I’m sorry, WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING?!?!?
Early 1900s speedrun
Anonymous asked:
I JSUT SCROLLED DOWN AND SAW YOU DON'T LIKE THE CHAIN ANON THINGS I'M SORRY AAAAAAAAAAAA
IT’S OKAY I APPRECIATE YOUR APOLOGY I SAW IT AT AN OKAY TIME.
I finished my Rome book and have now begun one about Pompeii. I’m 65 pages in and I already love it: yes, it covers the volcano, but most of the book is about “this is what the town and daily life of it would have been like, actually.” Fascinating stuff. Things I’ve learned so far:
- The streets in Pompeii have sidewalks sometimes a meter higher than the road, with stepping stones to hop across as “crosswalks.” I’d seen some photos before. The book points out that, duh, Pompeii had no underground drainage, was built on a fairly steep incline, and the roads were more or less drainage systems and water channels in the rain.
- Unlike today, where “dining out” is expensive and considered wasteful on a budget, most people in Pompeii straight up didn’t have kitchens. You had to eat out if you were poor; only the wealthy could afford to eat at home.
- Most importantly, and I can’t believe in all the pop culture of Pompeii this had never clicked for me: Pompeii had a population between 6-35,000 people. Perhaps 2,000 died in the volcano. Contemporary sources talk about the bay being full of fleeing ships. Most people got the hell out when the eruption started. The number who died are still a lot, and it’s still gruesome and morbid, but it’s not “an entire town and everyone in it.” This also makes it difficult for archeologists, apparently (and logically): those who remained weren’t acting “normally,” they were sheltering or fleeing a volcano. One famous example is a wealthy woman covered in jewelry found in the bedroom in the glaridator barracks. Scandal! She must have been having an affair and had it immortalized in ash! The book points out that 17 other people and several dogs were also crowded in that one small room: far more likely, they were all trying to shelter together. Another example: Houses are weirdly devoid of furniture, and archeologists find objects in odd places. (Gardening supplies in a formal dining room, for example.) But then you remember that there were several hours of people evacuating, packing their belongings, loading up carts and getting out… maybe the gardening supplies were brought to the dining room to be packed and abandoned, instead of some deeper esoteric meaning. The book argues that this all makes it much harder to get an accurate read on normal life in a Roman town, because while Pompeii is a brilliant snapshot, it’s actually a snapshot of a town undergoing major evacuation and disaster, not an average day.
- Oh, another great one. Outside of a random laundry place in Pompeii, someone painted a mural with two scenes. One of them referenced Virgil’s Aeneid. Underneath that scene, someone graffiti’d a reference to a famous line from that play, except tweaked it to be about laundry. This is really cool, the book points out, because it implies that a) literacy and education was high enough that one could paint a reference and have it recognized, and b) that someone else could recognize it and make a dumb play on words about it and c) the whole thing, again, means that there’s a certain amount of literacy and familiarity with “Roman pop culture” even among fairly normal people at the time.
Wait, how did the stepping stone crosswalks work? Wouldn't they just block the road underneath?
No!! It’s quite cool! Here’s a photo:
[image described : a street in pompeii. the sidewalks are quite a bit higher than the road, and three rectangular stones are laid out across the street at sidewalk height. There are narrow gaps between each step stone, and between the center two gaps you can clearly make out depressions in the road from countless wagon wheels.]
As you can kind of see in the photo, the stones were carefully spaced out to be just wide enough for a cart’s wheels to pass between them — not to mention any water. I’m sure there were still some terrible pain in the ass traffic and cart jams, but it’s still pretty neat!
Oooh, that makes sense. Thanks :)
Anonymous asked:
-boops your nose- send this to ten blogs you think are lovely and deserve a boop on the nose. 🖤~booooop~<^_^>
I appreciate you sending this to me but these sorts of things make me unreasonably anxious so I ask people do not send me chain things like this thank you.
~ Vénus: Autumn/Winter, Milieu du siècle collection.
Designer/Maker: Christian Dior; embroidery by Maison Rébé; authorized copy made by Nanty Frocks, New York
Place of origin: Designed in Paris, produced in New York
Date: 1949-1950
Medium: Viscose (rayon) tulle with pearlised paillettes and sequins
Anonymous asked:
why do you think a lot of historians don't think that alexander (and, by extension, other people in history) was gay? sorry if this is worded strangely by the way
slaygentford answered:
Anon I’m not yelling at you I love you but I have to yell because everyone on tumblr spreads such bad misinformation. NO HISTORIANS THINK ALEXANDER WAS STRAIGHT. NOR ANY OTHER OLD TIME GAYS. LITERALLY NONE. THIS IS A MYTH PERPETUATED ON TUMBLR AND IT ISNT REAL STOP BELIEVING IT IM LOSING MY MIND !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Okay. Now that I am. Calm. Sorry. Even tho plenty of historians were homophobic back in like last century — no one currently writing, period — they still could not DENY that Alexander who kept a MALE CONCUBINE , FUCKED MEN. Even the MOST homophobic ones were like “it was his worst vice” but they couldn’t DENY it. NOBODY EVER sorry normal volume nobody ever denied it in the whole history of the world never. Never. No one. That is fake. People who say that do not know what they are talking about.
On the OTHER hand , historians will say that for example Hamilton was “straight” because there IS NO DEFINITIVE EVIDENCE OTHERWISE. no, a few gay letters are not hard evidence. YES, male friendship mores were WAY DIFFERENT in old times, and it’s WAY too much extrapolation to assume from a few gay sounding TO US letters that he was fucking that twink Laurens. That is BAD METHODOLOGY. that is not homophobic it is BAD METHODOLOGY. you cannot publish that kind of thing cuz it’s simply not got enough evidence. I don’t care if they probably were, there is EMPIRICALLY NOT ENOUGH EVIDENCE.
Okay. Also. Last point. l hate the misinformation on this hell site. Last point.
Gay and straight were not labels that existed until the late 1800s. Historians do not write about sexuality in terms of gay and straight because gay and straight did not exist as we know them to people prior to the late 1800s. We can only judge how people in history had sex based on their actions. If a historian says Alexander wasn’t gay or bi it isn’t because they’re saying he didn’t fuck men. It’s because they’re saying it’s extremely reductive and bad scholarship to ascribe modern definitions of sexuality and modern sexual mores to the ancient world. When we’re just hanging out and talking one on one or casually, no problem saying gay and straight! It helps us conceptialize how they lived! It’s something we understand. But in a PAPER you are trying to PUBLISH, you CANNOT say that because it misinterprets the workings of their society.
Okay. Thank you. I hope this clears things up for every dumbass who makes those posts and misinforms my innocent fellow classics people who are new and do not know. I hate y’all. Not you anon. Y’all who peddle this ….. homophobia nonsense. Stop it
Stone-hewn graves at Heysham, Lancashire. Believed to be 11th Century.
and yet. someone has left fresh flowers
So I had to get nosy and do some research because It's never occurred to me that this kind of effect was possible in the 19th century (upon reading the origins I was like "Oh Shit That's what that is??").
Fabric is made up of basically two parts while being woven, weft (which goes side to side), and warp (which goes up and down).
ALT
ALTThis dress is made of Shot Silk, so named because of how the weft bobbin of a different color is "shot through" the warp color while the fabric is being woven. The silk in the original post is probably "Dove silk", made of turquoise and magenta fibers which makes that striking iridescent grey color. It was popular all throughout the 18th century, especially in French fashions, and gained a popularity during the American Civil War (cotton production was disrupted and yielding smaller crops as the enslaved peoples involved with production of cotton were dealing with bigger fish to fry, like seeking freedom from slavery and trying not to die).
You might be more familiar with its use in cosplay spaces, specifically with One Disney Princess In Particular
ALT
ALTThis fabric has so much potential in modern garment making, and I'm so shocked no one else has latched onto it for period pieces. Especially when we have documents suggesting that this technique has existed in Noble and Clergy circles since THE 700'S
Shot silk! What a concept!
yes! shot silk/changeable silk is so pretty. I see it fairly often in late 50s/early 60s party dresses, usually in really intense green/blue but sometimes in pink/orange or blue/purple.
There have been archeological finds of thousand-year-old medieval woollen cloth woven by hand that uses the same effect! It's so cool.
it REALLY annoys me these days when they show those simple, garishly painted versions of old marble statues and claim that the statues looked like that. like yeah, they were painted, we can find bits of color in various locations, so we know very roughly the color of various locations, but i dont think theres any more reason to believe they were painted in these flat (and matte!) colors than in more detail. like yes, we dont know what that detail was, but that doesnt make the flat version *more plausible*, i dont think you should have like, a stronger prior that they were flat than that they were detailed. these were expensive statues!
I remember it being pointed out once that we can only tell the base color that first touched the statue, not any additional shading, and the recreations are typically made by people who aren't artists; they're archeologists and anthropologists.
If you've ever seen how people paint, like dnd figures, it becomes very clear that bases don't tell the whole story:
Do you really think that people who could sculpt like the left painted like the right
This statue was recovered from Herculaneum - it had been buried under ash, perfectly preserved. Note that it is painted, but in a very delicate way. Nothing garish, and they used to natural luster of the marble as flesh tone.
Source: BBC's "Life and Death in Herculaneum" @16:48