I Apologize To Everyone I'm Spamming With Notes Rn. I've Gotten A New Fixation And It's Critical Role

I finished my Rome book and have now begun one about Pompeii. I’m 65 pages in and I already love it: yes, it covers the volcano, but most of the book is about “this is what the town and daily life of it would have been like, actually.” Fascinating stuff. Things I’ve learned so far:

- The streets in Pompeii have sidewalks sometimes a meter higher than the road, with stepping stones to hop across as “crosswalks.” I’d seen some photos before. The book points out that, duh, Pompeii had no underground drainage, was built on a fairly steep incline, and the roads were more or less drainage systems and water channels in the rain.

- Unlike today, where “dining out” is expensive and considered wasteful on a budget, most people in Pompeii straight up didn’t have kitchens. You had to eat out if you were poor; only the wealthy could afford to eat at home.

- Most importantly, and I can’t believe in all the pop culture of Pompeii this had never clicked for me: Pompeii had a population between 6-35,000 people. Perhaps 2,000 died in the volcano. Contemporary sources talk about the bay being full of fleeing ships. Most people got the hell out when the eruption started. The number who died are still a lot, and it’s still gruesome and morbid, but it’s not “an entire town and everyone in it.” This also makes it difficult for archeologists, apparently (and logically): those who remained weren’t acting “normally,” they were sheltering or fleeing a volcano. One famous example is a wealthy woman covered in jewelry found in the bedroom in the glaridator barracks. Scandal! She must have been having an affair and had it immortalized in ash! The book points out that 17 other people and several dogs were also crowded in that one small room: far more likely, they were all trying to shelter together. Another example: Houses are weirdly devoid of furniture, and archeologists find objects in odd places. (Gardening supplies in a formal dining room, for example.) But then you remember that there were several hours of people evacuating, packing their belongings, loading up carts and getting out… maybe the gardening supplies were brought to the dining room to be packed and abandoned, instead of some deeper esoteric meaning. The book argues that this all makes it much harder to get an accurate read on normal life in a Roman town, because while Pompeii is a brilliant snapshot, it’s actually a snapshot of a town undergoing major evacuation and disaster, not an average day.

- Oh, another great one. Outside of a random laundry place in Pompeii, someone painted a mural with two scenes. One of them referenced Virgil’s Aeneid. Underneath that scene, someone graffiti’d a reference to a famous line from that play, except tweaked it to be about laundry. This is really cool, the book points out, because it implies that a) literacy and education was high enough that one could paint a reference and have it recognized, and b) that someone else could recognize it and make a dumb play on words about it and c) the whole thing, again, means that there’s a certain amount of literacy and familiarity with “Roman pop culture” even among fairly normal people at the time.

In 1963, while doing renovations on his home, a man broke through an exterior bedroom wall in his home and discovered a tunnel entrance. What he found behind that wall stunned historians, archeologists and the world. The lost ancient underground city of Derinkuyu had been discovered. A multilevel series of rooms, carved from the soft volcanic rock in the Cappadocia region of Turkey, Derinkuyu extends to a depth of over 200ft. Believed to have been constructed by the Phrygians, an Indo-European people originally from the Balkan region, it dates back to the 8th Century BCE. Capable of holding up to 20,000 people, Derinkuyu had rooms for food stores, livestock, schools, kitchens, living and sleeping quarters and sanitary facilities. Small tunnels carved up to the surface allowed ventilation throughout the city. Entrance tunnels were carefully hidden in the hills surrounding Derinkuyu and connected to the city. One of these tunnels were discovered in 1963 when workers removed the bedroom wall. It is believed the city was originally carved as an escape from marauding Arab armies in 9th Century BCE and continued over the next several hundred years. The city was used often as a refuge during the Byzantine Era of the 5th through the 10 Century CE.

So sometimes I see bros on the internet talk about how women couldn’t have worn armor historically, because it was too heavy for them.

Here is a picture of me wearing armor when I was a nerdy 14-year-old girl who was about 5 feet tall and weighed less than 95 pounds. I sometimes wore it for 6 hours straight in summer heat, and I would run and turn summersaults in it for fun.

And before you start asking: this was authentic full steel plate with a padded arming doublet underneath. It weighed so much that I couldn’t carry the plastic tub it was stored in on my own. It was heavy. But once I was wearing it I just felt like I was being hugged or wrapped up in a really heavy blanket. That’s how armor works. The whole point is that the weight is distributed across your whole body, and your whole body can lift a huge amount. It has nothing to do with how strong you are or how much you can bench.

So if you think women are too weak to wear armor, you are wrong on so many levels. It does not even matter if you believe in your little misogynistic heart that all women are defined by their physical inferiority when compared to men, because you are also just wrong about how armor works. Even skinny teen girls can wear armor just fine. Everyone can wear armor.

Here is Lance! So he’s the middle child of eight, or rather, he would be once the last two were born. Currently he has four older siblings and one younger. Because of the hectic nature of his house, he was always doing attention seeking behavior, doing things he knew would upset his mom so she would have to spend an extra moment with him, which carried over into his life at the castle. He loves his family deeply though, and the jacket he wears constantly belongs to his second oldest brother, who gave it to him the day he went off with the castle.

As the third oldest, a knowledgeable eight year old, he leads Hunk and Pidge on adventures around the castle, causing mischief. They call themselves the Squid Squad, mostly because Pidge decided they should. He doesn’t get along with the other eight year old, Keith, and pushes for a rivalry because Keith wants a lot of attention too, which Lance deems inexcusable.

My dearest Granddaughter.

Na, “Annwyl Wyres”. You’ve asked me to write what I remember for your school project, So I suppose you’ll want me to do it in Welsh.

Cariad bach, Sai'n gwybod beth i ‘weud wrthi ti. Silence is a hard habit to break.

Right from day one, this wasn’t something we talked about. It was a non-subject. Mae'n rhyfedd pan ti'n meddwl am y peth; While the whole world and his wife were talking about us, With their editorials And their news items and so on A tra bod y beirdd yn sgwennu cerddi amdanyn ni   A'r holl eiriau'n golchi droson ni

O'n ni'n dweud dim.

We said nothing.

So how much should you know? It’s part of your history, Our family’s history. But I can’t share my guilt with you For making the child I lost go to school that morning (I wish I’d never shared that with your Bampy even) And that I felt guilty for having A child that lived.

But I wouldn’t have had you otherwise, would I?

None of this makes sense.

There are pictures that you ought to see from afterwards. The photographer came over from America And he was here for weeks after the disaster - Rapoport his name was. ‘Sgwyla di ar ei luniau fe. He took one of the first baby born afterwards The first wedding The first smiles And how many hundreds have there been since then, thank God? Those pictures show us carrying on Because we had to.

But there are things that those photos can’t show.

Like candles in pockets. Your aunty was afraid of the dark. I would light a candle for her in the cemetary - Lots did. It was like a second home to us for a long time afterwards. I would take extra candles in my coat pocket In case somebody else’s Had burnt down to nothing.

These are things I will carry with me ‘til I die.

But Do you have a right to them?

Because it was so terrible, Should you feel like so many before you That it’s your duty To comment To sympathise To identify?

Elli di ddim, cariad bach.

But I don’t want you to forget, either.

I can only give your aunty flowers On be ranna i beth alla i ‘da di. 

I’ll give you all the memories that I can.

- Llythyr Mam-gu, by the bard Ifor ap Glyn.

Written in memory of the Aberfan Disaster, 50 years ago.

Holy shit, can you imagine if mediaeval monks had figured out flipbooks?

❤ thank you for being so sweet!!!

^-^ Of course! I love everybody and you're blog is one of my faves.

Are you polish?

nope

Voltron Beta Reader?

I wrote the first chapter of this fanfic and I don't know about the end and could use some help! It's set in canon, basically, and it's gonna be kinda Klance and definitely langst. Keith and Lance are captured by the Galra and they want to get Keith to be more Galra so they torture Lance to make him mad, basically. The first chapter is just the capture. If you're interested in helping me out, message me!

Disney letter! I accidentally posted this on my England blog instead of here, oops, but I'm fixing it now. Okay so it's set in modern day, at least after the Soviet Union collapsed. The picture above is one that I took on vacation. --- Dear Pol, I wish you hadn't had that conference and could have come with me to Disney with America! She keeps talking about how she's sad I couldn't come here sooner but we soon stopped talking about that because it's a sore subject for both of us. All of us, really. But oh, Pol, it's amazing here! It's like magic! America took me to Epcot first. You know that big ball? I went inside the big ball! It talks about the history of the world and it's amazing. It took our pictures at the beginning and then used them to show us our future and it was so amusing. It didn't work right, and it only captured the image of part of America's hair, then my face, not my hair, and a lot of blue that was behind me, so there was a gap between my face and the blue. So a chunk of hair and my face with blue around it and no hair were traveling around space together on vacation. They also had countries! It was so fun because we got to poke fun at England and France and Canada but Canada made fun of her right back at her when we got to America. The two of them are closer than they show people. When the sun began to set we went over to the Magic Kingdom and oh my, Poland. Everything was lit up but the sun was still setting so everything was glowing and the castle in the distance was all blue and everything… it was magical, beautiful, amazing. I wish you could see it. You will some day, I swear. I need to head to bed. I'll send another email tomorrow, I promise! Yours, Liet