Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

very important

ichuzou:

asphodel-grimoire:

casual reminder that this is what some founding fathers (+ other important peeps) handwriting looked like

george washington:

alexander hamilton:

thomas jefferson that fucking dickbag:

lafayette precious child w/ fine ass handwriting:

james madison aka what the hell is even:

(lawn merriot? jaws merlin? THAT DOES NOT LOOK LIKE HIS NAME)

john laurens aka his handwriting weirdly looks like his personality:

AND THEN THERE’S FUCKING AARON BURR:

HIS SIGNATURE LITERALLY LOOKS LIKE A HANDWRITTEN VERSION OF

fucking aaron burr man god d ammit

:^U

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

bastlynn:

prettyarbitrary:

senkirowolf:

witwitch:

adinfinitumxx:

2p-germanys-blog:

spinosaurus-the-fisher:

funkylittlefang:

spinosaurus-the-fisher:

perspectiverelativity:

buddha-fett:

red-dirt-roads:

alessariel:

brainsforbabyjesus:

alessariel:

bitter-bi-witch:

datneeks:

socialjusticeichigo:

shadowthorne:

mizushimo:

mauridianhallow:

fangirlingoverdemigods:

drtanner:

suicunesrider:

uneditededit:

Remember in 1993 when Jurassic Park was like…the end all, be all of special effects?

not gonna lie that still looks intimately real

I’m still somewhat convinced that someone sold their soul to create the special effects in Jurassic Park because that shit is over 20 years old and it still really, really holds up, better than the stuff in a lot of current movies, even.

Fucking witchcraft, man. 

fucking look at this shit though

Literally see this post flying around with a few different responses added to the bottom each time so I’ll say it for this one myself:

THEY ACTUALLY BUILT A GIANT MASSIVELY DETAILED FUCKING ANIMATRONIC T-REX FOR ALL OF THIS THAT’S WHY THE EFFECTS ARE SO GOOD. CAUSE IT AIN’T CGI. AND IT AIN’T GUY IN A COSTUME. IT’S A BIG FUCKING ROBOT DINOSAUR. AND EVERY PART IS DESIGNED TO MOVE. IT COST LIKE HALF THE BUDGET OF THE FILM.

amazing

And they had the film it in small increments, especially in the outdoor scenes, because the rain fall kept soaking into the ‘skin’ of the rex and would slow down and mess up its movements. So they would stop filming and have a crew out there drying off this massive, fake dinosaur, and then they’d start filming again until it was too wet. Repeat until the end of the scene.

They used animatronics and detailed costumes for most if not all of the dinosaurs in the first movie.

The triceratops for instance, was also animatronic.

And the raptors were dudes in suits. I shit you not.

One of my favorite anecdotes I’ve read on tumblr is how the t-rex robot from Jurassic park would malfunction while it was drying out. How did it malfunction, you might wonder?

Motherfucker randomly started moving.

So apparently if you were on the jp set you would sometimes hear people screaming bloody murder even though they were all well aware that it was a giant animatronic puppet and wouldn’t actually, you know, eat them.

(link to said post about malfunctioning t-rex)

Did not know this, had to reblog for awesome movie history insights.

So, I knew about the animatronics bit but I did not know the raptors were guys in suits and the malfunctioning t-rex sounds terrifying.

And i just googled malfunctioning t-rex and was not disappointed. Apparently in order to put the skin on over the steel frame a guy had to crawl inside the t-rex while it was turned on and glue the skin down. And if somebody turned the t-rex off or the power went out the guy in the t-rex stood a very real chance of getting mangled and killed by the hydraulics.

So of course, the power goes out.

And this guy is still in there gluing the skin down.

Apparently the way to survive getting sheered to death by huge sheets of metal while you’re inside a giant t-rex robot is to curl into a ball and hope for the best.

And this guy hoped for the best and got it.

Some other people on stage pried open the t-rex jaws and glue guy crawled out of its mouth and was totally okay.

This is getting better and better.

I think they only had like 6 minutes of CGI

I’m just waiting for the T-Rex to come to life and leave its stand.

@spinosaurus-the-fisher is this the kind of content you love?

Realism comes at a cost, it seems.

i mean ok but why has nobody posted this:

It’s a three piece raptor suit.

Old movies had the best special effects

The thing about this that gets my special effects nerd going is the fact that EVERY single dinosaur was sculpted by artists based on the current existent archeological evidence of the time.

@jurassicparkandrecreation

@shepfax

Even better than that, this movie ADVANCED our best understanding of dinosaurs at the time.  They were blowing out a budget bigger than anything Hollywood had ever seen, and along with employing almost the last hurrah of incredible physical FX, they had a bank of those newfangled digital SFX computers.  Nobody’d ever really created convincing dinosaurs in a movie before.  It’d all been stop-motion animation, and even when the models were exquisitely crafted, you could just tell there was something OFF about them.  Spielberg wanted THE BEST DINOSAURS EVER, and he figured on using the cutting edge of digital modeling and animation technology to build them for him.

So they got hold of some of the best paleontologists they could find and said, “We want you guys to take this tech that your labs could pretty much never afford and use it to build us the most realistic, accurate dinosaur models the world has ever seen.”

The paleontologists knew an opportunity when it bit them in the ass.  They plugged in everything they knew about dinosaurs, all the skeletons and their best guesses about soft tissue and all that.  And when they’d created those dinosaur models, they had the computer start moving them as they realistically would with anatomy like that.  One guy took a look at those walking t-rexes and velociraptors (really utahraptors, but whatevs, fam), and he said, “Wait a minute, I’ve seen movement like that before.”

He called up film of a chicken walking.  Everyone in the room said, “Holy shit.”

Prior to 1989, the idea that birds were descended from dinosaurs existed–we knew about archaeopteryx, we knew there was some minor connection there–but the idea that DINOSAURS LIVE IN THE MODERN WORLD AND THEY ARE CALLED BIRDS was not pre-eminent.  Jurassic Park changed our scientific understanding of dinosaurs.

That paleontologists’d be Kevin Padian. Who is awesome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Padian

(via lupinatic)

some-like-it-luke-warm:

historical-nonfiction:

When trains were introduced in the U.S, many people believed that that “women’s bodies were not designed to go at 50 miles an hour,” and that their “uteruses would fly out of [their] bodies if they were accelerated to that speed.”

I have so much respect for historical women not murdering every man they know

(Source: The Wall Street Journal, via unpretty)

The Chicken-Witch or Satan’s Cock

simonalkenmayer:

thelordanubis:

vampireapologist:

simonalkenmayer:

dare-to-do-our-duty:

vampireapologist:

simonalkenmayer:

myusernameisstolen:

mutantadvocate:

simonalkenmayer:

This really isn’t a terribly interesting story, but it is something for the annals of human stupidity. I can’t remember the exact details, and I really don’t care to do an exhaustive search the Internet, but I’ll sketch it out for you as I recall having read about it some years ago.

In 1474, in Switzerland, a hen that was thought to be a cock, laid an egg. Nowadays this wouldn’t even cause concern, as it is known that certain female chickens exhibit masculine traits and even grow coxcombs. But in those days, if it looked like a cock, it was a cock, and when this intersexed chicken laid a yolkless egg, it was seen as a sign that some witch in the village was attempting to create a basilisk. A basilisk is supposedly made with a yolkless egg from a male chicken. This was of course the Devil’s work, and so the chicken was put on trial for witchcraft and the heinous crime of laying an egg.

The chicken’s attorney argued that while this may have in fact been a demonic act, it was involuntary and the chicken could no more help laying the accursed egg than any possessed person could help their actions while under the Devil’s sway.

The chicken was found guilty and burned at the stake.

The sad thing is they probably didn’t bother to baste him. Probably didn’t even eat him. What a waste.

This is the WEIRDEST and most entertaining story I’ve read all month.

The title made me rofl

It’s all true.

Okay but. The most important part of this entire story is that the chicken had legal representation. Why? Was it a legality? Was someone obligated by law to represent the chicken? or did someone just feel that strongly about its innocence?

Here’s an official essay about it. It sounds like lawyers really liked these cases because they let them argue about the lines between the natural and supernatural.

Yes, precisely. The attorneys of the day were just beginning to work through the philosophical theories of the juxtaposition of a religious state with necessary fairness and unbiased doctrine of law. This was at a crucial point in history, a kind of nexus between the feudal and the renaissance. These types of events were somewhat commonplace.

Ideal time-travel destination: The Chicken Trial

For the defense, this was basically free practice, and if they lost the case, it wasn’t like they had lost street cred, or had to deal with the next of kin.

Indeed. It was an intellectual exercise, but it was also more than that, because it was the beginning of the notion of equal and adequate representation. Lynch mobs and backward assize courts were nothing new. Barons and lords presided over matters on a constant basis without any presumption of fair treatment or ethical judgement. No representation was given, nor guaranteed. Moments like this were the strange psychotic delusions that mandated some sort of rationality. You’ve put a chicken…a non-speaking animal, on trial. For a crime that biblical texts tell us is only possible with intent, and as the Bible indicated according to the doctrine of the time, was incapable of having such intent. So there was a moment there of absolute insanity that was reined in.

“That chicken is a witch! Put it on trial!”
“But a chicken is an animal. It can’t be a witch.”
“Well………it’s being used by a witch!”
“But how would a witch use a chicken, and how do we get an animal to testify which witch is manipulating it?”
“Well………..give it an attorney who can make that argument.”

And from there on out, the precedent was set that all people brought before the law were entitled to representation.

Now, that is not to say that became common practice, nor that all such individuals obtained even a passing assistance from their representation, but when documents, laws and documents regarding the rights of citizens began to be adopted, moments like this became pivotal.

“You mean to say you would let a chicken have an attorney, but not a man accused of petty theft? What sense does that make?”

To the point that, James I, who had himself written a book about how to find and prove a witch “forensically”, actually used common sense to show that a person was not a witch, himself acting on the witch’s behalf.

So such things were an integral part of modern western legal principles…

But my heavens were they stupid.

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

littlestartopaz:

friendlytroll:

scientia-rex:

sandovers:

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

I am 100% convinced that “exit, pursued by a bear” is a reference to some popular 1590s meme that we’ll never be able to understand because that one play is the only surviving example of it.

Seriously, we’ll never figure it out. I’ll wager trying to understand “exit, pursued by a bear” with the text of The Winter’s Tale as our primary source is like trying to understand loss.jpg when all you have access to is a single overcompressed JPEG of a third-generation memetic mutation that mashes it up with YMCA and “gun” - there’s this whole twitching Frankensteinian mass of cultural context we just don’t have any way of getting at.

no, but this is why people do the boring archival work! because we think we do know why “exit, pursued by a bear” exists, now, and we figured it out by looking at ships manifests of the era -

it’s also why there was a revival of the unattributed and at the time probably rather out of fashion mucedorus at the globe in 1610 (the same year as the winter’s tale), and why ben jonson wrote a chariot pulled by bears into his court masque oberon, performed on new year’s day of 1611.

we think the answer is polar bears.

no, seriously!  in late 1609 the explorer jonas poole captured two polar bear cubs in greenland and brought them home to england, where they were purchased by the beargarden, the go-to place in elizabethan london for bear-baiting and other ‘animal sports.’  it was at the time run by edward alleyn (yes, the actor) and his father-in-law philip henslowe (him of the admiral’s men and that diary we are all so very grateful for), and would have been very close, if not next to, the globe theatre.

of course, polar bear cubs are too little and adorable for baiting, even to the bloodthirsty tudor audience, aren’t they?  so, what to do with the little bundles of fur until they’re too big to be harmless?  well, if there’s anything we know about the playwrights and theatre professionals of the time, it’s that they knew how to make money and draw in audiences.  and the spectacle of a too-small-to-be-dangerous-yet-but-still-real-live-and-totally-WHITE-bear?  what good entertainment businessman is going to turn down that opportunity? 

and, voila, we have a death-by-bear for the unfortunate antigonus, thereby freeing up paulina to be coupled off with camillo in the final scene, just as the comedic conventions of the time would expect.

you’re telling me it was an ACTUAL BEAR

every time I think to myself “history can’t possibly get any more bananas” I realize or am made to realize that I am badly mistaken

It was an actual, TINY bear. Just. like a babbeh polar bear. 

God i love history. 

@fujoshi-kianna-leigh @words-writ-in-starlight

starburstdragon:

krazykitsune:

just-shower-thoughts:

The first guy who heard a parrot talk was probably not ok for several days.

Actually, weird history fact about that. The island of Bermuda’s first name was Isle of Devils, being thought to be filled with demons and angry spirits when it was actually just filled with some loud ass birds.

@lotsandlotsofbirds

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)

mr-baberaham-lincoln:

lovelyladylunacy:

paintedlikestars:

lovelyladylunacy:

perfectlynormalhumanbeing:

lovelyladylunacy:

lovelyladylunacy:

lovelyladylunacy:

socialjusticethespian:

lovelyladylunacy:

lareinaxcvi:

lovelyladylunacy:

why does no one ever talk about how lewis and clark met why isn’t that taught in history classes it’s like some rom-com meet-funny trope and i’ve literally never heard it brought up. literally the start of one of the most famous friendships in america and no one talks about it.

Wasn’t Clark just Lewis’ commanding officer? I guess I don’t know this story either. Can you tell it?

yes!! oh my god!!

so at twenty-one years of age, stupid stubborn hotheaded ensign meriwether lewis decides to get hella drunk and crash the party of one of his superior officers, starting an argument over politics (namely, defending thomas jefferson, his neighbor and veritable father figure) and insulting his host and basically being an embarrassment. so, he’s arrested and leveled with a court martial!! because this ridiculous boy can’t mind his fucking manners when he’s tipsy apparently!!

but instead of having to explain to his poor mother why he got booted out of the continental army, he’s acquitted (”with honor” bc apparently i’m not the only one who plays favorites when it comes to meriwether lewis), but he has to be reassigned so he doesn’t piss off his commanding officer again (awk). and whose brand new sharp-shooting rifle unit does he get transferred to?? take a wild guess!!!! that’s right, william clark’s!!!! and over the next six months meri falls deepfuck in totally platonic bro-love with him until clark resigns his commission for family reasons. then, roughly eight years later, lewis writes him to ask if maybe he’d like to travel to the ends of the earth by his side and, well, the rest is history.

But how do you know it was platonic

i hope you guys understand that when i say “platonic” i say it in the patronizing sarcastic tone of voice i always use when i talk about meriwether lewis’s big ol’ crush on his bff. maybe i can’t prove totally that he was v gay and probably at least a little bit madly in love with clark, but damn i wanna believe love exists ok.

lewis’s obvious sexual repulsion of women, his inability to find a wife, his desire to live with clark after the expedition, that last letter he wrote to clark before his violent death that we don’t have because clark burned it – we can read a lot into all of this if we want to, but even besides all of that the point remains that meriwether lewis was intensely fond of clark, and that they cared deeply for one another, and that their personalities complemented and completed one another in a way that makes you think twice about soulmates.

sooooo, was sacagawea, covering for their relationship?, I need to know history!!. (via @adaywithoutlightis-night )

actually, sacagawea was a sixteen-year-old kidnapped shoshone girl sold into sexual slavery to a french trader named toussaint charbonneau, who pissed power couple lewis and clark off to no end due to generally just being who he was as a person.

whereas lewis had no real interest in women from what we can tell from his writings, he actually wrote about how much he admired sacagawea’s extreme fortitude and numerous skills that helped them throughout their journey. lewis also actually delivered sacagawea’s child!! she had a very difficult birth (probably because she was a child), which sent lewis into multiple kinds of panic. clark, however, really doted on sacagawea and her son; he gave them both nicknames, looked out for their safety during the trip, and was very close to them even after the expedition and ended up adopting sacagawea’s son. he was also a notoriously bad speller and i don’t think he ever spelt charbonneau’s name correctly ever not even once (which makes me think of the blenderdick cucumberpatch meme tbh).

i mean yeah there’s also a lot of angst here too because after the expedition their lives went in very different directions. 

clark comes home and immediately acclimates to a hero’s life. he gets married and has a son who he names meriwether lewis clark after his best friend. he has a respectable government position and lives a long and happy life.

meanwhile lewis struggles to get accustomed to civilized life again. he misses the freedom of the expedition. he still sleeps on buffalo skins spread out on his bedroom floor. he writes that he is determined to find himself a wife but no woman can seem to stand him; one even flees town in the middle of the night to avoid seeing him again the next day. with his lifelong history of depression (which comes in bursts which, to me, seem a lot like manic depression), lewis spirals downward. he’s hated and conspired against in his political career, he starts to drink heavily, he stops talking to all of the people who had been closest to him. 

he finally works himself up to taking a trip to dc to deliver his journals to jefferson and on the boat trip up he attempts to kill himself multiple times. he’s described as appearing frantic and afraid, and tries to calm himself down by repeatedly telling himself that clark is on his way, that clark will be coming to save him. we know that at this time he wrote clark a letter, but clark burned it so we don’t know what it said. i’m ashamed of the things i’d do to get my hands on that letter.

lewis dies in an inn on the natchez trace of two bullet wounds, and it’s still debated whether it was suicide or murder; everyone close to him seemed to accept it was suicide, including clark, who wrote, “oh, i fear the weight of his mind has overcome him”.

But what happened to Sacagawea and her son?

ok, more on sacagawea, because she deserves any and all the credit she gets plus a whole lot more honestly:

when sacagawea was about 12 years old, she was kidnapped by the hidatsa tribe and sold alongside another shoshone woman to charbonneau as his “wives”. charbonneau was officially hired by lewis and clark not just because he was a french fur trader who knew the pacific northwest territory as well as the hidatsa language, but because sacagawea’s knowledge of the shoshone language and people would benefit them as they traveled through their lands. sacagawea was not just some inconvenient extra, she was a purposeful and valued addition to the corps.

sacagawea had her son, jean-baptiste, while l&c and co. ™ were still wintering at fort mandan, so she was literally carrying this child on her back for the entire journey. she was also the only woman travelling in the corps! and she was given duties! strong and capable and literally perfect i love her so much!

while travelling on a riverway, the boat sacagawea was travelling on capsized, and along with saving her son she also rescued valuable supplies and papers; both the captains were blown away with how well she acted under that sort of duress (and how badly her husband did lmao). travelling through native lands, tribes were more likely to think these men were not dangerous purely because sacagawea was with them, so she literally saved their white asses through association. she was a necessary and important figure in council meetings between the corps and tribal chiefs. clark called her “janey” and called her son “pompy”. (cute.) when they do get to the ocean, sacagawea literally demands clark (which she would have to do through like three layers of translators) to let her go to the shore with them, because damn it she worked just as hard as anyone else and she wants to see the fucking whales man.

perhaps most remarkably, when the corps finally did encounter the shoshone tribe, among the very first group of people they encountered was sacagawea’s brother, who she hadn’t seen for five years. that’s. so incredible. like, that’s one of the most amazing things to me. this survivor of child sexual abuse bravely treks across huge stretches of territory with a military expedition and is reunited with her family, however briefly, and. god. i’m crying.

sacagawea was not paid for her contributions to the expedition, because the contract was with her husband. she gave birth to a daughter, lisette, six years after the expedition. she died at 25 years old of a sickness she apparently had throughout her adulthood (which may have been further complicated from her early abuse and pregnancies). after her death, clark adopted both of her children.

i love this beautiful brave bird woman just as much if not more than i love my adventurous southern sons.

@theworldasainoit

i’ve seen a lot of comments about the really sorry state of spelling and grammar in the expedition journals, and just wanted to let everyone know that, since no one had a dictionary with them on the expedition, they had to spell out words phonetically, and for the most part everyone wrote how they talked. by that logic, linguists have determined that by reading the journals of expedition members aloud you can actually start to mimic their accents! lewis was a virginian with some book learning, so his passages tend to have more eloquent language and less visible accent. however, clark was kentucky born and bred, and manages to misspell “mosquito”more than sixteen different ways.

Also, there’s a national memorial in Montana that Clark carved his name into, called Pompey’s Pillar. Clark named it after Sacajawea’s son.

(via charminglyantiquated)

thoodleoo:

thoodleoo:

so in my greek class we were talking about oral composition and how something like the iliad must have been composed, and my prof asked us to consider how we would rapidly compose something like poetry on the spot. and i think it was a really important exercise not just for understanding the construction of an oral epic but also for reminding us of how great works can come from supposedly “humble” origins. so if anyone is ever snobby about their homer, just remind them that, as my professor put it, the iliad is basically ancient freestyle rap, and homer is much closer to jay z than to f. scott fitzgerald

basically what i’m saying is please imagine homer asking someone to give him a beat on the lyre and then dropping the sickest fucking meter ever. the ill-iad, by lil homie

(via cthulhu-with-a-fez)