Ded-inside-anonymous - Thoughts And Stuff :D - Tumblr Blog

Being able to say, "yeah there was that one time I got to hold a Picasso" is my new biggest flex. Does it matter that it wasn't one of his famous ones? Not in the slightest, he made it, he signed it, I held it. And I'll get to say this for forever

I think Dave might be on to something...

I really need to unlock the horned lizard powers like how they do in the wild kratts, that way when someone tries to bully my siblings I can just shoot blood from my eyes and scare the shit out of them, ain't nobody messing with me when blood is literally projecting out of my eye balls

That moment when you realize that you and your friends not using the bathroom unless it was an absolute emergency in middle school and high school because sometimes people are weird about the stupid cracks between the door and stall and floor and ceiling in public bathrooms isn't a universal experience and other countries don't have these stupid gaps and people feel completely (or at least more) safe using public bathrooms

Bugs always be in a hurry, I ain't never seen a bug just walking casually, they always runnin like they got shit to do and places to be. I feel like they're tryin to make the most of their short lives but, my man, what's the point if ya don't stop and smell the roses, ya know?

The dumbest things make me feel like I'm an adult... And then I remember I am an adult...

(like I actually use up pens now?? Mainly cause I use one until it's gone and don't just use random ones like I did when I was a kid, but still. As a kid I seriously was starting to think pens never run out of ink... Now I have to keep buying refills 🥲)

OH MY GOSH NO WONDER PEOPLE ARE AFRAID OF COLORS-- THEY'RE CALLED COLOR SCHEMES

That moment when you're going on a diet and you're kinda struggling with it, cause, I mean, food, but your therapist compares your hunger to an abuser and says your hunger be like 'feed me' and you're like 'damn, ok how much?' and so your therapist asks you if you want to keep being your hungers little bitch and you're like, 'hey, I don't wanna be my hungers little bitch!' and now you're sticking to your diet way better

Strive to be a Savannah

If it doesn't get renamed Zoozve I will cry, it's way better then the scientific blah blah blah

Zoozve, my beloved

Adulthood is going to an ice cream social and not putting every topping on it... Being responsible is sad...

Surprise! You're a leader! Cuz when you do something you do it to the best of your ability and then people expect you to do things all the time (⁠〒⁠﹏⁠〒⁠)

I don't want much. I just want someone to figure out the best setting on an iron for making grilled cheese. I just want someone to talk to about how it's terrible to make mascots of food that encourage people to eat that food. I just want someone who's as invested in all my stupid thoughts as I am. I just want a relationship like Sam and Joon.

I think I've figured out what I want most in a partner. I was someone who listens when I tell them random things I find interesting, who ask questions and when I don't know the answer, listens to me tell them what I find when I Google it and doesn't just stop paying attention half way through. I think I want to find someone who loves me enough to listen to me. And I hope one day I find someone I love enough to always want to listen to too.

...I am a simple girl, I just want someone to fix my plague doctor cloak at the renfarie

I don't think I'd survive in another country. Their food would be too good. Which in all respects sounds like a stupid problem, how would good food lead to my demise? Simple. Good food is scary. I'm a picky eater with low standards. I'll only eat food I'm familiar with if it looks "right," but it could be like, the most dog shit version of that food. People be like, "college food tastes bad." And I'm like "oh my gosh it's the soup I get every Thursday at dinner! It's so good!" I'd go to another county, see the seasonings that make the food *actually* taste good and be like, "nope, nope, nope. It looks wrong I can't eat it or I'll throw up." And the sad thing is, it's probably the best tasting thing I've ever been in the presence of before, but it just *looks* sketchy. I don't know why but I'm *pretty* sure that food wants to throw hands with me. I dunno what I did but I think it's angry.

Angel Food Cake is the most delicious sponge I have ever eaten

When my little sibling found out I was on the Dean's list, they asked me what that was. This is what I told her:

Ok so there's this guy named Dean, right? And he has this list, and ya can't have a list without names, so he goes to each college or university and says "hey, yo, who's got the best grades?" And the college/uni is like "all these people" and then Dean's all like "dude that's so hype, imma put them on my list!" So Dean has like a bajillion lists of names of people with good grades bc he really likes lists

Fun Fact: you can line something up properly on the computer but when you print it, it might not line up

Fun Fact 2: things lines up differently if you print in black and white vs color

Fun Fact 3: sometimes printers get mad at you because you need to use special textured paper so it decides to eat it

Fun Fact 4: it's more efficient to buy fancy paper and figure out how to print on your own instead of at a store because you can make adjustments and print as much are you have paper for without racking up more money you have to pay to the store

You ever have that moment when finals are coming up and you have four papers to write, two art projects to finish and present, a test to study for, and two exams and you can't even get out of bed and your like "shit, maybe it won't work out this time" and then a couple days later you finally finish an (yeah just one of them) essay that's been hanging over your head and suddenly you think that maybe if you budget your time well that you can avoid failure but instead of working on all of that you are on your phone making a tumbler post? Umm *definitely* couldn't be me... Couldn't be me...

Medieval Scorpions Effortpost

So yesterday I reblogged this post featuring an 11th-century depiction of the Apocalypse Locusts from Revelations, noting the following incongruity as another medieval scorpion issue:

The artist, as you can see, has interpreted "tails like scorpions" as meaning "glue cheerful-looking snakes to their butts".

Anyway, it occurred to me that the medieval scorpion thing might not be as widely known as I think it is, and that Tumblr would probably enjoy knowing about it if it isn't known already. So, finding myself unable to focus on the research I'm supposed to be doing, I decided to write about this instead. I'll just go ahead and put a cut here.

As we can see in the image above, at least one artist out there thought a "scorpion" was a type of snake. Which makes it difficult to draw "tails like scorpions", because a snake's tail is not that distinctive or menacing (maybe rattlesnakes, but they don't have those outside the Americas). So they interpreted "tails like scorpions" as "the tail looks like a whole snake complete with head".

Let me tell you. This is not a problem unique to this illustration.

See, people throughout medieval Europe were aware of scorpions. As just alluded to, they are mentioned in the Bible, and if the people producing manuscripts in medieval Europe knew one thing, it was Stuff In Bible. They're also in the Zodiac, which medieval Europe had inherited through classical sources. However, let's take a look at this map:

That's Wikipedia's map of the native range of the Scorpiones order, i.e., all scorpion species. You may notice something -- the range just stops at a certain northern latitude. Pretty much all of northern Europe is scorpion-free. If you lived in the north half of Europe, odds were good you had never seen a scorpion in your life. But if you were literate or educated at all, or you knew they were a thing, because you'd almost certainly run across them being mentioned in texts from farther south. And those texts wouldn't bother to explain what a scorpion was, of course -- everyone knows scorpions, right? When was the last time you stopped to explain What Is Spiders?

So medieval writers and artists in northern Europe were kind of stuck. There was all this scorpion imagery and metaphor in the texts they liked to work from, but they didn't really know what a scorpion was. Writers could kind of work around it (there's a lot of "oh, it's a venomous creature, moving on"), but sometimes they felt the need to break it down better. For this, of course, they'd have to refer to a bestiary -- but due to Bestiary Telephone and the persistent need of bestiary authors to turn animals into allegories, one of the only visual details you got on scorpions was that they... had a beautiful face, which they used to distract people in order to sting them.

And look. I'm not here to yuck anyone's yum, but I would say that a scorpion's face has significant aesthetic appeal only for a fairly small segment of the population. I'm sure you could get an entomologist to rhapsodize about it a bit, but your average person on the street will not be entranced by the face of a scorpion. So this did not help the medieval Europeans in figuring out how to depict scorpions. There was also some semantic confusion -- see, in some languages (such as Old and Middle English), "worm" could be a general term for very small animals of any kind. But it also could mean "serpent".* So there were some, like our artist at the top of the post, who were pretty sure a scorpion was a snake. This was probably helped along by the fact that "venomous" was one of the only things everyone knew about them, and hey, snakes are venomous. Also, Pliny the Elder had floated the idea that there were scorpions in Africa that could fly, and at least one author (13th-century monk Bartholomaeus Anglicus) therefore suggested that they had feathers. I don't see that last one coming up much, I just share it because it's funny to me.

*English eventually resolved this by borrowing the Latin vermin for very small animals, using the specialized spelling wyrm for big impressive mythical-type serpents, and sticking with the more specific snake for normal serpents.

Some authors, like the anonymous author of the Ancrene Wisse, therefore suggested that a scorpion was a snake with a woman's face and a stinging tail. (Everyone seemed to be on the same page with regards to the fact that the sting was in the tail, which is in fact probably the most recognizable aspect of scorpions, so good job there.) However, while authors could avoid this problem, visual artists could not. And if you were illustrating a bestiary or a calendar, including a scorpion was not optional. So they had to take a shot at what this thing looked like.

And so, after this way-too-long explanation, the thing you're probably here for: inaccurate medieval drawings of scorpions. (There are of course accurate medieval drawings of scorpions, from artists who lived in the southern part of Europe and/or visited places where scorpions lived; I'm just not showing you those.) And if you find yourself wondering, "how sure are you that that's meant to be a scorpion?" -- all of these are either from bestiaries or from calendars that include zodiac illustrations.

11th-century England, MS Arundel 60. (Be honest, without the rest of this post, if I had asked you to guess what animal this was supposed to be, would you have ever guessed “scorpion”?)

12th-century Germany, "Psalter of Henry the Lion". (Looks a bit undercooked. Kind of fetal.)

12th-century France, Peter Lombard's Sententiae. (Very colorful, itsy bitsy claws, what is happening with that tail?)

12th-century England, "The Shaftesbury Psalter". (So a scorpion is some sort of wyvern with a face like a duck, correct?)

13th-century France, Thomas de Cantimpré's Liber de natura rerum. (I’d give them credit for the silhouette not being that far off, but there’s a certain bestiary style where all the animals kind of look like that. Also note how few of these have claws.)

13th-century England, "The Bodley Bestiary". (Mischievous flying squirrel impales local man’s hand, local man fails to notice.)

13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (A scorpion is definitely either a mouse or a fish. Either way it has six legs.)

13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (Wait, no, it’s a baby theropod, and it has two legs. (Yes, this is the same manuscript, that’s not an error, this artist did four scorpions and no two are the same.))

13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (Actually it’s a lizard with tiny ears and it has four legs.)

13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (Now that we’re at the big fancy illustration, I think I’ve got it — it’s like that last one, but two legs, longer ears, and a less goofy face. Also I’ve decided it’s not pink anymore, I think that was the main problem.)

13th-century England, MS Kk.4.25. (A scorpion is a flat crocodile with a bear’s head.)

13th-century England, "The Huth Psalter". (Wyvern but baby! Does not seem to be enjoying biting its own tail.)

13th-century England, MS Royal 1 D X. (This triangular-headed gentlecreature gets the award for “closest guess at correct limb configuration”. If two of those were claws, I might actually believe this artist had seen a scorpion before, or at least a picture of one.)

13th-century England, "The Westminster Psalter". (A scorpion is the offspring of a wyvern and a fawn.)

13th-century England, "The Rutland Psalter". (Too many legs! Pull back! Pull back!)

13th or 14th-century France, Bestiaire d'amour rimé. (This is very similar to the fawn-wyvern, but putting it in an actual Scene makes it even more obvious that you’re just guessing.)

14th-century Netherlands, Jacob van Maerlant's Der Naturen Bloeme. (More top-down six-legged guys that look too furry to be arthropods.)

14th-century Germany, MS Additional 22413. (That is clearly a turtle.)

14th-century France, Matfres Eymengau de Beziers's Breviari d'amor. (Who came up with that head shape and what was their deal?)

15th-century England, "Bestiary of Ann Walsh". (Screw it, a scorpion is a big lizard that glares at you for trying to make me draw things I don’t know about.)

I've spent way too much time on this now. End of post, thank you to anyone who got all the way down here.

You know that moment when you have two friends who don't know each other who you can tell would become really great friends but you're nervous to introduce them to each other in case they become better friends with each other than with you and you get cut out of the friend group, but you also don't want to be the reason soulmates never get together and also maybe you guys would make the best trio ever?

That moment when your on medication and you have to check if drinking energy drinks will kill you if mixed with your pills ✌️ sounds like it probably won't so that's nice

I don't think I have a brain, but if I did have a brain it would be jellyfish. Jellyfish with worms eating it and play cards and a random acorn bouncing around and gears with no teeth that just spin like wheels and don't do anything. Oh and I think if I had a brain it's in my feet. I step on it all day. No wonder it doesn't work.