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do flowers go down to the realm of the dead?
hilary - 35 - she/they - tired historian
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Total Solar Eclipse l April 2024 l U.S. & Canada
Cr. Deran Hall l Rami Ammoun(236) l GabeWasylko l REUTERS l KendallRust l Joshua Intini l Alfredo Juárez l KuzcoKhanda
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Given how wizards are themed around higher education, with their universities and ivory towers, I wanna see more fiction that goes into their published papers.
Like, there should be massive drama in the Wizarding world about how Fantasy Wikipedia says "There's no consensus about the origins of skydoves" when in fact, there very much is, everyone knows they were created in the first or second dragon wars, and that's uncontroversial. One single wizard at the University of Towers who thinks they're an offshoot of mermaids DOES NOT MEAN IT'S AN OPEN ISSUE.
Papers that are rebuttals to other magical discoveries. Like, look, that spell just won't work, and you can't call it a "theoretical exercise" just to cover up the fact that you've not been able to cast it. You can't combine Ichthyomancy with completely unrelated elemental summonings, that's just not how magic works, in all due respect.
Thesis defense would be significantly scarier when all your reviewers can cast Everburning Fireball on your ass.
Learning Theoretical Evocation from a hungover lizardman TA at 8am, because the professor for this course has been off on the Elemental Plane of Circles for half the semester trying to finish her paper on how Centaurs predate horses rather than the other way around.
Speaking of which, the life of a wizard graduate student... You keep getting called to go on "quests" which are just overgrown research expeditions to help out some professor's project. You spent nearly a month in that damp castle capturing all the spinfrogs you could find, all to help your professor's project on the possibilities of concentrated soul essences. To this day, you still get dizzy whenever you see battlements, let alone a donjon.
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I realize it has been approximately 800 years and I am sorry for that (though I am very excited about the new novel!), but I am pleased to report that I am finally working on chapter 10 of the unknown and static strange (Dreamling/The Sandman) and chapter 9 of in the land of snow and shadow (Fivan/Shadow and Bone season 3). The latter is closer to completion and might be posted this weekend, but yes. Maybe the fic muse will (slowly) return to me. We will see.
#hilary for ts#dreamling#the unknown and static strange#fivan#in the land of snow and shadow#i have not been on here much for the last week or so and i also have a bunch of asks etc#i can't promise that i will have the willpower to answer them#(trying to take a break from politics because /waves hand/ you know. The Horrors)#but i can at least present you with long overdue fic chapters#like a cat carrying a dead mouse#so yes
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the scariest thing about old tv isnt really the racism or the sexisim because you kinda go in braced for that it's all the scenes where suddenly an actress is holding a lion cub or a chimpanzee is in the same room as a toddler, or suddenly theres a lion, or there's a chimpanzee again but it's driving a car, or holding a lighter, or holding fireworks. You just kind of watch in horror as over and over an actress performs with only 1960s tv film shootings best animal handling between her and the opening to Nope.
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downside: going to have to include a picture of the Giza pyramids in the slides for the lecture
upside: i get to give people a crash course in why perspective matters in two frames, because
followed by
is such a funny sequence
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These Tiled Steps In San Francisco Glow At Night From The Moonlight
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I still think that my favorite urban legend/folklore fact is that there are certain areas in New Orleans where you cannot get a taxi late at night not because it isn’t safe, but because taxi companies have had recurring problems of picking up ghosts in those areas who are not aware that they are dead and disappearing from the cab before reaching the destination and therefore stiffing the driver on the fare causing a loss for the company.
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REPOST : Roman stylus 70AD, in comon vanacular translates into “i went into the city and all i bought you was this lousy pen” , link and full translation in the comments [640 x 320]
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In other news, I have also recently finished writing The Empire of Bones, the novel based loosely on my fic The Key of Solomon. I am very excited to figure out how I'm going to share this with y'all (whether I really want to bother trying to go the tradpub route or just slap the fucker up on Amazon/Lulu) because this is a big fat fantasy novel filled chock full with all the things I love:
Complex and detailed historically-inspired settings
Lots of political and magical intrigue
Thematic explorations of war, slavery, empire, history, memory, magic, power, religion, and destiny
Diverse and flawed characters
Extremely sassy djinni (if you've read Bartimaeus by Jonathan Stroud, then you know)
IDIOT GAYS. Like, we've got all kinds of moronic homosexuals for your reading pleasure. I cannot stress enough how many queers there are and how many of them are very, very stupid. We have the good old traditional Gay Garbage Men. We have arranged-marriage lesbians. We have polyamorous, trans and nonbinary characters, often in positions of power! We've got 'em all! Many of them cannot use their words and avoidable mishaps ensue.
...and a lot more, so, yes, hang onto your butts. Right now, @silverbirching is going to read the full draft and then we'll figure out what next. But I have worked hard on this novel for almost a year (there may be some fic updates now that I've got this done, we'll see) and I am very excited to get it to you once it's ready. Ahem.
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concept!!! "there's only one bed" fic but set in here
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Unfortunately, I have once again gone ahead and applied to graduate school.
#hilary for ts#school stuff#yes it is the second MA i was kicking around a while back#yes i had to choose between the two programs that both wanted me#yes i will be working full time in one college of the university and taking classes part time in another one#don't look at me i have nothing to say for myself
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BBC: The ancient remains of Great Zimbabwe
The ancient city of Great Zimbabwe was an engineering wonder. But archaeologists credited it to Phoenicians, Babylonians, Arabians – anyone but the Africans who actually built it.
W
Walking up to the towering walls of Great Zimbabwe was a humbling experience. The closer I got, the more they dwarfed me – and yet, there was something inviting about the archaeological site. It didn't feel like an abandoned fortress or castle that one might see in Europe: Great Zimbabwe was a place where people lived and worked, a place where they came to worship – and still do. It felt alive.
Great Zimbabwe is the name of the extensive stone remains of an ancient city built between 1100 and 1450 CE near modern-day Masvingo, Zimbabwe. Believed to be the work of the Shona (who today make up the majority of Zimbabwe's population) and possibly other societies that were migrating back and forth across the area, the city was large and powerful, housing a population comparable to London at that time – somewhere around 20,000 people during its peak. Great Zimbabwe was part of a sophisticated trade network (Arab, Indian and Chinese trade goods were all found at the site), and its architectural design was astounding: made of enormous, mortarless stone walls and towers, most of which are still standing.
However, for close to a century, European colonisers of the late-19th and early-20th Centuries attributed the construction to outsiders and explorers, rather than to the Africans themselves.
Indeed, the author of the first written European record of Great Zimbabwe seemed to be staggered by the very idea that it could have been built at all. Portuguese explorer Joao de Barros wrote in 1552 that, "There is masonry within and without, built of stones of a marvellous size, and there appears to be no mortar joining them."
Built between 1100 and 1450 CE, Great Zimbabwe was large and powerful (Credit: evenfh/Getty Images)
In the Shona language, zimbabwe translates approximately to "stone house", and because of the site's size and scope, it became known as Great Zimbabwe. Moreover, it was not the only such "Zimbabwe": there are remains of approximately 200 smaller settlements or trading posts spread across the region, from the Kalahari Desert in Namibia to Mozambique.
According to Munyaradzi Manyanga, a professor of archaeology and cultural heritage at Great Zimbabwe University, the position of Great Zimbabwe among these settlements has been widely debated. Some people have speculated that it was a capital city of a very large state, but to Manyanga, that seems unlikely. "Such a state would have been too large. One wouldn't have been able to manage that kind of extent and size. So most of the interpretations talk of these as having been influenced by Great Zimbabwe." He added that the Kingdom of Zimbabwe is considered to be made up of Great Zimbabwe and the smaller settlements located closer to it.
The walls, which are made of granite, are stacked precisely and do not use any mortar to hold them in place (Credit: 2630ben/Getty Images)
The walls, which are made of granite, are stacked precisely and do not use any mortar to hold them in place. "The quarrying of the granite, taking advantage of natural processes of weathering and the shaping of it into regular blocks was a major engineering undertaking by these pre-colonial communities," Manyganga said. Iron metallurgy was needed to make the tools required to cut the blocks; it was also needed to make trade goods subsequently found at the site. All of this points to a highly organised and technologically advanced society.
The population of Great Zimbabwe began to decline in the mid-15th Century as the Kingdom of Zimbabwe weakened (possible theories for the decline include a drop in mining output, overgrazing by cattle, and depleted resources), but the site itself was not abandoned. Manyganga explained that it was regularly visited by different Shona groups for spiritual reasons right up until colonisation by the British in the late 19th Century.
Europeans of the late-19th and early-20th Centuries attributed the construction to outsiders and explorers, rather than to the Africans (Credit: Agostini/Getty Images)
A decade later, in a speech to the Royal Geographic Society, British journalist Richard N Hall supported Bent's perspective after visiting the site himself. He talked about the artistic value of soapstone carvings that had been unearthed and the "marvellous cleverness" of a gold-mining operation that spanned hundreds of mines, before concluding that "it is quite a moral certainty that even the cruder methods of [these sciences'] application were imported from the Near East, and did not originate in South-East Africa." Instead, he and his colleagues held that Phoenicians, Arabians or Babylonians created the city.
According to Manyanga, "They wanted to use [this explanation] as a moral justification for colonising Zimbabwe. If there was this long-lost civilisation in this part of the world, there was nothing wrong with colonialism because they were resuscitating this old kingdom."
However, a few archaeologists of the time countered that the site was not nearly old enough to be from Biblical times. "The then-colonial government suppressed these views, and the official narrative in public media and museums was that Great Zimbabwe was of foreign origins," said Manyanga. This version of history was upheld through the 1960s and 1970s by the white-minority government of the colony. Only in 1980, when Zimbabwe achieved independence, could the new leaders finally affirm that the site was built by their own ancestors. During the 1960s, black nationalists had even settled on Zimbabwe as the name for the country they hoped to lead to freedom, harkening back to Great Zimbabwe.
Since 1980, local archaeological research has been slow to resume and has dealt largely with maintenance and repair. Research has instead focused on the satellite sites, in part because they were less disturbed by early excavations. Manyanga emphasised that scholarly understanding of Great Zimbabwe has shifted. "Eurocentric models interpreted the site as though you were looking at a castle in Europe. What has come to light from recent work is that Great Zimbabwe was built over a long period of time; it was not built once and then occupied, but grew over time. Even the walling came at a later stage because earlier on there were farming communities at Great Zimbabwe."
Today, the great ancient city remains just as important for Zimbabweans. Shona villages are located nearby, and many residents work to maintain the site. A religious centre is close by too, and the site still attracts worshippers who practice traditional Shona faiths.
"It was Africans who created this," said writer Marangwanda. "And over a millennium later it's still standing. It's a testament to who we are."
BBC Travel's Lost Civilisations delves into little-known facts about past worlds, dispelling any false myths and narratives that have previously surrounded them.
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I found the greatest reaction set:
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