Genuinely being a single woman in my thirties, living alone, is such a mixed blessing sometimes. I do love my house and when I'm here I literally never want to leave. But on the other hand, I do get tired of leaving to go hang out with people, even though I love seeing them. Especially because I have such a great group of friends but they live all over the place, geographically, and therefore most of them don't know each other. And I actually really love hosting? But I never have people in my house because logistically it's always more practical for me to go to them than vice versa.

But sometimes I buy new old dishes and wanna just have a little fancy wizard party, but all my guests are far away. Please may I have the teleport spell. Or a high-speed commuter rail system.

nothing will ever be as funny as drawfee being like “we gotta stop being so insular in our videos, we want those to appeal to a wider audience” and then their latest episode has a 10 minute improv comedy scene set at a dispensary

i know ive said being like 14 and on tumblr in 2023-2024 would've definitely fucked me up, just in a different way than i was fucked up by being 14 on 2016 tumblr, and i stand by that . but i'm so so glad that younger teenagers are growing up on a site that has started celebrating weight gain and fatness and eating rather than demonizing it . genuinely would've changed my life to internalize that instead of the 2010s proana culture when i was younger

fr tumblr is hilarious ill scroll past the same post like 15 times and maybe the 10 or 12th time im like alright yeah yknow what. thats good ill reblog. and now everyone whos already seen it 15 times has to see it AGAIN

For a long time there were no hadrosaurid fossils known from Africa.

This seemed to mainly be due to the limits of the geography of their time. Hadrosaurs evolved and flourished during the late Cretaceous, when Africa was isolated from all the other continents, and they didn't seem to have ever found their way across the oceanic barriers.

…Until in 2021 a small hadrosaur was discovered in Morocco, a close relative of several European species, showing that some of these dinosaurs did reach northwest Africa just before the end of the Cretaceous - and with no land bridges or nearby island chains to hop along, they must have arrived from Europe via swimming, floating, or rafting directly across several hundred kilometers of deep water.

And now another hadrosaur has just been described from the same time and place.

Minqaria bata lived in Morocco at the very end of the Cretaceous, about 67 million years ago. Only known from a partial skull, its full appearance and body size is unknown, but it probably measured around 3.5m long (~11'6") – slightly larger than its previously discovered relative, but still very small for a hadrosaur. It might represent a case of insular dwarfism, since at the time Morocco may have been an island isolated from the rest of northwest Africa.

Along with its close relative Ajnabia, and at least one other currently-unnamed larger hadrosaur species, Minqaria seems to be part of a rapid diversification of hadrosaurs following their arrival in Morocco, adapting into new ecological niches in their new habitat where the only other herbivorous dinosaur competition was titanosaurian sauropods, and the only large predators were abelisaurs.

If the K-Pg mass extinction hadn't happened just a million years later, who knows what sort of weird African hadrosaurs we could have ended up with?

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NixIllustration.com | Tumblr | Patreon

Théoden's Battle Cry before the Battle of the Pelennor Fields.

My art in celtic style. Watercolor and ink

It's funny seeing discussions around the new hbomberguy video on different sites. Over on Reddit, most are talking about internet historian. Which makes sense considering their demographic has a higher percentage of libertarian, centre/alt-right leaning gamer boys than the typical social media site. Meanwhile on Tumblr it's mainly Somerton, which also makes sense considering Tumblr's high percentage of left leaning, queer and queer-friendly people. Interesting how the video is almost kind of like a litmus test for the type of demographic each site hosts

i. about 2 weeks ago, i was told there's a good chance that in 5 or so years, i'll need a wheelchair.

ii. okay. i loved harry potter as a kid. i have a hypothesis about this to be honest - why people still kind of like it. it's that she got very lucky. she managed to make a cross-generational hit. it was something shared for both parents and kids. it was right at the start of a huge cultural shift from pre to post-internet. i genuinely think many people were just seeking community; not her writing. it was a nice shorthand to create connection. which is a long way of saying - she didn't build this legacy, we built it for her. she got lucky, just once. that's all.

iii. to be real with you, i still struggle with identifying as someone with a disability, which is wild, especially given the ways my life has changed. i always come up against internalized ableism and shame - convinced even right now that i'm faking it for attention. i passed out in a grocery store recently. i hit my head on the shelves while i went down.

iv. he raises his eyebrows while he sends me a look. her most recent new book has POTS featured in it. okay, i say. i already don't like where this is going. we both take another bite of ramen. it is a trait of the villain, he says. we both roll our eyes about it.

v. so one of the things about being nonbinary but previously super into harry potter is that i super hate jk rowling. but it is also not good for my mental health to regret any form of joy i engaged with as a kid. i can't punish my young self for being so into the books - it was a passion, and it was how i made most of my friends. everyone knew about it. i felt like everyone had my same joy, my same fixation. as a "weird kid", this sense of belonging resonated with me so loudly that i would have done anything to protect it.

vi. as a present, my parents once took me out of school to go see the second movie. it is an incredibly precious memory: my mom straight-up lying about a dentist appointment. us snickering and sneaking into the weekday matinee. within seven years of this experience, the internet would be a necessity to get my homework finished. the world had permanently changed. harry potter was a relic, a way any of us could hold onto something of the analog.

vii. by sheer luck, the year that i started figuring out the whole gender fluid thing was also the first year people started to point out that she might have some internalized biases. i remember tumblr before that; how often her name was treated as godhood. how harry potter was kind of a word synonymous for "nerdy but cool." i would walk out of that year tasting he/him and they/them; she would walk out snarling and snapping about it.

viii. when i teach older kids creative writing, i usually tell them - so, she did change the face of young adult fiction, there's no denying that. she had a lot more opportunities than many of us will - there were more publishing houses, less push for "virally" popular content creators. but beyond reading another book, we need to write more books. we need to uplift the voices of those who remain unrepresented. we need to push for an exposure to the bigotry baked into the publishing system. and i promise you: you can write better than she ever did. nothing she did was what was magical - it was the way that the community responded to it.

ix. i get home from ramen. three other people have screenshotted the POTS thing and sent it to me. can you fucking believe we're still hearing this shit from her when it's almost twenty-fucking-twenty-three. the villain is notably also popular on tumblr. i just think that's funny. this woman is a billionaire and she's mad that she can't control the opinions of some people on a dying blue site that makes no money. lady, and i mean this - get a fucking life.

x. i am sorry to the kid i was. maybe the kid you were too. none of us deserved to see something like this ruined. that thing used to be precious to me. and now - all those good times; measured into dust.

/// 9.6.2022 // FUCKING AGAIN, JK? Are you fucking kidding me?

i think one of the most interesting things about tradwives to me is the publicity, aka the fact that they're all influencers, profiting off of the lifestyle, but I'm not smart enough to delve into why it's interesting while pissing on break.

verse where alphas and nulls are like, comically hench. eight feet tall and three feet wide and have voices that make your bones shake. but they need way too many calories so the CCs are a mere seven feet tall. but, heck, kamino is running out of grey nutrient mush. fine. fine! so the CTs are positively dainty at six and a half feet of rugby player kind of shape.

(yes, trainers are all human standard, but the clones grow up in a system of abuse and have you ever seen a big dog cringe?)

(please imagine the bliss when fordo has a come-to-manda moment and simply crumples trainers like tin cans)

anyway. now obi-wan has met seventeen and gotten neck ache but has been reassured that seventeen’s teeny tiny baby commander will be more the general’s speed. they’re practically the same size. way more suited to those little jedi ships.

and then cody.

(somewhere palpafriend is finally looking at the specs for the army like. what the kark are these armour measurements? is this a misprint? get my spectacles!)

[Tuvok & Janeway: Control, Distance, Duty & Connection.] Sources: St Voyager Transcripts / Mitski 'First Love Late Spring' / Disco Elysium

Manuscript Monday

This Insular manuscript was created by Irish Catholics, who were well known to be stewards of knowledge and artistic ability during the ‘dark ages’ of the 6th-10th centuries CE. In particular, the Insular style consists of flattened, two-dimensional figures of people and animals accompanied by elaborate ornamentation throughout its pages. We often see interlacing designs and Celtic knots within this ornamentation and the proportions and rendering of the figures and architecture seen throughout the manuscript are not always realistic. For example, in the Book of Kells, produced around 800 CE by Irish monks in Scottish west-coast island of Iona, the columns holding up the arches on canon tables are circular and would lack structural integrity in the real world, for obvious reasons. We can see the flattened, strange rendering of figures on folio 32v (shown below), which is a depiction of Christ Enthroned. Christ’s knee is lifted to hold up the codex in his hand, but the placement of his knee is anatomically incorrect. We also see the flatness of the figure and the inclusion of ornamentation throughout the image, and we can see even more of this decoration on carpet pages throughout the manuscript. The Insular style was not only limited to manuscripts but was also used in metal objects like broaches, chalices, sculpture, and architecture which are also said to have been inspiration for Insular style manuscripts.

Our copy of the facsimile of the Book of Kells was published by the Faksimile Verlag of Luzern, Switzerland in 1990 and includes a separate volume with commentary edited by the noted Trinity College librarian Peter Fox. If you have the urge to see the original Book of Kells, it is shown in the Trinity College Library in Dublin. The library shows two folios of the manuscript at a time and changes the pages shown every twelve weeks.

View more Manuscript Monday posts.

– Sarah S., Special Collections Graduate Intern

Luke, 27

“I’m wearing Raf Simons, Insular Cult, @gothmcnugget, and Margiela on the feet. This might sound weird but Star Wars and anime have always inspired my style. Whether I'm dressing like a sith lord, or jedi master lol.”

Mar 11, 2023 ∙ Chelsea

THE BROTHERS SFORZA

augh. there sure is a lot going on between them. tfw you know your older brother is wary of you so you have to navigate that fine line of proving you're useful, but not dangerously so. tfw your younger brother has the potential to be a knife in your back, but he's your brother. don't think too hard about what happened with the galeazzo. unfortunately, you're both visconti as well as sforza, and the visconti were prone to conspiracy. fucking RIP.

this definitely won't be upsetting years down the line when ascanio is near death and ludovico will be desperate to figure out how to bring his brother's body back to milan so ascanio can be interred in the same place as ludovico's recently deceased wife, beatrice d'este, and where ludovico himself has been haunting in a perpetual state of grief.

& the background of the first panel are public domain scans of two cards out of the visconti-sforza tarot deck.

Ascanio Maria Sforza: la parabola politica di un cardinale-principe del Rinascimento, Marco Pellegrini

Ask and you shall receive (a sneak peak of what's to come)