Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
i can fix him *traumatizes him*
sinegard rivalry
Actually, ancient glass, having been rather neglected by archaeology for decades, is a pretty exciting topic in scholarship right now. The main thing is that glass persists–it’s very stable. After fabric rots and metal turns to a scrap of rust, there will lie a necklace, still scattered across a chest that itself has turned mostly to earth.
Bead typologies, for example (that is, the classification of different styles/shapes/decorative motifs/colors) can allow scholars to trace trade routes, as they study the distributions of different bead types over time and geography. Glass production is kinda industrial in nature, not like spinning or beer that make good cottage industries. It was often produced in one place, and then sold on to artisans elsewhere, and then the beads themselves were traded across entire continents.
Chemical analysis of the glass can do even more to trace routes, since different compositions and incidence of different mineral contaminants can allow archaeologists to trace glass production to individual sites, thousands of years after the fact. It’s dizzying, really.
The downside is that for a long time, archaeologists regarded beads as unimportant trinkets, and antiquities dealers understood that they were easy to take and easy to move. So an awful lot of the most exceptional beads we have from the distant past spent time in private collections or uncategorized drawers somewhere in a museum back room, so they’ve lost much of what we could have learned from their original provenance. Maybe we’ll be able to turn new analytical tools on some of these to reconstruct more of their past.
Franz Wright, from “East Boston, 1996; Night Walk,” in God’s Silence
Natalie Diaz, “Manhattan Is a Lenape Word.” Postcolonial Love Poem
11.11.2021
French lesson 11 and I still make mistakes in dictation after 8 years of studying french
the professors start talking about exams and I don’t feel mentally ready
Every time we have a Japanese lesson, half of the class doesn’t understand and feels stupid (I’m part of this half)
I’m not studying linguistics anymore
I hope your week is going better than mine🥲
I'm still processing how fucking funny it was to watch the Crows run around during the events of Shadow and Bone. Like on the one hand they accomplished pretty much NOTHING they set out to accomplish and every single one of their plans went horribly awry, but on the other hand??? They snuck into the little palace? Inej killed TWO Inferni? They carjacked the Darkling? Jesper went up against a heartrender who had on a bullet-proof kefta with a gun and won? The Darkling tried to use the cut on Kaz and he got out of it with what was basically a magic trick? They snuck onto the skiff? Inej STABBED the Darkling? Kaz fought off a fricking Volcra with his CANE? Accomplishing nothing but with STUNNING proficiency. And at the end Alina's just like "gotta appreciate the effort, fam. Have these priceless jewels and go back to being crime lords in Ketterdam, please."
I think my dark undereye circles are adding to the aesthetic actually.
anyway. onto better things