Something I’ve noticed is that when people talk about history there’s often a tendency to try and homogenize the beliefs and ideologies of a given time period. For example when people talk about homosexuality and Rome you often either get some virile purely heterosexual image or sometimes you get people advancing the idea of free-form sexuality being greatly tolerated but like its not really all or nothing. There were Romans that were very openly interested in homosexual sex and at the same time you had Romans who considered those types to be degenerates that undermine civilized morality.
Basically there’s often this tendency to try and turn any social context that isnt the “present” (or rather, is “familiar”, since this same thing happens when people talk about “other” cultures) into something that for any given topic has one single overriding attribute and if there’s “exceptions” well then they should be considered just “exceptions” rather than let the image of a homogenous society be challenged. The “culture of a people” oftentimes oftentimes refers less a series of unifying predicates and more rather the arenas where tension and social conflict emerges.
I wish I could recall her name but I once came across a post
by a novelist who’d started out as a history professor, got tired of trying to
explain that medieval people weren’t all some kind of Church-driven hive-mind,
and decided it was easier to convey the different viewpoints that existed at
the time by writing Dialogues.
Horse names: Infinite Sleep, Can Do Without Moving, Thirty Giant Children, The Void Is Among The Spirit Realm, Aaaaaaaaaawesome Man, Cloud Computing
Years ago I overheard some people looking over a racing form and an old guy was yelling about one of the names: “’Mobile Unit?’ It damn well better be a mobile unit, it’s a goddamn horse!”
Bragi? He’s a son of Odin, and the god of music and poetry.
And I’m laughing my absolute ass off that your aunt kept that a secret until she died, and feel like an ass for laughing. I’m sorry for your loss, but yeah, your grand-aunt was a heathen, and I may have to light a candle for her, because damn.
Oh. As for the apples…his wife is Idunna, who tends the golden apples that grant the gods ageless immortality.
Your grand-aunt was hella pagan.
I still cannot get over this. This woman fooled her entire family AND the people at her church into thinking that she was devoutly Catholic for who knows how many years, all while writing poetry to the ancient Norse god of skalds and his wife who she worshiped in the privacy of her own home.
Meanwhile, I almost out myself as heathen approximately every 10 seconds if I have to sit through even one (1) Christian service for a wedding or a funeral or whatever.
What a fucking legend.
In a way this makes me sad knowing she could never come out about her religion but man is Systlin right, she is a legend.
And now she has become a story, a poem unto herself, and that just seems all the more befitting of a devotee of Bragi.
I love them so much because they’re about as sharp as a baseball and their anatomy is ridiculous to the point of them literally being classified as plankton for years because they just sort of get blown around by the ocean and look confused, but because they lay more eggs than ANY OTHER VERTEBRATE IN EXISTENCE, evolution can’t stop them
Why is no big predator coming and gnawing on them?
Their biggest defense is that they’re massive and have super tough skin, but they do get hunted by sharks or sea lions sometimes and they just sort of float there like ‘oh bother’ as it happens
Even funnier, because they eat nothing but jellyfish they’re really low in nutritional value anyway, so they basically survive by being not worth eating because they’re like a big floating rice cracker wrapped in leather.
So basically the only reason natural selection hasn’t taken care if them is because they are the most useless fish
yes, they’ve perfected uselessness to the point of being unstoppable
I would like to thank this sudden, torrential rainstorm for its role in driving a pack of terrible Orff-Schulwerk recorder players away from my window, back indoors, and out of earshot. I’m four stories up, and yet I felt like I was sitting in the front row of an elementary school concert.
Mooncustafer 