#ancient turned modern

[ratschizowriting]

had a cool dream about an underwater temple

it was from the perspective of swimming down to an underwater ancient ruin, the upper floors hiding everything below with a beautiful light spire formed from the hand-shaped crystal above, where only the upper half of the hand and 4 fingers stretched from the above island. the ruin surrounded by walls akin to mountainous rock and fractured as if some form of unknown event happened in proximity.

within the actual chambers? people who had made the same journey had discovered the place's secrets, and also found out that whatever beings used to live there had also taken the time to create hidden ways to play their own games. Which the people who trekked down had still taken part in. Games akin to chess, trials of combat which would have the loser receive failure trophies like dunce caps. The entire central area was dry, with only the middle section dripping water from the upper floors into a sort of pond that the original owners had created. Now repurposed into the community pool, The water from the pond had a drain to send the water back above, letting it escape from the ruin.

The people who made this place a strange exotic home had taken effort to bring down material to form rooms, places to converse and essentially turned the lowest part of the underwater ruin into a beautiful exotic getaway hidden from the rest of the world, surrounded by historical fractures as mentioned before, as well as the large pillar of light formed by the crystals above.

strange dream but i unironically love the imagery of walls covered with not only ancient texts but stories of the beings who used to be down here and the entities that are now down there for people to find in the future.

imagine writings of an ancient evil rising from the depths combined with the many glyphic of passing travellers who want to leave their mark on the place showing their visit, but always left in the form of markings on the wall that can be compared to that of the old engravings found years ago.

[alexius-fr]

Alexius didn't you already scatter and gene your progen like a week ago??

Yes

I did.

And I did it again.

[littencloud9]

and id like to give a big shoutout to marina once again for raising me

[fr-thrice]

i know in theory why dragons can't retain their genes when switched from ancient to modern or vice versa. but still. it hurts so much

[honeybreadbee]

Lmao I adore the beef between the head vamp and Frost

[loki-ioki]

Melli mlp version: an Ancient Unicorn named "Toxic Camellia"

[gay-artificer]

Basically everything we see in RW is a direct descendant of heavily modified organisms, with a bit of a split between fully organic genetic modifiers to the introduction of foreign parts. This is undeniable. However I'm begging people to understand that nature routinely produces weird shit on its own and that's so much cooler than just 'anything slightly weird must be the result of modification and meddling in the process'

Please have some whimsy!!! bioluminescence!! Tool use!! Communication via static electricity! Electrical shocks as an attack method!! Beetles that spray caustic acid that can burn skin! Lizards that fire slime out of their tails!! These are all real things that are on this earth just because nature gets weird with it!

[girlscience]

Worldbuilding is great because you can reuse ideas all the time to make even better things. I just hoard every idea I've ever used, thought was cool, or wanted to do something with but didn't know what and paste them together later on to make something new and improved.

[hallwyeoo]

Quick apocalypse AU where Sqq takes Lbh (who is immune because protagonist halo) into their group of survivors who have settled in an abandoned town. Sqq has a habit of taking in kids but lbh is by far his favourite. A quick learner, good shot, smart, and an incredible cook, lbh latches onto sqq’s heart without fail. Ofc the abyss scene is lbh getting bitten after a horde attacks and he gets separated from Sqq. After the horde ravages the group and their resources, they have to start moving around, making it harder for lbh to find Sqq. After a few years of hunting them down, he finally finds Sqq (who has no idea how he survived getting bitten, and somehow convinces himself that lbh has a twin who wants revenge for the brother Sqq failed to save). They do their whole murder-chicken song and dance, and then happily settle close to the group (but still far enough that no one is woken up by their…nightly activities.)

[revvywevvy]

looks @ my mutuals

looks @ my modern au

......... one of us! one of us! one of us! one of us!!

[thelibraryiscool]

What is the name of the Greek veiling book you read?

It's called Aphrodite's Tortoise: The Veiled Woman of Ancient Greece! I'm not a hellenist so you can take my assessment with a grain of salt, but I really enjoyed it - the methodological grounding is compelling and there's some really lovely close readings of the art and texts.

[rmorde]

And JJK S2 wraps up!

Once again, I'm reminded of how annoying it was that Gojo took the high road with the higher ups. Those wrinkly old good for nothing assholes should have been massacred a long long time ago. They do not actually give fucking damn about peace and order. They all just want power and with Gojo gone they were drunk with it. Idiotic selfish self-centered bastards.

I swear Geto should not have helped Gojo grow a moral principle of killing only when there is meaning to it. It made him less inclined to commit homicide no matter how justifiable it already is. Because while I do see his perspective - *that it is meaningless to kill the higher-ups if his goal was to ensure that the youth would have a better life, it would have been so fucking cathartic if Gojo just Hollow Purple'd them all way back when they set up Yuji to die in the Juvenile Detention Center.

*Gojo is right (as much as it pains me to say it). He cannot kill the higher-ups because he would create a vacuum of power that would have resulted to any of the following: REPERCUSSION 1: Other seniors from the powerful clans would power grab leading to a civil war among sorcerers which can lead to many meaningless deaths. Lots of dead sorcerers = Less sorcerers to fight the ever growing number of curses = Gojo fails to ensure that young people enjoy their youth and have allies. ---> Less Sorcerers VS Lots of Curses = More Solo Missions. With the unpredictability of Curses, the new gen may even be forced to fight those above their Grade like Haibara. And, as proven in Hidden Inventory, Gojo maybe The Strongest but he cannot be everywhere and save/protect people all the time. The mortality rate of young sorcerers may raise even further no matter how much Gojo, Nanami, Shoko, Utahime, and Yaga overwork themselves to death to mitigate it. REPERCUSSION 2: Other seniors from powerful clans would fill the vacuum of power and unite to expel Gojo from jujutsu society and label him as a mass killer. Again, this can lead to a civil war among sorcerers: those who side with Gojo and those who do not which can lead to many meaningless deaths.

Lots of dead sorcerers = Less sorcerers to fight the ever growing number of curses = Gojo fails to ensure that young people enjoy their youth and have allies. -> Yeah. Yeah. Gojo is The Strongest. However, people that desire power are not very smart and can do a lot of stupid things (like what the higher-ups did after the Shibuya Incident). They can easily use the mass killing as an excuse to paint Gojo as the new "King of Curses" or something.

It is also highly possible for these power-hungry people to put an exorbitant bounty on Gojo's head that maybe even Mei Mei would be tempted to kill him.

Another likely result is for them to ally with Kenjaku. The Kamo clan did it so easily (if I remember it right). The Zenin clan may even use this as an excuse to also take away Megumi since they can claim that Gojo has gone crazy.

REPERCUSSION 3: Gojo takes all the power for himself and, as I have elaborated from REPERCUSSION 2, he could just be branded as the new "King of Curses" by the others and end up in an unwanted civil war with lots of unnecessary deaths. While he is powerful enough to be feared, envious assholes full of stupidity and hatred towards him can easily override common sense and still pick a bloody fight. Not to mention the ignorant "Yes Men" of the clan heads. So...

Lots of dead sorcerers = Less sorcerers to fight the ever growing number of curses = Gojo fails to ensure that young people enjoy their youth and have allies.

So... as cathartic as it would have been (like Maki's revenge on the Zenin clan), Gojo cannot exactly kill the higher-ups easily - not for the goal that he had in mind. He has to take the high road and play nice with them so he can focus more on helping nurture the next generation of sorcerers towards a better future.

It's sad tho. Regardless of his efforts to avoid bloodshed among sorcerers and protect the youth, Gojo failed anyway. He even blames himself for the entire fiasco after he got out of the Prison Realm. He doesn't fault anyone except himself (just like when Riko died). Gojo's choice to care doomed a lot of people.

Maybe if Kenjaku hadn't meddled through the Shibuya Incident, Gojo would have succeeded with his plan. He'd continue dancing through the finicky political games of the dying elderly jujutsu higher-ups while acting as a buffer for the new gen sorcerers. Eventually, the old clans would lose their influence as the youth grew strong together enough to change their society and render traditions as obsolete.

Sadly, it was not meant to be.

[achilleslyre]

it floors me anytime someone is dumbfounded when the source material of ancient poems and epics is brought into a conversation about ancient myths. you’re going to look at me and seriously tell me that you think a 2000s adaption into a childrens series is going to be more accurate than the actual ancient poets that recorded the stories? you’re going to question me straight faced on how there can be a “real” or “accurate” way of telling a story when 3 different ancient poets wrote it the same way? i’m pulling all of my hair out of my head you have to watch me strand by strand.

[fr-thrice]

is there any merit to exalting unleveled dragons anyway? like they dont give much reward, do they give much of a boost to dominance at all? i just have dragon money to yeet and cant do coli lol

[canary-prince]

If you catch me posting Bible memes I'm not turning into a Christian or whatever the fuck I was before my intense spiritual crisis 2 years ago (or was it three)? I went to school for academic theological studies (analysis of religion from an exterior view point) and recent books have me nostalgic and hyperfixating.

[tuulikki]

The thing is that the portrayal of Neanderthals as having been inherently grotesque and alien to H. sapiens is something we will never have proof of. But we do have proof that, in different locations and in different populations across time, we all found eachother desirable. We saw eachother and wanted to touch. And the offspring were held by their mothers and raised and had their own offspring in turn.

When you look for the first proof that H. sapiens found Neanderthals repulsive, you have to wait until the Victorian era, when the white masters of empires were busy portraying Neanderthals as stupid, brutish, and (of course) dark-skinned.

In more modern times, we’ve had people arguing that instead of seeing Neanderthals as Benighted Savages, they should instead be seen as Noble Savages, (allegedly) cruelly destroyed and driven from their lands by H. sapiens. Which one of their two you believe says more about your modern political views than it does about ancient H. sapiens.

And, whether we construct Neanderthals as Savage or Noble Savage, the fundamental assumption we project into the unfathomably distant past is still that H. sapiens saw Neanderthals as an Other, with the language we use being almost explicitly that of modern racial dynamics.

But we have no proof of any of that. We have no proof of hostilities. We know we co-existed and we had sex. That’s it.

Humans obviously have sex with some humans and kill others. We also know that, when small groups of humans occupy vast spaces with infrequent contact with others, unique cultures will always form, some more hospitable, some more neophobic/xenophobic. But many cultures of small settlements placed among huge unpeopled landscapes place supreme emphasis on hospitality to strangers. Plus, we fucking love other social animals, as evidenced by how we befriended wolves.

I’m a humourless weirdo and a wet blanket about popular constructions of Neanderthals as “monstrous”, and I freely admit it. But that’s because it’s tied up in legacies of imperialism. Not only that, but it also privileges one culture (yours, mine, modernity’s) as being most human by implicitly assuming we can project it onto people in the past. Since you don’t pretend that all global cultures share exact same values as you do, it doesn’t take more than a few moments’ reflection to realise you can’t do that to the past.