

They are not simply day-dreamers either. They aren’t being too optimistic. They are putting together road maps for how to safely get to the planet envisioned in the 2015 Paris Agreement, where temperatures hold at 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than before we started burning fossil fuels, this article from July states.

“Three decades is enough to do a lot of important things. In the next few years—if we get started on them—they will pay dividends in the coming decades,” says Chan, the lead author of the chapter on achieving a sustainable future in a recent UN report that predicted the possible extinction of a million species.

Making these changes won’t mean years of being poor, cold and hungry before things get comfortable again, the scientists insist. They say that if we start acting seriously NOW, we stand a decent chance of transforming society without huge disruption. 

No doubt, it will take a massive switch in society’s energy use. But without us noticing, that’s already happening. Not fast enough, maybe, but it is. Solar panels and offshore wind power plummet in price.  Iceland and Paraguay have stripped the carbon from their grids, according to a new energy outlook report from Bloomberg. Europe is on track to be 90 per cent carbon-free by 2040. And Ottawa says that Canada is already at 81 per cent, thanks to hydro, nuclear, wind and solar. 

Decarbonizing the whole economy is within grasp. We can do this.

“If we have five years of really sustained efforts, making sure we reorient our businesses and our governments toward sustainability, then from that point on, this transition will seem quite seamless. Because it will just be this gradual reshaping of options,” Chan says, adding: “All these things seem very natural when the system is changing around you.”

heliophile-oxon

Hoping people with more relevant knowledge and science parsing skills than I do might comment on this …

elodieunderglass

I think it is absolutely vital that people be able to picture The Healed World. Honestly I think it’s one of the most important things we can do.

Look at how many different apocalypses people can visualise. Our brains can freely feast on unlimited scenes of scarcity, competition and fear. Everywhere we turn we can consume endless content about killing our neighbors for scraps, about hurting children, about bleak planets and extinction, and lots and lots of guns. It is easy, accessible and cheap. Our minds gobble up as much of this content as the market generates and the market gleefully generates more. We feed and feed upon a future of suffering and loss. We feast on images of brown children being hurt, unnecessarily, and say smugly that “that’s just what humanity is like.” Our brains are programmed away from the natural human responses to crises (fix it, help each other, rebuild and hope) and TOWARDS the mindsets of fictional apocalypse (cause it, turn on each other [it’s just what humans do! We’ve all seen the same stories!], collapse, fight each other for crumbs, the world is doomed anyway.)

It’s pretty unnecessary. And frankly pretty cringe. Imagine being part of some of the most prosperous, empowered, educated, connected group of humans to ever exist, and having a brain that can only picture the future as apocalypse-movie.

And where is the food of abundance, equality, beauty, hope, diversity? Where is the actual food of the future? Oh. It’s in, like, three solarpunk anthologies, huh?

Huh.

Anyway not to get all Amitav Ghosh on main but we have GOT to address this unnecessary and EMBARRASSING failure of imagination. Because we are the generation currently failing in our responsibilities as caretakers of the earth, because of this deranged inability to picture the world as being a real place, and the future being a place where people will live.

So, basically, yes, let’s just say it and start saying it regularly. The work is now and we have to do it. It isn’t impossible. Yes there is hope. Yes it can all be done. Yes there is a future for fucksake. It’s within our grasp. that is what futures are.

climatesupport

👆 Not sure if I’ve already reblogged this, but @elodieunderglass is 100% right here. We find it so easy to picture doom, but we find it so hard to picture healing.

Also, giving up on a future that is still possible means not only giving up on your own life, but the lives of your loved ones, on the poor and disadvantaged people who will face the worst impacts of the climate crisis, and giving up on nature itself.

For some people, climate disaster is already here. There are millions of people already fighting for survival. They don’t have the privilege of sitting back, giving up, and waiting for the apocalypse to come.

They don’t have the privilege of saying “Oh well, the world’s doomed anyway so why should we bother?” And neither should anyone else.

thehopefuljournalist

Okay so, when I took a free online course in Positive Psychology (highly recommend, very interesting subject) I learnt something that I’ve said here already and will now talk about again. 

People are biologically and from birth programmed to be pessimists. The professor (Martin E. P. Seligman, one of the founders of Positive Psychology) explained it with something he called “the ice age theory”, or something among those lines, and it goes like this: if people went out one day, and saw beautiful blue skies, and the sun was shining and their reaction was ‘this is such a great day, I better get some rest’, and the next day came with extreme weather (such as the ice age), they wouldn’t be ready. They wouldn’t have food stored, they wouldn’t have warm clothes, and so they wouldn’t survive. However, if they went outside on a good day and said ‘this is such a great day, tomorrow might be way worse. I should get ready for any situation’, they might survive. So this pessimistic mindset is very natural for humans and has at least some biological bases, I believe.

And I think this psychological theory somewhat explains what @climatesupport said here, that we so easily imagine the absolute worst case scenario, but find it so hard to picture what healing would look like.

thehopefuljournalist

Hey, reblogging some old articles here!

Also, what I explained here is the theory I mentioned in the Introduction post, if anyone is interested :)

seananmcguire
aprilwitching

an anecdote i think ive neglected to share with you up until this point is about this one time when h.p. lovecraft was part of a round robin exercise with a bunch of other well-regarded pulp weird fiction writers

the resulting story, “the challenge from beyond” is, frankly, not….good. like, at all. what it is, however, is HILARIOUS, particularly when conan the barbarian creator robert e. howard, taking his turn at the writing wheel directly after that other howard, slam-dunks every single generally accepted round robin rule about not contradicting things that the previous writers have already introduced/established in the story, not dramatically shifting the tone, etc. STRAIGHT IN THE GARBAGE in one of the most gloriously petty displays of trolling/ Fuck That-itis i have ever seen in this kind of game (and i mostly hung out with the creative writing + theater crowd in college, soooo)

basically you have lovecraft being lovecraft, going on and on and on, making the protagonist faint from terror a solid three times in maybe 1,500 words (just a guess there, i didn’t actually bother to count), and concluding with a HORRIFIC REVELATION:

But even this vision of delirium was not what caused George Campbell to lapse a third time into unconsciousness. It took one more thing—one final, unbearable touch—to do that. As the nameless worm advanced with its glistening box, the reclining man caught in the mirror-like surface a glimpse of what should have been his own body. Yet—horribly verifying his disordered and unfamiliar sensations—it was not his own body at all that he saw reflected in the burnished metal. It was, instead, the loathsome, pale-grey bulk of one of the great centipedes.

yup. dude turns into a grotesque giant centipede alien monster and TOTALLY LOSES IT. truly, this hellish transformation is too great a burden for his fragile human mind to comprehend, let alone bear while remaining conscious, or sane–

but wait! ENTER ROBERT E. “CONAN THE BARBARIAN” HOWARD:

From that final lap of senselessness, he emerged with a full understanding of his situation. His mind was imprisoned in the body of a frightful native of an alien planet, while, somewhere on the other side of the universe, his own body was housing the monster’s personality.
He fought down an unreasoning horror. Judged from a cosmic standpoint, why should his metamorphosis horrify him? Life and consciousness were the only realities in the universe. Form was unimportant. His present body was hideous only according to terrestrial standards. Fear and revulsion were drowned in the excitement of titanic adventure.

THE EXCITEMENT OF TITANIC ADVENTURE

talk about mood (and philosophical outlook on existence) whiplash, right??!

the best part, though, is that he KEEPS GOING ON LIKE THIS for about four more paragraphs:

What was his former body but a cloak, eventually to be cast off at death anyway? He had no sentimental illusions about the life from which he had been exiled. What had it ever given him save toil, poverty, continual frustration and repression? If this life before him offered no more, at least it offered no less. Intuition told him it offered more—much more.
With the honesty possible only when life is stripped to its naked fundamentals, he realized that he remembered with pleasure only the physical delights of his former life. But he had long ago exhausted all the physical possibilities contained in that earthly body. Earth held no new thrills. But in the possession of this new, alien body he felt promises of strange, exotic joys.

etc., etc.

…and then george-as-centipede monster goes on a STRAIGHT UP BLOODTHIRSTY RAMPAGE like some arthropodian conan and then just totally CONQUERS THE FUCK out of the ENTIRE centipede planet because why not and someone please make john darnielle write a song about this, i am begging you

pipistrellus

#……..how much metamorphosis fixit fic did rob e howard store like wine inside him

mystery-moose

Robert E. Howard had one fucking speed and that speed was “titanic adventure.”

antiquariansam-blog
hollowedskin: “ lnicol1990: “ goldwerewolf: “ headspace-hotel: “ probablyfunrpgideas: “ neolithicsheep: “ senkkeidraws: “the things i would imagine running alongside the car when i was a kid ” This is gorgeous and I need a pack of them so we could...
senkkeidraws

the things i would imagine running alongside the car when i was a kid

neolithicsheep

This is gorgeous and I need a pack of them so we could run through the woods together hunting.

probablyfunrpgideas

The Runalongs are rare in worlds without fast transportation. It seems they are brought into being when someone, bored by a journey, looks out to watch the countryside go by. They daydream of a creature that follows their path (guarding? Or hunting?) and suddenly, without fanfare, it appears.

Runalongs have little in the way of ecology, but they are known to eat other dreams. Sometimes if the one who called them is particularly lonely or afraid they will get closer and even speak in humming voices without opening their mouths. But the second you stop moving, the creatures turn and vanish behind themselves, disappearing to wherever fantasies come from.

A Runalong can also have other forms; a humanoid figure (without distinct features) is common, and these may also ride things that are supposed to be horses. If only we were better at imagining, then they might not look so terrifying.

headspace-hotel

WAIT

OTHER PEOPLE DID THIS

???????!!!

Mine were large cat-like creatures

goldwerewolf

I forget what mine were but I imagined this too! I like the name Runalongs.

lnicol1990

Please, I’m nearly 30 and I still have Runalongs join me on long, boring car journeys. They must be able to sense people who are in need of their presence, for company, for entertainment, or are just so used to them being there.

hollowedskin

when you put your hand palm down out the window and it jumps and sways in the speed, the pressure you feel, not quite solid but not quite air is the ghostly backs of the runalongs arching up for a pat.