Distractions;

i’ve compiled a huge google drive folder of anarchist, socialist, feminist, anti-colonial, anti-imperial books+ essays, crip + disability theory, queer theory, critical race theory, film theory, transnational + diaspora trauma study essays, and writings that combine all of the above

some essays i’ve got from school, most of the books and some essays r from beautiful people on the internet

to be updated as often as i get more shit. which is fairly often~

GUITAR SONGBOOKS

I’ve managed to collect a ton of official guitar songbook PDFs for various albums which are totally accurate and verified. I thought I’d make a masterpost for anyone who would like to use them! These links should send you to Google Drive and you can download them from there. :)

AC/DC - The Best Of

Alice In Chains - Dirt

Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not

Arctic Monkeys - Favourite Worst Nightmare

Arctic Monkeys - Suck It And See

Audioslave - Audioslave

Blink-182 - Blink-182

Blink-182 - Enema Of The State

Bon Jovi - Crossroad

Coldplay - A Rush Of Blood To The Head (Piano)

Coldplay - X & Y (Piano)

David Bowie - The Best Of (Piano)

Ed Sheeran - + (Piano)

Ed Sheeran - X

Eric Clapton - The Best Of

Fall Out Boy - Folie A Deux

Fall Out Boy - From Under The Cork Tree

Fall Out Boy - Infinity On High

Foo Fighters - The Colour And The Shape

Franz Ferdinand - Franz Ferdinand

Green Day - 21st Century Breakdown

Green Day - American Idiot

Green Day - Nimrod

Guns N’ Roses - Appetite For Destruction

Guns N’ Roses - Use Your Illusion I

Guns N’ Roses - Use Your Illusion II

Kings Of Leon - Only By The Night

Led Zeppelin - IV

Metallica - Master Of Puppets

Metallica - Metallica 

Metallica - St. Anger

Nirvana - In Utero

Nirvana - Incesticide

Nirvana - Nevermind

Nirvana - Unplugged In New York

Oasis - (What’s The Story) Morning Glory

Panic! At The Disco - A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out

Paramore - Paramore (Piano)

Paramore - Riot!

Pink Floyd - Dark Side Of The Moon

Pink Floyd - The Wall

Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here

R.E.M. - Out Of Time

Radiohead - Amnesiac (Piano)

Radiohead - The Bends

Radiohead - Hail To The Thief

Radiohead - Kid A (Piano)

Radiohead - OK Computer

Radiohead - Pablo Honey 

Rage Against The Machine - Rage Against The Machine

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Blood Sugar Sex Magik

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Californication

Red Hot Chili Peppers - One Hot Minute

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Stadium Arcadium

Silverchair - Frogstomp

Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness

Smashing Pumpkins - Siamese Dream

Soundgarden - Superunknown

Van Halen - The Best Of

3 Doors Down - The Better Life

vaguely academic things to do to keep yourself entertained

go down a wikipedia research hole by clicking the first term you don’t understand

binge a crashcourse series end to end (personal recs: world history, history of science, big history, philosophy)

find free books on project gutenberg

download some western classics for free

borrow books and audiobooks from the libby app or borrowbox

start a commonplace book

take a khan academy course

browse MIT’s free online course materials

teach yourself to code

go on a google scholar essay dive

try the open access button to avoid some paywalls for academic media, or install unpaywall that does a similar thing

research the history of the place you where you live

tempt the wrath of the duolingo owl and learn a language

search for online streams of the local tv in your target language’s country and use as background noise for immersion points

print and scrapbook favourite poetry and literature quotes

improve your handwriting by doing handwriting exercises

learn philosophy with the philosophize this! podcast. actually just check out all the educational spotify podcasts there are many good ones

start a weekly club with friends to share new and interesting things you’ve learnt that week

clean and reorganise your study space, physical or digital

check out online museums

fave educational youtube channels that I adore: vsauce, crashcourse, smarter every day, kurzgesagt, school of life, tom scott, r. c. waldun, vsauce3, primer, mark rober, veritasium, asapSCIENCE, scishow, TED-ed

hopefully you’ll find something to enjoy! happy learning x

all duolingo irish tips and notes!

BASICS 1

BASICS 2

COMMON PHRASES

FOOD

PLURALS

ECLIPSES

LENITION

POSSESSIVE

VERBS: PRESENT TENSE 1

COLOURS

QUESTIONS

PREPOSITIONS 1

DATES/TIME

FAMILY

VERBS: PRESENT TENSE 2

PREPOSITIONS 2

GENITIVE

NEGATIVES

COMPARISON

PREPOSITIONS 3

PASSIVE

NUMBERS

FEELINGS/TRAITS

VERBS: PAST TENSE 1

CHARACTERISTICS

VERBS: PAST TENSE 2

VERBAL NOUNS

REFLEXIVE PRONOUNS

DIRECTIONS

SPORT

VERBS: FUTURE TENSE 1

IMPERATIVE

VERBS: IMPERFECT

VERBS: CONDITIONAL  

{screencaps by me, do not repost}

THE ILIAD: FOR DUMMIES ☀️ MASTERPOST

just kidding you're not a dummy, you're some hot stuff right there! i will be going through the entire iliad and giving you a general overview, some interesting plot points, additional context, and some other analysis tools to better help you understand the epic!

This post will serve as a table of contents (at the end) to my Iliad posts and a general overview that I will be constantly updating! I am using the Richmond Lattimore translation of the Iliad, alongside my companion book by Malcom M. Wilcock

Before we get into analyzing the actual Iliad, we need to get into some essential questions and context about the book

WHAT IS THE ILIAD:

The Iliad was written by Homer (this is actually debated but we can get into that later) around 750 and 550 B.C.E.

At its core, the story is about heros and humans. It's an Iron Age poem about an event, the Trojan War, that was supposed to have taken place in the Bronze age. The Iliad is considered to be a poem comprised of multiple books, 24 to be exact

This story is only a few days of the tenth and final year of the Greek siege against the city of Troy- this means it relies on the audience already knowing most of the basic details about the Trojan war and the gods themselves (don't sorry, I will provide this for you as we go along)

WHO IS HOMER:

The age old question: who the fuck is Homer?

Literally nothing is known about this dude except that he wrote (or was credited with writing) the Odyssey and the Iliad

People have referenced his writings for EONS. Archilochus, Alcman, Tyrtaeus, Callinus, and even Sappho have referenced the poems of Homer in their own works. These also were popular in fine art in the late 7th century B.C.E.

There is a general consensus that Homer was from Ionia- a territory in western Anatolia or modern day Turkey that was populated by Greeks who spoke the Ionian dialect, aka the birthplace of Greek philosophy. Want more info on Ionia? Click Here!

His descendants were called the Homerids/Homeridae

There is scholarly debate on if he even wrote both the Iliad and the Odyssey, or if he only wrote one, etc etc etc. This is due to some very specific differences in the structure of the words used (like the use of short vowels, and the seemingly unimportant semivowel of the digamma being missing from the epics...yeah it's a lot)

The poems were reproduced ORALLY. This means that the poems were passed down by word of mouth, which if I were to sit and listen to this entire book via a guy singing at me...idk man I think I would leave

All of this to say, we really don't know who Homer is. There's a lot more information about what he could have looked like, if he really did write the Iliad, and a million other things, but I've already talked your ear off and we haven't even gotten into the book yet. If you want more information about Homer, check out my sources at the end of the post!

WAS THE CITY OF TROY REAL:

Yeah. There were nine layers exposed at the site of where Troy was expected to be, and nearly fifty sublayers at the mound of Hisarlik

Troy was a vassal state: meaning it had an obligation to a superior state, which happened to be the Hittite Empire

Troy had a lot more allies than original fighters in the city, meaning they had many language barriers- making the army harder to control than the unified Greek enemy.

THE STYLE OF THE ILIAD:

Cause - Effect - Solution

The poem is concluded with a mirror image of its beginning: an old man ventures to the camp of his enemy in order to ransom his child

The poem foreshadows the death of Achilles in MULTIPLE passages! He knows he is destined to die young if he fights at Troy, and the demise of his lover (don't fight me on this) Patroclus gives us an even more extended foreshadowing of the grief that is to come

When Achilles dies, Thetis (his mom) takes his body from the pyre and takes him to a place called the White Island. It's not clear whether he is immortalized BUT the reference to Achilles funeral in the Odyssey states that Achilles is cremated and his bones are placed in a golden urn along those of Patroclus, and the urn is entombed under a prominent mound (tsoa fans...you're welcome)

This isn't really necessary knowledge but moreso something I think is cool: the backstory from the Iliad of an abducted bride also appears in the Sanskirt epic Ramayana (circa 4th century B.C.E.)

okay now here is the ACTUAL important stuff

Humanity is the center of the universe in the Iliad. Humans motivations and concerns generate action in the poem, while the gods are often reduced to the role of enablers or spectators

The style of the poem collaborates with the vision that the speciousness of this epic means that every thought and gesture, spear cast and threat, intimate conversation and lament CAN be recorded. It gives a consciousness behind the demands of the iliad that these interactions MUST be recorded, this attention to detail is another way of showing centrality and the worth of the human experience (Greek OR Trojan)

The Iliad is ultimately a poem about death, the chief elements that distinguish the mortals from gods are: Death shadows every action, and death is neither abhorred nor celebrated. Instead it crystalizes by means of this one theme, death in battle, the essence of what it means to be human (Life is a struggle each person will always lose, the question is how one acts with that knowledge)

Modern readers and analysis blogs will state that one's inner spirit is somehow the "real" self, however the Iliad assumes the opposite: The psykhai (soul, spirits) of dying heroes fly off to Hades while their autous ("selves") are left behind in the form of dead bodies

Glory is INCREDIBLY important in the iliad, why? If mortals could live forever (like gods) then glory would be useless. It's a commodity to be exchanged, and because of this it has an economic and symbolic reality

Companionship is incredibly important

Pity is also very important, it's the concluding note of the poem. Even the gods feel pity

THE GODS AND THE ILIAD:

The Iliad gains depth by the divine dimension shedding glory on the humans at Troy. The gods are so intensely concerned with warriors and their fates which elevates the mortals to a special plane

Mortals are only separated from gods because they grow old and die

The symbiotic bond of gods and mortals is always see-sawing between adoration and antagonism

Humans who get too close to the gods risk being struck down, case in point, Achilles. He's young, well-made, he's a warrior but also a singer/musician (the only hero to be seen doing such a thing), he looks and acts like Apollo. THEREFORE...it's no coincidence that Apollo is ultimately the god who slays Achilles, just as he did Patroclus

Poetry supplemented or even guided ancient Greek religious interpretation much more than the activity of priests due to the lack of any official religious text. This gave ancient Hellenism a very fluid nature

This was a long post, and it's only the first of many! I will continuously update this with more sources about the Iliad and answer any FAQs that come up! I love classic literature, and as a STEM student I need to entertain my passion somehow lol. There is a table of contents at the top of the post, as well as right here. This will be updated for each book of the Iliad I write about, as well as any supplemental posts I make about certain topics and themes as I go along. I am putting a LOT of work into this series of posts, so let me know your thoughts or anything you'd like me to change/add/etc! Happy reading!

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

(This is empty because this is the only post...more posts coming soon)

Sources/Citations/Additional Material

Homer- Britannica

Homerids- Britannica

Who Is Homer- The British Museum (fuck the British Museum)

Ionia Information- World Encyclopedia

The Hittites- Britannica

Ramayana Overview- British Library

Overview of Greek Mythology- Theoi

The Iliad- Overview via Britannica

Thetis- World Encyclopedia

(instagram: myfairesttreasure)

(instagram: myfairesttreasure)

Here are some resources I used for my Homer & Virgil module for Classical Studies this semester

^ Image: Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus is an 1829 oil painting by Joseph Mallord William Turner

Translated Texts

Homer Odyssey Text: Translated by Samuel Butler

Homer Iliad Text: Translated by Robert Fagles

Academic Articles on Homer [These links will take you to google drive]

Ares, Aphrodite, and the Laughter of the Gods by Christopher G. Brown

A Collection of Essays on Homer collated by George Steiner & Robert Fagles

The Comedy of the Gods in the Iliad by Kenneth R. Seeskin

Disguises of the Gods in the Iliad by Warren Smith

Divine Justice or Divine Arbitrariness

Heroic Epiphanies: Narrative, Visual, and Cultic Contexts by Jorge Bravo

Gods and Men in the Iliad and the Odyssey by Wolfgang Kullmann

Gods in the Homeric Epics by Emily Kearns

What is a Greek Myth by Jan Bremmer

Achilles’ God-Given Strength/ Gifts from the Gods of Homer by S.R. Van Der Mije

The Odyssey and the Conventions of the Heroic Quest by Gregory Krane

Odysseus and the Genus Hero by Margalit Finkelberg

Olympic Pantheon by Ken Dowden

The Gods of Homer by G.M.A Grube

The Hubris of Odysseus by Rainer Freidrich

The World of Odysseus by M.I. Finley

The Independent Heroes of the Iliad by P.V. Jones

Perceiving Iliadic Gods by Daniel Turkeltaub

Academic Articles for Virgil Aeneid

Virgil’s Tragic Theme by Lillian Feder

Cliff Notes: Virgil Aeneid by Richard McDougall

Critical Interpretations by Harold Bloom

Gods in the Aeneid by Robert Coleman

The Importance of the Fourth Book by Kenneth Quinn

The Role of the Sixth Book by W.A. Camps

The Meaning of the Aeneid by A.J. Boyle

An Interpretation of the Aeneid by Wendell Clausen

Other articles you can read online

I originally posted this on Reddit.

a crash crash course on the golden age of hollywood

to state the obvious, this is not meant to be a be all end all guide. it’s just a start for people who wanna know more about some of the essentials of the era. there’s plenty of people and movies i didn’t include but at least now you can listen to vogue and understand all the references.

Zebra Mildliner Hex Codes

Fluorescent #FEB5D8 | #FFDEB5 | #FFFEAD | #92D4E9 | #ACECE6 Cool & Refined #B5DA9A | #93B0D8 | #BAC7C5 | #BEB1D7 | #EA889E Warm #ABD5DB | #FEA389 | #FFD561 | #E17FD1 | #C1917F Bright #EFB9E0 | #F36B52 | #E0E666 | #64C5B4 | #696CB2 Friendly #FBF485 | #FCB675 | #FEB1B8 | #7AD0E2 | #8E8B87 Neutral #DDA36D | #DBC293 | #FCE9C3 | #D9DBDA | #DAD49A Gentle #FAD0AA | #F2F190 | #A1DCEE | #E2C6DF | #F9C6D4