twitch of twitch.cymru

Sometimes cultures have catastrophic memory failures. Memory erasures. Disruptions. Ireland in the sixth century provides us with a good example of this. Something happened. Something huge. We can see it laid bare in the archaeology: a revolution. Fundamental shifts in the way that people lived, farmed, ate, organized themselves. People started to build ringforts and crannogs (settlements in the middle of lakes). Palisaded enclosures. But we don't really know what happened or why.

[...] Our sparse records from that period refer vaguely to 'the first mortality' in 545, 'a great mortality' in 549, a 'pestilence' in 554, and another 'great mortality' in 556. They list battles, the deaths of kings, the foundations of churches. Beneath their laconic testimony the changes on the ground - visible in the archaeology but invisible in the textual record - show the radical transformation of communities.

[...] The social changes of the sixth century are one of the many reasons why it is highly unlikely that many - or any - practices or beliefs from pre-Christian Ireland survived intact into the Christian era.

Elizabeth Boyle, 'Fierce Appetites'

it's weird to feel jealous about seeing friends go on holiday when travelling is really stressful for me and they're all in places that would be way too hot for my health and i don't really have a desire to go anywhere anyway.

... It's because of deep thinking like this that it irritates me when I see medieval Ireland being portrayed in simplistic terms, as though everyone was sitting around a fire telling stories about gods and heroes; as though the stories which emerged from medieval Ireland are folk tales without authors. These writers thought so carefully about words, and wrote with a consciousness of having meaning layered upon meaning, that to reduce it all to 'mythology' feels like an insult. The tendency to romanticize it seems disrespectful to writers who valued precise engagement with words and what they signify.
The sophisticated grammatical terminology attested in Old Irish shows how writers subjected their own language to the same rigorous analysis as Latin.

Elizabeth Boyle, 'Fierce Appetites'

Cú Chulainn and Fergus, Medb and Derdriu aren't timless continuations of a pre-Christian mythology: they are concious creations fashioned by their authors - Cú Chulainn's character created to be a type of King David and a type of Christ; Medb's character created to exemplify the dangers of permitting a woman to hold power.

The wish to make characters ahistorical, to remove them from their precise contexts and romanticize them as an unbroken link to Ireland's deep past is not only insulting to the authors who produced the sophisticated literature of medieval Ireland but it is also politically probematic as it feeds into a pernicious idea that Ireland didn't have any real history until the English arrived. Once there are Anglo-Normans on the island of Ireland, historians start to take Ireland seriously. Before that, there's just some fuzzy notion of druids and Newgrange and Cú Chulainn and myths and 'Celtic' and everything packaged into a mush of non-history with an Enya soundtrack. But the inhabitants of Ireland - regardless of ethnicity - have always had their own agency, the ability to change, to fight each other, rule over each other, exploit each other, as well as to introduce new technologies, new ideologies, new ways of living.

[...] What the medieval Irish authors who wrote sagas about Cú Chulainn and Emer, Ailill and Medb were doing was writing historical fiction. [...] They wanted to write stories about characters living in a historic and heroic society, characters that could be equals of Moses, David and Solomon on the one hand, and Aeneas, Achilles and Hector on the other [...] They created a storied landscape populated by gods and heroes.

However, these authors couldn't escape their circumstances: the weapons the heroes hold are ninth-century not Iron Age weapons; the legal principles that characters uphold or violate are medieval Christian laws, not Iron Age pagan ones; the healing that Dían Cécht offers is medieval medicine derived from North African sources, not some kind of indigenous lore. [...] And while it can be hard to reconcile genius with anonymity, some of these authors were geniuses; so we should not reduce their work to one big indistinguishable myth, strip away their role, and diminish their achievement just because we do not know their names.

[...] And that literature was written by people who had received their educations in ecclesiastical schools: a bilingual education with the Bible at its heart.

Elizabth Boyle, 'Fierce Appetites'

idk anything about yinglets or the whole thing about how they speak/type but my main takeaway is that stuff like this is the reason physically abled people don't feel comfortable/safe in disabled spaces/communities bc of how neurodivergent people complain about how hard it is for them to remember to include us and make accommodations for us. like you do realise a lot of us physically disabled people are neurodivergent too right.

i don't really want to be involved in the conversations surrounding it really bc my god some people are vile. but it is very upsetting that things like this seem to be a common trend. and maybe it is hard to learn to remember to tag something, but just bc something's difficult doesn't mean it's not worthwhile. it is worth taking effort to take the time to give other people our basic needs.

that's the thing that irks me the most i think. why is other people's fun and comfort always prioritised above physically disabled people's actual basic fucking needs and accessibility.

"i am not willing to tag my typing quirks bc if you came to my page then you should expect it bc i literally have a yinglet icon" like ok that's fine if this was like your own website where you could just put one warning at the beginning or whatever and then not worry about putting warnings for every single thing you type after that. but this is a platform where posts get shared to oher people's pages, where they might not get tagged properly by the person sharing them. like i see a lot of stuff by people i'm not following bc it's been reposted by someone i am following. which is like fine, that's hoe this site works. i just think the original post should have the relevant tags/warnings applied so that it can be correctl filtered on all reposts of it.

also "i will translate typing quirks on request" is so strange bc why do i have to ask you to solve an accessibility problem that you created in the first place and are refusing to tag, or are refusing to provide a translation from the beginning. hello.

i feel like accessibility is just viewed as like an accessory or some sort of addition to some people. and that something being inaccessible is just an annoyance, and not something that can trigger bad health episodes.