so I had to make a lamp for pottery and sculpture II so I worked on my project all day today and every time people looked at me weird bc they were expecting like a bedazzled lampshades or some shit and I’m not about that so I got finished and went over to my teacher holding this huge motherfucker
and everyone was just staring at me like “what the fuck is this thing??? what???” and then I plugged it in
It’s genuinely worrying to me how often white supremacist misogynist dudes have a weird Viking obsession. The Vikings did not agree with you. Stop dragging the Vikings into this.
Right-wingers: We should treat the Muslims like the Vikings did! Me: You mean travel thousands of miles to strike up profitable trade deals with them in their own countries and establish mutually beneficial business arrangements? Right-wingers: Wot?
I love seeing grown humans setting about little creative tasks out of boredom and then looking quietly pleased with themselves, like maybe a middle-aged woman on her train home from work manages to make a tower out of empty coffee creamers and gazes at it proudly for a few seconds.
I love seeing other people make the overblown OOPS I FORGOT SOMETHING performance for no-one that most of us do when we have to turn around in the middle of the pavement.
I love seeing stony-faced people in queues unable to contain a smile when a baby looking over its mother’s shoulder in front of them locks eyes and does that astonished stare.
– when someone is standing in line and they don’t quite dance to the music playing, but you can SEE their head bop and them mouthing the words
– when someone thinks no one’s paying attention and they sing-talk themselves thru a task
– when they laugh or try to hide a laugh when looking at their phone
– when someone does the thing where they enter another space (such as a supermarket aisle) striding with total purpose, then suddenly forget what they’re doing/looking for, and stop there looking blank for a millisecond while they reboot.
– when people are looking for scissors, in their home or in a store, and they make the scissors gesture with their non-dominant hand as an aid to remind them what they’re doing.
– when automatic social interactions glitch, like when you tell a waiter that you hope he enjoys his food too, or tell the stranger on the phone that you love them.
– the hand gesture people make when they’re thinking at their computer, not typing, and their elbow rests on the table, and they feel the edge of their fingernail with their thumb. This is such a lovely little gesture and to my knowledge I have never seen it in fiction. You’d think it would come up all the time in fic.
– when you’re sharing an experience with a complete stranger (like watching a seagull throw up in public, or waiting for a late train) and you make eye contact, and some comment to each other, and then you guys are, like, ALLIES now. Like you would willingly ride to war to save them. You can’t make eye contact again, but you are very aware of them.
– just evidence of other people’s rich, baffling and complex inner lives.
i love watching couples or friends walking in tandem. i love seeing when they make each other laugh
This is what Hozier means when he says ‘I fall in love just a little bit everyday with someone new.’
Ok the accidentally saying I love you over the phone is the cutest thing ever and I never realized just how much it happens irl until now. Like I’m pretty sure I’ve done that.
I love these, the idle animations of humans
I love the little song we sing to ourselves while we’re working. The one with no words, just a little bop you sing without realizing
If you put a single crab into a bucket, it will climb out and escape from becoming someone’s dinner.
If you put a whole bunch of crabs in a bucket, however, the crabs in the bottom of the bucket will pull the crabs at the top of the bucket back down if they try to escape. Instead of allowing some or all of the crabs to survive, the group of crabs will ensure that every single one of them ends up on a plate.
This same phenomenon is seen in human communities, where it has become known – appropriately – as crab bucket mentality. From the outside, these crab bucket communities might look like support groups, or places to get feedback and advice. But in reality, they are black holes – these are communities where people go to tear each other down, and to actively be torn down in return. Instead of lifting each other up, these communities burrow further and further into their buckets, until everyone is too bitter and broken to ever climb out.
And you might be part of a crab bucket community without even knowing it.
Some online communities are obvious crab-buckets. The so-called “incel” community might be the most obvious example; these are angry young men who tell each other over and over again that they are worthless, unattractive, and that they will never be loved. Lonely teenagers enter the incel community to talk about how frustrated and insecure they are after dealing with romantic rejection, and they quickly find themselves pushed toward hopelessness, violent misogyny and suicidal fantasies. Likewise, the “pro-anorexia” and “thinspo” communities are crab buckets, where members encourage each other to adapt more and more extreme disordered eating, and often invite other members to make cruel comments about their bodies and food journals. Insecure young women (and some men) go to these communities because they want to like their bodies more, and end up weighed down with self-hatred.
But not every crab bucket is obvious.
Although there are lots of wonderful and supportive spaces online for LGBTQ+ people, the internet is also littered with LGBTQ+ crab buckets – especially for trans people. Some trans communities are almost entirely dedicated to discouraging and criticizing other trans people for not “passing”; these communities will pore over each others’ pictures, pointing out lingering masculine or feminine features, comparing each other to “a man in a dress”, or outright convincing each other that there is no point in transitioning, as they have no hope of ever “passing”. Anxious trans or questioning people join these groups to navigate a very difficult time in their lives, only to have their own insecurities magnified and distorted.
Communities and feedback circles for writers and artists can also be crab buckets. Again, while there are wonderful and supportive spaces available, there are also toxic black holes out there, masquerading as genuine communities. I’ve belonged to writers’ groups where every single piece of writing was viciously torn to shreds, no matter how promising it might have seemed, and there were constant discussions about how ‘pointless’ it was to try to get published. Members were so insecure about not “making it” that they frantically tried to crush the hopes and dreams of anyone who might be competition. Instead of producing better writing, these kinds of groups eventually produce no writing at all.
Activist communities are often crab buckets. On the surface, people join activism communities to lift each other up and feel less alone in their cause; in reality, however, many activist communities have underlying cultures of suspicion, gossip, and hostility. Members gleefully comb through each other’s posts and content carefully, constantly looking for any small mistake or out-of-context comment that will allow them to declare that someone is “trash” or “cancelled”. People join these causes to fight back against their own feelings of powerlessness, and often report developing anxiety, depression and panic attacks as a result.
The list of crab bucket communities goes on. Any kind of group can become a crab bucket group under the right conditions; just because a community is created by and for a marginalized identity, it doesn’t mean that that community is actually safe for that identity. As humans, we like to band together in groups to accomplish large goals and feel less alone… but sometimes, we turn those groups into echo chambers for our own toxic ideas, and try to drag as many people as we can down into our buckets of despair with us.
If you’re in a group that you suspect might be getting a little crabby, it’s probably time to leave. Turning a whole group around by yourself is an enormous and thankless task, and it’s not one that I’d wish on anybody. Once a group of people have formed a collective identity around proving why they’re all worthless or fat or problematic, it’s hard to turn that ship around, and any attempts to do it might be met with hostility. It’s okay to give up on toxic communities, and look for healthy ones that build you up instead of tearing you down.
[If you found my blog because you’re curious about Greek people mixing up prehistoric bears and demigods, this post is for you. I studied archaeology with a focus on other things, and the research on this topic goes back decades, but imo the best book on how dinosaur bones influenced mythology is Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters. I strongly suggest you support this amazing historian and buy her stuff – she’s a great writer and she specializes in folklore and geomythology, it doesn’t get much cooler than that – but if you can’t and you’re interested in the subject – well, I believe scientific knowledge should be shared and accessible to everyone, so here are a few highlights. Part one of six.]
Griffins: a very mysterious mystery
“A race of four-footed birds, almost as large as wolves and with legs and claws like lions.”
The one thing you need to know about griffins is that they don’t really fit in anywhere. They have no powers, they don’t help heroes, they’re not defeating gods or anything like that. Technically speaking, they’re not even monsters – people thought griffins were legit – real animals who lived in Central Asia and sat on golden eggs and mostly killed anyone who went near them. And okay, someone might say, ‘Frog, what’s fishy about that? People used to be dumb as rocks and there’s plenty of bizarro animals out there, anyway’ and yeah, that’s a very good point – except for one thing. See, what’s creepy about griffins is that we’ve got drawings and descriptions of them spanning ten centuries and thousands of miles, and yet they always. look. the. freaking. same.
Like, here’s how people imagined elephants.
This is insanely funny and probably why God sent the Black Death to kill everyone, but also pretty common tbh, because a) people want to feel involved, b) people are liars who lie and c) it’s hard to imagine stuff you’ve never seen. So the more a story is passed around, the more it’s going to gain and lose details here and there, until you get from dog-footed hairy monkey of doom to plunger-nosed horror on stilts. But griffins – art or books, they’re consistently described as wolves-sized mammals with a beaked face. So that’s what made Adrienne Mayor go, Uh.
And what she did next is she started digging around in Central Asia, because that’s the other thing everyone agreed on: that griffins definitely lived there and definitely came from there. And this is where things get really interesting, because as it turns out, on one side of the Urals you’ve got Greeks going, ‘Mate, the Scythians, you know – they’ve got these huge-ass lion birds, I’m not even shitting you rn’ while on the other side of the Urals – wow and amaze – you’ve got Siberian tribes singing songs about the ‘bird-monsters’ and how their ancestors slaughtered them all because they were Valiant and Good.
(This according to a guy studying Siberian traditions in the early 1800s, anyway, because you know who writes stuff down? Not nomads, bless them: dragging around a shitload of books on fucking horseback is not a kind of life anyone deserve to live.)
And anyway, do you know what else those Mighty Ancestors did? They mined gold sand, and they kept tripping over dinosaur bones because that entire area is full of both things and some places are lucky like that. And in fact, the more excavations were carried out in ancient Scythian settlements, the more we started to realize that those guys were even more obsessed with griffins than the Greek were. Hell, some warriors even had griffins tattooed on their bodies?
And it’s probably all they ever talked about, because that’s when griffins suddenly appear in the Mediterreanean landscape: when Greek people start trading (and talking) with the Scythians.
(Another important note here, not that I’m not bitter or anything: something else those excavations are showing is that Herodotus was fucking right about fucking everything, SO THERE. Father of lies my ass, he was the only sensible guy in that whole bean-avoiding, monster-fucking, psychopathic and self-important Greek ‘intelligentsia’ and they can all fuck off and die and we don’t care about temples Pausy you dumb bitch we want to hear about the tree people and the Amazons and the fucking griffins goddammit. Uuugh. /rant)
So anyway, Scythian nomads had been hunting for gold in places with exciting names like ‘the field of the white bones’ and basically dying of exposure because mountains, so Herodotus (and others) got this right as well: that successful campaigns could take a long-ass time, and very often people just disappeared, never to be heard from again. What everybody got less right: the nomads and adventurers and gold miners weren’t killed by griffins, because by the time they started traveling into those mountains, ‘griffins’ had been dead for hundreds of thousands of years. What they did see, and what was sure to spook the fuck out of them, were fossils – and, more precisely, protoceratops skulls, which can be found on all the major caravan routes from China all the way to Uzbekistan and are so ubiquitous paleontologists call them ‘a damn nuisance’.
And guess what they look like.
Just fucking guess.
[Left: a golden griffin, Saka-Scyhtian culture; right: psittacosaurus skull, commonly found in Uzbekistan and the western Gobi.]
Also, fun detail if you’re into gory and painful ways of dying: many of the dino skeletons are found standing up, because the animals would be caught in sand storms and drop dead. So basically you’d be riding your horse and minding your own gold-related business when all of a sudden you see the empty sockets of a beaked something staring at you and yeah – as a reminder, the idea of evolution was not a thing until Darwin, so any Scythian or Siberian tribesman seeing something like that would assume there was a fairly good fucking chance of a live whatever-the-hell-this-is waiting for him behind the next hill. And that’s what he’d say to Greek traders over a bowl of fermented mare’s milk: to stay the fuck away from those mountains, because griffins, man, they’re fucking real and there’s hundreds of them and anyway, maybe write that down if writing’s something you’re into, never saw the point myself but eh, to each his own, right, and cheers, good health, peace and joy to the ancestors.
Man, don’t you just love mythology?
(How fossils influenced mythology: part two, Cyclops, will be up soon.)
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