I Get The Impression That Feng Shui Isn't Really About Making Predictions About Reality, But Is Rather

Ofc Wikipedia is what it is but this line has a really important clue as to why it happened

So this suggests that the Aksumites were identifying themselves with the exonym of the land they conquered.

This claim is cited to the book Aksum and Nubia: Warfare, Commerce, and Political Fictions in Ancient Northeast Africa

so "ethiopia" as a term is originally greek, and i'm having a weird amount of trouble telling when the land now called ethiopia started calling itself that. from the discussion here and some wikipedia reading, the 13th century is the first recorded instance, but it's probably older than that. definitely *after* the 4th century, because the axumites and the ethiopians are distinct groups. its weird because ethiopia was originally the exonym, but then abyssinia became the preferred exonym, and at some point ethiopia became the endonym. which is kind of weird, i dont think it's that common that a distant exonym becomes your endonym

somehow, it looks like a beautiful world, all those thin landforms surrounded by sea

map of the world where the countries are weighted by speakers of the brahui language...

It's really hard to understand what is and isn't bodily autonomy when it comes to social pressures. Do people want to alter their bodies or are they being pressured into it... but really, there is no such thing as an authentic individual self that can make these decisions free of pressure. We are social pressure, it's part of us just like our bodies

people often talk about how AI makes small choices that a human would never make if they were drawing the image, but when I see Reach's art I feel as if this tendency has been harnessed to create an atmosphere of almost hallucinatory vividness. It's beyond what I've seen in most illustrator's stuff

devil armor

it's interesting how Rose of Versailles makes the aesthetics of the monarchy and the revolution fit together in a coherent whole. IRL the revolutionaries didn't like the rococo stuff, but Ikeda has made it so that the rococo aesthetics have transformed to symbolize the intensity of revolution itself.

me when bara wa bara wa

I'm the Daijou-Daijin of cringe

It's a strange spectacle to see how much the community around skeptical inquirer cares about issues of little relevance to culture or power structures

Some people defend this kind of rationalist ideology by talking about, say, anti-superstition activists in India, but those people are admirable for the specific reason that they are undermining hierarchical power structures

A Western skeptic getting angry about Americans venerating ghosts with offerings --- that's not subversive, and it's worthy of contempt!

really interesting concept. I feel like if you grew up in the universe where daemons were commonplace, this wouldn't feel like a big deal though. It would be as natural as saying, "we have to make sure the actor has the same face as well as the same body type of the character/historical figure."

Live theater in the His Dark Materials universe must be wild. Surely an actor's daemon also has lines to recite, so their daemon's form probably also factors into casting decisions. Maybe some plays have vague character descriptions for daemons, but I bet other plays have really specific or central daemon characters. And sure, big-budget theaters can afford to hire a separate actor with a particular daemon to stand backstage while their daemon plays its part onstage, but community theaters don't have those kinds of resources.

Like if you're casting for Julius Caesar, surely the real historical Caesar had a pretty iconic daemon, right? Are you going to cast an actor with a pigeon daemon as Caesar and just have everyone suspend their disbelief that it's Caesar's lioness, ἁμαρτία?

but looking at your phone to consume even more media in the middle of reading is maximalist and excessive, solar-economy pilled

(not sure if I'm /s or /j with this one)

every time you assume a post about art & transgression is referring to pornographic fanfiction about cartoons you should be locked in a cell and not released until you’ve read at least 1 work by georges bataille (you have to start over if you look at your phone)

it's time to research whether or not finding out that a transphobic person liked one of your posts and then failing to respond by blocking them will cause you to be infected by their spiritual contamination/miasma, ultimately resulting in you being sent to the preta realm where all the rivers flow with sewage