Reblogged heartofstanding
Haunted House
Reblogged transformativeworks
we all love timeloops, but what piece of media introduced you to the concept? i feel like it says a lot about how and why someone enjoys them. reblog and tag with your first loop!
Reblogged inevitablecorgi
how come you'll say tragedy is your favorite genre and then 100 thousand million people will be like "you should check out this adaptation of this famous tragedy but the twist is there's a happy ending this time." GET THAT AWAY FROM ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
nobody ever tells me to check out a Hamlet adaptation where things go even worse for him
Hamlet but he slept weird and is neck hurts a little bit through the whole play
honestly I think everyone should just play Hamlet this way anyway. he should have a tension migraine
I dunno, "famous tragedy but with a happy ending" worked okay for Goethe
Reblogged
Ok so one of my pet history peeves is the “medieval people never bathed!!1!” myth, firstly because can we PLEASE stop thinking of medieval people as subhuman idiots worthy of nothing more than our derision, but more practically - come on man. Use your brain. How could the species have survived for a thousand years in medieval Europe if everyone was as repulsively filthy as you think they were. Nobody would fuck. The innate human disgust response to bodily waste and contaminants is not an invention of the 1950s, how do you think medieval people ever managed to fuck if they literally never bathed in their entire lives.
#YEAH#this is a hill i will die on#like i get that this is sort of trying to turn narratives of european cultural superiority on their head but like#it's not true#and you don't achieve anything useful by just making shit up#what is true is that full immersion in water was not as common for obvious reasons#but people still did it when they could#and when they could not they still WASHED#the church didn't like public baths but a) people still went to them and b) that didn't disallow all personal hygiene#like come on now#they also preferred not to empty chamberpots into the street if possible
Reblogged heartofstanding
Dragon in the shape of an “S”
From “The Sherborne Missal” (Add MS 74236) c.1399-1407
Reblogged derring-do
Bryn Terfel as Méphistophélès
Faust (Gounod), Royal Opera House, 2004
Reblogged fiftysevenacademics
(This post is brought to you by the fact that tumblr are, hilariously, claiming that 50% of current users are gen z, and i wanna see how accurate claim that is.)
Reblogged ghostpoetics
Zwei Seelen wohnen ach in meiner Brust, Faust fan art, digital (circa. 2017)
Reblogged cardassiangoodreads
Republicans: we can just have Elon Musk go to Wisconsin and give everyone money. He'll give them a million dollars. It's all legal as long as we hold power forever and can stop anyone from doing anything to stop us. All of Wisconsin is bribed, nothing can go wrong now
The invincible Susan Crawford:
Reblogged
it’s always sunny in philadelphia | “the gang exploits a miracle”
Is this John Donne
Source: submissiveness
Reblogged poorshadowspaintedqueens
🔥 The beacons are lit; the library calls for aid
The Trump administration has issued an executive order aimed at dismantling the Institute of Museum and Library Services - the ONLY federal agency for America's libraries.
Using just 0.003% of the federal budget, the IMLS funds services at libraries across the country; services like Braille and talking books for the visually impaired, high-speed internet access, and early literacy programs.
Libraries are known for doing more with less, but even we can't work with nothing.
How You Can Help:
🔥 Call your congressperson!
Use the app of your choice or look 'em up here: https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member
Pro tip: If your phone anxiety is high, call at night and leave a voicemail. You can even write yourself a script in advance and read it off. Heck, read them this post if you want to.
Phones a total no-go? The American Library Association has a form for you: https://oneclickpolitics.global.ssl.fastly.net/messages/edit?promo_id=23577
🔥Tell your friends!
Tell strangers, for that matter. People in line at the check out, your elderly neighbor, the mail carrier - no one is safe from your library advocacy. Libraries are for everyone and we need all the help we can get.
...Wait, why do we need this IMLS thing again?
The ALA says it best in their official statement and lists some ways libraries across the country use IMLS funding:
But if you want a really specific answer, here at LCPL we use IMLS funding to provide our amazing interlibrary loan service. If we can't purchase an item you request (out of print books, for example) this service lets us borrow it from another library and check it out to you.
IMLS also funds the statewide Indiana Digital Library and Evergreen Indiana, which gives patrons of smaller Indiana libraries access to collections just as large and varied as the big libraries' collections.
As usual, cutting this funding will hurt rural communities the most - but every library user will feel it one way or another. Let's let Congress know that's unacceptable.
Apologies for adding to an already long post, but a few people have asked for updates. Here's the latest as of 3/31/25:
All IMLS staff have been placed on leave, which means grants have been suspended. It's not good news, but the call to action is the same: Call your congressperson!
Even if you have already called, you can contact them again since the situation has changed.
More info on what this means, tools for contacting your reps, and further reporting under the cut:
Reblogged
Another whine I have to do on this topic is as a music historian, when I see people act like Protestant music is inherently "worse" and less interesting than Catholic music. To me, it just makes it really clear that when people mean "Protestant" they really are just talking about "contemporary Christian music," which is funny because a lot of that is specifically evangelical, which many religious scholars view as a separate movement (Reconstructionism) from Protestantism. But regardless, it's a way that people who are culturally Christian who were raised evangelical are showing their own biases.
It's true that because Protestantism tends to value congregational participation in worship more, music tends to be overall less complex because it's designed to be easier for regular people to sing along with or otherwise participate in. However, along with that "complexity" is a cultural moving target and the idea that "complexity" in a Western classical music sense automatically makes music "worse" is bunk (and disqualifies probably most of the music that people reading this post listen to regularly), this ignores that there's long been a lot of variation in how each Protestant church interprets the role of music. Lutherans and Anglicans, for instance, from fairly early on in their history blended the Catholic approach of hiring professional musicians to play complex music with more congregational participation. And you have the other extreme, like Quakers, who traditionally don't use music in their services at all. A lot of more specific restrictions on music come not from "Protestantism" in general or Martin Luther, but from later people whose ideas are associated with specific branches of Protestantism rather than the whole of it (e.g. John Calvin).
(This also leaves aside that post-Vatican II, Catholic liturgical musical traditions have become a lot more varied. I had a very Catholic friend in high school whose church played contemporary Christian music, including some of the same stuff you'd find in Protestant and evangelical churches. Most Catholic churches in 2025 are not playing full-on Latin masses anymore.)
Anyway, here are some of the musical traditions that fall under "Protestant music" that don't have to do with most of what people consider "Christian rock" or "contemporary Christian music," that I personally think are pretty cool, in a very rough chronological order:
- everything religious that J.S. Bach wrote (yes, including the B Minor Mass - masses or portions of them were not unheard-of in Lutheran churches in Bach's time and it was intended as a fusion of Catholic and Lutheran approaches to music);
- Felix Mendelssohn's religious music, which makes up a huge chunk of hymns in contemporary hymn books;
- Gospel music, spirituals, and most other traditions coming out of the African-American church, which by extension had a major influence on a lot of secular Black popular music (this is such a huge thing that people always leave out of these takes!)
- Sacred Harp/Shape Note singing, a style of Protestant congregational singing from the American South (yes, the video is in Ireland, but the style originated in the U.S. during the Second Great Awakening) that has its own form of musical notation
And this is just specifically liturgical music, not even getting to all the popular music out there that references religious themes that is from Protestant musicians, but is not specifically "contemporary Christian" (for instance, Sufjan Stevens, Kendrick Lamar).
This has a PSA from been your friendly neighborhood musicologist! Who is not myself religious, but is not a fan of sweeping incorrect assumptions about music regardless.
I want to take these people ever so gently by the shoulders and say,
“You don’t dislike Protestant MusicTM. You dislike Hillsong music, and dislike Evangelical culture which is clearly aimed at ‘tricking’ young people into getting into it, and both of those things are valid.”
To be fair, a lot of the posts I've seen come from conservative Catholics (that's part of why in the other post I identified that some of this is propaganda from tradcaths - and of course, there's a corollary here to that a lot of tradcaths are white supremacists, so that's why they're not talking about Black church music), so I don't think that's necessarily the issue many of these people are taking. They're just dissing Protestants as unwashed rabble who make simple music compared to the glorious Latin mass.
But it is obviously being picked up on here by exvangelicals who have more legitimate gripes with Hillsong-style CCM.
Fair enough. Though I do think tradcaths also dislike Evangelical Youth CultureTM because it’s stealing their would-be trad teens lmao. Which for me (as a practicing Christian) is a very “Bite each other’s dicks off!” situation.
Also tradcaths probably don't go to mainstream Catholic churches so they don't hear all of the 1970s soft acoustic folk music that's most of what gets played there these days, as @cardassiangoodreads points out. (Or at least it was back when I was still observant; more recently, it's been revealed that the composer of a lot of that stuff was a massive sexual predator and is still alive, so most places have dropped his stuff and I don't know what they've replaced it with.) Can confirm that back when I was cantoring/doing church music I knew a lot of musical directors who really liked borrowing evangelical CCM--the homophobic/anti-choice political alliance of conservative American Catholics and evangelicals has also led to a certain degree of aesthetic blurring. I've seen "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" in Catholic hymnals, after all.
I'm not sure what they play in tradcath churches though. I have no intention of ever going to one (i assume a lot of it is classical but I can just listen to recordings of that)
Reblogged skeleton-richard
for april fools we’re deleting this entire site sayonara you weeaboo shits
tfw the BUCKLE UP, ASSHOLES style of Internet pop history shows up in scholarly books (thanks, I hate it)
(Also the author of this book seemed familiar and it turns out it's because she wrote an oft-cited blog post comparing the Showtime and Canal Borgias series, arguing for the superiority of the latter on account of how it--allegedly correctly--depicts people in the Renaissance as universally in agreement that it is completely acceptable and indeed the proper course of action to bash your adulterous wife's head in with a fireplace poker. WHICH THEY WERE NOT. It was certainly much easier to get away with it if you were a sufficiently powerful individual, but people didn't just think that was okay)
(Along similar lines I feel like a lot of historical/literary scholarship has done a bit of a turn from "the thing I study is the best and most important thing ever" to "the thing I study is the worst and the most responsible for destroying the world" and I am not really here for either of those. Anyway I get that vibe from this book)