So a while back I won a cheap eBay auction listing for a collection of love letters from the first world war.
They arrived today, and…the listing was WAY more than I expected for the price I won it for. There’s over 100, and they’re not just from WWI, but from 1906 (earliest I’ve found so far) through to 1915.
Charlie writes to his girlfriend, Gertrude. This is the most beautiful, lovesick stuff I’ve ever read. He sends her so many letters, sometimes twice a day, and lots of poems. He seems to have been an artist, as he talks a lot about small exhibitions of his stuff, and included a flyer for one. He also talks about how her parents don’t approve of them and how he’s desperately awaiting the day they’ll be married.
I haven’t found the latest of the letters, but the fact it’s up until 1915 and then stops…doesn’t give me hope for a happy ending.
This man continuously refers to his precious beloved Gertie as his queen and goddess, and whilst most of it is sickly sweet, there’s some raunchy stuff too, with him talking about how he can’t wait until they have a little house together and can ‘please each other all day’…
There’s. So many.
I’m going to put them in order by date, read them through, and then maybe even transcribe them so we can find out a bit about Charlie and Gertie’s love story.
This man was absolutely lost in the sauce
Y'all he writes about sending her pressed poppies and postcards for her collection 😭😭😭
111 years after Charlie got his dick touched in 1910, I decided to tell you all about it. Sorry Charlie.
Some more finds:
And some CODE!!!
Also all this is poems:
UHHHHH…👀👀👀
This has a lot of notes so I need everyone to know:
They got married 😭😭😭❤ (thank you to @lovesjustachemical for finding this!!!)
Kinda fucked up that you just stole somebody’s mail
Don’t know how to explain to you that acquiring, preserving, and transcribing historical ephemera that would have otherwise just been trashed from people who have been dead for over 50 years and don’t appear to have any living descendants isn’t the same as ‘stealing someone’s mail’ but Tumblr never ceases to amaze me with it’s cold takes.
The switch from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time which will take away my glorious hour of daylight in the afternoon and give it to the early morning is just another example of how Morning People are an oppressive class in modern society
We also figured out—the hard way—that the ancients probably cut each layer of linen to the proper shape before gluing them together. For our first linothorax, we glued together 15 layers of linen to form a one centimeter-thick slab, and then tried to cut out the required shape. Large shears were defeated; bolt cutters failed. The only way we were ultimately able to cut the laminated linen slab was with an electric saw equipped with a blade for cutting metal. At least this confirmed our suspicion that linen armor would have been extremely tough. We also found out that linen stiffened with rabbit glue strikes dogs as in irresistibly tasty rabbit-flavored chew toy, and that our Labrador retriever should not be left alone with our research project.
I love this in every way possible. What is it from? Where can I read more?
The pitfalls of experimental archaeology and puppies.
link to source:
“Unraveling the Linothorax Mystery, or how Linen Armor Came to Dominate our Lives.”
We found that even more of a threat than rain was one’s own sweat on a hot day. So, yes, it does need waterproofing, both inside and out. We did a number of experiments along those lines, and found that rubbing a block of beeswax over all sides of the armor provided nice waterproofing. It also makes the armor smell nice! When you wear it for a couple hours, your own body heat softens the glue a bit and makes it conform to your body shape, so it is much more comfortable to wear than rigid types of armor. Our reconstructions weighed about 10 pounds–about one third the weight of bronze armor that would provide the same degree of protection.
Honey i gotta go to war… not to smell my bee armor or hang with the boys or anything no.. uhh we need to uh do war things?
While all of this mayhem (both scientifically controlled and free-form) convinced us that our linothorax was ancient-battlefield-ready, we still felt compelled to try a real-life scenario, so Scott donned the armor and Greg shot him. And while we had confidence in our armor, our relief was still considerable when the arrowhead stuck and lodged in the armor’s outer layers, a safe distance away from flesh.
a good life-size mannequin is expensive but i guarantee it would’ve cost way less than they were spending on all that linen.
this is mind boggling levels of insane. if you’ve never done needlefelting you can’t quite comprehend how fucking difficult it is to not only make things so precise at such a small scale but like, not get the fibers tangled into literally everything else they interact with. and then ANIMATING it??? bro this is witchcraft
I grew up in the Great Lakes area of North America, where fishing is pretty popular but everyone knows that fish populations aren’t anything like “the good old days” when people took out huge numbers of fish while messing up their spawning sites. I got pretty into fishing when I found out that I could catch bluegill in the surrounding farm ponds, and once in a while my family took me to an isolated fishing cabin for vacation, but for years I never encountered a wild fish bigger than a kilogram or two.
BUT THEN…
I found out about sturgeon! They were HUGE fish that had once lived in the rivers and lakes all around my home, and better yet, fish almost exactly like modern sturgeon had existed all the way back in the Cretaceous period alongside the dinosaurs, and they STILL EXIST TODAY!!! The fact that small numbers of these huge dinosaur fish still existed made them seem almost like a real-life lake monster/cryptid, except that we had proof of their existence!
Furthermore, there’s just nothing else like them. Sturgeon get big. Like, REALLY big. The record for the largest sturgeon was almost 11 meters/24 feet long, which is colossal for freshwater animals. They have armor plates of bone running down their sides, and at the same time they don’t have bony skeletons. They also have a crazy mouth structure, which allows them to actually pop their jaws out like a tube and suck up food. And on top of all of this, the adults are absolute tanks. I’ve seen skin nearly 8mm thick, and it’s so tough that people make leather out of it, and they occasionally lose fins or even entire gill plates and just keep on swimming! (I found out about that last one when I tried to wrestle a big female out of a river and my hand went straight into her gills. She didn’t seem that bothered by it!)
For a long time I filed sturgeon along with Alligator Gar, Giant Mekong catfish, and Yangtze paddlefish as a semi-legendary fish that may still exist, but I was never going to see except possibly in an aquarium, until I enrolled in graduate school. For those unfamiliar with grad school in the US, it typically involves both high-level classes as well as an independent research project the student designs and carries out with help from an experienced professor. When my mentor asked what kind of thing I wanted to study, I tossed out “sturgeon” as one such possibility, expecting to hear that I would probably have to limit myself to more common/accessible species.
I was blown away when she said “Actually, I think I know a guy…”
For the next several years, I got to ride along collecting wild adult sturgeon, gathering eggs, and raising the baby fish in a lab and in a hatchery. I was holding something that I had thought of as a semi-mythical lake/river monster in my own hands! I got to see a river choked with giants as big as 2 meters long, and I got to hold a 5-centimeters mottled baby whose armored scutes were still sharp and possessed the little arrowhead shape and big black pectoral fins that remind me of Mickey Mouse ears! In the video below you can even see a little heartbeat! (Don’t worry, this little guy was returned to the tank soon after to recover from his anesthesia!)
Sadly, I didn’t find anything super groundbreaking in my research, but my experience DID land me a job working in sturgeon aquaculture! If you’ve ever had caviar that wasn’t poached, it probably came from a sturgeon farm, and if you want to see a lot of big fish up close, this is a good place to do it! I probably personally handled more individual sturgeon than there are wild fish in several sturgeon species. In addition, while the wild broodstock I mentioned above might reach 2 meters and over 50kg, the sturgeon I dealt with at the farm would easily double that, and there were a LOT of them! I got to see sturgeon behavior that had never been recorded in field guides, and even a few crazy one-in-a-million mutations like the infamous “ghost” sturgeon!
I even got the opportunity to cook my own sturgeon meat (Yeah, I basically turned into the Touden siblings from Dungeon Meshi except for sturgeon instead of RPG monsters). I got pretty good at making smoked sturgeon, but the meat is also good on the grill or baked, and people have been cooking them in various ways for centuries.
My favorite part of the job was physically wrestling the big fish! Sturgeon are easier to grab than other fish with the right know-how, but a human-sized fish often has its own plans for the day and won’t always cooperate. I was pretty good at moving the adults by the time I left that job, but it was still a wild rodeo every time!
Even more exciting was how we spawned each new generation of sturgeon. In the wild, they form massive spawning runs in big rivers that in the past would be enough to tip small boats, but in a lab or farm we have to use other means. I’ll spare you the details, but I am one of a small number of people who have surgically extracted eggs from a live sturgeon and sutured them back up to swim another day.
The tldr of this essay is that sturgeon are a big, crazy-unique fish that have been around a long time, and I’ve spent a lot of my career handling and working with them. There’s just nothing like them for a fish nerd and they’re damn cool!
(Clip art not mine, I think @sturgeonposting drew or shared it!)
My boss, who is a grown woman with children my age, just whispered, “Oh, this is going to be so fucking efficient,” before spraying Febreze directly into the ceiling fan and proceeding to cough her guts out when it blew back in her face.
I watched a lot of Star Trek as a kid. I remember some time ago I mentioned that I mostly learned English from watching Star Trek every day, with my parents. Someone said they could tell that “by the way I phrase things.” I asked them to elaborate. They did not. I’m still not sure what they meant.
if you find yourself in a situation like this, don’t panic. there are people who can, and will, help you <3
[video ID: a pale skinned person with blue hair and a lip ring is shown from the waist up, speaking into the camera. transcript (some of the captions on the video are not spoken, so those are added in parentheses):
“I don’t know who needs to hear this today but there is no such thing as a “leaked nude”! (obvs don’t mean colloquially) 1. if your nude is behind a paywall like onlyfans, it is: copyright infringement and onlyfans will fight for you. 2. if your nude was taken or sent in private, that is: revenge porn, and as of 2019, is illegal in most states and countries where social media is prominent.
in 2019 one of my girls came to me and said that her ex was threatening to leak her nudes. she played me his voicemail and I fucking laughed. homeboy left his full name and threat on a recorded message.
usually I’m not very supportive of the police if that’s not obvious (I made this decision based on the people involved and didn’t put anyone in danger) but in this situation I told her to call. she filed completely over the phone, never met with an officer and he never saw her face (she also said that he didn’t make any remarks or judgements on her which was important to her). that officer called the dumbass and told him that he was facing a felony in his state. basically, the dumbass wet himself and never contacted her again.
but if you don’t want to go that route you can always get a lawyer involved (to inform and advocate for you). I know even that sounds like “how can I do this?” but for my she’s, gays, & theys out there: if you are in an abusive situation or they’re committing crimes against you, some lawyers in your city will work for free.” end ID/transcript]
Once upon a time, in the heart of a dark and rainy night, a creature appeared at an abbey, climbing through a window to into the room where the abbess was writing notes. It was a wretched beast, not quite human but neither did it resemble any animal that the abbess could name. It was dripping wet, with scarred skin and odd patches of thin, sparse fur, long cracked claws that scraped the stone floor, and sharp teeth so haphazardly scattered that it was hard to say whether there were two rows of teeth or one.
“What do you want, creature?” the abbess asked it calmly.
“I want to become a nun”, the creature said. And there was no rule in the books that the abbess could remember that say that would prohibit a strange beast from becoming a nun, if it so desired. So, the beast was accepted into the abbey, and it took to life in the order as naturally as a shepherd dog to herding. She was a meticulous beast, first to wake and rise at dawn, neat and tidy with all tools and tasks she was given, dutiful and devout in all things.
No nun nor novice dared to question the creature’s right to be there after the first time the she demonstrated that her teeth are not merely for decoration, and then apologised to the novice who had tried. The beast even graciously offered to mend the habit she had torn. After the incident, she was never bothered again. A handful of other postulants, novices and even a few of the nuns flocked to her, knowing that the creature would not allow anybody to be mistreated in her presence.
Watching the creature wolfishly lope across the abbey courtyard, with her ill-fitting, haphazardly placed cowl flopping as it went, the abbess contemplated the strange being. Despite of her sloppy, haphazard appearance, the beast really did have great potential to become a nun. A being so gentle and friendly could have done well just about anywhere, as would anyone so devout, but what made the creature such a good fit for monastic life was her love of routine. Waking up each morning at the same time, performing the same tasks and duties at the same time, the beast was not only tireless in her work, but actively delighted in regular routines. Which was why the abbey was such a good place for her, and she would one day make an excellent nun.
I took my second ADHD pill a little too late I guess because it was suddenly 4 am and I made this thing about why parasitic organisms are shaped like ways and how to consider that for your fiction settings.
Raw text version below the cut for people with busted seeing:
