memento mori
@tenposike
just a little scrapbook where i reblog posts on the topic of death and posts that celebrate life and history. no original content. content warning for death, possibly unreality and occaisonally outdated language
as a child being told "the moon controls the tides" with no additional explanation was like. oh okay. you want me to believe in magic? you're talking about magic right now? okay. fine
sorry. only semi-related but i simply wasn't ready for "the sun is a distant gorilla". thank you NASA
PALLA GRANDE - charred saints
Saint Deja takes the stage
skeletal sculpting done by nikifor aka zdisław
inspired by the catacomb saints
Surprise. :)
romans: conquer a shitload of the known world, including parts of africa and the middle east
romans: institute a policy that says that conquered peoples are allowed to gain citizenship by military service, but also can’t serve in their home areas (because armed native soldiers + angry locals = revolt), thus requiring everyone who wants to be a citizen to work abroad for years of their lives, creating diversity.
racists: a single black person in an educational video about rome is unrealistic and i feel attacked.
And a lot of times legionaries settled down not far from where they served once their service was up. Some brawny Libyan kid signs on with the legions and gets stationed on the Rhine frontier. He learns to fight but also how to build roads and walls. After his service is up, he finds work as a mason, settles down with a sandy-haired German lass, and has a couple half-Libyan, half-German kids.
It ends up being a multi-generational thing when one of the kids also signs on with the legions. He gets stationed in Iberia, protecting Rome’s silver- and steel resources. He falls in love with a Celtiberian woman and has a couple quarter-Libyan, quarter-German, quarter-Celtic, quarter-Iberian kids.
Libyan kid’s grandson keeps the family tradition going by also signing up for the legions. He gets assigned to the Parthian frontier and after retirement settles down with a Syrian woman to raise a bunch of eighth-Libyan, eighth-German, eighth-Celtic, eighth-Iberian, half-Syrian kids.
And this is just from the legions. This isn’t counting trade fleets and caravans, the tourist industry, the slave-trade, or migration to Rome and provincial capitols for jobs or political reasons.
Stop clutching your pearls, racists. The Roman Empire was problematic in many ways, but racism wasn’t one of them. (They did occasionally act bigoted toward people of a specific nationality, but that was about culture, not about appearances.)
A poster boy—literally—for this diversity: black Egyptian kid grows up in Thebes (where there were a lot of people of color due to Ethiopia being next door), joins the Roman army, rises to command his largely-black home legion, and is sent with them to Gaul to deal with an uprising.
the “humans are inherently selfish” fanclub can genuinely and in all honesty go to hell. i once came back from a school yard where the kids had
heaped
piles of leaves and cut wildflowers on a narrow strip of grass bc a bee had
died. i actually want to cry.
when i was a child, my parents told me our houseplant would die of lack of sunlight. i was so young i don’t even remember this, but apparently, my response to this was starting to carry the plant around like an emotional support stuffed animal. whenever my family went outside i would hold the pot on my head to make it reach the sun better. i wasn’t in school yet, didn’t have any exposure to the lessons on caring they give in elementary, i don’t remember my thought process - but i can guess. kids integrally care about things, even tiny bugs and inanimate plants. humans care.
don’t let them beat it out of you
as someone in my 40s, may i also add: if they beat it out of you? put in the work to relearn it until it’s a part of you again. a part you’re proud enough of that if someone tells you it’s dumb and you should stop, you can laugh and say “oh, no. no, i don’t believe i will.” and then keep on keepin’ on.
compassion can often be a skill that needs to be relearned. so relearn it and revel in it.
Activists in Tasmania have stuck up more honest promo stickers inside Coles & Woolworths stores, the two dominant supermarket chains in Australia.
but someday this will be my final post in the queue
Happy Sci-Fi Dolphin Saturday. Ron Cobb, for San Francisco Express Times, 1968.
I’ll get some good pics later but I am DONE. That is 12x19 inches of solid hand embroidered satin stitch. One full year of work. Two very tired hands.
BILL WATTERSON ‘A cartoonist’s advice’
A bird explaining to a hedgehog crossing so it doesn’t die.
!!! ok but that’s legitimately what it’s doing!! That’s a corvid right there (looks like a hooded crow, to be precise), which means it’s intelligent enough to recognize, a) cars are dangerous and streets should be treated with a certain degree of caution, b) this car’s slowing down for them–cars do that sometimes–which means they’re not in imminent danger, so it doesn’t have to fly away just yet, c) that hedgehog’s still gonna get killed if it doesn’t MOVE, FAST (cars can change speed very quickly and the hedgehog’s still in the way), and almost certainly also d) if the bird does nothing it gets a free lunch.
Y’all, Y’ALL. This bird is consciously deciding to put itself in danger in order to save the life of a very stupid creature. A creature which, if the bird did nothing, could be free food.
i can’t - look if you follow me you know I have a thing for corvids, but this is - like!!! People are always saying “ah yes they have sub-human intelligence and don’t consider anything that isn’t immediately necessary for their own survival/pleasure,” but! Whether or not it can do philosophy, this crow is clearly demonstrating compassion. Even if it’s just the kind of compassion a toddler shows to a snail, a social creature that instinctively recognizes the potential for emotion in other beings, that’s still huge and cool and important and corvids!!! are! neat!!!
They’re incredibly smart! And kind!!!
