1. hates donald trump
2. got his ear pierced at claires because why not
3. legit asks people to beat him up in action scenes EVEN NOW AS AN OLD MAN
4. is arguably one of the most iconic star wars characters yet couldnt give less of a crap abt star wars
5. the universe tried to kill him (or at least permanently incapacitate him) twice in 2015 and it only mildly inconvenienced him
6. flies helicopters in search and rescue missions
7. was in his 40s for the majority of the indiana jones series which is insane when you think about all the stunts involved
8. quote “the director yells cut and harrison cracks open a beer and then builds a fucking shed”
9. arguably sexy
10. points angrily and its super effective
11. is just a really sweet person 12. no really my dad worked with him on firewall as the tech advisor and he was just a really swell guy 13. got my mom’s birth date from my dad and sent her flowers 14. he sent my mom flowers for her birthday 15. he didn’t even know her he just wanted to be sweet
this was a beautiful and necessary edition to this post thank you oh my god
When he was asked to be in Jimmy Kimmel’s “I’m Fucking Ben Affleck” video, in which he pulled up alongside them in a car and gave Jimmy a little wink and an air-kiss, when he showed up at the set he looked kind of put out. Kimmel was afraid he wasn’t down with what they were asking. But he just said, “I don’t know, this wardrobe…don’t you have anything mesh that I could wear?”
When he was filming “Witness” he rented a small farm from a friend of mine. At the end of the filming my friend went and checked out the property as usual. He noticed the barn door had been leveled so it no longer would swing open on it’s own. Went into the house and saw the closets had been redone, in the kitchen the cabinets had been replaced and all the drawers now opened really well. Turns out that there were thousands of dollars of work and materials put into fixing up everything at the place.
My friend called Ford and asked him how much he was asking for the work. Ford told him doing that kind of thing helped him relax and stay sane when he was filming. Would not take a dime. Plus he paid for a new water heater and got the sewage system cleaned out.
My family is from Nigeria, and my full name is
Uzoamaka, which means “The road is good.” Quick lesson: My tribe is
Igbo, and you name your kid something that tells your history and
hopefully predicts your future. So anyway, in grade school, because my
last name started with an A, I was the first in roll call, and nobody
ever knew how to pronounce it. So I went home and asked my mother if I
could be called Zoe. I remember she was cooking, and in her Nigerian
accent she said, “Why?” I said, “Nobody can pronounce it.” Without
missing a beat, she said, “If they can learn to say Tchaikovsky and
Michelangelo and Dostoyevsky, they can learn to say Uzoamaka.”
There’s another story that I like about a Chinese general who had to defend a city with only a handful of soldiers from a huge enemy horde that was in all likelihood going to steamroll the place flat within hours of showing up.
So when said horde did arrive, they saw the general sitting outside the city’s open gates, drinking tea. The horde sent a couple of emissaries over to see what was what, and the general greeted them cheerfully and invited them all to come and take tea with him.
The horde decided that this was a scenario that had “MASSIVE FUCKING TRAP” written all over it in beautiful calligraphy and promptly fucked off.
Whoever that general was, he was clearly the Ancient Chinese equivalent of Sam Vimes.
did he just invite us over for tea nah man i’m out
This just keeps getting better
I fucking love history.
ok but tbh that story misses a lot of the subtlety of the situation like ok
so this story is the Romance of Three Kingdoms, and essentially takes place between Zhuge Liang, resident tactician extraordinaire, and Sima Yi… OTHER resident tactician extraordinaire.
The two were both regarded as tactical geniuses and recognized the other as their rival. Zhuge Liang had a reputation for ambushing the SHIT out of his opponents and using the environment to his advantage, thus destroying large armies with a small number of men. Sima Yi (who kind of entered the picture later) was a cautious person whose speciality was unravelling his opponent’s plans before they began. So it was natural that the two would butt heads; however, since Sima Yi tended to have more men and resources, he started winning battles against the former. Which, y’know, kinda sucked.
On to the actual story: Zhuge Liang is all like “shit i gotta defend this city with like 10 men.” Literally if he fights ANY kind of battle here, he WILL lose; his only option for survival is not to fight. And that’s looking more and more impossible until he hears that his rival is leading the opposing army. And then he gets this brilliant idea. He basically opens all the gates, sends his men out in civilian clothes to sweep the streets, and sits on top of the gate drinking tea and chilling out and basically makes the whole thing out to be a trap
When Sima Yi comes he’s all like “yo come on in bro”
and Sima Yi is like “yeah he’s never been that obvious about his traps before. this is definitely a bluff” and he’s about to head in when he realizes
wait. he knows that i think he’s bluffing.
and so he gets it in his head that maybe, just MAYBE, Zhuge Liang has this cunning plan that will wipe out his army - recall that he has a pretty good handle on what his rival is capable of. And after a long period of deliberation (which is just like “he know that I know that he knows that etc.”), being the cautious man he is, SIma Yi eventually decides to turn his entire army around and leave.
Zhuge Liang later points out that the plan was based specifically on the fact that he was facing his rival; if it had been anyone else, there’s no way it would have worked. A dumber or less cautious person would have simply charged in and won without breaking a sweat.
and that’s the real genius here: it was a plan formed entirely just to deceive one man, and it worked.
Zhuge Liang is the most brilliant, sneaky-ass bastard in history. One time his side’s army was out of arrows, which pretty much meant they were screwed. So Zhuge Liang goes and does the logical thing, which is build a fuck ton of scarecrows and put them all on boats. Then he makes the men hide in the boats and sail them out on the river.
Well, that day was super foggy (which Zhuge Liang had predicted. Did I mention he was also a freakishly accurate meteorologist?). So the enemy across the river sees a fleet of boats armed to the teeth with what appears to be half an army of men. They panic! and start firing arrows like crazy.
Zhuge Liang lets this play out for a while, then he’s like, ”Ok guys that’s enough.” They calmly turn the boats around and go back to base, where they dismantle the scarecrows and pull out all the enemy’s arrows.
Zhuge Liang is legend.
I love this post. It just keeps getting better. Like seriously, I would have adored learning about this in World History.
If you want to see this in cinematic glory, watch Red Cliff.
Especially since it makes Zhuge Liang look like this:
Red Cliff is 50% bloody battles and 50% eye candy and about half of that eye-candy is due to Zhuge Liang
Sometimes the superpower of invisibility isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Are you a queer fan of comic books and superheroes? Do you sometimes wish we were just a little more visible? Are you 19 years old or older? Then you may want to participate in research that’s happening in Gender Studies at the University of Victoria on queer fans and representation!
Take this survey: http://uvic.fluidsurveys.com/surveys/kthwaite/the-superpower-of-in-visibility/and voice your thoughts on what it means to be here and queer. The length of the survey should not exceed 30 minutes and will help contribute to a growing body of knowledge of how important it is to be visible. Join us to keep the power of invisibility for heroics!
[**In order to protect your anonymity, please do not respond publicly to this post but proceed directly to the survey site**]
Also, PLEASE REBLOG! Let’s try to get as many participants as we can!
For all that MedievalPOC railed against how “awful” periodization in this reblog, what they mostly did was prove they have ABSOLUTELY NO UNDERSTANDING OF WHAT PERIODIZATION IS OR HOW IT WORKS.
Which is okay! Not everyone does. But if you’re a history blog, trying to pass off Italian Baroque Art from the 1670’s as from the Georgian period is flat out wrong on every humanly possible level. How do I know it’s not Georgian, but Italian Baroque? Well, MPOC actually directly linked folks back to the original works and then bet NO ONE would check their facts.
Talk about incriminating receipts, right? It’s a mistake anyone could make….except this is a history blog, and it’s not an easy mistake to make when you’re in the wrong CENTURY. The last photo is my accurate to period examples that i found quickly.
Periodization, by the way: an act or instance of dividing a subject into historical eras for purposes of analysis and study. Periods are “named blocks of time” that can be geographically specific. They are often named for major historical events, famous people, or dates. Periods are useful for analyzing change, continuity, or advances over time. Examples: Meiji Japan, the Renaissance, the gilded age, the long 19th century, the 60’s.
So MPOC hates historiography because its fluid/changing, different from art history in many ways, and not always precise — and therefore wrong. Then proceeds to prove their point by suggesting that the United States experienced the Victorian Era.
Which, granted, the US did experience a multitude of influences from the “victorian era” but….it’s also no longer a part of the British empire in the 19th century.
MPOC is asking people to pay them…..to break the law and/or do things that you can literally do yourself, for free or are already available for a price. IE: selling art prints of POC in art owned by different resources (museums, galleries, private owners, etc) is actually really illegal and against copyright. It’s technically illegal to put these images online without permissions anyways, but you don’t make a profit off of selling the art that isn’t owned by you when you do it. Interested in prints? Well you can either print off the image yourself for free, or buy them from the actual museums and galleries themselves, furthering the support of the actual items! When you buy prints or postcards of art DIRECTLY from museums, you are funding museums. the money they get from giftshops is actually VERY IMPORTANT because museums and databases like the ones MPOC use are NON-PROFIT organizations AND this money will go to funding the museum, be that for outreach to children, conserving the art, paying their staff, publishing free educational materials, etc. It is an absolutely vitalsource of income for museums that serve their communities and want to keep their art accessible.
There are a few collections which are free for reproduction commercially, like the National Gallery of Art but this isn’t the norm across the board. Besides that? Well I realize buying a $95 art book may be out of the range for some people’s pockets (TRUST ME: having been someone required to buy a lot of these textbooks which are pricey because of the vast amount of copyright fees paid to publish them), there are cheaper or used similar books on amazon AND several museums and universities have published some of their older books online for FREE. Which includes The Met. Why are you going to pay someone else to read books for you when they don’t even give you the facts right??
they want $1,200 a month to make lesson plans and curricula about art and art history but can’t even differentiate between two separate countries in two different time periods. This isn’t “one mistake” I found. This is systematically getting things wrong, including the time they claimed that Queen Urraca of Spain might possibly be Muslim — despite the fact that Queen Urraca of Spain spent her career helping and advocating the Reconquista - AKA the murder of muslim people in Spain. Uhhhh…
Which of course: These lesson plans? Stuff like this already exists! By (surprise) Museum educators whose JOB it is full time to make this stuff. It’s almost like this stuff is ALREADY free online [The Met, The Getty, Asian Art Museum… pretty much any major museum on the planet….] AND THIS STUFF IS AVAILABLE AND READY TO BE USED. A LOT OF IT IS FREE. How do I know this magical stuff??? because (and I’m guessing here) UNLIKE MPOC I have actually taken a class on museum education.
MPOC is offering to write a book. a really real published book. SPOILER ALERT: in the art history world, you GENERALLY have a PhD before you publish a book. Why? Because the PhD certifies you as an expert in the thing you study and it is an academic topic. No university/academic publisher alive would risk this. Is it maybe an ivory tower elitist thing? hell yeah it is. Would any editor in their right mind publish a book as riddled with basic factual errors as much as the MPOC blog? Hell no they would not. What about those publishers who publish psuedo-historical books like “PS ‘everything was made by aliens’” ? Well unless they want their asses sued to hell and back over copyrights, they probably won’t be able to foot the necessary bills for these images. Independent publishing doesn’t make any of it LESS illegal. They want to cover the license costs with crowd funding???
GREAT EXCEPT:
According to Linda Downs, executive director of the College Art Association, image permissions and licensing costs for a 200-page art-history book average $7,000 to $10,000. Authors usually have to cover those costs themselves. Scholars in disciplines that aren’t so visual might jump at the chance to publish in both print and online formats, Ms. Downs told me in an e-mail. But “art historians will choose one or the other” because they might get hit with two sets of permissions fees and other restrictions. Good luck with that. In order to recoup those kinds of costs the books will NOT be cheap.
MPOC has been called out by several NDN bloggers regarding the fact that they have been caught lying about their Native/POC heritage. Although the days of stupid_free and fandom_wank have long past, now we have other ways to collect receipts and here AND ALSO HERE REALLY IMPORTANT and know that they are white, white, white — and lied about who they were. Like here’s a hint there are NO Lakota reservations in AZ. If you really miss livejournal, however, you can see the call out on SF_DRAMA. The internet will never forget a white girl co-opting POC to garner cash.
they also have ZERO UNDERSTANDING of how to treat jewish people in europe in history. which is called out here better than I ever can or could because I am not jewish. they also fumble with the Roma (which they claim to be) and that + the judaism issue is also called out here.
don’t send this person harassment but don’t give them money holy shit y’all you are being scammed. SCAMMED. do not PAY people to feed you half-assed poor researched bullshit that is available free online.
- a poc who is tired of the “best diversity in history” blog being wrong about pretty much everything
