I accidentally made ombre dinner
The cigar-smoking Soviet wrestling heel Colonel Ninotchka from GLOW (real name: Lori Weathers).
I think she might have inspired the character in the current Netflix series (which is great fun).
Skeleton Dress w/ Pockets // ModCloth
With a spooky skeleton print that glows in the dark, this dress even has pockets to store your knickknacks in, this just might be one of the coolest dresses to exist! ! Finished with a pleated front and Chelsea collar, this dress is available in sizes XS through to 4X!
Dr Maru’s notes, translated
As an Assyriologist-in-training, I was pretty excited about cuneiform’s little cameo in Wonder Woman- there are no films at all about Mesopotamia, so even three seconds of flipping through a notebook of the languages I study was pretty exciting to see on the big screen. Now, I assumed at first that the writing in Dr Maru’s notebook, would simply be gibberish, but one thing about it stuck with me: how well copied the letters were. Now, Cuneiform writing was designed for clay and stylus, and it is BRUTALLY hard to write cuneiform symbols with pen and paper. You’d think you could just draw a bunch of triangles, but nope; the system was so clearly designed to use nuances only possible with stylus and clay, they’re nigh on impossible to accurately reproduce using pen. And whoever wrote that piece of paper did a damn good job of it. So, I remained convinced the text might actually have some meaning, and when I got home I started tinkering with it.
First things first: though the notes were described in the film as “Sumerian and Ottoman”, they’re not Sumerian. Dr Maru’s notes are very clearly written in the quite distinctive script of Neo-Assyrian Cuneiform, which was used on official inscriptions of the Assyrian Empire from around 1000- 700 BC. Sumerian died out as a spoken language in around 2000 BC and though it continued to be used in writing long after that in the same way Latin was in Europe, it was probably never written in the formal Assyrian script.
I’m going to safely assume the man who mistakenly called the page “Sumerian and Ottoman” got it wrong, but the fact that Diana doesn’t correct this, despite her vastly superior knowledge of ancient languages is interesting. Consider this though: historians estimate the destruction of the site of Hissarlik, which is thought MIGHT be the inspiration for the Troy legends to around 1300 BC, around the time of the Bronze Age collapse and dawn of the Greek Dark Ages. If we take this as the end of the Greek Mythic age and the hiding of Themiscyra in the DC Universe, Diana would only have been able to study Cuneiform scripts written before this period so she would know only Old Babylonian Cursive, or possibly even only Old Babylonian Lapidary. Neo-Assyrian script would be just legible with effort, but difficult for her to read.
Now, the way cuneiform works is that any one cuneiform symbol can represent one or more alphabetic sounds, OR syllables, OR entire words. Most stand for a number of those things, but some represent only one. The symbols that represent entire words are called Logograms, and they remained largely consistent through all the changes of the cuneiform writing system. If Dr Maru’s notes were primarily written in Logograms (which they turned out to be), it would make sense for Diana to still be able to read them despite the considerable changes between Old Babylonian Lapidary and Neo-Assyrian script, and also that she wouldn’t have to know Assyrian-era Akkadian to understand the logographic signs (because they represent whole words at once rather than spell them out alphabetically, they can be understood by speakers of multiple languages who know the signs).
So having sorted all that out, I began to translate. Virtually all the symbols were logograms standing for words like mountain, woman, king, builder etc, but a limited few stood for single syllables like “ru” or “ti”. This made no sense, because the signs used were consistent enough with the actual context in the film to make some sense and logically repetitive. Whoever wrote this knew what they were doing. Why intersperse them with random letters? I finally realised: Dr Maru is a chemist. The way her code works is that she uses mostly logograms, but uses signs for syllables when those syllables are our modern symbols for chemical elements. Every sign where a syllable-only translation was my only option, that syllable matched up with the abbreviation for a chemical element in the periodic table.
So, working with the assumption that Dr Poison’s code technique is using Logograms to represent whole words, and the symbols for sole syllables like ka, ga, la etc in their standard transcriptions from cuneiform to represent chemical elements, here it is at last, the first page of Dr Maru’s notebook:
To divide the town, one unit of the weapon to the throne of the builder: to please the builder, in the company of the god: lithium, 1 grain/seed of europium. 1 daughter of gold woman - yours. Country [given?] to god and then [to] lord/god/king. Ruthenium possibility, carbon disulfide*, and then rhenium. May it be pleasing to the country. Animal shoulder** Uunhexium*** . Lord/god and then gallium, and then radium. Weapon, iodine, administrator.
*This sign can mean “tree, wood” or, just stand for the sound “s”. So, i was left with a choice between carbon and sulfur, and settled on the compound
**I have no fricking idea why that’s in there, but it’s definitely that sign. Maybe she wants to make a pot roast and scribbled it down? Someone draw me happy dr maru and her pot roast pls
***This sign was VERY hard to identify, but i finally settled on the Old Babylonian Lapidary sign for “uuh”. Uuh also happens to be the chemical symbol for Ununhexium or Livermorium, a rare earth element not identified until the year 2000. This is strange, because this sign is CLEARLY Lapidary, while all the others are in the Neo-Assyrian script. So my conclusion is that Dr Poison isolated Uunhexium 92 years ahead of the game, it’s her big secret, and decided it needed a unique Logogram of its own, for which she adopted the sign for Uuh.
@blueandbluer Bloo blooooooooo where are you, you need to see this.
I had some thoughts about the borg. I wrote it in a post awhile back which I deleted for good reasons, but I thought I’d repost the idea:
That the borg started out as just nanites.
They were technology created specifically to help a species, it doesn’t even matter which one. They were a medical tool that were inserted into the body to heal and help it. Their mission was just a single directive: “Fix what is wrong with this body”.
Then they, like any other budding life form, evolved. They became more aggressive, took over the bodies they were supposed to help more and more. Their view of what was “wrong” with the bodies changed - as the nanites became more intelligent, they also started to view humanoid bodies as pretty frail in comparison to technology. Instead of just helping heal a body to a natural, or previous state they started to strive for perfection.
Here and there they started to replace frail humanoid veins, cartilage and even organs with the material from their own metal bodies. It was after all superior to the humanoids original structure. The bodies could be improved. Made more efficient.
When the recipients of the nanites resisted the increasingly aggressive changes, the resistance in itself became a fault that must be corrected. So the nanites started controlling the mind itself.
“Resistance is futile”.
First they just tinkered with their minds to make the humanoid more compliant. Restructuring their neural pathways just a bit. But then they started to view all the expressions of individuality as something that stood in the way of perfection.
Nanites were already a species built on the cooperation of millions for a single goal. It would be natural to assume this is the structure they would continue to operate within. So as they took over the bodies completely they used them as they would any other nanite: they treated them like separate parts in a big whole. Which was made possible by creating a link between every body.
Together the nanite controlled bodies could find more humanoids to “Fix”. Which meant joining them to this new collective of minds. Each individual would add to the intelligence and knowledge of the nanites, furthering their goal of being able to perfect the flawed humanoid.
Watching this (and fearing broken ankles with each loop) I can’t helping thinking about that old quote Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels.
But no, if you watch closely you’ll see she doesn’t even step on the last chair. That means she had to trust that fucker to lift her gently to the ground while he was spinning down onto that chair. That takes major guts. I’d be pissing myself and fearing a broken neck if I were in her place. Kudos to her.
I can’t stop watching this.
Whoa.
Okay so this is true, but a tiny part of a wider truth.
Ginger Rogers was a FUCKING BADASS. Ignore for a sec the rampant sexism in Hollywood (they once bleached her hair blonde in wardrobe without telling her beforehand), the fact that she fought her whole career against typecasting and stereotyping from fellow actors (Katharine Hepburn famously said of the Astaire/Rogers partnership “she gave him sex. He gave her class” ) for starting out in musicals, and went on to have a career lasting over fifty years, winning a Best Actress Oscar (Kitty Foyle, 1940). But… JUST focusing on the Astaire movies…
Not only did she dance “backwards” in high heels, the dances were a task in themselves. Astaire was an absolute perfectionist and choreographed for himself, so as a younger, less experienced dancer Rogers came in at a disadvantage and worked her ass off to match him.
Then there’s the filming complications… these numbers were filmed in ONE TAKE. So one thing goes wrong and you have to start over. Maybe you make a mistake or maybe your dress flies up because…
Ginger had to contend with her wardrobe. Dancing in heels is the norm at this time, but dancing in a dress designed for cinema cameras… not so much. They were heavy, embellished, uncomfortable, restrictive and cumbersome and essentially a third member of the dance, strapped to the body of one partner.Not only did she have to dance and look good, she had to control the dress too!
Take this routine from Swing Time… (it gets going proper at 1:30ish)
This dress has weights, YES WEIGHTS, sewn in to the hem to make it fly out and create a visual effect. So it’s heavy, it hurts if it hits you, and your partner gets mad if it hits him. So you gotta control it.
Well it turns out all these factors on this set, this particular day aren’t going so well. So you’re doing take after take, here’s no labour laws, so at 4am after 18 hours you’re still going, even though part of the routine requires you to spin up those curved stairs with no rail at high speed….
Okay so now back to those high heels. In Ginger’s autobiography she vividly remembers this night as the night she bled though her shoes. They did so many takes, her feet blistered, bled, and the white satin high heels she was wearing finished he night pink because they were literally full of blood. And still they keep shooting. She keeps dancing.
The take they use in the film is the last. Early hours. Bloody feet. And she spins, acts and bosses out until that last second. Because she was that professional, talented and bloody minded. This is the last set of spins…
So I say once again. Ginger Rogers was a badass.
She did everything Fred Astaire did backwards, in high heels, wearing a 20 pound dress, exhausted, injured and standing in a pool of her own blood. And watching her perform, you would never know.
Backwards and in heels <3
She May Be The Most Unstoppable Scientist In The World
Dauqan is a woman scientist in what’s possibly the hardest place on Earth to be just a woman: Yemen.
The World Economic Forum ranks Yemen as the worst country for women’s rights. In Yemen, it’s illegal for women to just leave the house without permission from a male relative.
Even as a young girl, she was rebel. “I was a little naughty,” she says with a snicker.
Read her incredible story here
She liked breaking rules. And proving people wrong. So when her parents told her she might not have the smarts to go into science and engineering — like her dad — Eqbal thought: Watch me.
“I told my father, ‘I’ve heard a lot about scientists in chemistry. What is the difference between me and them? So I want to try,” she says.
And she did more than try. She crushed it.
She was the first among her friends to finish college. Then she got a scholarship to do her Ph.D. in biochemistry at the Universiti Kebansaan Malaysia, where she studied the nutritional properties of palm oil.
When little girls in the Middle East see photos of Eqbal as a chemist — wearing a head scarf, measuring pH — they don’t need to use their imagination to think: “I could be just like her. I could be a scientist.”
derederest asked:
Maybe the garlic rumor was started by the vampires so their victims would season themselves
thebibliosphere answered:
Vampire: oh no, you’re covered in garlic *licks lips* how awful *ties napkin under chin* whatever shall I do? *pulls out crazy straw and smiles* What. A. Shame.
Makes you wonder about those other myths involving mustardseed, salt and peppercorns as a defence or distraction. No information about hot sauce, though…
fishyfishyfishtimes
