annoyingalchemist

[annoyingalchemist]

Hen and Chicks by Yamaguchi Okatomo, mid- to late 18th century

Masterpieces of Japan on Twitter: Source

[annoyingalchemist]

No, I would not steal a car. However, if I had the ability to create a copy of someone's car that I could have for free while the other person retained their original car, I would definitely do that.

[annoyingalchemist]

[annoyingalchemist]

one of my friends just got a mug that connects to the internet and let's you upload pixel art and text to it remotely. he gave all of us access and

[annoyingalchemist]

top 5 ancient artistic cultures (not sure about phrasing. yknow like "jomon style" or "anglo saxon art")

the jade creatures of Hongshen, a late Neolithic culture of northeast China contemporaneous w the latest stages of Sredny Stog and just about all of Yamnaya. attempts to find analogues to these critters in nature have borne little fruit, not least bc the Hongshen appear to had been perfectly capable of pursuing realism in their art – when they wanted to. this article argues the creatures draw inspiration from the shape of human bone and cartillage, like so:

the rest go as follows:

2. figurines of Bronze Age Scandinavia. I just think these look really aesthetically pleasing. look at those curves! idk what to think about attempts to interpret the figurines as depicting historically attested Nordic deities. the most famous artefact to survive from the Nordic Bronze Age, the Trundholm Chariot, seems to depict a myth of only marginal significance to later Norse civilisation

3. the erotic pottery of the Moche, predecessors of the Chimor, who flourished on the coast of northwestern Peru prior to their conquest by the Inca. this post goes a little into the various theories concerning the purpose of the so-called "porn pottery" – I like Larco Hoyle's idea that the pottery (none of which appears to depict penis-in-vagina intercourse) was used by the Moche in order to teach and show methods of natural birth control. but ofc there's a direct analogue in depictions of sodomy on Greek pottery, which doesn't really seem to had served a didactic purpose

4. the Thinkers of Hamangia - not much of a "style" given that it's only these two figurines, I suppose, but these two are my favourite sculptures to come out of Neolithic Europe by far. could write a whole post about them, honestly; definitely among my favourite pieces of prehistoric art in general. afaict, the figurines are nowadays mostly interpreted as a prehistoric equivalent to Gauguin's Where Do We Come From? - I personally prefer to think of them as analogous to his Grape Harvest at Arles

5. cosmetic palettes of late Neolithic Egypt, or what is properly known as the Naqada III phase of Protodynastic Egypt. I just find them to be really pretty – and I kind of love the idea of decorating what is basically a make-up container with depictions of your country's military conquests. the most famous of these palettes is the Narmer Palette; my personal favourite is the Bull Palette, shown on the left. I'd totally use them to mix my kohl

[annoyingalchemist]

[annoyingalchemist]

Hi guys this is a remake of a post I made like a week ago. But my work was closed for a week without pay and also I had to miss a day because of extreme pain. So my next paycheck will be really low and I need money for rides/bills. If anyone has anything to spare I would really appreciate it. Thank you.

v*nmo : x

c$shapp: x

0/40

[annoyingalchemist]

A little late posting this, but Hani Almadhoun has posted the weekly update on the Gaza Soup Kitchen fundraiser page!

They're operating pop-up kitchens, delivering food and medicine to medical posts, and running water trucks wherever they can.

You should read about the good they're doing and donate if you can!

[annoyingalchemist]

okay so I finished Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs, and here are my takeaways, because it was AMAZING and I can't believe all US students aren't required to read it in school:

shows how slavery actually worked in nuanced ways i'd never thought much about

example: Jacobs's grandmother would work making goods like crackers and preserves after she was done with her work day (so imagine boiling jars at like 3 a.m.) so that she could sell them in the local market

through this her grandmother actually earned enough money, over many years, to buy herself and earn her freedom

BUT her "mistress" needed to borrow money from her. :)))) Yeah. Seriously. And never paid her back, and there was obviously no legal recourse for your "owner" stealing your life's savings, so all those years of laboring to buy her freedom were just ****ing wasted. like.

But also! Her grandmother met a lot of white women by selling them her homemade goods, and she cultivated so much good will in the community that she was able to essentially peer pressure the family that "owned" her into freeing her when she was elderly (because otherwise her so-called owners' white neighbors would have judged them for being total assholes, which they were)

She was free and lived in her own home, but she had to watch her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren all continue to be enslaved. She tried to buy her family but their "owners" wouldn't allow it.

Enslaved people celebrated Christmas. they feasted, and men went around caroling as a way to ask white people in the community for money.

But Christmas made enslaved people incredibly anxious because New Years was a common time for them to be sold, so mothers giving their children homemade dolls on Christmas might, in just a few days' time, be separated from their children forever

over and over again, families were deliberately ripped apart in just the one community that Harriet Jacobs lived in. so many parents kept from their children. just insane to think of that happening everywhere across the slave states for almost 200 years

Harriet Jacobs was kept from marrying a free Black man she loved because her "owner" wouldn't let her

Jacobs also shows numerous ways slavery made white people powerless

for example: a white politician had some kind of relationship with her outside of marriage, obviously very questionably consensual (she didn't hate him but couldn't have safely said no), and she had 2 children by him--but he wasn't her "master," so her "master" was allowed to legally "own" his children, even though he was an influential and wealthy man and tried for years to buy his children's freedom

she also gives examples of white men raping Black women and, when the Black women gave birth to children who resembled their "masters," the wives of those "masters" would be devastated--like, their husbands were (from their POV) cheating on them, committing violent sexual acts in their own house, and the wives couldn't do anything about it (except take out their anger on the enslaved women who were already rape victims)

just to emphasize: rape was LEGALLY INCENTIVIZED BY US LAW LESS THAN 200 YEARS AGO. It was a legal decision that made children slaves like their mothers were, meaning that a slaveowner who was a serial rapist would "own" more "property" and be better off financially than a man who would not commit rape.

also so many examples of white people promising to free the enslaved but then dying too soon, or marrying a spouse who wouldn't allow it, or going bankrupt and deciding to sell the enslaved person as a last resort instead

A lot of white people who seemed to feel that they would make morally better decisions if not for the fact that they were suffering financially and needed the enslaved to give them some kind of net worth; reminds me of people who buy Shein and other slave-made products because they just "can"t" afford fairly traded stuff

but also there were white people who helped Harriet Jacobs, including a ship captain whose brother was a slavetrader, but he himself felt slavery was wrong, so he agreed to sail Harriet to a free state; later, her white employer did everything she could to help Harriet when Harriet was being hunted by her "owner"

^so clearly the excuse that "people were just racist back then" doesn't hold any water; there were plenty of folks who found it just as insane and wrongminded as we do now

Harriet Jacobs making it to the "free" north and being surprised that she wasn't legally entitled to sit first-class on the train. Again: segregation wasn't this natural thing that seemed normal to people in the 1800s. it was weird and fucked up and it felt weird and fucked up!

Also how valued literacy skills were for the enslaved! Just one example: Harriet Jacobs at one point needed to trick the "slaveowner" who was hunting her into thinking she was in New York, and she used an NYC newspaper to research the names of streets and avenues so that she could send him a letter from a fake New York address

I don't wanna give away the book, because even though it's an autobiography, it has a strangely thrilling plot. But these were some of the points that made a big impression on me.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl also inspired the first novel written by a Black American woman, Frances Harper, who penned Iola Leroy. And Iola Leroy, in turn, helped inspire books by writers like Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. Harriet Jacob is also credited in Colson Whitehead's acknowledgments page for informing the plot of The Underground Railroad. so this book is a pivotal work in the US literary canon and, again, it's weird that we don't all read it as a matter of course.

(also P.S. it's free on project gutenberg and i personally read it [also free] on the app Serial Reader)

[annoyingalchemist]

I'm a Buddhist Inverse Solipsist. I believe that I am the only guy still in samsara, and all of reality is a truman-show-like act by billions of bodhisattvas who are just humoring me.

[annoyingalchemist]

"Alchemy is the pre-Enlightenment version of scientific inquiry, and it resembles science in many respects: an alchemist observes phenomena in the natural world, hypothesizes a causal relationship to explain them, and performs an experiment to test their hypothesis. But here is where the resemblance ends: where the scientist must publish their results for them to count as science, the alchemists kept their findings to themselves. This meant that alchemists were able to trick themselves into thinking they were right, including about things they were very wrong about, like whether drinking mercury was a good idea. The failure to publish meant that every alchemist had to discover, for themself, that mercury was a deadly poison. Alchemists never figured out how to transform lead into gold, but they did convert the base metal of superstition into the precious metal of science by putting it through the crucible of disclosure and peer-review."

-Cory Doctorow

The stuff about alchemy having a pre-enlightenment scientific process is correct.

The publishing thing is just wrong. Alchemists published their results and techniques all the time, and regularly collaborated with their peers. That's what half these damn historical documents are.

Also, the toxic effects of metal fumes were well known by the 9th century. Abu Bakr Al-Razi emphatically writes about the need for proper ventilation in alchemical laboratories in the Sirr al Asrar, and that book was used as a manual for alchemists well into the enlightenment. Additionally, Al-Razi was just the first guy to actually write that down. Distilled mercury and sulphur fumes smell awful, and are often *physically painful* to inhale. Alchemists knew they were dangerous. It was the nature of the danger, and the techniques for mitigation wasn't fully understood.

I know that might not seem like an important difference, but it is. The problem wasn't that alchemists were secretive and never shared their knowledge with their peers. (They did.) It was because aggregate, instrumental, knowledge about the dangers of heavy metal poisoning simply had not been gathered yet.

It wasn't because the alchemists didn't understand mercury, poisons were poorly understood! In fact, it was an alchemist --our boy paracelsus-- who invented the concept of "the dose makes the poison"! Did he "trick himself into thinking he was right" when he tested similar doses of deadly poisons on different animals to gauge how concentration effected a biology? No!

Like who was Paracelsus supposed to appeal to? What panel of his peers could've reviewed his work? Who knew more about mercury poisoning than he did? Everyone else at the University of Württemberg was still reading Galen! What could he have done to make his experiments "count"? He was roundly rejected by the medical authorities of his time!

You could make the argument that alchemists had no centralized scientific authority, but that's a conditional claim! The Baghdad House of Wisdom effectively acted as that centralized body for jabirian era alchemists. Many Islamicate alchemists abandoned with the effusive language and mystical secrecy, because they damn well needed to teach people. The Sirr al Asrar, the "Secret Book of Secrets" is straight up a textbook written in very plain language.

Like, I know Cory is being pithy, and he's probably making some larger point whose context I am not seeing through this excerpt, but I reject the idea that alchemists were supersitious and secretive idiots that could've been proper scientists if they just submitted to peer review.

It is hard to collect knowledge! The methods underlying science have been present for quite a while, but the damn printing press is recent! It is time consuming and expensive to collect and disseminate expert knowledge when you don't have modern communication infrastructure!

[annoyingalchemist]

I like the phrase “sexual pervert” because at first it sounds redundant but I know firsthand you can be an asexual one too

[annoyingalchemist]

Randomly curious:

Everyone I know would know of these, and many would have some in their kitchens. So now I'm curious how far that knowledge goes.

[annoyingalchemist]

hi everyone! i know ive been super offline (for good reason lol) but i did want to share something on here.

the biggest reason why i haven't been posting is because i've been organizing really heavily with the filipino migrant population in chicago with the tanggol migrante (defend migrant) network that is based in many major cities in the us. we provide know your rights trainings, organize support systems for people with uncertain status, and have an emergency hotline for those detained.

recently, we were made aware of 2 filipino migrants in ICE detention in indiana, which falls under our jurisdiction as the closest philippine consulate is in chicago. one is a 71 year old working grandmother named tita r, who is currently in a clark county facility and has been since march, even though she is a legal green card holder and thus a us resident.

as you would expect, the conditions are horrible. she has been shackled, gone days without her kidney and blood pressure medication, and spends all of her time in a windowless, unsanitary hall filled with bunk beds and other people in detention. the only respite is video calls with her family, which cost $25 for 20 minutes, and is incredibly hard to navigate. at one point, she was being transferred so many different places, her family had no idea where she was.

this week i traveled with fellow organizers to kentucky, where her son and daughter are based. we were privileged to meet with them and offer support during this horrible time. tita r had her master hearing, where it was decided she would have to wait until next month to hear the decision of whether or not she will be deported back to the philippines. tita r has been in the country for over 40 years, and has built her life and raised her family here.

every time i am on a video call with her, i always want to cry, out of both sadness and laughter, because she may be one of the funniest people i have ever met. she calls everyone either boo-boo or bobo, which is always an endearment. she was showing the other people in her facility, look how tall my grandson has gotten! it breaks my heart to hear that she thinks she will die in detention due to the conditions. we learned that at one point, her blood pressure was at 204.

the stories of filipino migrants aren't exactly shared often within the us, where the narrative mostly centers around latinos, especially mexicans. but filipinos are the second largest undocumented population in the us. every day, 7,000 filipinos leave the philippines to seek work elsewhere, because us imperialism has destroyed the country's economy, and idea of sovreignty.

we are raising money for tita r, because the philippine consulate hasn't released funds that her family is ENTITLED TO through the assistance to nationals fund, and as a result her family has had to shoulder the burden of legal fees, on top of the unimaginable situation they are going through. tita r's final hearing is next month, august 7th. we're trying to raise as much money as we can, and collect signatures for a petition demanding her release. i will include links here, but you can also go to @tanggolmigrantenetwork or @migrantechicago on instagram to hear updates on her case, or to even get involved, as there are campaigns running across the country right now.

please share this post. i will make a follow up post about the second detainee, a father named tito e who was detained at o'hare when coming back from the philippines, even though he is a green card holder.

[annoyingalchemist]

hey so to make a long story short, since we didn't end up meeting our goal for our last big donation post, my sister got charged for dentist bills and it ended up putting her in the red. we're gonna need at least this amount to get her account back right, in fact to air on the safe side we're asking for $300 to get her back in good standing. please help or even just reblog if you cant personally donate.

c@shapp

p@ypal

v3nmo

$0/300

[annoyingalchemist]

shrewtabaga

[annoyingalchemist]

Double Income No Kids used to be seen as a kind of lavish lifestyle, now it’s like…a requirement to have any remote chance at financial stability