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 content warning for death, possibly unreality and occaisonally outdated language
Happy Petrov Day, everyone. To celebrate, try to follow his example and not end the world.
Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces who became known as “the man who single-handedly saved the world from nuclear war” for his role in the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident. The incident was unknown to the public until it was revealed shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
On 26 September 1983, during the Cold War, the satellite-based early-warning system of the Soviet Union reported the launch of multiple intercontinental ballistic missiles from the United States. At the time, tensions with the U.S. were on edge, and high officials of the Soviet Union, including General Secretary Yuri Andropov, were thought to be highly suspicious of a U.S. attack.
Petrov checked ground-based radars which had not detected a launch, noted that the warning system had detected only 1-5 missiles instead of the hundreds that would have been expected in the event of a first strike, and chose to mark the system alert as a false alarm. This decision is seen as having prevented a retaliatory nuclear attack, which would have probably resulted in immediate escalation of the Cold War stalemate to a full-scale nuclear war and the deaths of hundreds of millions of people. Investigation of the satellite warning system later confirmed that the system had indeed malfunctioned.
While it is highly probable that if Petrov had reported this incident to his superiors they would have come to the same conclusion, it was a point in time when many people feared that the Cold War might become hot. Andropov, the new Soviet leader, was considered weak by the US president Ronald Reagan, and the Western countries were deploying new missile installation in Europe to counter existing missiles in the Eastern Bloc. This fear of nuclear war meant that at this time the peace movement in most western countries reached one of its highest levels.
(source)
Happy stanislav petrov day
Forty years ago today!
Y'all have no idea how terrified we were as kids in the 80s because Reagan was practically poking the Soviet Union like he was hoping to piss them off enough to launch. Most of us started to believe we would never make it out of the 80s. When we found out years later about this, I nearly threw up.
Polishing the Brass by Thomas Benjamin Kennington - 1912
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i cant stress this though but people have to relearn how to start creating for the joy of creation instead of creating for the sake of skill. art is supposed to be for fun and its up to You to indulge ur appetite for creation as sincerely and candidly as u can
it doesnt matter if ur art is "bad" or "unskilled." the point of art is not to be good at it. the point is to create because u can and because it feels good
I laughed and rolled over on my back. The sky was crayon blue. I pretended I was lying on the white cotton clouds. The earth was damp against my back. The sun was hot, the breeze was cool. I felt happy. Nature held me close and seemed to find no fault with me.
Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues
Subway Riders in New York City • 1914 • New York Public Library
Francis Luis Mora (Uruguayan-American, 1874-1940) Mora worked in watercolor, oils and tempera. He produced drawings in pen and ink, and graphite; and etchings and monotypes. He is known for his paintings and drawings depicting American life in the early 20th century; Spanish life and society; historical and allegorical subjects; with murals, easel painting and illustrations. He also was a popular art instructor.
Flowers of the field • 1913 • Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Jeanne Cartier • c. 1916 • Yale University Art Gallery - New Haven, Connecticut
Mrs. F. Luis Mora and Her Sister • 1902 • Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
Las Manolas (Models in Sevilla) • c. 1909 • Private collection
Spanish Color Fantasy • n/d • Private collection
Having looked through historic googlebooks many a time and been frustrated by how difficult it is to search in this time period, this chart is most certainly due to the algorithm not properly picking up the "Long S" which was an f-like character used in place of an s especially in 17th and 18th century printing.
The rules of when the short and long s's are used are somewhat complicated to modern people, but they are almost always at the beginning of words, never at the end, and if there is a double s sometimes they are combined and sometimes not:
99% of the time the word actually being used is "suck" or "sucking." It actually shows up a lot as a word used to describe babies who were still nursing. In texts from this period the word "suck" will almost always read as "fuck." This makes some of these auto-transcriptions absolutely brilliant in hindsight:
If you search for the word "fuck" in googlebooks within this time frame, you get hundreds of pages of entries like this. For example, this Shakespeare anthology:
This is not to say that people in the 18th century didn't find this hilarious, I'm sure they did, but f-bombs were not being dropped in classic literature at the time. If they do show up, like in this 1785 slang dictionary: it is almost always bleeped out:
The other 1% of the fucks in 18th century books are, of course, not bleeped out because they are in Ye Olde Porn, of which there is a surprising amount on googlebooks.
I should also note if it wasn't clear that the immense dropoff just after 1800 is when the long s stopped being used in print, and the reemergence was in the mid-late 20th century when people DID start dropping f-bombs in literature
this is what the internet was made for
