a-study-in-darkness - Tumblr blog

[a-study-in-darkness]

- j (x)

[a-study-in-darkness]

“I am not actually tired, but numb and heavy, and can’t find the right words.”

— Franz Kafka, from a letter to Felice Bauer, c. November 1912

[a-study-in-darkness]

[a-study-in-darkness]

reading books shouldn't be about productivity, it should be about experience

it doesn't care how many books you have read if you cannot tell me in detail and with all your love and passion how absolutely wonderful or how absolutely awful it was to turn every single page

[a-study-in-darkness]

i like my room dark, cold, and quiet

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Sometimes you just need to listen to Hozier with rain and thunder asmr and scroll aesthetic tumblr at one in the morning. It's good for the soul.

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4am life changing paradigm shift I just had:

People, including myself, talk about an inner child and sometimes an inner teen. They are separate from me so I can understand them better, individual but a part of the whole of me.

I propose a new inner person: the inner future. They are a separate enough being that I can care about them more than I care about myself. They are a canvas with me as their God. Not like the perfect Christian God but an imperfect Greek God. I get to shape them, choose who they are, and take care of them by taking care of myself now. The inner future will thank me for taking a shower, brushing my teeth, reading that book, and going to that early morning class. I don't care enough to take care of myself but I can take care of someone else. I'll just be that someone else.

[a-study-in-darkness]

Wounds of the Earth

— by xis.lanyx

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helen “trans people are perpetuating gender steriotypes” joyce is now upset that the scientific american is writing about how women were hunters too back in the day, not just mothers and caretakers. feminist win!

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Fucked up how society can be like "okay, go to school" for 12-17 years and then be like "okay enough to that :)". Leads to really dangerous sad fucked up disease called Grad Student. Can progress even more dangerous into PhD Student. Very comorbid with Debt due to Costs Money and Doesn't Make Money. Very scary, these things.

[a-study-in-darkness]

“So often we try to make other people feel better by minimizing their pain, by telling them that it will get better (which it will) or that there are worse things in the world (which there are). But that’s not what I actually needed. What I actually needed was for someone to tell me that it hurt because it mattered. I have found this very useful to think about over the years, and I find that it is a lot easier and more bearable to be sad when you aren’t constantly berating yourself for being sad.”

— John Green

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you know, at the dawn of human civilization, when a person began to acquire wealth and prestige based on providing a service or artisan craft that others could not provide, they told themselves and others that they were chosen by gods for their innate gifts, and thus should be worshipped.

they gathered more material wealth, their knowledge became prized, and they taught their children what they knew, so that dynasties could be made and wealth could be kept amongst them and their ilk.

and thus we conflated wealth and power with divinity. they would not be so wealthy, they would not be so special, if the gods did not smile upon them. and everyone wanted to be close to divinity, and pray that they or their children would one day be touched by divinity too.

it's a shame that thousands of years later, we still apparently think the same, worshipping Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Bill Gates for their wealth, and seeing the rich as more innately special than the rest of us and thus deserving of the divine right of kings.

it's just ironic that it's not artisans we worship anymore, it's people who steal the work of artisans.

and we no longer dream of being touched by divinity, we all hope that perhaps we'll get lucky and become rich too.

but you know, I'd say your chances of being touched by gods and becoming as wealthy as Jeff Bezos are about the same.

but humans never learn.

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"Our results demonstrate that Scythians primarily used domesticated species such as sheep, goat, cattle, and horse for the production of leather, while the furs were made of wild animals such as fox, squirrel and feline species. The surprise discovery is the presence of two human skin samples, which for the first time provide direct evidence of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus’ claim that Scythians used the skin of their dead enemies to manufacture leather trophy items, such as quiver covers."

I love it whenever one of Herodotus' wild claims is proven right.

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THIS

THIS IS ONE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS ABOUT ANTHROPOLOGY

This article showcases a man taken care of for years, not just kept alive but really cared for as they moved him to prevent bed sores. He would have been able to provide absolutely NOTHING to his group's survival, but they kept him alive and comfortable as long as they could anyway. It's such an act of love that it screams to be heard all the way into the 21st century.

Anthropologist margaret mead once said that the first sign of civilization is a healed femur and we have skeletons from before humans even became human whose jaws were too broken to eat but they still lived for several years because someone must have painstakingly chewed their food for them and maybe this is all proof that since the dawn of time, survival of the fittest never meant surviving alone.

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LOOK AT HIM

THIS BABY

MANY SWEET BABY BOY

TOO PERFECT FOR THIS WORLD

also very deadly, but that's beside the point

anyone else out here missing the megafauna of the pleistocene?

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It’s probably so dumb to be feeling this upset over a copper-age mummy, but, Ötzi the iceman makes me so sad.

He didn’t get lost. He didn’t starve. He didn’t freeze to death. He was murdered in cold blood, and left there in the snow. His family never knew what happened to him. He was never laid to rest by his tribe.

If you’ve ever seen a mummy up close before, they don’t usually give you that same feeling of disgust or sadness that a fresh body would, because they’re so old and dry that they look a lot like detailed movie props. And their skin is hard, almost like plastic. It’s so easy to forget that the body you are looking was at some point a real person, who had a childhood, who cried, who loved, who had hobbies and interests.

One of the things that really gets me about Ötzi, is how he died. No sacred ritual. No elaborate mummification process. He was murdered, left there, and never seen by his loved ones ever again. And when you think of him as not just a mummy, but as a real person who likely had people waiting for him back home, it’s all the more heartbreaking.

Human greed and senseless violence transcends time. People still get murdered in cold blood, just like Ötzi was, to this very day. The only difference being guns instead of bows and arrows.

But, human compassion also transcends time. His family may have never gotten to properly mourn him, but thousands of years later, people world wide respect and mourn him. There’s something truly beautiful about that.

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How many archaeologists does it take to record a geotechnical bore?

No, really, how many? Because there are currently 5 of us here.