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 content warning for death, possibly unreality and occaisonally outdated language
🏳️🌈 Ruth Ellis (1899 - 2000) was the daughter of former slaves. She came out as a lesbian when she was 16-years-old to the complete acceptance of her family. In 1937, Ruth and her longtime partner moved to Detroit from their hometown of Springfield, Illinois for the promise of higher wages. There, she became the first woman in Michigan to run her own printing business. She printed fliers, posters, and stationary in the front room of her home, which also quickly became a hotspot for Black LGBTQ social life. Before long, Ruth was helping those who came around in any way she could, including by paying for college tuitions. After the Stonewall uprising, 70-year-old Ruth began giving speeches in support of gay and lesbian rights all across the country. She remained an activist for the rest of her long life and even spent her 100th birthday leading the San Francisco Dyke March. At the time of her death at 101, she was recognized as the oldest out lesbian in the US. She is the subject of the documentary "Living With Pride: Ruth C. Ellis @ 100" and is the namesake of the Ruth Ellis Center, a shelter for homeless and at-risk LGBTQ youth in Detroit.
Celebrate Ruth Ellis.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Ellis_(activist)
#Pride #BlackLivesMatter
[Caption: picture of Ruth Ellis as an elderly black woman smiling at the camera. She has short white hair and is wearing a light pink jacket over a black shirt with a partially visible white drawing on the center.]
Snife (snake knife)
ailichi-deactivated20230730
i like irish poetry. i like knowing a man called tadhg ó ruaic, fl. 1684, lost a game of cards to a girl called blánaid on purpose because he wanted her to top him
ailichi-deactivated20230730
you penetrate my weak defence / teasing me with anxious love / i know the score; my turn to play / against your side i make my move ... blánaid, my dear, my favourite one / gentle, fragrant, guileless love / it’s time for you to trump my man / and ‘take’ me with a daring move ... come sit beside me, woman of the wavy hair / embrace me, bright branch of the cool grey eyes / resolve my torment, generous-gentle woman / and ‘take’ me quickly to your merciful bed
extract translated from the classical gaelic by derek mahon
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
“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
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
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
Pride, Greenwich Village, June 1986
FRAGMENTS OF THEDA BARA’S CLEOPATRA HAVE BEEN FOUND GUYS.
update on this: toronto silent film festival just announced they have scanned the fragments and they total to about 40 seconds of footage. they also said they’ll be uploading it to youtube soon !!!