hannibal is the best show i’ve ever seen. someone will look at a corpse and say “where did the liver go....” and then it cuts to exactly where the liver went
like yeah i know he gets a bonkers good redemption arc but like. he didn’t actually need one because if you give a teenage boy a ship and tell the people on it to listen to him the least you can expect is some attempted murder. that’s not on him at that point
He still sees the light blast and goes to the South Pole but instead of trying to capture aang he rolls up in his free boat like ‘get in losers we’re going to kill my dad’
i like the implication that Zuko wanted to get the avatar to help kill his dad, but then he meets Katara and is just “oh ya you will do just fine instead, the literal demigod can be the cheerleader then”
A student once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead, “What is the earliest sign of civilization?” The student expected her to say a clay pot, a grinding stone, or maybe a weapon.
Margaret Mead thought for a moment, then she said, “A healed femur.”
A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. A healed femur shows that someone cared for the injured person, did their hunting and gathering, stayed with them, and offered physical protection and human companionship until the injury could mend.
Mead explained that where the law of the jungle—the survival of the fittest—rules, no healed femurs are found. The first sign of civilization is compassion, seen in a healed femur.
— Ira Byock, The Best Care Possible: A Physician’s Quest to Transform Care Through the End of Life (x)
Fun fact! This is a Dmanisi skull from Georgia, another type of hominin to us.
Notice that jaw? When we lose our teeth, over time our jawbone heals the gaps, making it smooth, so when archaeologists discover skulls centuries later they can tell whether the tooth was lost after death (as the bone didn’t grow to cover the hole) or during the individual’s life.
The majority of this jaw has healed, so this person would have lived a number of years with basically no teeth. The age of this skull, according to wiki, is 1.8 million years.
This means that millions of years ago this person had a diet with soft, easy foods, and that others in the group would have known, understood, and helped by specialising their foraging for this one individual.
Or, in the words of my lecturer when we covered this, “Someone would have had to chew up this person’s food for them. Every day. Multiple times. For years.”
When me and my siblings were much younger my dad owned a Volvo car with a computerized voice. It was a very deep voice that would give you warnings about the car’s status. “The boot (trunk) is not shut” being one I remember. Very creepy now I look back at it.
Me, my older brother and our dad would joke that the voice came from “a little man” inside the car. My younger sister was at an age where you could tell her anything and she would take it as gospel. She actually believed there was a tiny person with an extraordinarily deep voice living in the car. We kept it going for a long time until one day someone crashed into the vehicle and it ended up in the scrapyard. As she cried for the safety of the little man we had to tell her the truth. She was mad at us for weeks.
I convinced my kids that my car’s triangular, red, hazard button was a ‘self destruct’ button. This was initially to keep them from hitting it since it is a really prominently placed, large, red button. This worked out great until I quickly pulled the car over the other day to get a dog off the road. Threw on my hazards and jumped out of the car after the dog. I looked back and both kids are hitting the ditch.
Have you ever wondered about like cave paintings? Like, “What were they doing? These don’t… look very good,” -chuckles- In fact, almost every cave painting has Spaghetti Lines, which are webs of lines drawn over-top images, which you can see here.
-picture changes to a grayscale image of a deer standing in tall grass-
And here’s an example of natural Spaghetti Lines in nature, but we’ll get to that in a second.
-picture changes to a photo paleolithic drawing of a mammoth. Alongside the photo is a tracing of the drawing, to clarify the lines-
The second weird thing is like sometimes animals are given extra body parts, like here the mammoth has two trunks. And here, there’s a drawing of an antelope or a deer, it looks like, that seems to have two heads.
For a long time, people would assume like maybe the Spaghetti Lines were just some kind of paleolithic graffiti, and maybe the animals were these kind of religious creatures that they had mythologized. But then, in 1993, a German scholar went into this cave in southern France, and it changed everything.
Unlike the other caves he had been to, this one was very poorly funded, so it had no artificial lights, and he had to be guided in by a local farmer, with nothing but a flickering lantern to guide his way. Here is how he described the experience.
He said, “M. Lapeyre finished his story and wanted to move on. I encouraged him to remain and to slowly swing his lantern back and forth a few feet from the cave wall. As he moved the light, I saw the colors of the tectiform begin to shift. When the lamp arced to the left, the blacks faded, the browns became red and the red intensified. When the light moved to the right, the pattern reversed, creating a shifting color scheme.
Moreover, the engraved lines under and around the tectiform became animated. Suddenly, the head of one creature stood out clearly. It lived for a second, then faded as another appeared. The spaghetti lines were no longer a confused two-dimensional pattern. Rather, they became a forest or a bramble patch that concealed and then revealed the animals within.
By firelight, a secret of the cave painters was exposed. In the space of a few moments, I saw cuts and dissolves, change and movement. Form appeared and disappeared. Colors shifted and changed. In short, I was watching a movie.”
Understood this way, the antelope with two heads, under the dance of the firelight, is an antelope going from grazing to checking for predators. And the mammoth with two or three trunks becomes a mammoth in motion, swinging his trunk.
There’s something beautiful to me about knowing that hundreds of thousands of years ago, ancient humans descended into the depths to watch movies.
honey as a tea sweetener is so superior to sugar… the nectar of the gods and whatnot… when you add honey to tea it’s an ancient civilisations moment. when you add a sugar cube to tea it’s a british dude with a white curly wig moment. does anyone else get what i mean
in average
are photos
are videos
are texts
are gifs
are audio