Happy Honk!

I VOTED WOOP

I VOTED AND I'VE BEEN EXCITED TO VOTE FOR LITERALLY YEARS!!!!! I VOTED DID THE FIRST TIME AND IT'S SO EXCITING I'M V HAPPY!!!!

Trigger Warning, Suicide

This is the day my friend committed suicide three years ago. We were freshmen back. I had moved to a different state and we hadn’t had contact in months. When I left, he refused to accept that we would never see each other, isn’t that ironic? My friend John Chris. The guy who would stand there talking to me for ten minutes about his turtles, about his job at the pond in town. The guy I tried stop people from bullying. He committed suicide December 16th because he was being bullied. Don’t stand to the side, guys. If you’re being bullied, get help. If you see it, get help. Don’t let more innocents like John Chris feel like their only choice is for release is suicide. Please.

Disney letter! I accidentally posted this on my England blog instead of here, oops, but I'm fixing it now. Okay so it's set in modern day, at least after the Soviet Union collapsed. The picture above is one that I took on vacation. --- Dear Pol, I wish you hadn't had that conference and could have come with me to Disney with America! She keeps talking about how she's sad I couldn't come here sooner but we soon stopped talking about that because it's a sore subject for both of us. All of us, really. But oh, Pol, it's amazing here! It's like magic! America took me to Epcot first. You know that big ball? I went inside the big ball! It talks about the history of the world and it's amazing. It took our pictures at the beginning and then used them to show us our future and it was so amusing. It didn't work right, and it only captured the image of part of America's hair, then my face, not my hair, and a lot of blue that was behind me, so there was a gap between my face and the blue. So a chunk of hair and my face with blue around it and no hair were traveling around space together on vacation. They also had countries! It was so fun because we got to poke fun at England and France and Canada but Canada made fun of her right back at her when we got to America. The two of them are closer than they show people. When the sun began to set we went over to the Magic Kingdom and oh my, Poland. Everything was lit up but the sun was still setting so everything was glowing and the castle in the distance was all blue and everything… it was magical, beautiful, amazing. I wish you could see it. You will some day, I swear. I need to head to bed. I'll send another email tomorrow, I promise! Yours, Liet

The reconstructed face of the “Cheddar Man” (c. 7,000 BCE) compared to his living descendant, Adrian Targett    

The Cheddar Man is a Mesolithic skeleton that was recovered from England’s Cheddar Gorge in 1903. At around 9,000 years old, the Cheddar Man is the oldest complete skeleton ever discovered in the UK, and has long been hailed as the “first Briton.” DNA analysis on the Cheddar man from 2018 indicated that he was lactose intolerant, had light-colored eyes, dark brown or black hair, and had a dark to black skin tone. Although the discovery of the Cheddar Man’s dark skin tone was surprising for both scientists and the public alike, it corresponds with recent research suggesting that genes linked to lighter skin only began to spread about 8,500 years ago - approximately 32,000 years later than what was previously believed.  

In addition to the development on his skin tone, the Cheddar Man surprised scientists in 1997 when DNA analysis revealed that he had a living descendant -  a retired history teacher named Adrian Targett. Targett and the Cheddar man share the same mtDNA, which is passed down from mother to daughter. In other words, they share a common maternal ancestor. What is even more remarkable is that Targett lives in Cheddar, only a half mile away where his 9,000-year-old ancestor was discovered.

Targett was not invited to the initial reveal of his ancestor’s new facial reconstruction, but he has since seen it and has commented on the family resemblance. “I do feel a bit more multicultural now,” he once joked in an interview “And I can definitely see that there is a family resemblance. That nose is similar to mine. And we have both got those blue eyes.”

The development of the Cheddar Man’s skin tone has generated resistance, especially among far-right and white supremacist circles. Targett, however, is unbothered by it, stating that it is “marvelous what scientists can reconstruct once they sequence the DNA.” When asked if he thought whether the findings affected the way people think about race, Targett responded: “Yes, I do think it’s significant. Not many people in Cheddar mind it. But the lesson is that we’re all immigrants, whether you’ve been in a place for 10 minutes or 9,000 years. We’ve all come from somewhere.”

Hey Guys

So as maybe some of you know, I’m in college now. After a lot of thought, about my past and my future, I decided to change this blog into a general blog, mostly history related. I love Europe! I love Lithuania! I want to be able to talk my interests outside of the contexts of Hetalia, considering while it did get me into researching more than it had, and I wouldn’t have fallen in love with Lithuania if I hadn’t watched the show, I feel like I can’t communicate with blogs relating to history and stuff and be taken seriously. So, this blog that was @ask-cosplay-nyo-lithuania is now this! I’m still around and stuff if you want to chat, I’m just going to be talking about more real stuff than an anime.

For people who will know me after this post, I was a big fan of hetalia for years because I had a love for European History and the show inspired me to look into new places and new times. Please don’t hold that against me! I know how the fandom has been in the past, and I know it’s rough, but I am serious about history, and I want to go into research, potentially becoming a professor one day. I plan on going to grad school, probably going into anthropology, and using my skills to help people learn more about the past.

I think it’s really insulting that westerners talk about communism. y'all had it too good and now y'all are being spoiled little brats. let me talk to you about the women and men executed and how their bodies were thrown out of trains and the basic food being rationed so harshly that we actually started black markets for fucking sugar and oil and let me talk to you about how they used to spy on everyone, we had mikes in our homes, how they made kids rat on each other and how controlled the education was. lights went out at 7. my parents used to study by a candle. everything. was. controlled. everyone. was. oppressed.

I have … a tip.

If you’re writing something that involves an aspect of life that you have not experienced, you obviously have to do research on it. You have to find other examples of it in order to accurately incorporate it into your story realistically.

But don’t just look at professional write ups. Don’t stop at wikepedia or webMD. Look up first person accounts.

I wrote a fic once where a character has frequent seizures. Naturally, I was all over the wikipedia page for seizures, the related pages, other medical websites, etc.

But I also looked at Yahoo asks where people where asking more obscure questions, sometimes asked by people who were experiencing seizures, sometimes answered by people who have had seizures.

I looked to YouTube. Found a few individual videos of people detailing how their seizures usually played out. So found a few channels that were mostly dedicated to displaying the daily habits of someone who was epileptic.

I looked at blogs and articles written by people who have had seizures regularly for as long as they can remember. But I also read the frantic posts from people who were newly diagnosed or had only had one and were worried about another.

When I wrote that fic, I got a comment from someone saying that I had touched upon aspects of movement disorders that they had never seen portrayed in media and that they had found representation in my art that they just never had before. And I think it’s because of the details. The little things.

The wiki page for seizures tells you the technicalities of it all, the terminology. It tells you what can cause them and what the symptoms are. It tells you how to deal with them, how to prevent them.

But it doesn’t tell you how some people with seizures are wary of holding sharp objects or hot liquids. It doesn’t tell you how epileptics feel when they’ve just found out that they’re prone to fits. It doesn’t tell you how their friends and family react to the news.

This applies to any and all writing. And any and all subjects. Disabilities. Sexualities. Ethnicities. Cultures. Professions. Hobbies. Traumas. If you haven’t experienced something first hand, talk to people that have. Listen to people that have. Don’t stop at the scholarly sources. They don’t always have all that you need.

“Who is it? Who is it?”

My interpretation of the first half of the forth year finally.

I painted Supernatural fanart for Mother's Day and my mom loved it.