Pantheons in fantasy will almost always be something like “fire deity, water deity, light deity, EVIL deity, GREAT MOTHER” while an average bronze age city’s pantheon was s/t like “deity personifying the city, god everyone has to treat as the main one because his city got geopolitically lucky, three or so personifications of main local sources of income, a nearby mountain, half a dozen incoherent minor deities (at least one is the result of some misspelling a name), deified branding iron”
(via gcfmug)
Recently, I was at the dentist’s. I was putatively getting some fillings done, but I was actually stealing their nitrous oxide through a hose snaked up through my shirt collar. While I was there, I saw something amazing: a television set. Where I live, actual broadcast television hasn’t existed for decades, having been replaced by a series of all-knowing, all-serving automatons who can read your mind and deliver to you the most advertiser-pleasing television. This television? It was playing HGTV.
Now, in case you’re unaware, HGTV (”Home and Garden TV”) has been around for a real long time. Once, it gave suburbanites basic skills about taping, sanding, priming, painting, and finishing their kitchen renovations. People liked it. Eventually, though, they hit a natural ceiling on audience. In today’s busy world, only so many people actually went out and fixed their houses with the advice from television. They needed more eyeballs, and they knew where to get them.
Television is actually about fantasy. You, the viewer, are not capable of going to foreign countries and saving the world from conspiratorial terrorist plots to overthrow neoliberalism. At best, you’re going to frown slightly during a World Vision ad telling you about staving children. And just like that, HGTV figured out that what they really wanted to sell was the fantasy of knocking down a wall in your house with a sledgehammer.
Every single show features this scene: a buff, but sometimes unconventionally handsome, man hitting a wall with a sledgehammer. Why does he have to take that wall out? “To open up the space,” the narrator explains. What was wrong with the old space? It is implied that the space was not open enough, and therefore we needed to hit a nearby wall with a hammer in order to make it slightly more open. This is good: it is both an action that the audience can imagine themselves doing, and produces a fantastic visual (”fuck this house!”) that demarcates the transition between The Bad Old House and The Good New House.
After this scene happens, they quickly rush to paint and interior design, and no further effort is made to explain what’s going on. You got your demolition, you got your renovation, and the fantasy of being able to remodel your kitchen without engaging in back-to-back divorces has been reached within 30 minutes or less. Now go think about buying some paint.
All this has made me think about how I needed to represent my own life so that I would reach more mainstream appeal, but it turns out that I didn’t have any cameras rolling when I knocked down the wall to the convenience store down the street after hours, and made off with several dozen bottles of automatic transmission fluid.
(via seat-safety-switch)
Neanderthal tools might look relatively simple, but new research shows that Homo neanderthalensis devised a method of generating a glue derived from birch tar to hold them together about 200,000 years ago—and it was tough. This ancient superglue made bone and stone adhere to wood, was waterproof, and didn’t decompose. The tar was also used a hundred thousand years before modern humans came up with anything synthetic.
After studying ancient tools that carry residue from this glue, a team of researchers from the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and other institutions in Germany found evidence that this glue wasn’t just the original tar; it had been transformed in some way. This raises the question of what was involved in that transformation.
To see how Neanderthals could have converted birch tar into glue, the research team tried several different processing methods. Any suspicion that the tar came directly from birch trees didn’t hold up because birch trees do not secrete anything that worked as an adhesive. So what kind of processing was needed?
Each technique that was tested used only materials that Neanderthals would have been able to access. Condensation methods, which involve burning birch bark on cobblestones so the tar can condense on the stones, were the simplest techniques used—allowing bark to burn above ground doesn’t really involve much thought beyond lighting a fire.
The other methods involved a recipe where the bark was not actually burned but heated after being placed underground. Two of these methods involved burying rolls of bark in embers that would heat them and produce tar. The third method would distill the tar. Because there were no ceramics during the Stone Age, sediment was shaped into upper and lower structures to hold the bark, which was then heated by fire. Distilled tar would slowly drip from the upper structure into the lower one.
The resulting tars were all put through chemical and molecular analysis, as well as micro-CT scans, to determine which came closest to the residue on actual Neanderthal tools. Tars synthesized underground were closest to the residue on the original artifacts.
“[Neanderthals] distilled tar in an intentionally created underground environment that restricted oxygen flow and remained invisible during the process,” the researchers wrote. “This degree of complexity is unlikely to have been invented spontaneously.”Weeping with joy over the idea of a Neanderthal industrial engineer
(via sexhaver)
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