You're Literally A Source Of Joy. How Do You Do It?

I'm not an asshole, I'm acting like an asshole for reasons.

Buffy, guidance counsellor extraordinaire and cheer coach, with her potentials cheer team that happens to know how to behead a primordial vamp—hear me out.

it's been years since i saw it in full but i'm thinking about the last season of buffy again. crazy how the "back to the beginning" motif manifests as the new high school starting as a huge deal - dawn is a student there, the hellmouth is underneath it, spike's crazy in the basement, the new principal is the son of a slayer. buffy even gets a job as a guidance councilor for troubled students, arguably the best episodes in the season are all about it. and then in the second half they bring in the potentials, a massive group of troubled teenagers who need guidance- a class, one might say- and they just. live at her house. train in her backyard. perhaps there was a second, more thematically significant place for high schoolers to go to learn. oh well.

ppl are always writing characters doing dumb shit like roasting a fresh-caught rabbit over an open flame instead of making a stew with that thing. great now you’re letting all the fat drip down into the fire as it cooks, wasting calories and flavor as well as causing the flame to flare up = inconsistent heat source,… when you could be maximizing the nutritional value of small game by making a soup or stew. Come on

Overturning Child Labor Laws: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Lowering the Marriage Consent Age: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Spicy-brained friends, I would like to propose an update to the very useful ‘if you hate everyone, eat, if everyone hates you, sleep, and if you hate yourself, shower’ mantra to live by

Have you suddenly become a petty, hateful little gremlin who thinks people should face the firing squad for (checks notes) leaving teabags on the counter, breathing loudly, or daring to exist in the same space as you? Perhaps mundane and reasonable requests like ‘hey, we agreed to hang out now, let’s hang out’ make you want to scream and move to a yurt in the woods.

You. Are. Overstimulated.

People talk a lot about being overstimulated, and the physical/mental effects of it. What I haven’t seen is people talking about what it does emotionally, and it took me an embarassingly long time to link up those nitpicky, resentful emotions with the state of overstimulation/meltdown/shutdown.

These feelings do not mean that you’re a bad person! They probably aren’t how you actually feel about the people around you. They probably do mean that your nervous system is at its absolute limit and any request/demand/stimulus is Too Much and taking you into fight or flight territory.

Go lie down in a dark room for an hour, or find somewhere safe and familiar to stim for a bit. If it’s happening a lot, schedule yourself regular low-stimulation shutdown time

Signed: someone who moved in with their nearest and dearest only to have a massive crisis of faith about Suddenly Hating All of Them. I don’t hate them, it’s just overstimulating living with people. If I can spare anyone else a similar 9 months of suspecting that they may actually be a bit of a shit person, then this post is worth it!

someone i follow on instagram just put out the PRETTIEST rendition of the traveler's prayer

So I’m using my college’s library resources to check out ebooks related to ancient, medieval, and early modern graffiti.

Most of us have seen things about the funny and obscene graffiti of Pompeii, but the underrated interesting thing about this subject isn’t what people wrote but the culture surrounding writing it. Both of the main books I’m looking at—Graffiti and thr Writing Arts of Early Modern England by Juliet Fleming, and Graffiti and the Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii by Kristina Milnor—touch on this argument: for most of history, “graffiti” wasn’t understood, culturally, as transgressive in the way it is now.

We have this cultural taboo against writing on walls and other surfaces, even in our own homes. People throughout a lot of history didn’t have that. They wrote on things, and they wrote on them a lot. For example, in early modern England, it was normal to write all over walls and other surfaces in your house.

Another interesting thing is how much graffiti is quoting or parodying other things. A lot of Pompeii graffiti is in verse, and a lot of it is believed to be variations or parodies on quotes from popular plays and poems. In many cases, it’s stuff where we just... aren’t capable of getting the joke. (What I’m saying is, Romans liked to write memes everywhere.)

A lot of Roman graffiti is political. A lot of it is also personal. In Pompeii we see a lot of “Greetings/hello to [name].” I’m in love with how much graffiti involves responses and dialogue from multiple people. There’s an example of Pompeii graffiti that seems to be five women...just??? saying hello to each other on the same surface??? The Fleming book has an example of a riddle scratched into a mantelpiece (from the 1500’s iirc?) and an answer scratched below.

Also, if anyone remembers the “Halfdan” inscription in thr Hagia Sophia? The cool thing is that this isn’t an extraordinary thing at all. One of the most common formats of graffitied inscriptions is “[name] was here”/“[name] wrote this.” This transcends time and space and culture.

Milnor is inclined to call it “close to a fundamental human impulse,” and that makes my heart ache a little bit. How important it is to us, to say “I was here.”

Ms. Johns, my high school English and Literature teacher, must have been dead wrong about my osmosis theory because I have no other explanation because I've been operating under my own creative connotations for years now.

I got the Top 4.47% on this English Vocabulary test

Journals, articles, books & texts, on folklore, mythology, occult, and related -to- general anthropology, history, archaeology. 

Some good and/or interesting (or hokey) ‘examples’ included for most resources. tryin to organize & share stuff that was floating around onenote.

Journals (open access) — Folklore, Occult, etc

Culutural Analysis - folklore, popular culture, anthropology — The Mythical Ghoul in Arabic Culture

Folklore - folklore, anthropology, archaeology — The Making of a Bewitchment Narrative, Grecian Riddle Jokes

Incantatio - journal on charms, charmers, and charming — Verbal Charms from a 17th Century Manuscript

Oral Tradition — Jewish Folk Literature, Noises of Battle in Old English Poetry

Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics — Nani Fairtyales about the Cruel Bride, Energy as the Mediator between Natural and Supernatural Realms

International Journal of Intangible Heritage 

Studia Mythologica Slavica (many articles not English) — Dragon and Hero, Fertility Rites in the Raining Cave, The Grateful Wolf and Venetic Horses in Strabo’s Geography

Folklorica - Slavic & Eastern European folklore association — Ritual: The Role of Plant Characteristics in Slavic Folk Medicine, Animal Magic

Esoterica - The Journal of Esoteric Studies — The Curious Case of Hermetic Graffiti in Valladolid Cathedral 

The Esoteric Quarterly

Mythological Studies Journal

Luvah - Journal of the Creative Imagination — A More Poetical Character Than Satan

Transpersonal Studies — Shamanic Cosmology as an Evolutionary Neurocognitive Epistemology, Dreamscapes

Beyond Borderlands  — tumblr

Paranthropology

GOLEM - Journal of Religion and Monsters — The Religious Functions of Pokemon, Anti-Semitism and Vampires in British Popular Culture 1875-1914

Correspondences - Online Journal for the Academic Study of Western Esotericism — Kriegsmann’s Philological Quest for Ancient Wisdom 

— History, Archaeology

Adoranten - pre-historic rock art

Chitrolekha - India art & design history — Gomira Dance Mask

Silk Road — Centaurs on the Silk Road: Hellenistic Textiles in Western China

Sino-Platonic - East Asian languages and civilizations — Discursive Weaving Women in Chinese and Greek Traditions

MELA Notes - Middle East Librarians Association

Didaskalia - Journal for Ancient Performance

Ancient Narrative - Greek, Roman, Jewish novelistic traditions — The Construction of the Real and the Ideal in the Ancient Novel

Akroterion - Greek, Roman — The Deer Hunter: A Portrait of Aeneas

Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies  — Erotic and Separation Spells, The Ancients’ One-Horned Ass

Roman Legal Tradition - medieval civil law — Between Slavery and Freedom 

Phronimon - South African society for Greek Philosophy and the Humanities — Special Issue vol. 13 #2, Greek philosophy in dialogue with African+ philosophy

The Heroic Age - Early medieval Northwestern Europe — Icelandic Sword in the Stone

Peregrinations - Medieval Art and Architecture — Special Issue vol. 4 #1, Mappings 

Tiresas - Medieval and Classical — Sexuality in the Natural and Demonic Magic of the Middle Ages

Essays in Medieval Studies  — The Female Spell-caster in Middle English Romances, The Sweet Song of Satan

Hortulus - Medieval studies — Courtliness & the Deployment of Sodomy in 12th-Century Histories of Britain, Monsters & Monstrosities issue, Magic & Witchcraft issue

Annual of Medieval Studies at CEU

Medieval Archaeology — Divided and Galleried Hall-Houses, The Hall of the Knights Templar at Temple Balsall

Medieval Feminist Forum  — multiculturalism issue; Gender, Skin Color and the Power of Place … Romance of Moriaen, Writing Novels About Medieval Women for Modern Readers, Amazons & Guerilleres

Quidditas - medieval and renaissance 

Medieval Warfare

The Viking Society - ridiculous amount of articles from 1895-2011

Journals (limited free/sub/institution access)

Al-Masaq - Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean — Piracy as Statecraft: The Policies of Taifa of Denia, free issue

Mythical Creatures of Europe - article + map

Folklore - limited free access — Volume 122 #3, On the Ambiguity of Elves

Digital Philology -  a journal of medieval cultures — Saracens & Race in Roman de la Rose Iconography

Pomegranate - International Journal for Pagan Studies

Transcultural Psychiatry

European Journal of English Studies  — Myths East of Venice issue, Esotericism issue

Books, Texts, Images etc. — Folklore, Occult etc.

Magical Gem Database - Greek/Egyptian gems & talismans [x] [x]

Biblioteca Aracana - (mostly) Greek pagan history, rituals, poetry etc. — Greater Tool Consecration, The Yew-Demon

Curse Tablets from Roman Britain - [x]

The Gnostic Society Library — The Corpus Hermeticum, Hymn of the Robe of Glory

Grimoar - vast occult text library — Grimoires, Greek & Roman Necromancy, Queer Theology, Ancient Christian Magic

Internet Sacred Text Archive - religion, occult, folklore, etc. ancient texts

Verse and Transmutation - A Corpus of Middle English Alchemical Poetry

— History

The Internet Classics Archive - mainly Greco-Roman, some Persian & Chinese translated texts

Bodleian Oriental Manuscript Collection - [x] [x] [x]

Virtual Magic Bowl Archive - Jewish-Aramaic incantation bowl text and images [x] [x] 

Vindolanda Tablets - images and translations of tablets from 1st & 2nd c. [x]

Corsair - online catalog of the Piedmont Morgan library (manuscripts) [x] [x]

Beinecke rare book & manuscripts  — Wagstaff miscellany, al-Qur’ān—1813

LUNA - tonnes from Byzantine manuscripts to Arabic cartography

Maps on the web - Oxford Library [x] [x] [x]

Bodleian Library manuscripts - photographs of 11th-17th c. manuscripts — Treatises on Heraldry, The Worcester Fragments (polyphonic music), 12 c. misc medical and herbal texts

Early Manuscripts at Oxford U - very high quality photographs — (view through bottom left) Military texts by Athenaeus Mechanicus 16th c. [x] [x], MS Douce 195 Roman de la Rose [x] [x]

Trinity College digital manuscript library  — Mathematica Medica, 15th c.

eTOME - primary sources about Celtic peoples

Websites, Blogs — Folklore, Occult etc.

Demonthings - Ancient Egyptian Demonology Project

Invocatio - (mostly) western esotericism

Heterodoxology - history, esotericism, science — Religion in the Age of Cyborgs

The Recipes Project - food, magic, science, medicine — The Medieval Invisible Man (invisibility recipes)

Morbid Anatomy - museum/library in Brooklyn

— History 

Islamic Philosophy Online - tonnes of texts, articles, links, utilities, this belongs in every section; mostly English

Medicina Antiqua - Graeco-Roman medicine

History of the Ancient World - news and resources — The So-called Galatae, Gauls, Celts in Early Hellenistic Balkans; Maidens, Matrons Magicians: Women & Personal Ritual Power in Late Antique Egypt

Διοτίμα - Women & Gender in Antiquity

Bodleian Library Exhibitions Online — Khusraw & Shirin, Hebrew Manuscripts as a Meeting-Place of Cultures

Medievalists — folk studies, witchcraft, mythology, science tags

Atlas Obscura — Bats and Vampiric Lore of Pére Lachaise Cemetery