Read my series Boy

love how tumblr staff has time to censor words like “paint mixing” and “my face” and yet they can’t get rid of ssexsophie8127 thats been liking my posts from 2017

fuck you

i won

Have I ever mentioned that time I accidentally convinced the students of a college campus that the woods were haunted

First question, were they? (in order not to get into beliefs debate, I'm counting as haunted any phenomena that would stand a decent chance of being qualified as such by several people.)

Just by me.

So, I used to do night shift security at a college campus. It was a nice spot and I liked that job. I'd work there still if it hadn't closed.

It was on a large wooded property. In the woods there were loads of berry brambles, and in the summer and fall there were SO many raspberries and blackberries to be had back there. So, during my break, I'd take a bucket and a headlamp and go back there and pick a bunch. My boss and the college knew and didn't care.

What I didn't consider was that this meant, since I worked 11 PM to 7 AM, that at like 2 in the morning there would be a seemingly random ball of light bobbing around in the woods.

Behind the nun cemetery.

Because, yeah, see, this used to be a catholic university run by nuns, and many of them were buried in a little private graveyard back by the little chapel.

So from the POV of the students glancing out their dorm windows when they woke up at 2 AM for whatever, they'd see a random light bobbing erratically through the woods behind the nun cemetery some early autumn nights.

They quickly became convinced that the woods were haunted. It took me like, 2 years to happen to hear one of the students in the dorm lounge telling another one about the nun ghost that showed up as a ball of light in the woods sometimes, and how everyone was too scared to go out and go ghost hunting.

The way I just kinda stopped and stood there awkwardly like 'oh. Oh fuck. Oops.'

And that's how I had to explain to several years worth of college students that the ghost was just me looking for blackberries.

ghost hunting team that keep a nonbeliever named steve around as an emergency supernatural suppressant

he waits in the car with a walkie talkie while they investigate and if things break bad they call him in. as soon as he enters everything stops floating around/trying to kill the hunters and he rolls his eyes and goes back to the car.

he’s not bluffing. i can’t emphasize that enough. he 100% believes that the hunters calling him in is either a prank, to make him feel useful, or because they’re spookable cowards who panicked when a book fell.

he stays because the money is good and he can play his gameboy in the car.

i fucking love this so much. it’s like having a service animal but instead it’s a guy named steve who owns more cargo shorts than the Gap continuously baffled by why he keeps getting befriended by goths.

Doghouse, Levins St. Paper Miniature

[Silent Hill]

Made from paper for AGDQ2024

Math is really tiring, im so glad i finally get to relax and do some knitting and crochet and i oh god oh my what the fuck

Woagh thats a lotta fish

can you count them?

The sushi-shaped isopod is a crustacean like no other.

(Image credit: Aquamarine Fukushima)

So, my iPod does this fucking genius factory thing where it forgets which artwork goes with which album and it makes guesses. Because it’s pretty sure I won’t notice.

Needless to say, I noticed.

the most 2014 post possible

our house in the middle of our house

Duskull — S&V Shrouded Fable #68

Illustrated by: James Turner

what the fuck why would anyone call it that

just saw the perforated baton rope making demonstration video for the first time and i 😲

none of you even give a fuck that weve found a possible use for one of the most mysterious ancient tools...?

YES ABSOLUTELY

so perforated batons are a type of paleolithic tool that was in use for THOUSANDS of years. weve found hundreds of examples across Europe and Asia of these. theyre typically made from antler or ivory, and are long batons with at least one hole thats been drilled through

at first they were called "batons of command" and the assumption was that these were ritualistic or symbolic items that represented strength or status in a group of individuals.

more modern interpretations include that they couldve been used as spear throwing tools, or that the holes couldve been used in spear or arrow making to pull them straight.

in a more recent study done on this mammoth ivory baton, which was found in Hohle Fels cave in Germany, they were specifically interested in the spiralized carvings feeding into each perforation

they studied small pieces of organic matter that were found inside the holes, and they were found to be FULL of plant fibres in way higher concentration than the other nearby soil, indicating that this baton at least was a tool used on plants. the idea came up that it could be a rope making tool

so they made a replica, and wove rope.

these tools were likely multipurpose, and we can never know the motivations of the ancient people who made them, but we have at least proven that these tools are capable of making rope very efficiently!

here you can watch a video demonstration of a group using a replica to make rope!

Oh this is FASCINATING! Mod A and I were recently on a conference on prehistoric clothing - this is one aspect of textile working in the broader sense that I definetely missed!

Fun fact, also: The specific finds that lead to this discovery were made at the Hohe Fels by Professor Nicholas Conrad and his team and published in 2016, in collaboration with Dr. Veerle Roots - here's a link to the original paper about ropemaking, and another one to the Archäologie Online article about the discovery. The Hohe Fels and neighboring Vogelherd caves are some of the most important prehistoric sites in all of Europe - you might be more familiar with them as the sites that turned up these ivory animal figurines, amongst others!

Experimental Archaeology is one of the most powerful tools in humanity's toolbox, because you can't know about some things until you try it for yourself.

And sometimes what you thought was the reason or purpose? Turns out to be a wild guess that was way off mark.

A lot, and I mean a lot of guesswork assigns ritualistic significance to archaeological finds (speaking of the objects, not any conclusions, here). "If it was important enough to bury with them, then it must have religious significance!" is a thought that sounds plausible, but a lot of what a person would need "in the next life" would be tools similar to what they used in this life. Making rope? Very important.

How important, you might ask?

Well, bushcrafters, survivalists, and so forth all have come to agree with what survivalist instructor Dave Canterbury calls "The 5Cs of Survival". These are the 5 tools you need to survive just about any situation (on land). They are: Cover (which starts with clothing, not just tarps, tents, etc), Cutting Tool (as sophisticated as steel, as simple as a sharp-edged stone), Combustion Device (matches, lighter, ferrorod, fresnel lens, magnifying lens, and any sort of friction or compression setup, such as a fire drill bow drill, and so forth), Container (for boiling and carrying water), and Cordage (threads, cords, ropes).

Cordage is absolutely a survival need. With it, you can tie things to your body, such as a gathering basket, wear a blanket as clothing, etc. You can tie up a tarp to serve as a rainfly. You can bundle together sticks to carry back to your camp for firewood. You can make netting for a fishing net, a net bag, a net basket, a hammock to sleep up off the ground where snakes and scorpions, etc, cannot get at you. You can lash together tripods for supporting the rain tarp or the hammock, and put together furniture to sit on, to process gathered materials on, and even a platform to build a fire on if the ground is too wet, or too dangerously peaty to build a fire. (It does require mud & stones for insulation, but it is doable! Some areas, you do NOT want to build a ground fire, because it'll lead to forest forest.)

In the modern era, we've come to rely heavily upon nails & screws, which thanks to industrialization are cheap and plentiful, but while we could also use wooden pegs and holes, it's difficult to drill the hole in a Stone Age setting. (Not impossible, just difficult and time-consuming.) Notching two sticks so they fit against each other a little more closely and then binding them with lashings--cordage!--is a valuable tool for constructing drying frames for preserving meat and plant-life, as well as crafting a nice chair to sit on. Cordage can be used to get your food high up off the ground, out of the reach of wild animals--a trick we still use to this day in bear country!

Cordage is incredibly useful, and absolutely, if our fellow humans from ages ago had invented a tool to aid in rope-making, you can absolutely bet they'd want to have a tool that helps them make evenly constructed rope that would be solid enough to be reliable. And they'd absolutely want this useful tool for making more consistently successful rope with them in the next life.

Why is it important to have well-made rope? If one strand in a ply of cordage is more tautly pulled than the others, then more of the load placed on that cordage will be placed on those specific fibers, while the other ply (2-ply, 3-ply, however many are involved) will not be taking up nearly as much of the load.

Cordage is only as strong as its weakest fibers, but that weakness can come not just from materials quality, but also from having too much stress applied to one set of fibers. A ropemaking tool like the one in the posts above absolutely will help even out the stresses applied to the fibers, redistributing the weight more evenly. After all, if one strand of a 3-ply cord is taking 80% of the weight and the other two are taking 10% of the weight each, then the moment that 80% snaps, the very abrupt shock of that part of the cord breaking will likely cause the other two to snap as well, because suddenly they're having to support 50% of the stress when the third section breaks. But if you can get all 3 cords close to each one sharing 33% of the weight, they have a lot more "cushion room" to share out the stresses involved.

Well-made cordage can save lives, whether it's keeping the parts of a hut lashed together, or a rope used to ascend and descent a cliff to go after honeycomb, or even just as the rotation string on a bow drill that is being used to start a friction fire that'll keep you warm and dry and scare off predators in the night.

Cordage is 100% a major survival tool, and well-made cordge will save your life. Badly made cordage won't.

im getting astral plane war propaganda

everyone is talking about the war on europa but no one mentions the war in the astral plane, yet more evidence of the bias in western media

Every day I learn of new unique gimmick blogs on tumblr

I thought the visuals to the conclave movie were so striking but then you see the real thing and it all makes sense

Woman murders man in broad daylight

Always reblog this queen of burns the dude didn't even realise happened