Tell me you know nothing about history without telling me you know nothing about history

You make a movie and get called by one half of the class war a shill for Big Feminism and the other half, a bootlicker of capitalism, and yet ESPN got an Oscar for making a long form commercial for their network...

Alright uninformed rant time. It kind of bugs me that, when studying the Middle Ages, specifically in western Europe, it doesn’t seem to be a pre-requisite that you have to take some kind of “Basics of Mediaeval Catholic Doctrine in Everyday Practise” class. 

Obviously you can’t cover everything- we don’t necessarily need to understand the ins and outs of obscure theological arguments (just as your average mediaeval churchgoer probably didn’t need to), or the inner workings of the Great Schism(s), nor how apparently simple theological disputes could be influenced by political and social factors, and of course the Official Line From The Vatican has changed over the centuries (which is why I’ve seen even modern Catholics getting mixed up about something that happened eight centuries ago). And naturally there are going to be misconceptions no matter how much you try to clarify things for people, and regional/class/temporal variations on how people’s actual everyday beliefs were influenced by the church’s rules. 

But it would help if historians studying the Middle Ages, especially western Christendom, were all given a broadly similar training in a) what the official doctrine was at various points on certain important issues and b) how this might translate to what the average layman believed. Because it feels like you’re supposed to pick that up as you go along and even where there are books on the subject they’re not always entirely reliable either (for example, people citing books about how things worked specifically in England to apply to the whole of Europe) and you can’t ask a book a question if you’re confused about any particular point. 

I mean I don’t expect to be spoonfed but somehow I don’t think that I’m supposed to accumulate a half-assed religious education from, say, a 15th century nobleman who was probably more interested in translating chivalric romances and rebelling against the Crown than religion; an angry 16th century Protestant; a 12th century nun from some forgotten valley in the Alps; some footnotes spread out over half a dozen modern political histories of Scotland; and an episode of ‘In Our Time’ from 2009. 

But equally if you’re not a specialist in church history or theology, I’m not sure that it’s necessary to probe the murky depths of every minor theological point ever, and once you’ve started where does it end? 

Anyway this entirely uninformed rant brought to you by my encounter with a sixteenth century bishop who was supposedly writing a completely orthodox book to re-evangelise his flock and tempt them away from Protestantism, but who described the baptismal rite in a way that sounds decidedly sketchy, if not heretical. And rather than being able to engage with the text properly and get what I needed from it, I was instead left sitting there like:

And frankly I didn’t have the time to go down the rabbit hole that would inevitably open up if I tried to find out

help, now that i have stopped tearing up at every mention of the series, the young royals forever documentary and the bts videos have brought my past obsession with film-making back-

Val's infinite skills and abilities

part 4

@erlysworld thanks for the sweet request ❤️

Every new thing I learn about James Somerton's process just drives home how he almost (but really doesn't) knows what he's doing. Yes, of course you use the sources you read as a jumping off point. Of course you copy and paste the important sections into your outline document so you can reread them. That's why you put them in quotation marks.

Trying to watch documentaries about your field of study is so frustrating. Yes I know we have a common ancestor with chimpanzees; why did you take ten minutes to explain that?! Everyone knows that! Right? Right!? Of course chimps are built for climbing but tell me why! Are you gonna talk about their shoulder joints or aren’t you? Yes, yes, the hand-feet, we’ve all seen them. Shoulder joints are way more interesting. Shut up about the hand-feet.

I fucking love being autistic and I love being autistic and I love being autistic and i

This blog has focused a lot on character names in the past, but have you ever wondered about how the most important name in the series came to be?

In 1985, brothers Dene and Simon Carter had an idea for a game.

After the brothers (Big Blue Box) joined forces with Peter Molyneux (Bullfrog Productions) "The Game" started being referred jokingly to as "Thingy", and even as "Jesus 2000".

With the founding of Lionhead Studios, the ideas of the player changing the world around them with their choices solidified into a project called "Wishworld", a strategy game set into an Academy for wizards. The same project's name was later changed in 1999 to "Godslayer" and later simply referred to as "Heroes".

In 2000, Peter Molyneux suggested the project focused on one single wizard, affecting and changing the world through his choices, and renamed it "Merlin".

In 2001, the team ideas and concept of morality and choice based story progression had solidified in "Project EGO".

Finally, in 2004, the "Fable" we now know and love was released!

I started writing this space Ateez fic like 9 months ago but have been researching for so long that I'm pretty much just studying astronomy and nuclear physics at this point.

I think a six hour video about star wars n star fandoms racism wouldn't fix me but itd make me feel less alone

this just in: i am, once again, crying over the chernobyl firefighters

I just love this woman. So much

that previous post has me thinking of a shitty brony documentary that was made years ago, most of its pretty hard in the "directors/writers had no idea what they were talking about" but there was a part that focused on this kid who really liked the show but he was really afraid to tell his dad cuz his dad was Conservative and was afraid what hed think of him cuz of it and they kept this scene in and its just so fucking sad

This blog is just memes about my suffering now, I guess

I love Hetalia, but once I have the time I'd like to check out other stuff because I need to be in other fandoms beisdes this one for my sanity. I'm so busy I only have time to do stuff regarding only one fandom and it's usually hetalia