This is a hilarious concept
Silly idea for a novel: the maintenance guys for ancient temple traps.
They’re a team of travelling engineers and quality assurance experts, who have to stay a step ahead of the assorted adventurers and archaeologists. The job is to make all the puzzles and traps authentic to original design, difficult to solve (but not too difficult. They want a staggered fatality rate so the final traps and puzzles get a chance to shine as well), and to stay ahead of schedule.
They’re all members of the reportedly long lost people who built the ruins. How or why this might be is never addressed. They carry themselves like regular tradesmen, all ‘well there’s you’re problem’ while dangling on a harness over a spike trap to fix the giant swinging axe. They have a water traps guy but he’s sick so the mechanical engineer is filling in. The spring loaded traps are all sticking this year due to humidity. The spinning clockwork puzzles are waiting for a part. The guy who replaces the tiles on collapsing floor traps thinks that’s bullshit. The stone worker who fixes the facades after the repairs has a UST-drenched rivalry with the botanist who arranges the moss and vines over hidden entrances and faded murals. The poison darts guy and the snake handler are siblings trying to fill their dad’s shoes. The final assessor is the grizzled old expert who’s seen it all and everyone respects. He has final say on whether or not the work is up to scratch and they can move onto the next temple. He gets injured/falls into a bottomless pit at the end of act one and they have to do the big job without him. The pressure is on to do him proud.
The archaeologists/adventurers have no clue about any of this. They’re constantly traipsing through the jungles, trying to decode clues, and loudly dying in the background. This is treated like a standard inconvenience.
Occasionally they run into vengeful spirits or surviving priests, who treat them the same way you treat a plumber who is fixing your sink: and tentatively offer them a sandwich and a cup of tea and try not to complain about them wearing work boots in the house.
oh uh. scuse me. just a lil snail crossing your dash
Today is July 2nd, the day Independence was voted on. It took two days to draft the Declaration, agree on the final draft, and sign it, thus making July 4th the day it was signed and the day we celebrate Independence.
Happy Treason Day everyone, for today is the day we committed to the path of treason against the British Empire.
You may have seen photos of him before, such as this one from 1886, when he (on the left) was already 50 years old:
It just struck me today that in his lifetime he has lived through the invention of photography itself, as well as moving pictures, television, VHS tapes, DVDs, BluRays and streaming; sound recording, 78rpm shellac records, 8-track tapes, CDs and MP3s; bicycles, cars, motorbikes, zeppelins, airplanes, helicopters, spaceships, satellites, the Moon landing, the Mars rover; the telephone, the internet, the smartphone, lasers, plastics, cellophane, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, electric ovens, microwaves, atomic bombs; the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and JFK, the American Civil war, the Boer War, WWI and II, Vietnam, 9/11; Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, impressionism, surrealism, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Jazz and Blues and Rock & Roll, Disco, Punk, Hip-Hop and Grunge; Charlie Chaplin, Oscar Wilde, Harry Houdini, Sherlock Holmes, Gandhi, Jack The Ripper, Sigmund Freud, Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid, Communism and the Soviet Union.
None of these things existed before him. Yet he's still alive today, walking around and eating grass.
Gold and lapis lazuli earring, Egypt, 19th Dynasty, 1295-1186 BC
from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
"During the 70s, some priests were becoming rather casual with the liturgy. One afternoon, a priest came into the soup kitchen that Dorothy Day was working at. He wanted to offer a liturgy for the homeless. He went into the kitchen and grabbed a mug to use for the chalice.
Dorothy, although frustrated at the irreverent use of houseware for the liturgy, prayed throughout the mass with the priest. After the liturgy ended, she quietly got up and started to cleanse the vessels. Then, she walked outside with the mug and a shovel.
A man followed her and asked her what she was doing. It is said she kissed the mug and then buried it. She told him that it was no longer a mug, but a chalice. It was no longer suited for coffee- it had held the Blood of Christ. She didn’t want anyone to mistake it for a mug again. Once something holds the Body of Christ, it is no longer what it was. When the mug held the Blood of Christ, it changed its vocation forever. It could no longer hold anything less than Christ again.
We were common mugs. Simple, functional, practical, and good people. We had a capacity to hold good things. But when Christ entered our lives, we became more. We became Chalices. We started to hold divinity Himself within our hearts. Now that we have held the Body of Christ within our bodies, we are no longer common, but rather extraordinary.
May you know the transformation God has placed in your heart. May you trust that you are truly made new and be extraordinary today."
Cobalt blue glass bracelet uncovered at Passiery, Switzerland, La Tene culture, circa 200-125 BC
from The Museum of Art and History Geneva
Also apparently Galileo didn’t get put on trial by the Catholic Church just because of heliocentrism, apparently he got put on trial because he was an asshole about heliocentrism, didn’t have all of the evidence he needed to actually really prove heliocentrism (apparently one of the big hangups at the time was “why are the stars so small if the heliocentric math says they should be big?”, and they didn’t have the tech yet to explain “it’s because the stars are really goddamn far away”). Apparently one of the Popes at the time, who was actually Galileo’s friend, actually did let him write about heliocentrism on the condition that he talked about the pros and cons of the theory instead of the aggressive “this is real and you’re all dumb!!!!” he’d been doing. And Galileo, high intelligence/negative wisdom/negative charisma dumbass he was, doubled down on his arguments and also insulted his friend the Pope by representing the Pope’s arguments via a character named “the Simpleton”. And it was this idiot move of shittalking his now ex-friend the Pope that got him on the big bad trial we all know now, not helped by the fact that he apparently burned all his fucking bridges with everybody else who could’ve saved his bacon too (apparently one of the people in charge of his trial was a guy he plagiarized too). It was never about actual religious faith or heresy, it was always just. The stupidest, pettiest politics fight.
✩ Spy x Family 2nd Cour Key Visual ✩
Well, that escalated quickly
when she says she doesn’t send nudes