silverpolarbears - Tumblr blog

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all the movies and tv shows over the next few years that will have to decide if they’re canon compliant or a canon divergence no plague au

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its funny when edgy dudes are like “humans are unnatural. we are the only species that will consume so many resources that the land can not sustain us and still continue to reproduce. name one other species that does that” because like, off the top of my head? deer. 

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dare i say that stuffed animals are one of the single greatest inventions of all time and im thankful every day for the fact that someone thought to make animals but in huggable plush form…..saved me from a lot of bad nights and nightmares as a kid, i love you stuffed animals

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Huffpost article about the fight for Oak Flat

apache-stronghold.com

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More Accurate World Map Wins Prestigious Design Award 

The AuthaGraph map is the most accurate map you’ll ever see. You probably won’t like it.

You probably don’t realize it, but virtually every world map you’ve ever seen is wrong. And while the new AuthaGraph World Map may look strange, it is in fact the most accurate map you’ve ever seen. 

The world maps we’re all used to operate off of the Mercator projection, a cartographic technique developed by Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator in 1569. This imperfect technique gave us a map that was “right side up,” orderly, and useful for ship navigation (because it kept longitudes consistent and the angle from any point to the North Pole constant) — but also one that distorted both the size of many landmasses and the distances between them.

To correct these distortions, Tokyo-based architect and artist Hajime Narukawa created the AuthaGraph map over the course of several years using a complex process that essentially amounts to taking the globe (more accurate than any Mercator map) and flattening it out…

Read more: https://allthatsinteresting.com/authagraph-world-map

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How new WIPs are born:

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can you talk about being intersex and cis? how do you know if you're cis or trans when you're intersex? i promise this isn't meant to be rude i'm just a little confused as to how gender works when you're intersex. thank you so much.

I’m cis because I’m afab and still identify as a woman. If I was afab and identified any other way, I’d be trans. I’m intersex because my body itself has a mixed bag of secondary sex characteristics and hormones.

The label “intersex” itself isn’t a gender identity as much as it’s a way for people with mixed or ambiguous sex characteristics to define that experience. There are cis men and women who are intersex, trans people of every kind as well. I’m sure there are intersex people who just identify as intersex entirely but most intersex people I’ve met still identify as male, female, or nonbinary. Because your body doesn’t determine your gender identity.

Also, the opposite of intersex is perisex. You can be cis or trans, while being intersex or perisex. If you’re not intersex, you are perisex.

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Someone: “People would never do anything without monetary gain”

Dungeon masters, Minecraft players, fanfic writers:

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Night Hunt II (2018 / Oil on canvas) - John Brosio

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If you’re ever feeling like the quarantine isn’t worth it, or feel like we should re-open the country before we have reliable testing available… use this comic to help put things into perspective.

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The city-state of Knidos was famous in ancient Greece for its statue of Aphrodite. Really, really famous.  It was widely considered the magnum opus of Praxiteles, himself widely considered the greatest sculptor of the ancient world.

For his model, Praxiteles used the beautiful Athenian courtesan Phryne. Phryne was a legend in her own right. She earned so much money from her liaisons that she offered to sponsor the rebuilding of the walls of Thebes, so long as they included the inscription “Destroyed By Alexander The Great, Rebuilt By Phyrne The Courtesan” (Thebes declined). Later she moved to Athens, committed some unspecified offense, and got charged with impiety, a capital crime. Athenaeus writes that when the trial seemed to be going against her, she disrobed in the middle of the courtroom. The judges were so awed by her beauty that they became concerned she might be a god, and that something terrible would happen if they harmed her. They voted to acquit. She was lovers with basically all the famous and important Athenian men of her day, and one of them was Praxiteles, the greatest sculptor in the world. Thus the Aphrodite of Knidos.

It was the most famous statue of its time. Pilgrims would come from all over the Greek world to look at it. Sometimes more than look. There was apparently a problem with lovestruck young men breaking into the temple to copulate with it. It was a really good statue.

According to a legend recorded by Antipater of Sidon, the statue’s fame reached Aphrodite herself, and she descended to Knidos to judge it. She got confused and upset, wondering when Praxiteles had seen her naked. It was a really good statue.

Around 260 BC, King Nicomedes of Bithynia offered to buy it. One source says that in exchange for the statue, he “offered to liquidate the entire national debt of Knidos, which was immense”. The Knidians refused. It was a really good statue.

It stayed in place until the Christian era, when it was destroyed as part of the general persecution of pagans. Some sources say instead that it was rescued and brought to Constantinople by a wealthy collector, but his museum caught fire and it was lost in the blaze.

I find myself fascinated by these kinds of stories. Stories of legendary objects, things so far outside the normal range that they seem almost supernatural. There are a lot of them in fantasy - Tolkien is very good at this. A gem brighter and more beautiful than any that have survived to the present day, an elven city fairer than any built by mortal men. Part of what makes the past so alluring is that it has this kind of thing, something beyond all your experience, something where all you can do is speculate fruitlessly about what it would have been like to live in a time when you can see such wonders…

…except that the Romans were as practical as the Greeks were fanciful, so they sent a bunch of sculptors to Knidos to create various replicas of the statue, and many of these have survived. There’s a picture of one on Wikipedia. It’s a very pretty statue, but if I saw it in a museum I’m not sure I’d take special notice of it. These things are always more impressive in your imagination.

Sometimes I worry that if I ever really saw a Silmaril, I’d think “ooooh, yeah, that’s really nice, definitely,” and then wander off and do something else.

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The fact that Julius Caesar burst into tears after reading about Alexander the Great because they were the same age but he could never live up to Alexander is one of the greatest things I’ve learnt as a classics student

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I have been thinking about the importance of being non-judgmental towards people who change their labels, whatever those labels are.

Found out you weren’t autistic but actually schizophrenic? Thought you were ace and aro but you were just a late bloomer? Tried out new pronouns and a new name, but eventually learns that you are cool with your assigned gender? Thought you were gay, but then one day you also fell in love with someone of another gender? 

….And so on and so forth.

We NEED to normalize this shit. No one should feel like they need to uproot their whole identity and move to a new blog because their label changed. No one should be shamed for getting that one step closer to figuring themselves out - even if that step is a step towards the “norm”, we need to celebrate the bravery and strength it takes to come out again and again and again.

I’m 28, and I’m STILL unclear on where I am on the ace and aro spectrum, if I’m even there at all. If you’d asked me 6 years ago, I would have told you I’m a monogamous, neurotypical, cis “bicurious” girl despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I can’t stand to think where I would be today, if I hadn’t been allowed to question this image.