i kinda hate every mdzs fix-it fic because theyre all like “well actually everyone was willing to help wwx he was just too oblivious or prideful or stupid to notice” LIKE?????

"I'm the voice in the wheels below... I'm the breeze that takes you to and fro... I'm your friend, so worry not as foe... What does it look like? I ' M A F U C K I N G B I C Y C L E !"

So this is my own sort of Spore-take on the Ten Speed of God's Blood & Burial from the Amory Wars' Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV arc.

While he's technically more or a unicycle in this depiction, as well as now also having arms, I still think my interpretation largely retains the same vibe as the original (pictured down below)

jiang siblings: (make sure their brother is fed)

My least favourite thing about Bioshock Infinite is the argument of, "Its good and you're just not smart enough to understand." there's a difference between complexity while maintaining excellence and convolution while creating mediocrity and bioshock infinite falls into the latter.

What were you going for here exactly Ken?

Tangled but violent? religion and politics? racism? theoretical physics? the concept people can't change? the death of hope?

its like you put a bunch of fruits, vegetables, and spices into a blender and presented that as a finished smoothie. Yes you can make some good smoothies out of those ingredients but if you combine all of them together its going to be a fucking mess.

And thats what bioshock infinite is, a fucking mess.

Title: Falling (wangxian)

Wei Wuxian has always been falling alone that he got used to it─doesn't expect someone to catch him nor for someone to lend a hand to stop him from falling─so he perseveres for his own sake.

But now, Lan Wangji was there, standing with his arms outstretched in front of him, answering a firm "mn" when asked if he would catch Wei Wuxian and it made his heart clenched painfully in his chest, almost choking him with how sincere it was.

Once upon a time, during a cold summer night, there was someone who was willing to catch him but that person has long been outside his reach. Shijie had given him warmth but she brought it with her when she passed.

When he fell in the Burial Mounds, he felt the antagonizing pain of his bones breaking but despite that, he had deliriously imagined the feeling of someone wrapping their arms around him─foolishly hoping to feel that warmth and safety.

In the Nightless City, there had been someone who was willing to wrap their hands on him, trying to stop him from falling to his doom. Although he was deep in his grief, he had felt so cared for however fleeting it was. At least, there had been someone who tried.

Wei Wuxian got used to falling alone but the fear still lingers nevertheless. He was afraid to fall alone yet again, without someone's arms wrapping around him─to fall alone and wake up with nothing but darkness and suffocating resentment.

Years have passed by and yet this lingering fear didn't change a bit.

But Lan Wangji is good─so good and so righteous that people both respect and hate him. Lan Wangji who dared scold him when everyone praised him to the heavens, the same Lan Wangji that he claimed to be his soulmate in his past life. So, putting aside his fear, Wei Wuxian let himself fall─waiting for the moment when the impact to the ground would hurt him yet again but the pain never came.

When Wei Wuxian opened his eyes, Lan Wangji's golden eyes stared right back at him.

Lan Wangji caught him and Wei Wuxian finally let himself smile.

a little more information regarding the maui wildfires:

medical workers on the ground are describing finding hundreds of bodies. the current death toll in the media is, unfortunately, only a fraction of the reality

hospital workers are describing injuries and trauma as if survivors had come out of a warzone

thousands are still missing

an apartment complex for the elderly was lost. not everyone could get out. people were saying goodbye to loved ones over the phone

people who did get out of lahaina were leaving with ashes covering their faces and nothing but the clothes on their backs. people are losing everything.

hotels are still operating. hotels are still operating. they are not the ones offering shelters or housing or food. even bowling alleys are offering shelter, but hotels have the audacity to build on burial sites but not open their doors to local families who have lost everything.

donate to maui united way, the maui food bank, mutual aid, and maui humane society

I'm trying to come up with something clever to say here but I feel like I've been hit by a truck. In a good way. I never thought anything like this would pass in the Midwest, not even in a blue state like IL, because it's simply not the kind of thing anybody campaigns on or even talks about at the gubernatorial level.

This is honestly the perfect legal addendum to NAGPRA, and I'm thrilled it's at the state level. This type of legislation would be way too complex at the federal level, but the individual state responsibilities are manageable, and more importantly, doable.

Here's some of the highlights of what the law does:

It is now the state's responsibility to help return ancestral remains, funerary objects and other important cultural items to tribal nations

The state must follow the lead of tribal nations throughout the repatriation process.

Money must be allocated as part of the state Repatriation and Reinterment Fund to help with the costs of reburial, tribal consultation and the repair of any damage to burial sites, remains or sacred items.

Criminal penalties for the looting and desecration of gravesites are increased, and the law adds a ban on profiteering from human remains and funerary objects through their sale, purchase or exhibition.

Tribal nations must be consulted as soon as possible when Indigenous gravesites are unintentionally disturbed or unearthed — such as during construction projects. (We already had kind of a version of this, but it wasn't strong enough.)

IDNR must set aside and maintain land solely for the reburial of repatriated Native American ancestors and their belongings, as tribal nations have pointed to the lack of protected places for reburial in Illinois as among the highest barriers to repatriation.

Institutions that display human remains that are Native American and any items that were originally buried with those individuals (funerary items) cannot charge admission. You want to display looted grave goods? No money for you. (This is specifically targeting the Dickinson Mounds Museum, which is... well, it started as a guy's private display of Native American skeletons he personally looted. The state took it over in the 90s, but they didn't rebury any of the 230~ human skeletons.)

My favorite comment is this: When asked about what he would say to museums that may push back against the law, Illinois State Rep. Mark L. Walker said: “Too bad.”

This is from 2019. It was a major find and it was voted one of the top ten finds in 2019 and a game changer in the world of archaeology. The tomb was amazingly preserved, giving archaeologists a lot of information about the tomb owner.

Archaeologists Find a Beautiful 3,000-Year-Old Octagonal Sword in Germany

A rare Bronze Age sword unearthed from a burial site in Germany is in such good condition that it still glimmers.

According to a statement the Bavarian State Office for Monument Protection released on Wednesday, the weapon was discovered in the town of Nördlingen in Bavaria, and may date to the 14th century B.C.

"Last week, archaeologists made a very special find during excavations in Nördlingen: a bronze sword that is over 3,000 years old and is so extraordinarily well preserved that it almost still shines. It is a representative of the bronze full-hilt swords, whose octagonal hilt is made entirely of bronze (octagonal sword type)," a translation of the statement reads.

Its octagonal shape make it a rare find, as only the most skilled blacksmiths were capable of making these types of swords—known as Achtkantschwert in German—that required precise casting and decoration.

"The production of octagonal swords is complex because the handle is cast over the blade (so-called overlay casting). The decoration is made with an inlay and using hallmarks. While there are two real rivets, another pair of rivets are only implied," the statement said.

These rare and specialized swords were only made in two locations in Germany at the time, one in the north, one in the south, although the exact location of this sword's origin could not be confirmed.

This find is especially unusual considering that most burial mounds in the area of Germany where the sword was discovered have been opened and looted in the past.

"Sword finds from this period are rare and come either from burial mounds that were deliberately opened in the 19th century or as single, presumed sacrificial finds," the statement said.

It is unclear if this octagonal sword was ever used in combat, or if it was a ceremonial blade.

However, archaeologists noted that while the blade had no signs of wear in battle, its center of gravity made it suitable for use as a real weapon, and it was capable of being used to slash opponents.

The grave in which the sword was found contained the remains of a man, a woman and a child.

"It is not yet clear whether the persons were related or what the relationship between them was," the statement explained.

Despite these questions, the sword marks an exciting find for the archaeologists and for Germany.

"The sword and the burial still have to be examined further so that our archaeologists can classify this find more precisely. But it can already be said that its condition is exceptional. A find like this is very rare," Mathias Pfeil, head of the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments, said in the statement.

like i get why people don’t like wq/jc blah blah blah disclaimer or whatever. but maybe they just don’t get them like i do.

This Saint Patrick's Day, don't forget the reason for the season. Celebrate like St. Patrick would have wanted:

Speak Welsh.

Turn your enemies into foxes

Call out your local politicians

Set a bonfire, piss off the cops

Curse your enemies' fields to become barren marshes, unfit for farmland.

Cause an earthquake

Write all your letters in Latin

Despite this, claim that your Latin is bad.

Become a key part of Uí Néill propaganda.

Yeet your enemies into the sky so that they freeze to death.

Adopt a child who refuses to leave you alone.

Bargain with an angel to be allowed to judge the souls of the Irish on Judgement Day

Remind your local surviving members of the Fianna that all their friends are dead and in Hell.

Have two oxen decide your burial place

Develop a long and complex relationship with St. Brigit in the folk tradition, despite neither of you being contemporaries.

Refuse to suck the nipples of the pirates who you are trying to convince to take you back to Britain.

Disguise yourself as a deer

Fight against manmade climate change

Be accused by your former friend of unspecified charges that might or might not have involved gay sex and write a long self-justifying letter about your tragic backstory.

Led by renowned palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger, researchers said they discovered several specimens of Homo naledi – a tree-climbing, Stone Age hominid – buried about 30 meters (100 feet) underground in a cave system within the Cradle of Humankind, a UNESCO world heritage site near Johannesburg.​ "These are the most ancient interments yet recorded in the hominin record, earlier than evidence of Homo sapiens interments by at least 100,000 years," the scientists wrote in a series of yet to be peer-reviewed and preprint papers to be published in eLife.​ The findings challenge the current understanding of human evolution, as it is normally held that the development of bigger brains allowed for the performing of complex, "meaning-making" activities such as burying the dead.​ The oldest burials previously unearthed, found in the Middle East and Africa, contained the remains of Homo sapiens – and were around 100,000 years old.​

Continue Reading

How I found you was, someone on Tumblr mentioned your Hades LP to the tune of “this guy went into this long rant about how you can’t put modern sexuality labels onto ancient people, yadda yadda yadda, and then he wrapped it up with ‘That said, Achilles was extremely gay’” and I looked you up because I decided I wanted that energy in my life. It was a good choice.

Historian Brain: applying modern labels and conceptions of gender and sexuality to people from ancient history is fraught and problematic. It imposes a modern lens on the past which obscures the true complexity of their identities and the complex ways in which people's emotional and sexual selves have had to navigate culture through the ages.

Bring Achilles forward in time to the modern day and we don't even know if he would identify as a man, much less with any of our categorizations of sexual and romantic attraction. Gender and sexuality are labels we apply to complex human experiences and those labels are always to one extent or another socially negotiated and unavoidably reductive. They must be refined and re-invented continuously to reflect our reality, and that process works backwards in time as well.

The existence of queerness in history should be explored and indeed highlighted, because history writing suffers from a long tendency of systemic queer erasure, but that spotlight should emphasize the historical complexity and fluidity of our identities. It is as problematic and inaccurate to label Achilles gay as it would be to call him a libertarian or hold him up as a model of masculinity in a modern context. Such inaccuracies should be avoided and critiqued appropriately in scholarly writing. Our past deserves to be understood in terms as nuanced and complicated as our present.

Person brain: they mixed their ashes in their fucking burial urns, that is the gayest thing I have ever heard in my fucking life

A system of ancient ceramic water pipes, the oldest ever unearthed in China, shows that neolithic people were capable of complex engineering feats without the need for a centralized state authority, finds a new study by University College London researchers. In a study published in Nature Water, the archaeological team describe a network of ceramic water pipes and drainage ditches at the Chinese walled site of Pingliangtai dating back 4,000 years to a time known as the Longshan period. The network shows cooperation among the community to build and maintain the drainage system, though no evidence of a centralized power or authority. Dr. Yijie Zhuang (UCL Institute of Archaeology), senior and corresponding author on the paper, said, "The discovery of this ceramic water pipe network is remarkable because the people of Pingliangtai were able to build and maintain this advanced water management system with stone age tools and without the organization of a central power structure. This system would have required a significant level of community-wide planning and coordination, and it was all done communally." The ceramic water pipes make up a drainage system which is the oldest complete system ever discovered in China. Made by interconnecting individual segments, the water pipes run along roads and walls to divert rainwater and show an advanced level of central planning at the neolithic site. What's surprising to researchers is that the settlement of Pingliangtai shows little evidence of social hierarchy. Its houses were uniformly small and show no signs of social stratification or significant inequality among the population. Excavations at the town's cemetery likewise found no evidence of a social hierarchy in burials, a marked difference from excavations at other nearby towns of the same era. But, despite the apparent lack of a centralized authority, the town's population came together and undertook the careful coordination needed to produce the ceramic pipes, plan their layout, install and maintain them, a project which likely took a great deal of effort from much of the community. The level of complexity associated with these pipes refutes an earlier understanding in archaeological fields that holds that only a centralized state power with governing elites would be able to muster the organization and resources to build a complex water management system. While other ancient societies with advanced water systems tended to have a stronger, more centralized governance, or even despotism, Pingliangtai demonstrates that was not always needed, and more egalitarian and communal societies were capable of these kinds of engineering feats as well.

(HUGE rdr2 spoilers)

do you ever think about the process of charles burying arthur? at first i didn't think about it much but then i saw people talking about it more and now im just in pain

charles says that he buried arthur after 'word got up to him up north.' how long would that take? weeks, probably. then he'd have to actually locate arthur's body—he obviously found grimshaw and buried her first, as she died at beaver hollow. assuming that the pinkerton's left arthur's body where he died, charles likely would've had to find arthur's body using weeks-old tracks. he'd find arthur's horse first. did he bury the horse too? i don't think he would purely for logistics reasons, but i do think he would've had a moment of silence or something. he knew how much arthur cared for his horse(s). he'd find arthur's body and put him on taima (which is a parallel to the beginning of the game—taima is the first and last horse that carries arthur). he'd try to find a fitting burial place. how long would he spend looking? how long was he traveling with arthur's rotting corpse? how could he stand to even be around it, the body of one of his closest friends?

but he found a place. a place with a good view of the natural world. he carved out a grave marker that's more complex than any other we've seen made for the fallen gang members. he carved a quote that he felt described arthur at his core, even if arthur never saw himself that way and wasn't even a religious man to begin with (seeing as it is a quote from the bible). he planted flowers because he knew arthur had a deep appreciation for nature. how long did he spend making that grave? how long did he sit there afterwards? was he the calm, collected man we know him to be or was he angry or upset or heartbroken?

i wish they'd gotten a happy ending together. i wish they'd had more time.

Immediate international action must be taken to investigate the hundreds of mass and random graves in the Gaza Strip containing the bodies of thousands of Palestinian victims since the start of Israel’s genocide, ongoing since 7 October 2023. Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor field teams have closely observed the recovery of hundreds of dead bodies from these mass graves, some of which were found in the courtyards of different Gaza Strip hospitals. The significant number of graves and bodies is concerning and calls for rapid international action, which should include the immediate creation of an independent international investigation committee to look into the circumstances surrounding the creation of these graves and the deaths of the victims buried in them. This is especially important given that a large number of the victims were directly subjected to premeditated murder and arbitrary and extrajudicial executions while handcuffed. A technical committee of experts is needed to investigate the burial circumstances and determine the cause of death of the victims that have been recovered. Additionally, a system for future identification ofdeceased victims’ identities must be developed.

The Euro-Med Monitor field teams previously documented the recovery of dozens of bodies from the mass graves in Al-Shifa Medical Complex’s courtyards, belonging to handcuffed victims, otherindividuals who were wounded but not provided withmedical care, and those who were executed despite their health conditions. The victims’ decomposing bodies were found in several places, with some having been run over by Israeli bulldozers which left their bodies torn into pieces. The presence of urinary catheters or splints, whichwere found to be still attached to some of the dead patients’ bodies during the exhumation process, as well as medical files that were buried with them in Al-Shifa Medical Complex, confirm the execution of ill and injured people. Due to the extended period of time in which the bodies were left in the mass graves—as Israeli forces had impeded their recovery for the past few months—most of the bodies were in a state of decomposition when recovered. Some of the corpses had also evidently been mauled by cats and dogs. Dr Moatasem Saeed Salah, a member of the Ministry of Health’s emergency committee, told Euro-MedMonitor that after the withdrawal of Israeli forces, 30 bodies were found to have been buried in two makeshift cemeteries in Al-Shifa Medical Complexduring the Israeli siege of the medical facility. One of these cemeteries was in front of the reception and emergency department, and the second was in front of the industrial department. Salah said that only 14 of the victims had been successfully identified, with the rest being patients or injured individuals who had been receiving treatment in the hospital.