I Am Nothing

victoriousvocabulary:

SUPERNAL

[adjective]

1. celestial; heavenly.

2. of, coming from, or being in the sky or high above; emanating from the sky.

3. of or from the world of the divine.

4. exalted; of exceptional quality or extent.

Etymology: from Mediaeval Latin supernālis, from Latin supernus - that is on high, from super - above.

Source: astroanarchy.zenfolio.com

east of the sun west of the moon — requested by etzyofi
One, two, three tiny drops of tallow fell to dot his thin nightshirt, and with a terrible shudder he awoke, dark eyes flashing in the candlelight.“What have you done?” he cried, voice heavy with anguish that pierced her to the heart. “The year was almost at its end, and at last I would have been freed from my stepmother’s terrible curse. Now, now! Oh, you have doomed us both, my love!”

east of the sun west of the moon — requested by etzyofi

One, two, three tiny drops of tallow fell to dot his thin nightshirt, and with a terrible shudder he awoke, dark eyes flashing in the candlelight.

“What have you done?” he cried, voice heavy with anguish that pierced her to the heart. “The year was almost at its end, and at last I would have been freed from my stepmother’s terrible curse. Now, now! Oh, you have doomed us both, my love!”

(via gallifreyancomplex)

Source: zombres

snoipahkat:

ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE IS LIKE MY FAVORITE MYTH EVER BECAUSE THE POWER OF ROCK OK THIS GUY’S WIFE GOT BIT BY A SNAKE AND DIED AND HE WAS ALL BUMMED SO HE WENT DOWN INTO THE UNDERWORLD AND STRUMMED OUT SOME REALLY PLACID REFLECTIVE MELODIES ON HIS LYRE AND MADE EVERYONE CRY AND THEN HE DROPPED SOME SICK RHYMES ON HADES THAT BASICALLY WENT “MY LADY IS DEAD AND I AM SAD CAN I HAVE HER BACK” AND HADES CRIED TEARS OF LIQUID IRON (HOW METAL IS THAT) AND WAS LIKE “FINE TAKE UR LADY AND GET OUT”

(via subpixels)

Source: snoipahkat

victoriousvocabulary:

XIĀNNǙ

Chinese: 仙女 - fairy.

[Bao Pham]

Source: victoriousvocabulary

fatcattrio:

cat bunny love

(via subpixels)

Source: fatcattrio

victoriousvocabulary:

JUSTICIAR

[noun]

1. administrator of justice; supreme judge.

2. a high judicial officer in mediaeval England.

3. the chief political and judicial officer in England from the reign of William I to that of Henry III.

4. justiciary; of or pertaining to the administration of justice.

Etymology: Mediaeval Latin jūsticiārius.

[Source - Artist Unknown]

Source: victoriousvocabulary

Word of the Day: Theurgy

writeworld:

theurgy \THEE-ur-jee, noun:

1. the working of a divine or supernatural agency in human affairs.
2. a system of beneficent magic practiced by the Egyptian Platonists and others.

But it is with the later evolution of theurgy in the Platonist milieu that we are mainly concerned, and here we find some compensation for the lacunosity of the Oracula.
— Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hemes, 1993

I wandered around, trailing my fingers over the spines of books written in Hebrew and Greek, Old Testaments and New Testaments, books on theurgy and theology and philosophy.
— Jodi Picoult, Change of Heart, 2008

Theurgy entered English in the 1560s. It comes from the Greek word theourgeía meaning “magic.”

Source: writeworld

victoriousvocabulary:

CLAVIGER

[noun]

1. key carrier; one that keeps the key or keys; custodian, warden

2. one who carries the keys of any place.

3. one who carries a club; a club bearer.

Etymology: Latin from clavis - key + gerere - to carry.

[Christian Schloe]

Source: victoriousvocabulary

victoriousvocabulary:

VIBRISSA

[noun]

1. any of the long stiff hairs that project from the snout or brow of most mammals, as the whiskers of a cat.

2. any of the bristle-like sensitive hairs on the face of many mammals; a whisker.

3. one of several long modified feathers that grow along the gape of the mouth of insect-eating birds.

Etymology: from Late Latin vibrissae - nostril hairs > Mediaeval Latin, derivative of Latin vibrāre - to shake.

[Source]

Source: victoriousvocabulary

stepchildofthesun:

art-of-swords:

Ceremonial Sword

Dated: 18th century

Culture: Eastern Tibet or Mongolia

Medium: Steel blade, jade handle; silver sheath inlaid with coral and turquoise; silk tassel

Measurements: 21 1/2 x 3 1/2 in. (54.6 x 8.89 cm)

Source: © Museum Associates 2011 - LACMA

(via karethdreams)

Source: art-of-swords

victoriousvocabulary:

SELENOGRAPHY

[noun]

description of the moon’s surface; the scientific mapping of the moon; lunar geography.

[Luna]

Source: sleepypsychedelia

vgperson:

“Wah!” - Hachi

Source: pixiv.net

ziggyzagz:

I really wanted to try painting fur BUT I CANNOT…i do not understand you, Sai. This is a wild african dog bat thing yeh..

(via subpixels)

Source: ziggyzagz

The Telephone Line

seinfelt:

Elaine gets a call from a man who claims to have gotten her number from a mutual friend. Despite having reservations about going on a blind date under such shady circumstances, the man sounds so charming that she decides to take her chances. When she arrives at the restaurant, however, the maître d’ informs her that her date has called to cancel. Disappointed, she returns home, finding an apologetic message on her answering machine from the man. She returns his call, and after a conversation even more charming and thrilling than their first, he asks her to a movie the following night. She agrees with only mild reluctance.

At the theater the next night, the man is nowhere to be found. Elaine watches the movie alone and returns home to find another message on her machine. Instead of listening to it, she calls their supposed mutual friend and asks her about the guy. The friend claims to never have heard of him, and that nobody she knows has ever asked for Elaine’s number.

Whenever Kramer looks out the window, he sees an old woman dressed all in black with a black veil looking back up at him from different places below. He’s so terrified by her that he’s afraid to leave the apartment building.

A half-second delay in the sound system at a comedy club leaves Jerry unable to say more than two or three words at a time before being rendered speechless by the Delayed Auditory Feedback effect. The audience finds his confusion and growing frustration far funnier than any of the jokes he would have told.

Over the next two weeks, Elaine receives seemingly endless calls from her would-be suitor, apologizing for having to cancel on their date the previous night and asking her out on another that night. She tries to decline, but he doesn’t seem to hear her, and hangs up without letting her get a word in edgewise.

George suspects that his coworkers have been going into his office without his permission when he’s not around, and has a high-security lock installed on the door. He immediately loses the key, and the locksmith refuses to make him a new one without the registration card that was included with the lock, which he had thrown carelessly away. After digging fruitlessly through the dumpster, he spends the next few weeks meandering around the building trying to hide the fact that he’s unable to get into his office.

When the food in Jerry’s kitchen runs out, Kramer orders lunch from a nearby Chinese restaurant, but when he answers the door, the woman in black is standing on the other side, holding his delivery. He slams the door and stares at her through the peephole, but she doesn’t leave, despite his pleas. Eventually, he works up his courage and opens the door to ask her who she is. She lifts her veil to reveal his own face beneath.

Frustrated and desperate, Elaine convinces a phone repairman to help her track down the man who keeps calling her. After digging around in records and logs at the phone company, the two drive out to the location listed as the origin of the calls. There they find a flock of birds pecking furiously at the phone line on an otherwise barren road in Tennessee. As Elaine steps out of the truck, the birds spot her and fly away, cackling uncontrollably.

Kramer enjoys a lovely lunch with his quirky, socially-inept grandmother.

Source: seinfelt

science-junkie:

Why everything you know about wolf packs is wrong
By Lauren Davis

The alpha wolf is a figure that looms large in our imagination. The notion of a supreme pack leader who fought his way to dominance and reigns superior to the other wolves in his pack informs both our fiction and is how many people understand wolf behavior. But the alpha wolf doesn’t exist—at least not in the wild…

Although the notions of “alpha wolf” and “alpha dog” seem thoroughly ingrained in our language, the idea of the alpha comes from Rudolph Schenkel, an animal behaviorist who, in 1947, published the then-groundbreaking paper “Expressions Studies on Wolves.” During the 1930s and 1940s, Schenkel studied captive wolves in Switzerland’s Zoo Basel, attempting to identify a “sociology of the wolf.”

In his research, Schenkel identified two primary wolves in a pack: a male “lead wolf” and a female “bitch.” He described them as “first in the pack group.” He also noted “violent rivalries” between individual members of the packs… Thus, the alpha wolf was born. Throughout his paper, Schenkel also draws frequent parallels between wolves and domestic dogs, often following his conclusions with anecdotes about our household canines. The implication is clear: wolves live in packs in which individual members vie for dominance and dogs, their domestic brethren, must be very similar indeed.

A key problem with Schenkel’s wolf studies is that, while they represented the first close study of wolves, they didn’t involve any study of wolves in the wild… In more recent years, animal behaviorists, including [wildlife biologist L. David] Mech, have spent more and more time studying wolves in the wild, and the behaviors they have observed has been different from those observed by Schenkel and other watchers of zoo-bound wolves. In 1999, Mech’s paper “Alpha Status, Dominance, and Division of Labor in Wolf Packs” was published in the Canadian Journal of Zoology. The paper is considered by many to be a turning point in understanding the structure of wolf packs…

Mech’s studies of wild wolves have found that wolves live in families: two parents along with their younger cubs. Wolves do not have an innate sense of rank; they are not born leaders or born followers. The “alphas” are simply what we would call in any other social group “parents.” The offspring follow the parents as naturally as they would in any other species. No one has “won” a role as leader of the pack; the parents may assert dominance over the offspring by virtue of being the parents. While the captive wolf studies saw unrelated adults living together in captivity, related, rather than unrelated, wolves travel together in the wild. Younger wolves do not overthrow the “alpha” to become the leader of the pack; as wolf pups grow older, they are dispersed from their parents’ packs, pair off with other dispersed wolves, have pups, and thus form packs of their owns.

This doesn’t mean that wolves don’t display social dominance, however… Wolves (and other animals, including humans), display social dominance, it just isn’t always easy to boil dominant behavior down to simple explanations. Dominant behavior and dominance relationships can be highly situational, and can vary greatly from individual to individual even within the same species. It’s not the entire concept of wolves displaying social dominance that was dispelled, just the simple hierarchical pack structure…

Source: io9.com

Images credit: Caninest - Michael Cummings

(via scarecrowfan)

Source: io9.com