Lived through my emergency mouth surgery!
Lightly terrorized the medical staff by cheerfully telling them ketamine is a drug you can literally physically outrun before surgery, then getting up and walking to the front room unassisted way before I should have afterwards.
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Oldest medical amputation on record was performed on a Stone Age child in Borneo 31,000 years ago
About 31,000 years ago, a skilled prehistoric surgeon cut off the lower leg of a child hunter-gatherer in Borneo. Now, archaeologists have concluded that this ancient surgery is the earliest medical amputation on record.
The skill of the Stone Age surgeon was admirable; the patient went on to live an additional six to nine years after the surgery, a radiocarbon dating performed by researchers of the individual's tooth enamel revealed, according to a study published online Wednesday (Sept. 7) in the journal Nature.
"It was a huge surprise that this ancient forager survived a very serious and life-threatening childhood operation, that the wound healed to form a stump and that they then lived for years in mountainous terrain with altered mobility," study co-author Melandri Vlok, a bioarchaeologist and postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sydney," said in a statement. "[This suggests] a high degree of community care." Read more.
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Queens of the Stone Age - No One Knows
2002
"No One Knows" was the first single from Queens of the Stone Age's third album, Songs for the Deaf. The album features guest musician Dave Grohl (of Foo Fighters and Nirvana) on drums, and he also toured with the band during 2002.
"No One Knows" was a chart success, becoming the band's first single to chart on the Billboard Hot 100 and their only single to top the US Alternative charts, and is also the band's highest charting single on the Dutch Singles Chart (where it reached number 39) and on the Irish Singles Chart (where it peaked at number 26). It reached number 15 on the UK Singles Chart.
The song was also critically acclaimed, receiving a nomination for Best Hard Rock Performance at the 2003 Grammy Awards, but they lost the award to Foo Fighters.
"No One Knows" recieved a total of 75,9% yes votes!
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'uh but the coronation has brought in money' of course it has, to london, where wealth and tourism is centralised, where multiple millionaires live. it's not going to magically alleviate the cost of living crisis around the rest of the country.
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The most common mistake people make when thinking about prehistory and how to avoid it.
In "The Dawn of Everything, A New History for Humanity" David Graeber gives what I think might be the best piece of advice I've ever heard for understanding deep human history, and that is to get your mind out of the Garden of Eden.
People speculating about prehistory before modern archeology were quick to frame early humanity as existing in a "state of nature", either with pure innocent tribal communism, or being brutish barbarous cavemen, then something happened to bring us from the state of nature into "society". Did we make a Faustian bargain by domesticating plants and animals? Why is evidence of intergroup violence in prehistory so rare? How did we fall from the innocent state of nature? This, of course, smacks of the biblical creation story, so even if people don't believe it literally, they seem to have a hard time letting go of it spiritually even in a secular context.
This is pretty much nonsense, of course. Humans have existed for over 2 million years. Anatomically modern humans have existed for at least 300 thousand years. Behaviourally modern humans (with symbolism, art, long distance trade, political awareness) have existed for at least 50 thousand years, from our best evidence, but possibly a lot longer. The time between the Sumerians inventing writing and urban living 5,000 years ago and now is only a narrow slice of human history.
If we want to understand human history properly, we shouldn't understand people of the past as fundamentally different from us. They were intelligent, politically aware people doing their best in the world they found themselves in, just like we are today. We didn't fall from innocence with the development of behavioral modernity, religion, farming, war, money, capitalism, computers, or anything else. The world has changed a lot, but people have been experimenting with different ways to live for as long as there have been people, like this example I've posted before about disabled people's role in late pleistocene Eurasian society.
People have been the same as we are now for at least the last 50 thousand years. We have lived in countless different ways and will continue to experiment. There was no fall, and we don't live at the end of history.
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"The Ayla Descent Theory" of Mary Sues
"Children of the Earth," Luis Royo.
After the success of Jean M. Auel's stone age novel Clan of the Cave Bear, there was a very lengthy trend in the publishing world of stone age adventure novels aimed at women that lasted for a decade and only really fizzled out in the early 2000s. After all, "Ayla," the name of the main character of these books, was one of the top baby names of 1987.
The target audience for these books were weird midwestern aunts....you know, the Mists of Avalon and the Mercedes Lackey/Valdemar audience. Therefore, the Clan of the Cave Bear imitators also featured things of interest to the weird aunt audience: Scotland, redhaired women with sharp tongues, commanding wolves, Ireland, Feminism, riding herds of wild horses bareback in scenic locations, Wicca, matriarchial religions, swimming with dolphins....but above all else, American Indians (a culture this audience finds interesting, as anyone who has seen the home decor of a typical weird midwestern aunt can attest), with many novels set in Ice Age America, like Children of the Dawn, Reindeer Moon and the First Americans. Decades later, this audience would form the core fandom for Game of Thrones, and the character of Khaleesi Targaryen in particular.
These books almost assuredly still have a place of honor on the book shelf of the weirdest woman at your job.
Nearly all of these imitators have two of Clan of the Cave Bear's defining traits: 1) a supremely beautiful, usually blonde athletic and statuesque main character over 5'11" who does not realize that she is so beautiful and desirable, who is good at a variety of different skills and is friendly with animals like hawks, dolphins, or horses, and 2) a love triangle between this aforementioned blond but innocent Venus and two bodybuilder muscular he-men cave hunks, one of whom is a blonde guy with long rock star hair (it was the 80s), and the other being a buff black guy with dreadlocks (or otherwise ethnic in some way).
The heroine usually picks the blonde guy in the end, but the audience usually picks the ethnic guy.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, in the broader culture of fandom, it was fashionable to dump on "Mary Sues" (indulgent wish-fulfillment author personas in fanfiction) and the people who wrote them. Accusations of creating a Mary Sue approached a kind of hysteria. Even at the time, when everyone else was getting swept up in this, I thought that getting mad about aunties writing fanfiction showed a loss of perspective, and was a bit silly. Thankfully, we've benefitted from moral evolution: the consensus in fandom now is that writing aspirational characters is a harmless activity that tests a young writer's creative muscles, like the half-Vulcan pretty new ensign on the Enterprise that Kirk and Spock both fall in love with, or a new archer girl who Legolas falls in love with joining the Fellowship. This hate walked hand in hand with insecurities, in the exact same way that people worried about their appearance or concerned with their weight are often cruel to fat people, and there were frequent tests if this or that character in your writing was a Mary Sue.
There was a running joke in this 2000s culture of anti-self insertion called the "Ayla Descent Theory of Mary Sues." The joke was that Mary Sues came into existence because Ayla, the beautiful, athletic heroine of the Clan of the Cave Bear novels, was the ancestor of their entire lineage, as the first known Mary Sue to ever exist in the historical record, described as being a statuesque blonde who did everything right and was always at the center of love triangles, and who changed human history.
According to the running joke, Mary Sues everywhere were descended from Ayla from Clan of the Cave Bear, and she was the first to exist, and Ayla was the explanation of where all the Enterprise's new ensigns main characters fall in love with come from.
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“There will come a day where I won’t be here anymore, but for now, I’m right here, Oz. I’m not going anywhere anytime soon, I promise.”
Ozzie has a nightmare of Fizz dying (& he's even more afraid of it because he knows it's gonna happen one day).
Based on a little headcanon that Oz can change his forms based on emotion, & when he’s extremely scared or sad, he morphs into this tiny flickering flame.
In this form is Asmodeus at his most vulnerable.
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