#archives in action

[metadata-uber-alles]

Footage of 1920s Juneteenth parades in Oklahoma and Texas, video held by Yale Library:

For more context see the writeup for the collection -> Solomon Sir Jones Films, 1924-1928

[metadata-uber-alles]

There's a transcript of the inventory on the Bristol Archives website

Portrait of an unidentified young woman by Wenceslaus Hollar, 1645

The reason why we should remember Cattelena, who lived in Almondsbury near Bristol, is that she is one of the few African women to have left a record in the rural Britain of the seventeenth century. All we have is the inventory of her goods at her death in 1625: a cow worth £3, a bed, a quilt, a candlestick, four pots, dishes and spoons, ‘all her wearing apparel’, a coffer and two little boxes. It amounted to £6, 9 shillings and sixpence. She was not wealthy, but she was supporting herself, with the aid of her cow and her labour. She was single, like one in five of the women of seventeenth-century England, and she appointed another woman as her executor. Her name – only a first name was given - suggests she had arrived in Bristol via Spain. That’s all we know, but it’s enough to change our picture of the English countryside.

Almondsbury is a small village close to Bristol. At the time Cattelena lived there at least another 16 Africans lived in Bristol. Just like Phylis Setterford, the way we know about Cattelena is because of the inventory of her possessions after her death. She is described as ‘Cattelena, a negra deceased of Almonsbury in the county of Gloucester, single woman & in the diocese of Bristol’. Her inventory includes cooking utensils, clothes, bedding, tablecloth, and a candlestick. However, Cattelena’s most prized possession was a cow. One cow would keep her in milk and butter, as well as provide an income through the sale of dairy products in the local area. Cattelena would have been able to graze her cow on common village land. This would provide her the opportunity of independence and self-sufficiency. Dairying was women’s work. With around 80% of people living in the countryside, it could be a serious income generator. On a farm you would have one dairymaid to six cows. Anything greater would require more servants, and a herd typically had no more than twelve cows. The best hours for milking were between 5-6am and 6-7pm. From Whitsun (May) to Michaelmas (end of September), a cow could produce a gallon of milk a day, which could be used to make a range of ‘white meats’ – meaning cheese and butter. Catellena’s cow was worth £3 10 shillings, £460.32 in today’s money. In 1625, the year Cattelena died, this would have also bought you 10 stones of wool, a quarter of wheat, and was the equivalent of 70 days of skilled labour. In Tudor times, cows were given names. Some reflected their function, as well as the owner's sense of humour. Eleanor Cumpayne of Halesowen, Worcestershire, inherited a cow named Fillpayle from her father George in 1559. Was this name an order shouted at the cow or a compliment for how productive she was? Other cow names recorded include Gentle, Brown Snout, Lovely, Motherlike, Winsome, and Welcome Home. There is no record of Cattelena’s cow having been given a name, but that doesn’t mean she wasn’t, as this wasn’t a typical thing to record in an inventory. There is no furniture in Cattelena’s inventory. This could suggest that she rented a room in someone else’s home. This could be the home of a widow named Helen Ford, who was named as administrator to Cattelena’s estate. Cattelena was unmarried but this was not unusual, with around 30% of the English adult female population single. However, it was rare for single women to live in their own home and only about 5% of single women below the age of 45 were head of their own households. Naming Helen Ford as her administrator suggests she was not living with relatives. The total of Catellena’s possessions was valued at £6 9s 6d (£851.59). The existence of Cattelena’s inventory shows us that Black Tudor women could own property themselves and live independent lives. It is significant that as a woman she owned anything at all, it indicates her relative independence. Not only was she not enslaved, but thanks to her cow she seems to have been able to support herself and was free from service or any family obligation. Imagining Cattelena, a dark skinned, independent woman, going about her day-to-day business, preparing her meals, cleaning her bedding, milking her cow, in her rural village makes us imagine English life of the past in a completely new way. She was independent, but she lived an ordinary life, much like most other Tudors.

[reasonsforhope]

If you're feeling anxious or depressed about the climate and want to do something to help right now, from your bed, for free...

Start helping with citizen science projects

What's a citizen science project? Basically, it's crowdsourced science. In this case, crowdsourced climate science, that you can help with!

You don't need qualifications or any training besides the slideshow at the start of a project. There are a lot of things that humans can do way better than machines can, even with only minimal training, that are vital to science - especially digitizing records and building searchable databases

Like labeling trees in aerial photos so that scientists have better datasets to use for restoration.

Or counting cells in fossilized plants to track the impacts of climate change.

Or digitizing old atmospheric data to help scientists track the warming effects of El Niño.

Or counting penguins to help scientists better protect them.

Those are all on one of the most prominent citizen science platforms, called Zooniverse, but there are a ton of others, too.

Oh, and btw, you don't have to worry about messing up, because several people see each image. Studies show that if you pool the opinions of however many regular people (different by field), it matches the accuracy rate of a trained scientist in the field.

--

I spent a lot of time doing this when I was really badly injured and housebound, and it was so good for me to be able to HELP and DO SOMETHING, even when I was in too much pain to leave my bed. So if you are chronically ill/disabled/for whatever reason can't participate or volunteer for things in person, I highly highly recommend.

Next time you wish you could do something - anything - to help

Remember that actually, you can. And help with some science.

[madootles]

the two seater couch from mag 175 has seen better days

[razielim]

being an adolin kholin fan is the gift that keeps on giving. every fucking book he just gets better and better, aging like fine wine

when he murdered sadeas i didn't think he could get any better. and then he got better

[moonlit-tulip]

It's often noted, in discussions of the Death Note anime, that it's much weaker than the manga in its rendition of post-timeskip events partly for pacing reasons: the pre-timeskip parts of the anime adapt ~6.5 manga-volumes in 25 episodes, while the post-timeskip parts adapt ~5.5 in 12 episodes, so a lot more important detail-work is lost and the whole thing ends up feeling kind of perfunctory.

Much less often noted as far as I've seen, but nonetheless also true, is that the Death Note anime removes some important characterization-nuance from Light, starting right near the beginning, whose presence elevates the manga to be substantially better than the anime even before the time-skip.

In particular: the Death Note manga is, at its core, a tragedy in classic "character who has everything falls into ruin due to a fatal personal flaw" style. Light is a brilliant student who, in the future ahead of him, has the potential to do practically whatever he wants. He's driven to ruin by the fatal flaw of unwillingness to admit, either to others or to himself, when he's made a mistake. This flaw is an essential piece of his characterization, in the manga. And the anime pretty much entirely skips over it.

As portrayed in the manga, Light's decision to become Kira—which ultimately leads to his downfall—is made in the following way. First, he finds the Death Note, and is led by morbid curiosity to write a name in it, killing someone. Then, still not really believing it, he kills a second person too. At which point it hits him that he's killed two people. And at that point, after a viscerally-horrified breakdown about what he's done, the inability to admit mistakes kicks in, and he proceeds to rewrite his own value-system such that it yields the result that killing those people was actually okay, and in fact morally good. Because the alternative would be for him to acknowledge himself as having made a terrible mistake, and that, more than anything else, is something he's unwilling to do if he can see any other option at all. And then, having convinced himself that those two murders were good, he proceeds to reason that, if they were good, then doing more like them is good; and thus he becomes Kira, leading eventually, far down the line, to his ruin. The anime, by contrast, substantially deemphasizes this flaw of his, portraying him as much more calmly put-together through that series of events and thus making him come across as having been tempted in becoming-Kira-ward directions all along.

Similarly, in the anime, when Light leaks a bunch of information to L about his identity by using non-public information acquired via police channels, he declares that actually this was deliberate as a means of baiting L out so he can kill him, and the anime presents this declaration pretty uncritically. The manga, by contrast, presents it as an extension of that same character-flaw: Light is unwilling to admit to having actually just straightforwardly messed up, and therefore makes up a new plan to view himself to have been following-all-along, thus leading him to take more risks in his game against L going forward and thus, once again, helping him along the path to ruin.

Et cetera.

Compared with the manga, then, the anime's version of Light's characterization ends up less interesting. And, moreover, it introduces a plot hole, when the Yotsuba arc comes around! It makes it much less clear why an amnesiac Light would be so straightforwardly aligned against Kira. In the manga, this is pretty clear: a Light who never killed anyone wouldn't have rewritten his values to consider killing people to be good, and therefore would look at Kira as straightforwardly evil. And, in fact, his amnesiac self has trouble taking the possibility of his having been Kira previously, even as the evidence starts building up, because becoming Kira would be a mistake according to his value-system of the moment, and this leaves him having a very hard time contemplating the possibility of its having in fact happened! Whereas the anime, by deemphasizing Light's big flaw, makes his amnesiac-self's differences from the way he is for most of the story up to that point come across as much more out-of-nowhere, much less narratively well-founded.

So, overall, the people who talk about the Death Note manga as superior to the anime specifically post-timeskip strike me as somewhat understating things. The manga is superior to the anime pre-timeskip, too, via that extra layer of characterization and a resulting improvement both in character-interestingness and in plot-coherence. And thus I consider the manga to be very much the definitive version of Death Note from start to finish, despite the anime's relatively-higher popularity.

[empty-movement]

Prolific animator Yoshihiko Umakoshi (馬越嘉彦) is best known for his work in shonen anime like My Hero Academia, however he also worked on several episodes of Kunihiko Ikuhara's 2011 Mawaru Penguindrum. During this time, he gave us this Revolutionary Girl Utena piece, itself a bonus purchase privilege poster at Mandarake stores for the purchase of Monthly Anime Style (月刊アニメスタイル) magazine, Vol 5.

It was first published as the full-color feature of the Hardcore of Utena's Supplement booklet in 2013. The Hardcore of Utena is a massive, two volume artbook released at Comiket 84, where you could receive this booklet with the purchase of the larger volumes. Mostly miscellaneous sketch art that features elsewhere, I nevertheless had it scanned already and felt like, hell, let's just finish it and get up there for you! So here are the scans of the 44 page booklet, or if you want the even larger versions, or a download of the lot, I also uploaded it to the Internet Archive! That's gonna be a pattern, y'all. ;)

[hay-bails]

telling my kids this was jesus and judas

[ao3demographicssurvey2024]

In the AO3 Demographics Survey 2024 - an unofficial demographics survey of 16,131 AO3 users - the three most popular genres/tags were Hurt/Comfort, Romance, and Canon Divergence, while the three least popular were Genderswap, High School AU, and Character Death.

To see more analysis, including comparisons to real fic data and previous surveys, please view the full results on AO3.

[liquidch4os]

"Is this necessary?"

[autumnmobile12]

My Hero Academia AU: Road Trip

An Ambush Simulation Prequel

I am a little ashamed that this one was in progress for so long and I have only three pages to show for it, but I got so burned out with it that I just thought, "Damn, I'm done." So sadly I'm wrapping up Road Trip as a slice-of-life brief.

I bit off a little more than I could chew and found out I have zero interest in drawing vehicles the hard way. Still, I'm happy with how Shimura's motorcycle turned out.

[andromeda-lv]

Okay so is it going to be addressed that Adolin grew up with an alcoholic father (with the whole set of organising an intervention at 15, finding him black out drank etc.) oooooor will the story be just as oblivious to it as Adolin is atm?

[dyke-in-crisis]

these divas are having a sims off

[ihatebrainstorm]

Some Rogues Gallery AU Drift warmup sketches

Bonus:

[the-uncanny-dag]

Y'all remember the horrible CW live action PPG? Bc we have leaked footage

[y-unrei]

ᵗᵃᵏᵉ ᵐᵉ ᵒᵘᵗ ᵗᵒⁿⁱᵍʰᵗ ʷʰᵉʳᵉ ᵗʰᵉʳᵉ'ˢ ᵐᵘˢⁱᶜ ᵃⁿᵈ ᵗʰᵉʳᵉ'ˢ ᵖᵉᵒᵖˡᵉ ᵃⁿᵈ ᵗʰᵉʸ'ʳᵉ ʸᵒᵘⁿᵍ ᵃⁿᵈ ᵃˡⁱᵛᵉ

ᵈʳⁱᵛⁱⁿᵍ ⁱⁿ ʸᵒᵘʳ ᶜᵃʳ ⁱ ⁿᵉᵛᵉʳ ⁿᵉᵛᵉʳ ʷᵃⁿⁿᵃ ᵍᵒ ᵇᵉᶜᵃᵘˢᵉ ᴵ ʰᵃᵛᵉⁿᵗ ᵍᵒᵗ ᵒⁿᵉ ᵃⁿʸᵐᵒʳᵉ

ᵈʳⁱᵛⁱⁿᵍ ⁱⁿ ʸᵒᵘʳ ᶜᵃʳ ᵖˡᵉᵃˢᵉ ᵈᵒⁿ'ᵗ ᵈʳᵒᵖ ᵐᵉ ʰᵒᵐᵉ ᵇᵉᶜᵃᵘˢᵉ ⁱᵗ'ˢ ⁿᵒᵗ ᵐʸ ʰᵒᵐᵉ ⁱᵗ'ˢ ᵗʰᵉⁱʳ ʰᵒᵐᵉ

ᵃⁿᵈ ⁱᶠ ᵃ ᵈᵒᵘᵇˡᵉ ᵈᵉᶜᵏᵉʳ ᵇᵘˢ ᶜʳᵃˢʰᵉˢ ⁱⁿᵗᵒ ᵘˢ ᵗᵒ ᵈⁱᵉ ᵇʸ ʸᵒᵘʳ ˢⁱᵈᵉ ⁱˢ ˢᵘᶜʰ ᵃ ʰᵉᵃᵛᵉⁿˡʸ ʷᵃʸ ᵗᵒ ᵈⁱᵉ