Colophon: a statement at the end of a book containing the scribe or ownerâs name, date of completion, or bitching about how hard it is to write a book in the dark ages
Oh, my hand
The parchment is very hairy
Thank God it will soon be dark
St. Patrick of Armagh, deliver me from writing
Now Iâve written the whole thing; for Christâs sake give me a drink
Oh d fuckin abbot
Massive hangover
Whoever translated these Gospels did a very poor job
Cursed be the pesty cat that urinated over this book during the night
If someone else would like such a handsome book, come and look me up in Paris, across from the Notre Dame cathedral
I shall remember, O Christ, that I am writing of Thee, because I am wrecked today
Do not reproach me concerning the letters, the ink is bad and the parchment scanty and the day is dark
11 golden letters, 8 shilling each; 700 letters with double shafts, 7 shilling for each hundred; and 35 quires of text, each 16 leaves, at 3 shilling each. For such an amount I wonât write again
Here ends the second part of the title work of Brother Thomas Aquinas of the Dominican Order; very long, very verbose; and very tedious for the scribe; thank God, thank God, and again thank God
If anyone take away this book, let him die the death, let him be fried in a pan; let the falling sickness and fever seize him; let him be broken on the wheel, and hanged. Amen
This is the greatest progression of events I have ever read, whereâs my historical gay romance novel about this
KING JAMES, CAN YOU CHILL?
Local King Cannot Stop Promoting His Boyfriend
whereâs the lush period drama about this series of events?
fun thing about king James, this guy was fairly public about his bf (more public than what was acceptable). He threw lots of extravagant parties with his man on his arm. It pissed off the church obviously so to get them off his back, heâs the one that ordered the third translation of the Bible from Hebrew to English (the King James Version aka the Authorized Version) so the Bible every hot blooded all American Christian reads today was literally just written so a very gay king could fuck his boyfriend in peace.
oh my god this is hilarious
âguys, guys. I know this looks kinda gay, and i promise i have a good explanation for all this, but have you considered⌠that jesus⌠is also gay? checkmate, heteros.â
I was at Adeevka where the Ukrainians are trying to take a strategically-located overpass from the Separs (I was there as a peaceful tourist who never even touched a firearm, of course) and the positions there are about 400 or so meters away from each other, so if you scream loud enough the fucks on the other side can actually hear you.
Up to this point, Iâd observed a guy dropping his phone like it was going to bite him when I told him the Bruno Mars song he was playing was gay, and could reliably make people leave the room by asking them âwould you rather sit on a chocolate cake and suck a dick, or eat a chocolate cake while getting fucked in the assâ, so itâs at this point in the trenches that a flash of inspiration hits me.
In my best Russian (which was utterly broken but âproperâ Russian grammar is barbaric caveman-speak anyway) I scream out ânext guy that shoots is gayâ. And I swear to whatever god exists that two solid minutes of silence followed. It was some guns-fall-silent Christmas miracle shit
sit down, kids, iâm gonna tell you a fucking story about california city.
imagine itâs the 1960s. weâre gonna fucking go to SPACE and thereâs hella people who wanna OWN LAND because if you own land then youâre rich and shit. everybody wants to own land in the 1960s. owning land is like the iPhone of the 1960s, and nat mendelsohn knows it.
âyo,â nat says to himself one day, ânobody lives in the mojave desert and that shitâs basically like FREE LAND. what if i just buy the mojave desert for real cheap and sell it to people so they can FULFILL THE AMERICAN DREAM and OWN SOME LAND.â
so he bought the mojave desert and did exactly that.
(historical accuracy note: nat did not buy the entire mojave desert. he did buy a huge fucking chunk of it, though, so the statement âhe bought the mojave desertâ is accurate, if slightly misleading.)
once nat had bought the mojave desert, he split it up into a bunch of lots and drew some roads and put in some street signs so it looked like the first five minutes of when youâre playing the sims and you havenât actually built any buildings yet but youâre trying to plan out where the fuck your house is gonna go and where your shitty neighbors are gonna go.
with like Âźth of a city planned, nat then had huge planefuls of people flown in so he could show him all the streets and shit heâd marked out for his city and hopefully sell them a piece of this city. they were gonna have a huge park and swimming pools and white picket fences and it was gonna be AWESOME.Â
he made BOATFULS OF MONEY selling these plots of land. everyone fucking owned a california city plot. my own great-grandmother owned a california city plot. it was gonna be BIGGER THAN LOS ANGELES and they could all build cute lil cookie cutter 1960s houses and plant lawns and have backyard barbecues with the fam. california city was gonna be POPPINâ, but everyone had to move there first.
this is where natâs choice of making a city in the middle of the desert was REALLY FUCKING STUPID.
kids, if youâve never been to a desert then itâs gonna be impossible to explain why moving to the middle of the mojave desert is a stupid fucking plan. instead, iâll just tell you this: california city is located just 65 miles from DEATH VALLEY NATIONAL PARK, which is the hottest place on the face of the earth. california city isnât much cooler than death valley, let me tell you, and even the native los angeles residents who now owned california city plots were kinda rethinking moving to the middle of bumfuck nowhere to be part of this poppinâ new california city.
âfam,â those people said to their squad on the telephone because itâs the 1960s and group chat hasnât been invented yet, âi dunno about this california city thing. yeah, my boy nat says itâs gonna be LIT but also itâs in the mojave desert and iâm not sure if he mean lit like âturned upâ or lit like âyour ass is gonna be lit on fire if you try to sit down in this hundred degree heat.â maybe we should just move to burbank. at least they have movie stars and shit plus i donât gotta build a whole fucking house.â
so nobody but like three people moved into california city.
(historical accuracy note: it was like three hundred people, but that makes it sound impressive for those of you that come from places where three hundred people living in bumfuck nowhere is actually a lot of people living in bumfuck nowhere so please just imagine three people, by themselves, in the desert. way more accurate representation of how many people actually showed up versus were supposed to show up.)
those three people sure built a functional, working city, though. they got an AIRPORT! they got a BASEBALL TEAM! they got the EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE nearby, so everyoneâs got jobs! all the borax for those middle school kids that are selling slime probably comes from the BORAX MINE in california city! and by golly they got their fucking park.
itâs a cool place, aside from the fact that it always feels like youâre being cooked alive in an oven except for in the winter when itâs fucking freezing because deserts want to kill you no matter what season it is.
and thatâs the story of why californiaâs third largest city has less than fifteen thousand people living in it.Â
TL;DR: local man ran successful kickstarter for a planned city but found out if you donât actually build it, they ainât gonna come.
this reads like a bill wurtz video and the all caps are the jingles
I just saw a troubling comment on a gifset of Antiope and her badass three-arrow stunt shot at the three german soldiers on the beach. I love that moment as much as anyone. However, this comment referred to her âkilling Nazisâ. And those men were not Nazis.Â
Wonder Woman is set in WW1. Hitler would not come to power for over a decade after WW1 ended. Fascism had not yet become a political force in Europe. In fact, Germanyâs treatment as a defeated aggressor instead of as an equal party in the armistice negotiations – and later the Treaty of Versailles – despite the Alliesâ equal culpability for the war, directly contributed to the rise of fascism and nationalism in Germany.
Stop calling the German soldiers in Wonder Woman Nazis. One of the greatest tragedies of WW1 is that the soldiers on both sides of the trenches were hungry, young, sick, poor men, who had no stake in the war. This article talks about the experiences (at least early in the war) of both sides on the Western front meeting on no manâs land and finding little difference between one another.Â
Thereâs a lot to love about Wonder Woman, and I very much enjoyed it. I also loved the points in the movie when the violence done by Americans and British – such as when Diana speaks to Chief about the death of his people – were addressed as well, but they were brief. The presentation of Germans As The Bad Guys – especially since Ariesâ influence was inconsistent as a plot point – has led to people mistakenly reading it as a movie about Nazis, when the Nazis did not exist in 1918. A WW1 setting does not sustain a narrative of one side being âheroicâ and the other âvillainousâ, especially if one takes into account the atrocities both sides had committed during the quarter century leading up to the armistice. It troubles me that this movie allows WW1 German soldiers to be read as Nazis.Â
Please stop referring to Nazis in the context of Wonder Woman.
^ THIS THANK U
This is important
I think this lends to an underlying point that Aries was trying to cause chaos on all sides apparently including the audience
As Steve points out in the movie, World War I isnothing like World War II⌠the whole thing was just a big messâŚthere was no one country that was on the ârightâ side, just callous people in power all over the world sending kids off to get massacred and not caring about the damage it was doing and the lives it was destroying
Itâs worth noting that Steveâs side isnât really shown to be any more âRightâ or heroic than the Germans areâŚwhile Ludendorf and Dr Poison are cetrainly villains as well, when we meet them the people in charge on Steveâs side theyâre a bunch of clueless, cruel, self important, sexist old men who donât care about the troops on their own side which is pretty much 100% accurate to what World War I was likeâŚthe people giving the orders back then were all basically General Melchett from Blackadder Goes Fourth except even less rationalâŚhell the only person who showed ANY compassion among those in power on Steveâs side turns out to be the GOD OF WAR and only be doing it to further his own evil plansÂ
Diana doesnât side with any country in the conflict eitherâŚshe works with Steve and the team he puts together because theyâre good people not because theyâre not GermanâŚ
Iâve seen some comments of Wonder Woman,
basically on the extent to which it is alternative history, if Wonder Womanâs
involvement in WW1 was hushed up, if it
could be hushed up, if the rumours of a superhuman warrior queen never
spread because the people she saved ended up dying, or if her involvement is
widely known, a historical fact, etc.
And itâs a cool question, and I hope people will
write the same quasi-historical, quasi-journalistic fics about her that they
wrote about Captain America.
At the same time, WW1 mythology was fucking
unbelievable. Iâm not an expert, but I worked with someone who was, and Iâm not
kidding, very bored but very scared people come up with some exceptionally
weird shit. Contemporary reporting of WW1 was already a mess of understatement
and overstatement. If you want to calm the panic on the home front, youâll
write about how our soldiers laugh in the face of machine guns, and mustard gas
is just a minor inconvenience. If you want to motivate people, youâll tell them
the enemy desecrates altars and murder babies for fun. Â People were told conflicting things about the
confusing terror they experienced.
Partly as a result of this, partly as a result
of shock upon shock, people who were in the middle of it came up with the
weirdest shit, truly. There were tons of stories about stone statues on churches
who came to life, either to protect the inhabitants or to predict the end of
the war. Overall, very many things prophesied the end of the war: spontaneously
breaking glassware, blessed infants who spoke immediately after birth, all
sorts of dreams and visitations. A flying woman with a shield was not the
slightest bit out of place in the trenches. Catholics would probably assume she
was the Blessed Virgin Mary, some Brits would probably say she was Britannia
herself, and after the war was over, nobody would be quite sure if they really
did see her, or if they just really, really needed to see something to give
them the strength to walk out into No Manâs Land.
the big mans a lad i have fuck all, he lets me have a kip in a field he showed me a pondÂ
I think my favorite part is how the first three are totally comprehensible to a modern reader, and then the fourth one is just âWait, what?â You can practically see where William the Conqueror came crashing into linguistic history like the Kool-Aid Man, hollering about French grammar and the letter Q.
So as a reaction to the recently passed anti-gay laws, Russian gay rights activists have taken various Soviet propaganda posters and adapted them into pride posters instead.
But I gotta say, a lot of the original Soviet propaganda posters were pretty damn gay already.
These are unedited Sino-Soviet propaganda posters. With their insistent and repetitive slogans of âAlways together!â and âFriends forever!â and the aggressive hand-holding and hugging, I gotta say the Russian and Chinese guys in these posters seem like quite the committed couple.
They have kids and everything! Lookit their little blended family.
They love working together, relaxing together, and reading the works of Lenin to each other. On weekends they garden in their matching overalls.
I for reals thought this was a visual story of guys meeting at work and then hitting it off at a serried of dates til they eventually got married and had kids.
sparksoffandommagic 