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 content warning for death, possibly unreality and occaisonally outdated language
Image description: multiple bats flying around giant clusters of blooming agave flowers (I think that's agave it looks like agave) and feeding from them against a black background
Leslie Feinberg
Transsisters: The Journal Of Transexual Feminism Volume 1, Issue 7. Spring 1995
To start thinking about Roman slavery is to stare into an infinite abyss of deliberate human suffering. The Roman Empire is considered to be one of the genuine slave states in human history, in that, like the antebellum Southern states of America, it could not exist without slavery. Slavery was the social and economic foundation upon which the entire Roman Empire rested. But while the slave states of Louisiana and Virginia lasted 150 years before abolition, the Roman Empire stood on the backs of unimaginable numbers of enslaved men, women and children for almost a thousand years. A thousand years is thirty-four generations of people enslaved to the Romans. A thousand years before the year I wrote this, King Cnut was glaring down the sea. A thousand years is an immense amount of time. And they didn’t just have domestic slaves, they had vast mines across the Empire for silver, lead, gold, iron and copper. Google the Las Médulas mines in Spain and imagine the sixty thousand enslaved people who worked there twenty-four hours a day to produce the gold the Roman Empire demanded, and then multiply that by hundreds of years and hundreds of sites and all those lives that were sent to toil for nothing and join me staring into this bottomless pit of Roman horror. Then picture the near infinite acres of land owned by the Gaius Caecilius Isidoruses and Melanias of the Roman world, each maintained by chain gangs of hundreds of enslaved people. And on top of that were those enslaved in the house, the cooks and cleaners and washers and dressers, the people enslaved by the state who maintained the aqueducts and laid the roads and built all those temples and fora across the vast Empire and fought fires and carried the emperor in his litter. A general estimate (which means, of course, a total guess but a guess from someone I’d trust in a quantitative situation) is that there were between 4.8 and 8.4 million enslaved people in the Roman Empire at any time, with the city of Rome‘s population including anywhere from ten to twenty-five percent enslaved people. Millions and millions and millions of lives, each a person with a heart full of love and hate and envy and joy and aching knees and sore eyes and dreams and thoughts and desires and hopes, all of whom were owned by another person and subject to the most extraordinary violence every day.
A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome by Emma Southon
ITS REAL ITS REAL HOLY FUCK ITS NOT FAKE OMIGOD
here it is in infra-red (as prepared by Nick Wright, University College London, on behalf of the IPHAS Collaboration).
space is metal as hell
THATS US!
“The abbreviations correspond to the standard pattern of words used in the Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus – aq = aqua (water), dq = decoque / decoctio (decoction), con = confundo (mix), ris = radacis / radix (root), s aiij = seminis ana iij (3 grains each), etc. So the herbarium of the Voynich manuscript must therefore be a series of (“simple”) recipe ingredients with the necessary measures.“
Guys.
All this time.
It was someone writing latin in stenography.
I’m so happy and yet so mad at the same time.
Unfortunately, this is from six years ago, includes only two decoded lines, and seems to have been largely dismissed by academics who have studied the manuscript.
Yeah, I reblogged another post about that, soon after, six years ago
I don’t know why that first post is still getting reblogs but that’s tumblr for you I guess
only-tiktoks
I MADE A GAME! it's a short little walkaround adaptation of Sophocles' Antigone, set in a dying apartment tower, with a whole host of characters who you may or may not recognize. Music, art, and writing all by me - you can play it here, either in-browser or downloadable (although I've been informed that if you download it, the fonts may not function correctly).
It may receive updates in future - I made it in about a month for a class assignment, so I didn't have time to include everything I wanted to, and the music is all taken from various other projects of mine - so stay tuned for whenever that happens! For now, enjoy a 30-40 minute game with a single, inevitable conclusion. And do let me know what you think.
[Image description: Four screencaps from the game linked above:
image 1: Antigone tells her sister, "Don't wait up. If you need me, I'll be burring my brother." They are shown in a scene that mimics the designs on Greek pottery.
image 2: Antigone looks at a notice on a bulletin board that reads "For sale: two pairs of children's shoes, slightly worn - Medea, 5B".
Image 3: Antigone stands in front of an apartment door with bottles strewn about it. From inside, Dee calls out "Antigone!"
Image 4: Antigone walks through a hall in an apartment building
Image 5: The title card for the game. Antigone sits on a staircase, framed in red. The rest is black. Below her is writing that reads "Antigone will take the stairs today". End description.]
I cannot express how much I adore dappled shadows formed by sunlight in paintings and photography and in real life
I also adore how this pattern has manifested itself in the form of camouflage for some species
The echo of those same dappled shadows that we paint in our art is genetically coded into a baby’s fur in order to keep her safe. A beautiful thing.
(Photos by Joel Sartore)
Detail from the cover of ‘Dynamic Science Fiction,’ June 1953, Volume 1 No 3, illustrated by Milton Luros
skirt details, ph5 resort 2022
