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Clearer Thinking

Can astrologers use astrological charts to understand people's character and lives? Our new study put astrologers to the test

Astrology is very popular — both Gallup and YouGov report that about 25% of Americans believe that the position of the stars and planets can

Astrology doesn't seem to work.

It's that time of year again where Mari Lwyd starts to be talked about and shared around and an INCREDIBLY misleading post gets shared a lot. As someone who grew up with Mari Lwyd I wanted to clear some things up.

Also hello, if you are unaware who Mari Lwyd is. This is about the Welsh tradition of the horse skull who visits houses during the Christmas to New Years period in Wales asking for alcohol.

First off and probably the most important one:

Mari Lwyd is not a cryptid!

I can not emphasise this enough. She. Is. Not. A. Cryptid. There is no story or mystery about a ghost or zombie horse roaming the Welsh valleys. She's not even supposed to be a ghost or a zombie. It's just a horse skull on a stick with a guy under a sheet. She's a hobbyhorse and a folk character used to tell Welsh stories and keep songs alive. When people spread the misinformation that she's a cryptid, it's the equivalent of saying Kermit the Frog is a cryptid.

She is actually only one character in a wider cast of characters who go door to door or, in more modern times, pub to pub. The cast of characters can change town to town and village to village but there are some common ones I see time and time again. The Leader, the Merryman, The Jester and The Lady are just some I see regularly. Punch and Judy used to be more popular a few years ago but I haven't seen them in a while as their tradition has mostly fallen out of popularity. In most cases, almost the whole cast will be played by men. Even the characters are considered and referred to as female. Though this again depends and varies by which group is partaking in the Mari Lwyd tradition.

This point also goes onto my second point,

Mari Lwyd does not rap.

I think this comes from a very common misunderstanding of what rap is vs spoken word. Rap is a very specific style of music originating from the African American communities of the USA and has it's own structure and motifs unique to it. It's a lot more complex than people give it credit for as a style of music and just flippantly assign anything similar to it as being rap. If someone is talking fast or reciting poetry, it is not rap. Or anything that is an exchange of words between two people is not a rap battle. Mari Lwyd does not do rap, actually something that gets left out of these posts is the fact Mari Lwyd does not even speak. It's actually the Leader, who does all the speaking and song based banter between the house/pub owner for entry. Mari Lwyd just clicks her mouth, bites people and bobs her head around.

I think Mari Lwyd is a really beautiful and unique part of Welsh culture. She's not actually as wildly celebrated as a lot of the posts make her out to be. Actually, I think most Welsh people themselves learn about Mari Lwyd through the internet as well. Her popularity is increasing thanks to the drive of local groups wanting to keep the traditions alive and a renewed desire to document Welsh traditions before they're gone. Which is why it's such a shame that she's turned into something she's not to earn horror points on the internet. I think this is why it bothers me so much to see the misunderstandings of the culture and the folk tradition. Mari Lwyd's origin is very hot debated as well as how long it's been going on for. But I think it's thanks to a lot of traditions like this that the Welsh language and our stories weren't lost forever. Welsh culture is recovering as is the language. But it's still in a very fragile place. I think it's why it's important to document and correct information when it's spread.

Anyway, if you want to see the tradition in action, here's a lovely video from the Cwmafan RFC going to one of the pubs for charity. It includes the song exchange with the pub owner for entry and the whole pub singing and joining in once Mari Lwyd and the rest are inside.

As well with another video from St Fagan's showcasing the more traditional and door to door form with the larger cast.

“girlcock” this, “girlcock” that. what if I want to watch the corner of her eyes crinkle when she talks about the tv show she likes. what if I want her to be able to confide in me the things she never felt safe enough to tell anyone else.

In space no one can hear you genocide.

137 Hours on Stellaris

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ok ok that thing about shackling people down with morals so you can feel more comfortable about their existence, it puts into words the feeling i get when zionists ask palestinian/pro palestinian people to condemn hamas first in their fight for liberation. i feel like beyond the question not being asked in good faith, it’s also because zionists first and foremost hate palestinians, they have to, palestinian existence makes them uncomfortable. so to hear and see calls for the existence that brings them so much discomfort, they must play a battle of morals. they get on their high horses to trample on palestinian liberation, because if you condemn hamas then really you can’t blame or condemn the settler colonial state in return because it’s hamas they’re fighting against, even though this is very clearly not the case. they’re unsettled tho because even when they get the answer they want, people are still against the settler colonial state. they can’t fathom it.

Thing from my world Theia. Essentially Earth but with more crazy stuff going on. This is where my characters live.  

You guys do know you're supposed to reblog things, right

I think it would be funny to take two distinctly different book genres that happen to be set at the same time and just have them both happen in the same story. Hell, make them antagonistic to each other, you've got one set of protagonists over here and another set there, whatever happens on their turf works by their genre logic, and vice versa.

Like imagine you're reading a Jane Austen style sensibility realism about the british landowning gentry who are very delicate and polite with each other but consider abject poverty to mean only having two maids and one horse carriage. The protagonist is pleading her father to please reconsider his oath to never forgive some duke over an imagined slight in a starkly worded letter, before he brings ruin to the entire family over his own stubborn pride. If her brother won't come back from his service in the navy, the duke is their only hope. Her father insists that he will, his son is his the favourite child and if anything ever happened to him, then he would simply die from grief on the spot because he would no longer have anything worth living for. The protagonist is unsure whether it didn't cross her father's mind that by saying this he would imply that she is worth nothing to him, or whether he said that intentionally and simply does not care that it hurt her. She does not ask, and instead goes to her room to write a 15-page letter to her closest most beloved bosom friend.

Then it cuts to halfway across the world right into a rowdy romantic pirate adventure, right in the middle of a swashbuckling battle at sea. This time there's no time for long introductions of family backgrounds and scenic high detail descriptions of their respective estates, one of the ships is on fire and whichever side manages to get control of the other ship will live. Battle for survival alone at this point. Shit's pure tits up chaos. The other protagonist, a pirate, shows up on the scene, and in their introductory sentence stabs the aforementioned brother through the throat.