My delirium

animentality:

It’s so fucking unfair that Daniel Radcliffe, Elijah Wood, and Robert Pattinson have never been in a movie together where they all play the part of dirty little gremlin man that must go on a grand quest of some kind in which they spent the entire film arguing, lighting each other on fire, inexplicably dressing in drag to sneak into locations that welcome both men and women, and singing old sea shanties.

Never too late!

dduane:

cryptid-deity:

auroranibley:

what-even-is-thiss:

what-even-is-thiss:

what-even-is-thiss:

what-even-is-thiss:

I keep hate-reading plague literature from the medieval era, but as depressed as it makes me there is always one historical tidbit that makes me feel a little bittersweet and I like to revisit it. That’s the story of the village of Eyam.

Eyam today is a teeny tiny town of less than a thousand people. It has barely grown since 1665 when its population was around 800.

Where the story starts with Eyam is that in August 1665 the village tailor and his assistant discovered that a bolt of cloth that they had bought from London was infested with rat fleas. A few days later on September 7th the tailor’s assistant George Viccars died from plague.

Back then people didn’t fully understand how disease spread, but they knew in a basic sense that it did spread and that the spread had something to do with the movement of people.

So two religios leaders in the town, Thomas Stanley and William Mompesson, got together and came up with a plan. They would put the entire village of Eyam under quarantine. And they did. For over a year nobody went in and nobody went out.

They put up signs on the edge of town as warning and left money in vinegar filled basins that people from out of town would leave food and supplies by.

Over the 14 months that Eyam was in quarantine 260 out of the 800 residents died of plague. The death toll was high, the cost was great.

However, they did successfully prevent the disease from spreading to the nearby town of Sheffield, even then a much bigger town, and likely saved the lives of thousands of people in the north of England through their sacrifice.

So I really like this story, because it’s a sad story, because it’s also a beautiful story. Instead of fleeing everyone in this one place agreed that they would stay, and they saved thousands of people. They stayed just to save others and I guess it’s one of those good stories about how people have always been people, for better or worse.

It gets better.

Here’s the thing. One third of the residents of Eyam died during their quarantine, but the Black Plague was known to have a NINETY PERCENT death rate. As high as the toll was, it wasn’t as high as it should have been. And a few hundred years later, some historians and doctors got to wondering why.

Fortunately, Eyam is one of those wonderful places that really hasn’t changed much in hundreds of years. Researchers, going to visit, found that many of the current residents were direct descendants of the plague survivors from the 1600s. By doing genetic testing, they learned that a high number of Eyam residents carried a gene that made them immune to the plague. And still do.

And it gets even better than that, because the gene that blocks the Black Plague? Also turns out to block AIDS, and was instrumental in helping to find effective medication for people who have HIV and AIDS in the 21st century.

Here is a lovely, well-produced documentary about Eyam and its disease resistance. It’s a little under an hour. Trigger warning for general disease and epidemic-type stuff, but also, maybe it will help you have some hope in these alarmly uncertain times.

[Image 1: a photo of Eyem’s abbey and graveyard.]

[Image 2: a photo of a stone basin.]

…Medical mysteries. I love these. 😄

atopfourthwall:

siphersaysstuff:

siphersaysstuff:

rest in piss andrew “alpha male grifter and human trafficker” tate, stepped up to a teenage girl and got fucking vaporized

“But his ‘how dare you’ was making fun of a speech Greta once maaaade”

Y'all. Ain’t no-one who ain’t tits-deep in these shitcrumbs’ weird little circlejerks is ever going to recognize that. That’s the thing about that lot: they luvvy-luv to cling to one thing they heard ten years ago and never let it go, because they have zero imagination, and they are entirely lost in the sauce of their buzzwordy in-group/out-group dynamics… and the in-group is fucking SMALL. Larger than it should ever be, but still very, very small.

To the public at large, he ABSOLUTEY came across as a blustering fuckwit who corncobbed immediately into a prima donna having the vapors and needing a fainting couch after a teenage girl one-sentence-KO’d him… and now they also think of him as a sex-trafficker who outed himself to Romanian police who were after him because he released a video basically masturbating at everyone while wearing a $5.99 Spirit Halloween “Dipshit Playboy” robe.

Stop thinking these people are playing 4D chess. They just fucking dumb and doing anything they think they can get away with. To them, image is everything, and Tater Tot’s image is so, so hilariously sad right now. It’s why you make fun of them. To ruin their image. Deflate their delusions of invulnerability. Rob them of their power, sour any potential audience they might seek.

“UM ACKSHUALLY IT WASN’T THE PIZZA BOX-”

Who gives a shit if it’s actually true? Because that’s what it looks like happened and as said: image is everything to these assholes. And the image of this dipshit is that his petty, pathetic cosplay of masculinity and power to try to intimidate a young woman resulted in his arrest and said young woman dunking on him even harder.