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A heroes return awaits you, Rollo. 

Go limp back to your wife so she can kiss the ache of your betrayal better. Also, don’t mind the dead people on the dining room table. 

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Lincoln Lee + colors

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Lesson 3 - The Origins of the Viking Age

Many people across Europe saw the coming of the Vikings as divine punishment, but what really caused the people of Scandinavia to take Europe by storm? What made them capable of pulling off these raids? There are many possible explanations, although much is speculation. Some key candidates to be discussed in detail are: 

Technological advancements

Centralization pressures

Environmental change

 Population growth

Trade/ Economics

For now, I will be rather brief with much of the following discussion, since much of this material will be showing up again later on. Still, it is good to understand the things that allowed the people of Scandinavia to stand out during this time period. Just be aware that I will be revisiting these elements with more detail and vigor in the future. Feel free to send me an ask if you don’t want to wait or if you have questions about the following material.

Keep reading

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People honestly fascinate me with how they can watch an entire series about a warrior society that made a living off of the murder, pillaging, and enslavement of people, sometimes even unarmed, defenseless people, but then think a woman is a fucking devil if she goes into battle pregnant.

It honestly reminds me of that scene in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire where the people in The Capitol have spent the last 75 years watching children murder each other for entertainment but were like “OH NO!!! STOP THE GAMES!!!” when they think Katniss is pregnant.

Like what is your logic? I’m trying to understand this. Why are you so okay with one of these things but so defensive and crazy over the other?

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What is the evolutionary benefit or purpose of having periods? Why can’t women just get pregnant without the menstrual cycle?

Suzanne Sadedin, Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from Monash University

I’m so glad you asked. Seriously. The answer to this question is one of the most illuminating and disturbing stories in human evolutionary biology, and almost nobody knows about it. And so, O my friends, gather close, and hear the extraordinary tale of:

HOW THE WOMAN GOT HER PERIOD

Contrary to popular belief, most mammals do not menstruate. In fact, it’s a feature exclusive to the higher primates and certain bats*. What’s more, modern women menstruate vastly more than any other animal. And it’s bloody stupid (sorry). A shameful waste of nutrients, disabling, and a dead giveaway to any nearby predators. To understand why we do it, you must first understand that you have been lied to, throughout your life, about the most intimate relationship you will ever experience: the mother-fetus bond.

Isn’t pregnancy beautiful? Look at any book about it. There’s the future mother, one hand resting gently on her belly. Her eyes misty with love and wonder. You sense she will do anything to nurture and protect this baby. And when you flip open the book, you read about more about this glorious symbiosis, the absolute altruism of female physiology designing a perfect environment for the growth of her child.

If you’ve actually been pregnant, you might know that the real story has some wrinkles. Those moments of sheer unadulterated altruism exist, but they’re interspersed with weeks or months of overwhelming nausea, exhaustion, crippling backache, incontinence, blood pressure issues and anxiety that you’ll be among the 15% of women who experience life-threatening complications.

From the perspective of most mammals, this is just crazy. Most mammals sail through pregnancy quite cheerfully, dodging predators and catching prey, even if they’re delivering litters of 12. So what makes us so special? The answer lies in our bizarre placenta. In most mammals, the placenta, which is part of the fetus, just interfaces with the surface of the mother’s blood vessels, allowing nutrients to cross to the little darling. Marsupials don’t even let their fetuses get to the blood: they merely secrete a sort of milk through the uterine wall. Only a few mammalian groups, including primates and mice, have evolved what is known as a “hemochorial” placenta, and ours is possibly the nastiest of all.

Inside the uterus we have a thick layer of endometrial tissue, which contains only tiny blood vessels. The endometrium seals off our main blood supply from the newly implanted embryo. The growing placenta literally burrows through this layer, rips into arterial walls and re-wires them to channel blood straight to the hungry embryo. It delves deep into the surrounding tissues, razes them and pumps the arteries full of hormones so they expand into the space created. It paralyzes these arteries so the mother cannot even constrict them.

What this means is that the growing fetus now has direct, unrestricted access to its mother’s blood supply. It can manufacture hormones and use them to manipulate her. It can, for instance, increase her blood sugar, dilate her arteries, and inflate her blood pressure to provide itself with more nutrients. And it does. Some fetal cells find their way through the placenta and into the mother’s bloodstream. They will grow in her blood and organs, and even in her brain, for the rest of her life, making her a genetic chimera**.

This might seem rather disrespectful. In fact, it’s sibling rivalry at its evolutionary best. You see, mother and fetus have quite distinct evolutionary interests. The mother ‘wants’ to dedicate approximately equal resources to all her surviving children, including possible future children, and none to those who will die. The fetus ‘wants’ to survive, and take as much as it can get. (The quotes are to indicate that this isn’t about what they consciously want, but about what evolution tends to optimize.)

There’s also a third player here – the father, whose interests align still less with the mother’s because her other offspring may not be his. Through a process called genomic imprinting, certain fetal genes inherited from the father can activate in the placenta. These genes ruthlessly promote the welfare of the offspring at the mother’s expense.

How did we come to acquire this ravenous hemochorial placenta which gives our fetuses and their fathers such unusual power? Whilst we can see some trend toward increasingly invasive placentae within primates, the full answer is lost in the mists of time. Uteri do not fossilize well.

The consequences, however, are clear. Normal mammalian pregnancy is a well-ordered affair because the mother is a despot. Her offspring live or die at her will; she controls their nutrient supply, and she can expel or reabsorb them any time. Human pregnancy, on the other hand, is run by committee – and not just any committee, but one whose members often have very different, competing interests and share only partial information. It’s a tug-of-war that not infrequently deteriorates to a tussle and, occasionally, to outright warfare. Many potentially lethal disorders, such as ectopic pregnancy, gestational diabetes, and pre-eclampsia can be traced to mis-steps in this intimate game.

What does all this have to do with menstruation? We’re getting there.

From a female perspective, pregnancy is always a huge investment. Even more so if her species has a hemochorial placenta. Once that placenta is in place, she not only loses full control of her own hormones, she also risks hemorrhage when it comes out. So it makes sense that females want to screen embryos very, very carefully. Going through pregnancy with a weak, inviable or even sub-par fetus isn’t worth it.

That’s where the endometrium comes in. You’ve probably read about how the endometrium is this snuggly, welcoming environment just waiting to enfold the delicate young embryo in its nurturing embrace. In fact, it’s quite the reverse. Researchers, bless their curious little hearts, have tried to implant embryos all over the bodies of mice. The single most difficult place for them to grow was – the endometrium.

Far from offering a nurturing embrace, the endometrium is a lethal testing-ground which only the toughest embryos survive. The longer the female can delay that placenta reaching her bloodstream, the longer she has to decide if she wants to dispose of this embryo without significant cost. The embryo, in contrast, wants to implant its placenta as quickly as possible, both to obtain access to its mother’s rich blood, and to increase her stake in its survival. For this reason, the endometrium got thicker and tougher – and the fetal placenta got correspondingly more aggressive.

But this development posed a further problem: what to do when the embryo died or was stuck half-alive in the uterus? The blood supply to the endometrial surface must be restricted, or the embryo would simply attach the placenta there. But restricting the blood supply makes the tissue weakly responsive to hormonal signals from the mother – and potentially more responsive to signals from nearby embryos, who naturally would like to persuade the endometrium to be more friendly. In addition, this makes it vulnerable to infection, especially when it already contains dead and dying tissues.

The solution, for higher primates, was to slough off the whole superficial endometrium – dying embryos and all – after every ovulation that didn’t result in a healthy pregnancy. It’s not exactly brilliant, but it works, and most importantly, it’s easily achieved by making some alterations to a chemical pathway normally used by the fetus during pregnancy. In other words, it’s just the kind of effect natural selection is renowned for: odd, hackish solutions that work to solve proximate problems. It’s not quite as bad as it seems, because in nature, women would experience periods quite rarely – probably no more than a few tens of times in their lives between lactational amenorrhea and pregnancies***.

We don’t really know how our hyper-aggressive placenta is linked to the other traits that combine to make humanity unique. But these traits did emerge together somehow, and that means in some sense the ancients were perhaps right. When we metaphorically ‘ate the fruit of knowledge’ – when we began our journey toward science and technology that would separate us from innocent animals and also lead to our peculiar sense of sexual morality – perhaps that was the same time the unique suffering of menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth was inflicted on women. All thanks to the evolution of the hemochorial placenta.

https://www.quora.com/what-is-the-evolutionary-benefit-or-purpose-of-having-periods

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Tyr (Artwork found on Pininterest, posted by Styy Gens)

Yesterday was Tuesday (Tyr’s Day) and because of that fact it seems fitting to discuss a God whose origins are quite mysterious. Tyr, the one handed God of warriors and justice who embodies the idea of righteousness. We know that he is a war God, a member of the Aesir, once the keeper of Fenrir, and the God to sacrifice his hand to chain that same beast when it grew too large. However, his parentage is something of a mystery; his relationship with Odin, again an enigma; the role he takes as God of war, this is contradicted by Odin who was worshiped for the same thing. How then do these two Gods reconcile their similarities to one another. Simply put, Odin is the God that inspires the qualities which Tyr embodies. Odin is a source, he is the steel; Tyr is the refining process, he is the forge. As for their relationship to one another, Tyr is often described as an equal to Odin and regularly sits in command of Asgard in the wanderer’s stead. Unlike Odin, Tyr always behaves in a noble fashion and obeys the law to its letter. Loki would be Tyr’s ultimate foil while Odin marks a boundary between the two. The Allfather is known to break both law and tradition, learning the woman’s magic for instance was frowned upon and allows Loki’s acts of trickery as many benefit Asgard. Finally, Tyr’s origins are one of two options. Either: Tyr is a Jotun made Aesir, adopted by Odin; or is Odin’s son from an undisclosed mother. As we hear much about Odin’s various spouses and partners it stands to reason Tyr was adopted. This is because it seems sensible we’d know whom Odin partnered with to sire this God. This makes Tyr’s foiling of Loki curious as, if Tyr definitely is an Ice Giant (and not a Rock Giant) he stands in sharp contrast to the native of Muspellheim Loki. Tyr’s rune is the tyr, which is symbolic of the spear and often leads to Tyr being depicted with a spear in his remaining hand. The tyr was also a symbol of justice and right action, which makes it the perfect symbol for those that often worship Tyr to wear.

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Cutie

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Rewatching Fringe. What an amazing piece of sci-fi. I bloody love this show.

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fringe meme (asked by karmkarnstein):

→ nine scenes (3/9)

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Asterisk, Astro, Asteroid, Astringent, Astral, Aspirin, Asterix, Astricks, Ostrich, Esther Figglesworth, Ashram, Claire, Aphid, Ascot, Athos, Alex, Aspen, Afro, Astril, Astrif, Abner, Agnes, Asner

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“aaaah donald trump is doing well and greece is collapsing and everyone is so mean on the news the world is going to hell nothing has ever been this bad”

LOOK:

in 1838 france and spain went to war over a pastry chef

famous astronomer tycho brahe literally died because he was too polite to get up from the table to go to the bathroom

an orphanage in paris once raffled off babies for cash

a bunch of hippies ran a 140-pound pig as a candidate for president in the ‘60s under the slogan “if we can’t have him in the white house, we can have him for breakfast.” the pig was immediately and in complete seriousness arrested by the police, along with his campaign staff

in 1842 mexican general/dictator santa anna ordered elaborate funeral ceremonies held for his lost leg

the president of france died from apoplexy in 1899 while being fellated in his office

in the 17th century peter the great of russia banned beards because of reasons

that time there were three popes and they spent forty years passive-aggressively excommunicating each other

in 1968 the dictator of portugal slipped and fell and everyone thought he was going to die and he was replaced, and then when he unexpectedly recovered the government of portugal was too awkward to tell him he wasn’t leader of portugal any more and let him go on thinking he was for 2 years

that time eight years ago when switzerland accidentally invaded lichtenstein

napoleon bonaparte, conqueror of much of europe, once got in a fight with bunnies and lost

in conclusion: “deez nuts is ruining the solemnity and dignity of the political process, the world is going to hell” BELIEVE ME FRIEND HUMAN POLITICS HAS SURVIVED MORE RIDICULOUS THINGS THAN THIS AND WILL CONTINUE TO SURVIVE MORE RIDICULOUS THINGS THAN THIS FOR CENTURIES 2 COME

[zagreus8me]

Just a reminder: Mary Shelley was awesome

Mary Shelley created a monster when she was just nineteen.

Considered by some to be the first example of science fiction, her classic novel “Frankenstein” made her a literary immortal.

“I think she’s one of the bravest and most imaginative writers we’ve ever had, woman or man,” says UC Santa Barbara’s Julie Carlson, one of the nation’s leading scholars of Shelley.

Shelley was the daughter of two intellectual rebels. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, is understood to be the mother of Western feminism (she wrote “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” in 1792, which argued that women were not naturally inferior to men, but only appeared to be because they lacked education). Shelley’s father, William Godwin, was a political philosopher who gave his daughter a rich —if informal— education.

The reception to “Frankenstein” wasn’t always positive.

A review of the novel from 1818 said, “The writer of it is, we understand, a female; this is an aggravation of that which is the prevailing fault of the novel; but if our authoress can forget the gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should; and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment.”

But “Frankenstein” wasn’t dismissed.

Shelley’s novel, as Carlson notes, is “constantly cited in discussions of the ethics of technology and scientific invention, because it dramatizes the consequences of launching new things into the world without giving thought to the consequences.”

Read more about an author who was ahead of her time.

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Did you hear that Michael Healy-Rae got attacked by a cow?

[zagreus8me]

I wish this hell would end. Thought after my first therapy session I felt like I was hopeful and was ready for a nights sleep. Woke up every hour feeling extremely anxious and unable to sleep. I just want to fucking sleep. I can keep doing this. I'm falling apart.

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Right so I finally watched the first episode if Versailles. Apparently it's extremely filthy.. Eh.. I've seen way worse so I don't get what the hype was about and also, I couldn't follow it to be honest it was a bit odd. Still gonna watch it though!!! Haha!!

[zagreus8me]

Not being funny but I went for a piss in an old pub loo and there was NO ONE in there and someone knocked on my cubicle door. I noped the fuck out of there.

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This little bitch is turning her phone off at weekends. It needs doing. And this little bitch is going AWOL for as long as needed. PEACE!