We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far

I was going to post a link to quilt pictures here and then I thought I should post pictures of the other quilts I've done and then I realized I didn't really have any good pictures of them and then it was two months later.

So here are pictures of a quilt I finished in March! (Tumblr) (Twitter)

And here are some of the other things I did in the past two months that didn't make it here:

Learned more programming

A bunch of unrelated thoughts about The Old Guard on Tumblr: one, two, three

Listened to some French podcasts

Signed up for my local city councillor's mailing list, which I recommend if you are that kind of person and have a decent city councillor

Had meta-thoughts on omegaverse (Tumblr) (Twitter)

Provided a blood sample for the Ontario Health Study's COVID antibody study (Tumblr) (Twitter)

Was moderately snide about "accessible design" by non-disabled people (Tumblr) (Twitter)

Blue Beads in the Tundra

Note that the first sentence of this article contains a really major error: the actual "first European item[s] ever to arrive in North America" were on the other site of the continent, in Newfoundland, and at least 400 years older. (The Norse also landed, though did not settle, on the mainland at Labrador.) What the archaeologist quoted actually says is “[t]his was the earliest that indubitably European materials show up in the New World by overland transport.”

It's really neat because we knew the Silk Road facilitated trade between Europe and East Asia (earlier than we'd expected!), and we knew there was cultural movement and interchange around the entire high Arctic region, but we hadn't had hard evidence connecting all of these trade routes together.

marvelfemslashevents is having a Big Bang, signups open until the end of February.

And

is open on rthstewart's journal!

Also:

Does anyone have any advice on how to get yourself to actually close some damn browser tabs?

1. I have one more paragraph to write on this thing. It'll probably happen tomorrow.

I'm looking at the denouement here, and my brain is going "no, you can't stop here, there's all this work to do digging up the conspiracy and figuring out who was working for them!" Which A) would be a lot of writing, B) is not the kind of plot many people find interesting, and C) is contrary to my stated policy on this project. So I'm not writing it.

Unless the sequel shows up, which is isn't going to because I don't actually have the canon knowledge to write it anyway.


2. Putting the (NSFW) link here: This Is What It's Like to Have Sex With Hearing Loss


3. World map shirts! I have no idea what the quality or business is like, I just saw them and I really want one and I can't buy one right now so I am telling you about them instead.


4. Have two quotes from Central Asia in World History by Peter B. Golden, since I'm not sure if I will end up finishing it before it needs to go back.

Archaeological excavations of cities such as Taraz (in Kazakhstan) and Samarkand show that the designs on the products often catered to the stylistic preferences of the neighbouring nomads as well as the local urban population. For example, seals on gemstones from ancient Samarkand (the archaeological site Afrasiyab) have two different styles: one depicting a bull with wings, reflecting the mythological subject matter preferred by the townsmen, the other a goat in flight with an arrow in his neck, an example of the scenes of the hunt so dear to the nomads. (p 19)

The Uighurs, hitherto predominantly nomad pastoralists, began to settle, taking up urban and agricultural pursuits. Like their mentors, the Sogdians, they developed a rich commercial sulture as Silk Road traders and a complex spiritual life in which Manichaeism, Buddhism, and Christianity were all represented. In the eastern steppe zone, they replaced the Sogdians as culture-bearers. ... The post-imperial Uighurs produced a rich literature, largely religious in content, for a population of which perhaps one-third was literate. The shift in the role of the Uighurs is reflected in a phrase from an early tenth-century Arab historian, Ibn al-Falqîh, who called them "the Arabs of the Turks." (p 47)

This book is made more difficult by the fact that the maps are all the precise opposite of the one in "The Hunting of the Snark."


5. Pride was two weeks ago and I am still finding random glitter.

[Multifandom friendship fest]

Also, hurtcomfortex nominations are open.

New-to-Dreamwidth people may be interested to know that Dreamwidth can be used as an RSS and Atom feed reader. Details on how to set them up are here, the most popular feeds are listed here (for ease of finding blogs/webcomics to subscribe to), and my mood today can be seen in panel five here/here.

I just put up a few things from tumblr and I think I'll keep doing that, because tumblr inspires me to thinky posts but I want them somewhere I can find them again.

So I saw a post somewhere recently about weird simultaneities in history. For example, there were still mammoths around when the Egyptians were building pyramids.

Other things that happened before mammoths went extinct: women wrote poetry.

From Tumblr, going here because I don't trust Tumblr not to lose stuff:

you know what we need? we need queer romcoms. we don’t need any more sad lifetime movies about queers who end up dead or heartbroken. we don’t need any more real life stories. we need queer romcoms.

ladies falling in love after they stumble against each other on the subway.
guys who work for opposite companies and bicker at the meetings until one of them kisses the other.
a trans lady bartender who always ends up having deep philosophical chats with a drunk girl who gets dumped every week by a different person.
an asexual journalist falling in love with the football player xie interviews every week after the matches, and having cute make outs and a lot of awkwardness around the ace thing with the fight and the ridiculous gesture of love and the make up.
happy fluffy endings after a lot of dumb cute shit happening.
queer rom coms !!!

-- Queerhawkeye