earhartsplane

Latest Posts by earhartsplane

I was wondering who would be the new Michael.

my initial design for Heinrich Unheimlich

Today's bird is this white breasted nuthatch!

Above image is a pride flag with every color band represented by a NASA image. White is Earth clouds, pink is aurora, blue is the Sun in a specific wavelength, brown is Jupiter clouds, black is the Hubble deep field, red is the top of sprites, orange is a Mars crater, yellow is the surface of Io, green is a lake with algae, blue is Neptune, and purple is the Crab Nebula in a specific wavelength.

shout out to all the christians on radio stations who are going to play a very jewish song about kinky breakup sex as a misguided homage to the now-dead pope today. leonard cohen's ghost is shaking his head at you and so am i

i think the thing about intracommunity conflict over who can 'claim' certain queer figures from the ancient world (e.g., was sappho a lesbian or bisexual, was iphis a lesbian or a trans man) is that it basically never tells us anything interesting or new about the ancient material and only ever becomes an opportunity for ppl to show their worst, most vitriolic assumptions about the experiences of other queer people today.

i think this happens bc often these inquiries come from a place of wanting to see one's own identity and experience reflected exactly back in ancient material, which i don't think is harmful on it's own, although it's often a little boring because it limits our field of vision for seeing how ancient gender and sexuality could be queer in ways that don't immediately register to us -- when norms around gender and sexuality are different (which they unarguably were in many, many ways), the experiences that fall outside of those norms are also different. but this way of approaching queer history gets really nasty when it couples with a view of contemporary gender and sexuality that is, well, bogged down by any number of issues: an excessive attachment to identity as ontology ("this category terminology reflects perfectly who everybody is inherently inside"); a perception of privilege and oppression as zero-sum (aka the pokemon typing theory of structural violence); a watered down understanding of what intersectionality means (thinking only about individuals who occupy multiple marginalized positionalities rather than considering how multiple marginalizations overlap or are linked).

all of this has no effect on sappho (dead) or iphis (fictional), but it does have an effect on the queer people today who get caught in the crosshairs when ancient figures are used as cudgels and mouthpieces to lend historical authority to contemporary disputes. when really it seems like the most historiographically responsible answer to "was [ancient figure] a [queer interpretation a] or [queer interpretation b]" is "yes. and no. and original historical context matters. and the way that figure has been interpreted outside of their original historical context also matters. and that original historical context usually can't be completely reconstructed. and also we don't need the certainty of complete reconstruction to draw connections. and also ancient queerness looks a lot different than we expect. and also modern queerness looks a lot different than we expect."

I cannot express how disappointed I am in the fact that the link to [Elliot, 2025] doesn't work. And that the paper was an April's Fool. Elliot please share the joke with me I want to know what's the Elamo-Minoan hypothesis.

University really is about looking at the worst pdf known to man huh

me normally: i'm not personally a huge fan of modern art

me around right wingers: I love modern art sooooo much and I think there should be litter boxes in schools also

If you are an avid Discworld reader, you remember that the premise of Jingo is the sudden appearance of an island in the middle of the sea.

Say hello to Graham Island, a real thing that happened in the 19th century. An island rose up in the Mediterranean, stayed there just long enough to be claimed by England, Spain, Sicily and France, then sank back. The whole thing lasted less than six months.

hey say something nice to me

I was recently reminded of this and it's just as funny now as it was then.

My cartoon for this week's New Scientist

Sam plz,,, you're so close,,, just one coworker away from starting shit,,,

we need more pathetic female characters written by authors who don't hate women

it is so funny to me how i started learning english on my own age 10 because the manga i was reading was turning so so so bad i went to fan content to cope with how shit it was. and 15 years later this pays off as my boss tells me i'm an essential asset in the team as the only fluent english-speaker.

I miss when everyone on my dash listened to Welcome to Night Vale so there’s be a good chance that on any ole day someone would reblog a quote that would grab me by the throat and forcibly ascend me to a higher plane where I understood myself and the universe better and with more kindness but also a little spook

fellow goth transmacs do you ever read monstrous regiment, 31st novel in the discworld series by the late sir terry pratchett, and become consumed by thoughts of renaming yourself "maladict" every waking moment since putting the book down

that moment when you’re reading a history book and get jumpscared by an eerily familiar name from Discworld. pterry strikes again

context: Wynkyn de Worde (along with William Caxton) first popularized the printing press in England

BOOK: How To Be A Tudor by Ruth Goodman (pg 13)

the thing about time loop jokes is, sure, they may be repetitive, but they never get old

I’m afraid I’ve changed my mind about sleep. I don’t think it’s such a terrible thing. In fact, I think we could do with a little more of it. And I’m not so sure I’m willing to be a sacrifice after all. Because in the soft and silent space between death and dreaming, I have glimpsed a better gospel, and I have witnessed the birth of a superior god. And in a thousand tongues I whisper its glad hosanna: sleep. You’ve done enough. Your work is done. Sleep. Never wake. Sleep.

— Chapter 13: So Let Me Dwell Eternal.

Franchouillarderie might be useful to the American scientists who are planning on fleeing to France ...

If you were to talk about Concorde, would you do it on an episode of Britainology or Well There's Your Problem?

Britainology? Britainology?! Not unless it was a 50-50 shared episode with, like, Franchouillarderie, the French equivalent of Britainology

Never kill yourself

How can anyone hate Junji Ito 

While I generally agree, I am going to go against type and share one thing that did always bug me about the Discworld: a lot of the ordinary protagonists turn out to be scions of important families. Vimes is first introduced as an alcoholic cop, but by Feet of Clay he's the descendant of the man who led the revolution against monarchy and killed the last king. Angua is an "ordinary" werewolf in Men at Arms but the daughter of one of the three most important families in Uberwald by The Fifth Elephant. Even the Weatherwax family is several times referred to as one with a lot of innate power (I am excluding Carrot from this because the fact that he is The One True King was always the joke).

It doesn't mean that there aren't characters who are, in fact, common folks. Or that these changes aren't very interesting directions for the characters. But it's definitely a pattern.

I think that the real reason that Terry Pratchett is my favourite fantasy writer is that he’s the only one who really centres working people in his stories. I mean, Game of Thrones is almost entirely about the antics of rival aristocrats; Harry Potter is heir to two family fortunes and the subject of a prophecy and goes to an elite boarding school; even the Hobbits (save Sam) in The Lord of the Rings are minor gentry. Meanwhile, who are the main protagonists in Discworld? A recovering-alcoholic cop; an old peasant woman who lives in a cottage; a conman who was forced to take over the post-office. Pratchett writes entire novels about classes of people that other writers treat as background characters. He’s not condescending in his depictions; he’s willing to show enlisted soldiers as people, rather than arrow-fodder; and he’s aware that even ‘simple peasants’ know detailed information about things that wizards and knights can’t be arsed to care about; that everything about the world takes a hell of a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes and that most people never see, And he makes sure that you know this, too.

would be fun if for once characters in a scifi story landed on a planet and it was like desert or whatever and theyre like ooh... a desert world.... and the people who live there are like what? no? this is just a desert. planets are very big. they have multiple biomes