#i just generally felt good yesterday

[realbeefman]

started wearing Actually Supportive sneakers everywhere because house wears sneakers and i’m a silly little fanboy who thinks he’s the coolest dude ever and suddenly realized that my knee and hips no longer hurt??? thank you gregory house for tricking me into taking better care of my body

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[after-nine-at-the-oasis]

can we talk about how beautiful the most recent episode of welcome to night vale was?

[storfulsten]

hey uh sorry for disappearing yet again for a couple months. don't have much of an excuse, though things have been more stressful than usual, offline life having involved family and hospitals and stuff, but not gonna go into any details, things are better now either way so ye. my way of coping with things have been mostly to just play games (ffxiv mainly, leveling alts and other grinding can be a good distraction sometimes) and nothing else to keep my mind off things, so haven't been able to focus enough to do much of any art at all. I am hoping to get back into the swing of things, I am back on my meds that I skipped out on for like a year due to various reasons, but they seem to be helping again so yeah, fingers crossed that things will work out and such ha

[dalishthunder]

.

[rollingaroundin-bread]

Owl House week!! Everyone’s new designs were so CUTE and I was so excited to draw them!!! :)

[dykedragons]

i love making things for my friends!! i love it when my friends enjoy the things i make them!!!!!

[famewolf]

fighting every urge in my body to take a nap before work and instead filling my morning with things that I enjoy watching/reading

[delta-piscium]

Re ur tags about worrying about having the perfect snippet for wip Wednesday/weekend: 1. Totally absolutely feel that, but 2. I literally posted a snippet the other day and realized I had straight up written the scene wrong based on my outline and realized I was gonna have to rewrite that but literally a minute after hitting post. Which DID feel very shitty, except then I realized that if the fic changes between the snippets I write and what actually gets posted, that means people get a glimpse into what some of the editing/revising process entails, which I also think is really cool!

Anyway, obviously it's still hard and scary to put raw/unfinished writing up on the internet for everyone to see, but at least for me I know I'm never expecting polished sentences from wip snippets, and part of what I enjoy about then is getting to see people in the process of creation, which is always gonna be a little messy!

(about my tags on this post)

first of all thank you so much for this because I got in my head about it all, like ridiculously so and this helped a lot!

I’m sorry about the scene you had to rewrite that’s annoying but you’re so right, seeing other peoples process and what they post for wip stuff vs finished fics is so interesting, like actually love seeing that

that’s something I’ve been scared off because some of the fics are so messy and discombobulated right now I’m not sure if anything will stay the same. But like you I don’t except anything polished or like a special scene from wip wednesday/weekends I’m just excited about people writing in general and I do love seeing the small little glances whatever they are. I think I just need to remember that these aren’t like previews or supposed to reflect the entire fic but literally just motivation

[machidielontheway]

feeling mcfucking lonely today

[morningmask27]

i’ve been working for a few hours on preparing a proper text to send to my religion teacher about amatonormativity. i’ve been researching it in english, i’m writing my first draft in english and i am thining about leaving it in english instead of also doing the hard work of translating it in dutch. this is just one of those concepts i cannot explain in another language than english so i’ll probs do that

[laikahh]

[roz-ani]

I hereby declare the 1995 "Pride and Prejudice" TV series to be the superior adaptation. Thank you. You are dismissed. Have a nice day ❤️

(rambling in the tags)

[eggmeralda]

I may not be that squeamish about most things but there's something about earlobes that can make me weirdly dizzy

[roylustang]

I legitimately feel super acclimated to the heat now. I ran-walked 15 miles yesterday when it was 104-106F / 40-41C and I didn’t even die. No one likes global warming but at least I’m ready for it. I do this not only to get better at running but to honestly survive the oncoming apocalypse. I will survive global warming.

[maniculum]

Medieval Scorpions Effortpost

So yesterday I reblogged this post featuring an 11th-century depiction of the Apocalypse Locusts from Revelations, noting the following incongruity as another medieval scorpion issue:

The artist, as you can see, has interpreted "tails like scorpions" as meaning "glue cheerful-looking snakes to their butts".

Anyway, it occurred to me that the medieval scorpion thing might not be as widely known as I think it is, and that Tumblr would probably enjoy knowing about it if it isn't known already. So, finding myself unable to focus on the research I'm supposed to be doing, I decided to write about this instead. I'll just go ahead and put a cut here.

As we can see in the image above, at least one artist out there thought a "scorpion" was a type of snake. Which makes it difficult to draw "tails like scorpions", because a snake's tail is not that distinctive or menacing (maybe rattlesnakes, but they don't have those outside the Americas). So they interpreted "tails like scorpions" as "the tail looks like a whole snake complete with head".

Let me tell you. This is not a problem unique to this illustration.

See, people throughout medieval Europe were aware of scorpions. As just alluded to, they are mentioned in the Bible, and if the people producing manuscripts in medieval Europe knew one thing, it was Stuff In Bible. They're also in the Zodiac, which medieval Europe had inherited through classical sources. However, let's take a look at this map:

That's Wikipedia's map of the native range of the Scorpiones order, i.e., all scorpion species. You may notice something -- the range just stops at a certain northern latitude. Pretty much all of northern Europe is scorpion-free. If you lived in the north half of Europe, odds were good you had never seen a scorpion in your life. But if you were literate or educated at all, or you knew they were a thing, because you'd almost certainly run across them being mentioned in texts from farther south. And those texts wouldn't bother to explain what a scorpion was, of course -- everyone knows scorpions, right? When was the last time you stopped to explain What Is Spiders?

So medieval writers and artists in northern Europe were kind of stuck. There was all this scorpion imagery and metaphor in the texts they liked to work from, but they didn't really know what a scorpion was. Writers could kind of work around it (there's a lot of "oh, it's a venomous creature, moving on"), but sometimes they felt the need to break it down better. For this, of course, they'd have to refer to a bestiary -- but due to Bestiary Telephone and the persistent need of bestiary authors to turn animals into allegories, one of the only visual details you got on scorpions was that they... had a beautiful face, which they used to distract people in order to sting them.

And look. I'm not here to yuck anyone's yum, but I would say that a scorpion's face has significant aesthetic appeal only for a fairly small segment of the population. I'm sure you could get an entomologist to rhapsodize about it a bit, but your average person on the street will not be entranced by the face of a scorpion. So this did not help the medieval Europeans in figuring out how to depict scorpions. There was also some semantic confusion -- see, in some languages (such as Old and Middle English), "worm" could be a general term for very small animals of any kind. But it also could mean "serpent".* So there were some, like our artist at the top of the post, who were pretty sure a scorpion was a snake. This was probably helped along by the fact that "venomous" was one of the only things everyone knew about them, and hey, snakes are venomous. Also, Pliny the Elder had floated the idea that there were scorpions in Africa that could fly, and at least one author (13th-century monk Bartholomaeus Anglicus) therefore suggested that they had feathers. I don't see that last one coming up much, I just share it because it's funny to me.

*English eventually resolved this by borrowing the Latin vermin for very small animals, using the specialized spelling wyrm for big impressive mythical-type serpents, and sticking with the more specific snake for normal serpents.

Some authors, like the anonymous author of the Ancrene Wisse, therefore suggested that a scorpion was a snake with a woman's face and a stinging tail. (Everyone seemed to be on the same page with regards to the fact that the sting was in the tail, which is in fact probably the most recognizable aspect of scorpions, so good job there.) However, while authors could avoid this problem, visual artists could not. And if you were illustrating a bestiary or a calendar, including a scorpion was not optional. So they had to take a shot at what this thing looked like.

And so, after this way-too-long explanation, the thing you're probably here for: inaccurate medieval drawings of scorpions. (There are of course accurate medieval drawings of scorpions, from artists who lived in the southern part of Europe and/or visited places where scorpions lived; I'm just not showing you those.) And if you find yourself wondering, "how sure are you that that's meant to be a scorpion?" -- all of these are either from bestiaries or from calendars that include zodiac illustrations.

11th-century England, MS Arundel 60. (Be honest, without the rest of this post, if I had asked you to guess what animal this was supposed to be, would you have ever guessed “scorpion”?)

12th-century Germany, "Psalter of Henry the Lion". (Looks a bit undercooked. Kind of fetal.)

12th-century France, Peter Lombard's Sententiae. (Very colorful, itsy bitsy claws, what is happening with that tail?)

12th-century England, "The Shaftesbury Psalter". (So a scorpion is some sort of wyvern with a face like a duck, correct?)

13th-century France, Thomas de Cantimpré's Liber de natura rerum. (I’d give them credit for the silhouette not being that far off, but there’s a certain bestiary style where all the animals kind of look like that. Also note how few of these have claws.)

13th-century England, "The Bodley Bestiary". (Mischievous flying squirrel impales local man’s hand, local man fails to notice.)

13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (A scorpion is definitely either a mouse or a fish. Either way it has six legs.)

13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (Wait, no, it’s a baby theropod, and it has two legs. (Yes, this is the same manuscript, that’s not an error, this artist did four scorpions and no two are the same.))

13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (Actually it’s a lizard with tiny ears and it has four legs.)

13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (Now that we’re at the big fancy illustration, I think I’ve got it — it’s like that last one, but two legs, longer ears, and a less goofy face. Also I’ve decided it’s not pink anymore, I think that was the main problem.)

13th-century England, MS Kk.4.25. (A scorpion is a flat crocodile with a bear’s head.)

13th-century England, "The Huth Psalter". (Wyvern but baby! Does not seem to be enjoying biting its own tail.)

13th-century England, MS Royal 1 D X. (This triangular-headed gentlecreature gets the award for “closest guess at correct limb configuration”. If two of those were claws, I might actually believe this artist had seen a scorpion before, or at least a picture of one.)

13th-century England, "The Westminster Psalter". (A scorpion is the offspring of a wyvern and a fawn.)

13th-century England, "The Rutland Psalter". (Too many legs! Pull back! Pull back!)

13th or 14th-century France, Bestiaire d'amour rimé. (This is very similar to the fawn-wyvern, but putting it in an actual Scene makes it even more obvious that you’re just guessing.)

14th-century Netherlands, Jacob van Maerlant's Der Naturen Bloeme. (More top-down six-legged guys that look too furry to be arthropods.)

14th-century Germany, MS Additional 22413. (That is clearly a turtle.)

14th-century France, Matfres Eymengau de Beziers's Breviari d'amor. (Who came up with that head shape and what was their deal?)

15th-century England, "Bestiary of Ann Walsh". (Screw it, a scorpion is a big lizard that glares at you for trying to make me draw things I don’t know about.)

I've spent way too much time on this now. End of post, thank you to anyone who got all the way down here.