Episode #105 - Tumblr History with HR Owen
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Hi, Kero. Hi, Emma. How's it going? How are you? I'm good. I'm good. I'm very excited to be here.

Yes, you're welcome back to History is Sexy as our ongoing Janina replacement whenever Janina has something else to do, like go to a different hemisphere. Ugh, inconsiderate really. And paddle in the Pacific. It is inconsiderate, out there enjoying the sunshine and left us to the Northern Irish weather. Yeah, well I never leave the house, so I'm always available. You've no idea what it's like out there. I've got no idea, it might be lovely.

It is actually delightful today. I went to the butcher earlier and it was very charming. But yes, so welcome back. Janina is away for a couple of weeks and is having some time off, which is extremely fair enough. So you've come back to delve into the wonderful world of Tumblr history. Yes, I've come to speak to you of my people.

and the lies they believe. Yeah, so this episode has come about because Hero and I have known each other for a long time and one of Hero's favourite things to do is screenshot terrible things from Tumblr, a place where they live and I do not.

and say, is this true? Or just look at how terrible this is. Yes. Usually I think I've moved past is this true and just gone to this is going to upset and distress you, my dear friend. It is a beautiful friendship that we have. Here is the thing, a person on the internet truly, sincerely believes about the Romans. Yes.

Yeah. Yes. I haven't actually chosen any of the Roman ones, although I considered it, but I thought I would just go on for too long. And much as I suspect that some people enjoy that, I don't know that everybody needs to hear me do. Maybe we'll save that for a special episode. An extra special. Yeah. Just Emma rants on and on and on. And then every so often Hero says, uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Well, I was going to say, I think,

Well, you know, one of the most special things about stupid things that people on Tumblr believe is that you don't need to be an expert to know that it's not true. Those are my favorites where it's like, you know, you going, oh, well, this fact about the Romans is wrong. Well, you know, the Romans, you know, I'm pretty well, you know, you're pretty, pretty swatted up on them. But when I look at something and I go, that's not true.

And I don't know anything. I've just read the words and gone, this is not true. And yet. Yes. You do believe this. The Susan Dooku one that you sent me. I can't think about it without laughing until I cry. Yeah. I will put links to all of these screenshots in the show notes so that people can see them in their original glory. But basically.

Basically, this episode is coming back because here at Lysa, send me these things. I kind of squint and I am a monstrous pedant. And then I have this kind of unconquerable desire that I have to go and find out how true these things are. And people on Tumblr...

And it's not just Tumblr because I will say a good chunk of them are screenshots from Twitter. That's true. Before it was X, when it was just Twitter, that people screenshot and then put on Tumblr and then will often put some like a load of other extra bonus nonsense around it. But sometimes they'll just put it...

it by itself so it's social media in general but there is something about the tumblr people where they love a specific kind of story which is kind of an underdog story whereby there is an oppressed person and they're getting one over on either academics or like the man yeah

Yeah, there is. I was thinking like, what makes this Tumblr does history rather than like what's different than a TikTok history or a Twitter history? And it is like, there's the glee of feeling like you've got won over on the people in power. There's the universal failure to examine any sources whatsoever. Just never. Why would you? But that's kind of everywhere. But I think the Tumblr thing is also this like,

like tension between a kind of pseudo intellectualism and an anti intellectual bent you know they hate academics

But they do think that having done one module in art history two years ago qualifies them to hold forth on any subject they're so pleased with. Yes, there is that. On the one hand, craftsmen are the salt of the earth and can never be wrong, while academics are in ivory towers and can never be right. But on the other hand, if you screenshot a book

That is an unassailable source that can never be questioned, no matter what that book is. You took a photo of a page and therefore you're an intellectual. And where this sometimes lets them down is in... So this is a post that just says it is...

This is the joy that we're going to have. This is going to entertain you, whereby I'm going to say the names of Tumblr users out loud. Because Tumblr names are special. They're real special. Thy Flesh Consumed, where consumed has a zero for an O. Of course. Just posted every time I think about what the New York Times did to Susan Dooku, I get enraged inside.

And then followed it up with, and this has a load of links in it, so it looks really authoritative if you're not really paying attention. In case you didn't know, Susan Dooku, inventor of the popular number puzzle game, Sudoku.

was outed as a lesbian by the New York Times in 2003. Many have speculated this was done to more or less slander her to the public so their attempted purchase of the exclusive printing rights of the game could be done at a much lower price. She lost a lawsuit against the Times as it was not deemed libelous given that she was in a civil partnership with her now wife, Christina Chris Ward.

Susan also claims to the first recorded use of the word polyamorous in her 1994 essay, 81 Squares.

And here we're now crying with laughter again. Because this has loads of links. So this was posted. It has 18,000 notes. And a lot of those notes initially are people being like, wow, I can't believe the New York Times did this. I've always told you guys, don't trust the New York Times. The New York Times are so bad. But when you click the links, they all go to cat videos. LAUGHTER

The thing that kills me about that is like, yes, all of the links go to cat videos. But in order to click the link to find out the source for this claim, you have to first believe that Sudokus were invented by Susan Doku. By a woman called Susan Doku. It's called Chris Ward.

And that's why it's called Sudoku. Yeah, I'm crying, genuinely crying. I have read this post so many times and it gets me every single time. It is kind of a perfect combination of looking really authoritative and I can't believe that the New York Times would be bad to a gay person, which just is like...

bait for Tumblr people who are like, how dare they out her? How dare they? To the extent that most of the responses now, like as time has gone on, are like, oh my God, I can't believe I fell for this. But still, you fell for it, my friends. You fell for it. That's insane. I also like the people who have responded to being told that it's fake with like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. That's on me. Like I've learned my lesson about like media literacy and I will just check.

the sources before I share anything in the future. And it's like, you shouldn't have to check the sources on Susan Dooku. On Susan Dooku. Like, you don't need... That's not media literacy. That's just not having a sense of humour. Yeah. I mean, that is being...

like quite impressively gullible. Yeah. So yeah. So with that in mind and the kind of thinking that underpins a lot of Tumblr ones, I have gone through a bunch of various ones you have sent me. I have prioritized ones which got huge amounts of engagement. So they all have well over 10,000 like...

I don't really understand how. Just say notes. When I say this. Notes. They have notes, but there also appears to be notes. And then there's like reblogs and those things are different. And I don't really understand them. Notes. Just. This is quite boring. Just notes covers everything. It's just notes. Notes covers reblogs, likes and replies. So the big number that you see at the bottom is the total engagement of any kind of

which is a note. Okay. Yeah. So they all have been very popular. So I'm not going for people who are posting things into a void. I'm posting people, except possibly this one, which is the first one, which I'm going to get out of the way, but I'm just including it because I think it was the first one that you sent me where I was like, I think we should do an episode about this because these people are fascinating. Yeah.

And also because then I got a new phone and I like wiped my old phone to send it away to be recycled. And before I forgot to back up my WhatsApp and of all of the things that I lost in like five years of WhatsApp conversations, this one was the one that I was most devastated to lose. And I made you find it and resend it to me. Yeah. And you sent it to me decontextualized, but I found the original source because I am a nerd. Yeah.

And it is just a series of hashtags, so I assume this is a reply. It says, oh, I know this one, I think. This is all in capital letters. The sea during the, like, Triassic-ish used to be red and it was pink before that. Because of the microorganisms in the sea, because of their weird experimental chlorophyll, neon pink was the first organic pigment in the world. Neon fucking pink. Earth's oldest colour is pink. She was literally girly pop before organisms had figured out being multicellular.

The genesis of life as we know it came from the sea and the sea was pink before it was ever blue and that is so cool to me. It's so cool to me. Also hearing you read Tumblr tags, I feel like this is what it's like if you get pulled up in court and they start reading your text and then on March the 1st you said, LOL, I'm going to shoot him in the face. No.

Yes, it is like that. Or like that I think you should leave. Have you ever watched I think you should leave? I've definitely not watched I think you should leave because it's been on television since 2005. I think Matthew has watched it while I'm in the room, which is how I consume most of my media. For everybody else, it's very much like the I think you should leave sketch with the hat, which me and Connor watch, I'd say probably once a week and just laugh and laugh and laugh. Wildlife you have. Oh.

We do. I cannot tell you how funny that sketch is. If you've not seen it, then the I think you should leave hat sketch is peak comedy as far as I'm concerned. So my question is, was the world girly pop before it figured out being multicellular? A great question. A great question. Yes. The answer is obviously no. Because that's ludicrous.

With the kindest will in the world, the thing that they are referring to is a multicellular organism. Yeah. So I worked out where this paper is that they're talking about. And it is a paper published by a PhD student called Noor Giyanle from the

National University of Australia, Australia University, where they were doing completely different research in Africa and they were looking for oil and they drilled into a very, very ancient marine shale and pulled out bits of rock that were made up of 1.1 billion year old cyanobacterias. Mm.

And then when they crushed that rock up, it was bright pink. And we're like, hey, cool. We have a color from 1.1 million years ago. Let's put it in our PhD. Yeah. It doesn't seem to be part of their PhD at all. They just happened to come up with it, which is extremely cool as a thing. I don't know. It happens in the humanities, does it? You never find a cool rock when you're drilling in the library. No.

The thing that they were interested in and the thing that it's published in, the paper is called, I'm going to read this in the exact same tone of voice I do Tumblr tags, 1.1 billion year old porphyrins establish a marine ecosystem dominated by bacterial primary producers. Wow. Riveting stuff. Yes.

And basically it argues that 1.8 to 1 billion years ago, the cells at the bottom of the food chain were too small to sustain life that was large or complex, basically. This is so tedious to me. I don't even know how to deal with it. Too small to sustain life that was large. Yes. And it's not until they become bigger and...

that they can sustain life. And basically there seems to be this long discussion amongst certain types of biologists as to like why it took, I'm going to put this in quote marks, so long for large life to evolve on Earth. Like why...

complex life is relatively recent, like less than a billion years old. And one of these answers is that there's all these side bacteria and they're quite small and they don't have enough energy to give the next thing in the food chain enough energy to get any bigger. Essentially, what the media took from this was we found neon pink and it's really old. Nice. That's what I've taken as well. I'm going to be honest. Yeah.

And so you get a lot of news coverage that's like millennial pink is the oldest colour in the world. And what they mean is millennial pink is the oldest colour we have found in that it's the oldest colour that has survived, not that it is the oldest colour that ever existed. Right. Not everything wasn't sort of, you know, the first bit of The Wizard of Oz. Yes. And then this. Yes.

This girly pop algae just slugged in. Just appeared. Yeah. Pow. Yes. So this cyanobacteria is...

It is 1.1-ish billion years old, and it is the oldest pink, oldest color that has ever been found. But it is not the oldest thing that has ever been found. And we know that there are older cyanobacteria, which were blue or green-blue, which are at least 3.5 billion years old. We have just never found them in color, if

If that makes sense. Yes. Like we've never found. Yeah, they're faded. Like old jeans in the wash. Exactly. It's been a while, you know, but they definitely used to be blue. Yeah. And so first off, these are indeed multicellular organisms. So sorry about that. Two, this is not the Triassic period. The Triassic period is 250 million years ago. In fairness, that user did say Triassic.

or whatever like you know trisocesque if ish i guess ish you know their past big past not little past yeah trisocura is the period of which crocodiles appeared and the first dinosaurs so that's nice yes yeah that is nice they are definitely multicellular pretty definitely has loads of cells up to five tons up at least i would say yes and then i was like i

Like what colour is the sea basically like in various periods and it's been lots of colours over the billions of years of the sea's existence. It was black. It was very poorly named and this is why we don't let scientists name things very often. Milky turquoise. Oh. It's evocative. I mean it's disgusting. I don't know.

Yeah, but you know, I know what they mean. You know exactly what they mean as turquoise but milky. It probably was red at various points. And I also learned the words microbial mats, which sort of disgusts me as well.

I have a stupid question. The whole sea all at once. I suspect it's a different bit. Right. Because the sea is currently lots of different colors. Like, so water. Yeah. Hear me out. Isn't. Water doesn't have any color. No. It just is reflecting. Okay. But.

So this is why I feel like an idiot because like the sea isn't blue because it's blue. No. It's blue because the sky is blue. Yes. And so it's only blue on days when the sky above it is blue. And if you go to Ballycastle on a grey miserable day, the sea is grey. Uh-huh.

Yeah. Yes. Like this isn't, I'm not, I'm not wrong. You're not wrong. I have understood. Colors. And this is, what you have is the colors of the seas in different parts of the world change. And obviously seas grow and get bigger and get smaller and move around and are constantly, continents are constantly shifting and the earth is several billion years old. So stuff is always going on. But different,

points in different places there would be concentrations of different chlorophyll producing organisms or there would be elemental sulfur is one of the things microbial mats is one which is just like fucking billions and billions and billions of microbes just I think I had one of those in my bedroom as a teenager once

I think we've all had one of those in the living room. The cereal bowl left under my bed. Been in the bathroom of a student house, then you see the factory. The microbial mat.

And they basically change the colour of the sea when you're looking at it. So there are still in the world red. You get lakes and stuff that are red or that are white. There is a pink one, I think, in Australia maybe, which looks pink sometimes because of the stuff that lives in it. And yeah, so the important part

And I think that the thing that is implied by this is that somehow the world was girly pop, was like feminine before it became blue and masculine. You say girly pop with a little bunny rabbit ear and the look of skepticism on your face. And you're like, so they're saying the world was girly pop. Yeah.

How dare they? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Before it was... Before it was blue and masculine. Yes, exactly. Right. And I think that's what I have a problem with is the... Yeah. The idea that the... Like, it just kind of links in my mind to this idea of, like, feminine divine and, like, femininity being somehow... And the notion... Full life came from the ocean. Yeah. Who was hard femme. Yeah. Yeah.

Yes. Or the idea that some, like, you know, we've done an episode about it, but the idea that like the feminine was worshipped and there were matriarchies before men came along somehow and just like kind of overthrew it. And that men are... I like the idea of men coming along and you're like, I think I'm going to go out on a limb here. I'm not the smartest cookie in the box, but I think men might have already been that. Yes.

And basically the notion of femininity, of matriarchy being the original way that things were and therefore the way things should be and patriarchy and masculinity being kind of violent overthrowers. Right. Instead of feminism being a good thing because women are people. And that's kind of the end of the sentence. That's kind of the end of the sentence to a bit, yeah. Yeah.

And so God bless you, girly pop, before the world was multicellular. Your words will live in my mind for the rest of my life. I think you sent me that over a year ago. Yeah. Certainly, I have never forgotten it. I may be the last thing that I think when I'm on my deathbed. Yeah.

You'll hear the, you'll be fading out and you'll be like, Connor, I can see a light. I can, I can hear waves crashing gently against the shore. The girly population is calling me home. It was girly pop before it was multicellular. So a delight, a horror. It's changed me.

The other one that I want to mention which is related is a post which I found when I just searched history to see what kind of thing got the most notes on Tumblr. And it was one which did show a red sea, like a red body of water because of the cyanobacteria that are in it. Mm-hmm.

And it had like an image of this red water in a bottle and was like, oh, cool. Look, sometimes you get cyanobacterias that make seas red. And every single response of the like 90,000 responses. And it did say like, you know, this is like a billion years ago, there was more of this and more seas looked like this. And every single response said, yo, it's the wine dark sea. My boy Homer was right. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, because Homer lived in the big past. He lived in the big past, not the little past. So the little past goes up to 1972. And then, actually, no, 1990. Actually, I heard someone post about Freddie Mercury being an openly queer man, late 20th century Britain, and wanted to die. What?

I mean, yeah, not wrong, I suppose, but I hate it. Not wrong, but I hate it. So I think actually the past, like the big past starts, you know. 2000, isn't it? It's 2000.

2000, let's be honest. Yeah. Are the Twin Towers the big past yet? I think I was born in the big past. I was born in the late 1900s. Yeah, I was born in the late 1900s. I love it. I don't love it. I hate it very much.

But yes, so like literally there's like 93,000 notes on this. And I would say three quarters of them say something about the wine dark sea and Homer and how great it is. And the other quarter of them were like, guys, how long ago do you think Homer was writing? This is what I mean by the weird relationship that Tumblr has with like,

academia and intellectualism because I guarantee everyone who made that reference felt oh the other the other crucial thing to a tumblr history is smugness every single person who made that reference felt very smug about the fact that they knew a classical classical reference reference do you know

And they were like, I know what the wine dark sea is and I know where it comes from. And you're like, OK, but you are a big dummy. And that kind of undermines... You have said something very silly. So, yes. And then...

Yeah, so a lot of people being like, and a lot of them like my boy Homer was right, as though there was some kind of great academic desire to make Homer look like an idiot and be like, he doesn't even know what the sea looks like. The sea's blue, dummy. Yeah, and to suggest that all of the kind of various theories about, like, because there's a lot of different, you know, this is something that people have talked about for a long time. It's like, why does he call it the wide, dark sea? And like, why?

For like a billion years. Yeah, for like a billion years. And as we now know, it's because Homer was actually alive one billion years ago when the sea was red. But like one theory is that the Greeks somehow didn't know what blue was. Like had never heard of it or just had no concept of blue.

another theory which I know is one that Natalie Haynes ascribes to is the idea that then he's not talking about like wine dark as in the colour he's just he's using it to talk about how the light sparkles off of it as it does off of wine another one is just that he's just saying it's dark like wine is dark yeah like and yeah also like once again

You go up to Ballycastle. You go to Ballycastle, yeah. On a dark kind of day. I used to live in Ballycastle and spent a lot of that time looking at the sea on various days. And it was rarely sunny. The sea is rarely blue. And I feel like I've seen...

A dark sea. Like a dark sea. I don't feel like that's beyond the realm of just go to a beach and have a look. You might understand what he's talking about. I do think that the seas of the Aegean might look a bit different to the Irish Sea. No. On a grim day. Salty, salty. Yeah. I think that having seen them, they are much more delightful and welcoming. Oh, you're going to pull that I've left Northern Ireland card, are you? I have left Northern Ireland.

I leave the house. Check your privilege, Emma, okay? Not all of us get to go on holiday to the Mediterranean whenever we want. This is what Tumblr does to you.

Yeah. Also a total unwillingness to believe that there might be other translations for the Greek, whatever Greek word has been translated to Wind Dark Sea, which I didn't look up. But yeah. So I just hugely enjoy this idea of one, we are better than the academics who will think that Homer's an idiot. Whereas we realize that Homer, a man who may probably not have existed, who his name has been attached. May probably. Yeah.

We understand him. We boys and girls of Tumblr. Oh, they're all non-binary. I say that as a non-binary person on Tumblr. Before anybody crashes into the history of sexy. God bless them.

Yeah. Yes. Okay. God love them. That's the C. I'm done with the C. I'm done. I'm done with it. The next one is the first one that consumed probably my entire Sunday afternoon, which is, in fairness to Tumblr, a screenshot of a Twitter post.

which reads British cavalry in the 1850s consisted entirely of twinks who used Uru speak. Now read the Uru speak. Do you want to read the Uru speak or do you want me to do it? No, I don't have it. I don't have it in front of me. I want you to do it because I enjoy hearing you say Uru and girly pop. I'm going to do it in my most academic voice. Okay. The quote then has a photograph of a book, classic.

And it says...

And interlarded sentences with loud and meaningless exclamations of whore whore. Their sweeping whiskers, languid voices, tiny waists laced in by corsets and large scars were irresistible, frantically admired and frantically envied. Magnificently mounted horses were their passion. They rode like the devil himself and their confidence in their ability to defeat any enemy single-handed was complete.

Cavalry officers were saying in London drawing rooms that the take the infantry on the campaign was superfluous. The infantry would really be a drag on them and had better be left at home. Beautiful. And it's fairly easy to find this conveniently. It comes from a book called The Reason Why, The Story of the Fatal Charge of the Light Brigade by Cecil Woodham Smith, who was a novelist in the 1950s who then moved into writing popular history books. She is a woman. Mm-hmm.

And she wrote a biography of Florence Nightingale and was kind of largely responsible. I really like the way he said that. She's a woman. Well, she's called Cecil, which I think kind of implies. I know, I know. But it was just, I liked it. She's a girl. I liked the force. She's a girly pop. She's a girly pop. Girly pop historian. And multicellular. Look at her go. Yeah, girl boss.

Hashtag winning. Yeah, so she is actually kind of responsible for rehabilitating Florence Nightingale after Strachan wrote Eminent Victorians and kind of castigated her and destroyed her reputation. So she has then written this book about the Charge of the Light Brigade, which is this disaster that happened in the Crimean War, which is kind of a pointless war.

And her argument is basically that the British system of allowing people to buy commissions combined with a kind of general arrogance and flamboyance of British aristocracy led to people... And this particular clash of personalities between two guys who aren't very important...

led to these kind of disasters occurring and 600 people dying in the charge of the Light Brigade, which I will confess until this point I thought was something that happened in the American West. So...

Oh, wow. I'm going to get a little judgy. Yeah, that's fine. I might not know your comedy television references, but I know my Alfred Lord Tennyson. Yeah, I do not know my Tennyson, but I do know Spaced. So between the two of us. We've got the sum of human knowledge covered, really. Yeah, and that's fine. So...

I started looking into this. The first thing I found was I'm pretty sure I found somebody plagiarizing her. And I didn't actually get around to checking whether they referenced it, but I definitely found a book that repeated with slightly changed sentence structures, like this exact paragraph. So I won't name them because I don't want to be making accusations, but I was still pretty like, oh, okay. But it actually was quite hard to...

because neither of these terms seem to be enormously popular, like plungers and tremendous swells were quite challenging to search for. And I couldn't really find a lot of writing about this kind of thing, except things that quoted this specific book. I could not find where she had got it from. Eventually, after a lot of poking about and dead ends and things, I found...

some punch cartoons from the 1850s. Hurrah. Hurrah. Actually, I might send them to you. I'm going to WhatsApp them to you so that you can see them. Okay. And I have found that at the very least, she is talking about something that is real. Ah. So I have sent you a wood engraving by John Leach called A Great Mental Effort. And it has two men, one of whom is wearing a positively enormous...

bow tie it is too big beautiful and the first cock sparrow it's just big i think it's not too big really i think it's fashion it's certainly fashion and the first one is saying what a miraculous tie flank how does you manage it and the other is it's how the deuce do you manage it and the other is saying yes i fancy it is rather grand but then you see i gave the whole of my mind to it

I love them. I love these beautiful boys and their silly, silly clothes. They are beautiful boys with silly, silly clothes. So what I found is a bunch of specifically drawings by a guy called John Leach in Punch Magazine, where we specifically are talking about, I'm going to send you another one, called Very Distressing. LAUGHTER

which has a man who is standing very, very stiffly with a very, very narrow little waist. And it says, distressing very. And then somebody saying, did you call, sir? Who is a policeman. And the swell who would rather perish than disturb his shirt collar says, yes, I've had the misfortune to drop my umbrella and there isn't a boy within a mile to pick it up.

I really enjoy this. Yes. This is great. These are delightful. I had a great time looking at them. Some of them, annoyingly, I say annoyingly, because this is Victorian Punch magazine, you'll be like going through them and be like, ha ha ha ha ha ha, and then one will be monstrously anti-Semitic. Oh, great. Or...

Some very famous ones where they're talking about home rule and the Irish rule depicted as monkeys. Yes, I've sent you then a link to one which I think is the best evidence for what Cecil is saying, which is a drawing again from Punch Magazine of a bunch of tents and some people who are clearly in Turkey because it says the plunger in Turkey and there is a Turkish man on a horse looking at a kind of...

English man lying on the floor and he is saying, I say, old fella, do you think it's probable the infantry will accompany us to Sebastopol? LAUGHTER

I think we should say he's not so much lying as he is reclining elegantly with a cigarette and his beautiful curly hair and his beautiful twiddly mustache. And he has a look of elegant boredom, I would say, if you zoom in on his face. He does. He does. Yeah. Yeah, I think so. Yes. And from this, I gather that at the very least, this is enough of a stereotype that she is correct, that people were going around saying very and how we done. So we am probable that.

I actually do that as well. I walk around the house and if something is alarming, I go, oh, here we are. And I say my own name. And I think I'm going to start saying, distressing, very distressing, very distressing.

Oh, here we are. Distressing very. I don't know that, like, if I'm going to be pedantic about the situation, which obviously I love to be, I don't know if we can, I do think that the very tiny waist actually is referring to dandies from about the 1820s rather than tremendous swells from the 1850s. Yes. I think also there's something in representing them as twinks. Yes.

They are strapping young men who are, you know, I don't think that this, the little that I know of sort of masculinity in history, I don't think this would have necessarily been seen. It would have been seen as frivolous and silly. Yes.

but not gay. No, I think it would be to an extent somewhat effeminate. So a lot of the cartoons are... So there's one of a coach driver leaning into a coach in the pouring rain and saying, I say, madam, would you mind riding outside so this gentleman can protect his coat? So there is a thing whereby they're being seen as effeminate, certainly. Which...

And because frivolity, we talked about this in our episode where we talked a bit about dandies when we did the episode on why male fashion is so boring. And it is partly this development of this idea that anything frivolous is feminine and anything that is interest in external appearance is automatically feminine. It is something that only women are interested in. That kind of gets complicated.

strongly codified in the Victorian period. So they're definitely seen as not fully masculine. And so I think you could probably say twinkie, twinkie?

Twinkie? Twink-esque? Yes. I think that the kind of languid boredom and it takes them out of that a little bit because it is a... But that's aristocratic. And this is something that's only open to the aristocracy who can buy a big horse and positively enormous bow tie and rather die than mess up their delightful linen shirt. But it pleases me that...

that this one is at the very least has some basis in fact as far as I can tell. And I read a lot of reviews of the book to see, you know, how this is taken because it's a popular history from 1953. It is still in print and it is, you can still buy it and it looks like it's quite a fun read. And it's clearly polemical. Like she was an Irish woman

Well, she was a Welsh woman who descended from like an Irish upper middle class family. And so as far as I can tell, she fucking hated the English. I was like... And who can blame her? Apparently she was very snobby. And there's this great anecdote from Alan Bennett who quotes her...

and says that she was like a massive snob and at one point she said of somebody that they both knew of course he married a mitford but that's a phase we all go through excellent that is yeah excellent i

I think it's delightful. And I love the idea of her looking down on the Mitfords as well, like who look down on everybody. Like it's all just layers of people sneering at each other in the aristocracy. Yeah, so she sounds great. And from the reviews I read of the book, they were like, you know what, there's nothing really wrong with it. Like as a polemical, as long as you're aware that it's polemical and it's not offering you like a balanced analysis of what went wrong, you're not going to get a bad history of the Charge of the Light Brigade and the...

It ends at that point. It ends at Sebastopol. But you're not going to get a full history of the Crimean War, but you're going to get a decent history of...

the whole thing and you're going to get a fairly well justified argument that the English aristocracy were to blame for their own downfall. Yes. Which must have been very satisfying to write. And so good for her, I say. I do think science sources, but I say good for Cecil. Good for Cecil. She also wrote... A woman. A woman. Yeah.

She also wrote a biography of Queen Victoria, but died before she finished the second part. So a woman of varied interests. Can't say if they're in history. Victorian history is not that varied. I mean, military history and biography are quite different. I think I wouldn't. It's all just the past, isn't it? I think it's mainly because you couldn't pay me to write military history. But that's where I'd write another biography, I reckon. Yeah.

Okay, next up is something that we have alluded to, which is why does Tumblr... Well, I've called it in my document, Chad Craftsman versus the Virgin Academic. Perfect. Yes, which is specifically the one that we have is a fairly long post, which I'm not going to read in its entirety, about basically that

I find it very cool that they've, and I'm putting this in very little heavy quotation marks. You can't see, but Emma is waving her hands around doing bunny rabbit ears. And they're really, really going for it. Incredibly emphatic. This is incredibly emphatic. They. They.

found Neanderthal bone tools made from polished rib bones and they couldn't figure out what it was for for the life of them until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leather worker and she took one look at it and said, oh yeah, that's a leather burnisher, blah, blah, blah. And then it has an imagined conversation between they being the archaeologists and paleontologists who are sad virgins who can't drive and...

the cool traditional leather worker who's like yeah this is the best thing ever and I can't believe that you didn't invite me to the dig and I could have told you immediately the thing I like about that is that they did in that story in that imagined encounter they did know enough to ask a leather worker about it they already had a pretty good guess do you know what I mean like

They were like, this is some kind of tool for leatherworking. I wonder if we should ask a leatherworker. I wonder if we should ask someone who does that, maybe. Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't like she just wandered into a museum. Yes. And was like, what? Has anybody ever... There is, in fairness, one story in this quite long thread of various different ways in which Chad leatherworkers have...

Fixed everything. So it's the vaguest possible thing that you could ever imagine. But it says, I remember years ago on an email list, a woman talking about going to a museum and seeing the woman's household objects, a number of fired clay items referred to as prayer objects. And she found somebody said, excuse me, but I think they're drop spindles. But they're all like, I remember that thread because they're all like that. They're just like, they found this. And you're like, who? When? When?

They found this thing. They didn't know what it was. And then this other person, this salt of the earth craftsman who works with his hands and, you know, said, oh, I know what that is. I know why we do that. I know what that's for. And you're like, OK, what are you fucking talking about? Yeah. But then they...

She says, oh yeah, I'm pretty sure they're drop spindles because they look exactly like the ones I use. And then the museum changes everything and changes all of the things and says like... And everybody clapped. And everybody clapped. And then my personal favorite in this thread, which is a bunch of pictures of mostly Flavian era hairstyles, which I talk about a lot, which are very, very large Roman hairstyles that kind of go...

up at the front and then have a bun and lots of kind of, Livia's come to say hello. She is forcefully saying hello. She is. Watching you try and keep talking while Livia is like, hello, it's Livia time. I'm so sorry Emma, I'm so sorry but it is actually Livia time. You say that, that no human nor no animal has ever been less sorry that it's Livia time than Livia.

Yes. So ancient Romans had weird hairstyles, correct? And archaeologists just couldn't figure them out. They just didn't know. They didn't have hairspray or hair bands. So how did they keep them up?

Eventually they decided wigs or hats. Definitely not real hair, which is untrue. Before hairdressers started actually doing proper research, they assumed that they were hair pieces that were attached somehow, but they were human hair pieces. But whatever. And then a hairdresser comes along, looks and is like, yeah, they're sewn. Don't be silly, the archaeologists cry. Why do they have to do this as an imaginary dialogue? Yeah.

This is why the character limit on old Twitter was good. Nobody could write fucking entire plays about this stuff. About stuff that did not happen. Stuff that did not happen. When then there's a long play about everybody, all the archaeologists going, ha, ha, ha, you're so terrible. You're an idiot, women, and we have PhDs. And then her like proving...

they were sewn and this one I find fascinating because they're specifically talking about the work of Janet Stevens whose work is fantastic and she does have a YouTube channel and whose work is published in the Journal of Roman Archaeology

Yeah, because they actually do let girls be archaeologists now. Yeah. And practical archaeology is a thing. It is very much a thing. We know about that. It's very much a thing. It's very much been a thing. She wasn't like on the blogs being like or like fighting, having fistfights in conferences over this. Like she...

Just crashing into a time team dig. Yeah. Smashing Tony Robinson in the face and screaming into the camera. They were sold! Yeah. So basically she did like a huge amount of research and a huge amount of practical research, wrote an article about it, published it in one of the major...

It's called The Journal of Roman Archaeology. It's that. That's it. This is like a small regional one. And everybody was like, oh my God, that's so cool. We'd never really thought about it. And when you sent me this specific one, I had cited her personally about a week before. Okay.

Because her work is incredible. And she is also, as she said, married to a professor of Italian. And so she has institutional access. So it's academic research that she is doing, not just like hairdresser shit. Yeah. But yeah, I do love very much this idea. And then it's just like a list of these stories. And then right at the bottom, somebody being like,

Yeah, but they did ask. Right. They did. They did do this. Like they did. They did actually go, this is probably for working leather. Yeah. Let's go and ask someone. And the same thing with like there's one about Egyptian archaeologists and another one about

Egyptian archaeologists with rings of bricks, which are apparently for keeping baby chicks in, and one about obsidian blades in pre-Columbian America. Oh, that one. That one killed me, honestly. I think because I think what a lot of these assume, so the obsidian blades, it was that they found them in the roof rafters, wasn't it?

And then a woman was like, oh, yeah, well, we keep them up there because they're out of the way from babies. A mother, it specifically says. A mother. And it's so often that it just sort of shows this assumption that all of the people doing archaeology and doing history aren't women and mothers and, you know, and have no experience with any of these things. And you're like, that's just like...

This is just not true. It's just not true. It's just... I know, yeah. It's like the way Tumblr... I like talking about Tumblr like it's them over there that do it. Not you involved in posting daily. Yeah. You're special. Posting constantly. But it's the way that people on Tumblr, and I don't think this is just Tumblr, but a lot of people online like to talk about queer history, like queer history.

as if historians like, oh, and historians don't want to acknowledge that this person was gay or like historians won't like they're like, oh, they were just close friends. And you're like, do you think there's a lot of straight people doing queer history? Because I don't know a single one. No, most of the people who were like, I'd really like to know what it was like being a gay man in the 1600s.

are gay men they mostly are gay men yeah um largely uh and the thing with that like like Sappho and her friend or like um they will do anything to insist that um the gays don't exist is that it fund one it assumes that there can be no ambiguity that if somebody has said I love you then there can only be one form of that and that

there can be no kind of shifting of identity or of different forms of love. And two, that generally when they are referring, if they are referring to anything, they are referring to something that is from the early 20th century or late 19th century. When everybody who is doing this stuff

had the idea that being gay was an aberration that didn't exist. And completely refusing to acknowledge that there has been almost 100 years of queer historical racism

And certainly the last, like since the 1980s, like huge amounts of work queering the past and looking at it through completely different lenses and finding new ways to think about relationships. And sometimes declaring that everybody is gay if they have ever said that they love you. I had a very...

Oh, sorry. No. And, you know, that there has been now many decades worth of history and that virtually every historian working today is aware of and would be thrilled to find a bunch of letters that were like,

Let's fuck. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I had a very, very Tumblr encounter on Tumblr. On the Tumblr? Amazing. Yeah, on the Tumblrs where I posted something. I was on the account for my podcast. Mm-hmm.

Oh yeah, we should promote your podcast. Yeah, we should plug that. You can listen to Monstrous Agonies or Travelling Light. They're both me. Travelling Light is new and very, very good. Monstrous Agonies is a little bit older and also very, very good. And we have a Tumblr which is at Monstrous Productions. And I was on there and I was like, which historical figures do you think I could fight? Send me historical figures and I'll say whether I think I can take them or not. And somebody sent in Oscar Wilde.

And I was like, no, wasn't he like, didn't he? He was massive and boxed. Absolutely not. But in the course of it, I think I refer to him as queer. And this person was like, actually, I think it's really problematic for you to call him queer, given that that would have been a name that he would have been persecuted under. And it's just not really appropriate. And I'm like,

Okay. What do you want me to call him? Like, you want me to talk about him in a historically accurate way? You want me to call him a sodomite? Is that what we're going with here? Unclear. And I was like, you can't, you need something. Okay. And the word that we have that is the most helpful for saying not everything that he did was not 100% straight perhaps. Yeah.

It's queer. That's handy. It's, you know, that's what we've got, you know. It is. That was not on. The dead have feelings too, Hero. But you definitely... I don't care. Definitely could not take it. Absolutely not. No. Not even a little bit. Okay. Right.

This might be the last one, but this is the one that slurped up my entire Sunday evening and the one where I thought I might be losing my mind slightly and distracted me very heavily from the Great Pottery Showdown

the Great Pottery Showdown final. Oh, wow. A highlight of my year. So that's how invested in this I was. I believe you. I love that you've just got back from a lovely holiday in Rome and you're like, the most important thing in my year so far was actually the Great Pottery Throwdown final. I mean...

I love Rome and I had a delightful time me and my mum went to Rome it was her 70th birthday so I took her to Rome and we went and did many delightful things and then I came home but those potters watched Pottery Throwdown amazing it's a delightful programme of fundamentally low stakes and people doing very well at a thing and I like that very much anyway the

The post that you sent me is a picture of an iron hand. And it says, the iron hand of Guts von Berlichingen, 1480 to 1562, a knight and mercenary who lost his right arm in a siege. Now, point one, this is a picture of a left hand. Just got to get that real clear, real quick. This is...

Not the correct hand. It is absolutely not the correct hand, but you will be surprised at how many websites I have found it listed as his hand, even though it's very clear that he lost his right hand in Siege. Then under this, there is a little note.

that somebody else has written. They are called Brunhidden Musings. Hello. Points about this. One, it was shot off by a cannon. Two, he continued being a knight for over 40 years after getting the Iron Hand. Three, it was delicate enough that he could still write with a quill while using it, which is important as he was described as a warrior poet. Remember that bit. After a merchant punching life suitable for an Elder Scrolls protagonist...

He was outlawed by the Holy Roman Empire. Friends of his used a high diplomacy role and a bribe to get him out, and then almost immediately he kidnapped a bishop. After the outlaw of the Holy Roman Empire to Electric Boogaloo, he was placed under house arrest in a castle he had purchased with all his quest rewards to spend the next 20 years drunk off his ass.

And then Fuckers Punk has said, I can't believe you'd make this post and not mention that his poetry contains the first known usage of the phrase lick my ass. Hero, do you want to know how many of these things are true? Oh, I'm going to guess. I think I'm going to go out on a limb and say he existed, which is not always the case. It's not always the case. He did exist. So that's good. He did exist. Yes. I think he did lose his arm. He did.

I think he did write poetry. Ah.

No. I don't think he did. He didn't write any poetry? You don't think he wrote poetry? I don't believe that he wrote any poetry. I need German speaking, reading listeners. I know we have a lot in Germany and Austria. I don't read enough German to get through because most of the stuff that is written by him, I did get a crap translation of his autobiography and read that and I couldn't find really any references of poetry to it at all. Interestingly enough... Maybe he was just modest. Pardon me?

Maybe he was just modest. Maybe. He didn't want to brag about it. I mean, he wrote an autobiography, so that's quite good. So he did some writing and he talks a lot about writing accounts of things, but he doesn't talk anything about poetry. Okay. Lick my ass is now attributed to him forever and ever and ever. And there is no way that can ever be removed from him. Mm hmm.

But it actually comes from a play that was written about him by Goethe of Faust fame, who saw him as a... Or kind of imagined him as a fighter for individual freedom who got tangled up by the bureaucracy of the modern world. Right. And as a kind of like...

emblem of German individual greatness. The play is so fictionalized that it has him die young when he lived until he was 80. Right.

And at one point in the play, he is being, he's surrounded and besieged in his castle. And an army captain comes up to him and says, will you surrender? And he says, er kann mich am Arschen lechen, which is he can leg my arse. I think I probably would have worked that out if you hadn't provided the translation. I mean, you know, I'm helpful. I'm giving it to everybody. So that is actually a quote from...

A lot of things are like the apparently correct. He apparently really said this, but he doesn't say it in his autobiography. And that's the only thing that we have that he ever wrote. And the only place that it was ever written down was in the play by Goethe. Is that like 200 years later? Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. Yes. About that. So not super duper reliable. No. So his poetry is absolutely not the first known usage of the phrase lick my ass. It is in fact a play. So this is my bullet points. One, this is a picture of a left hand.

This is where I started to think I was immediately losing my mind. So I then looked up to find out which hand this was, like whose actual hand is this. You can see pictures of what is allegedly his hand on Wikipedia. He had two.

I looked at his Wikipedia. Yeah, so he has like a kind of rubbishy one and then he has a fancier one. A fancy one. Beholding his quill while he writes poetry. Allegedly. A thing that I'm going to continue to believe. Notably also not in his autobiography. I read his autobiography, which was republished. It was originally called just like my autobiography or like the autobiography of...

And in the 1980s, a brilliant, brilliant publicist somewhere, a publisher in Germany, republished it under the new title My Feuds and Actions. Excellent. Excellent. Here's what I did and no, I'm not sorry. Yes. So I find that delightful. Anyway, I then found the image that had been kind of clipped for this post and found it in various places. And it always...

claims to come from something called the F.W. Poole Collection in Berlin. The F.W. Poole Collection in Berlin does not exist, as far as I can tell. If anybody is in Berlin and can tell me that this is a real collection, then I will love you forever. But I have done as much searching as I can humanly do, and every search engine that I can find, including some weird ones...

I have tried everything and I cannot find an FW4 collection. If you search for it, the only thing that comes up that is that is this image. Which...

I think somebody made it up. Yeah, yeah. That sounds about right. I don't know who. It'll turn out it's somebody's weird niche audio drama, you know, like riffing on the Magnus archives. It's the F.W. Poole collection. The F.W. Poole collection. But they only did one episode and it was about that hand. So I was now fairly far into this. And this point I wrote, I have spent 45 minutes looking at iron arms because...

Because I found a list that somebody had made on a random, I think, Russian wiki of every iron arm that has ever been identified. Sure. And I eventually, by comparing a lot of pictures of iron arms to this picture, think I have discovered what this is a picture of. It is a picture of a mechanical arm held in the Royal Armory of Sweden, which on their website, which I have the link to, is listed as War Booty from Warsaw.

1655. Okay. It is stated to have been used by Gunterfeldt, court equerry Carl Gustav Gunterfeldt, who lost both of his hands in the Battle of Klischkow in 1702. And do you know, if the post pretending to be about our fella had used the other hand of this guy who got both hands blown off,

We'd never want to know, would we? No. Yes, the only evidence that I can find that it was gentle enough to hold a quill is the Wikipedia page, which has no reference. I read his entire autobiography. He comes across as a prick. No, really? Who is...

His autobiography largely seems to be him trying to defend himself. The specific thing that they are talking about with the mercenary punching, he does kidnap a lot of mercenaries all the time, largely because he is in feuds with cities all the time. And he'll be like, obviously I was in a feud with this city because my friend went there and then he disappeared and then I had to go and declare war on them.

Sure. One of the ones, he says he kidnapped some random merchants who were traveling out of Nuremberg. And basically, he would just take people hostage and then they would pay a price. And then he would just go backwards and forwards forever and ever. He kidnapped a load of random mercenaries and random merchants, one of whom he had previously kidnapped twice before. Oh.

And this was the third time. Excellent. Enemies to lovers slow burn. It was the second time that he had kidnapped him in six months. Amazing. Amazing. And basically his account is that it was all very unfair that he was given this imperial ban because he barely terrorized them at all. And all of the beatings that they were given were done by other people. It wasn't even his fault. He's like, it wasn't even my hand, your honor. It

It's made of iron. Exactly. He mentions his hand once in the entire autobiography. The rest of it is just him justifying being sort of a bit of a prick. And he talks about how his hand was cut off or it was shunned.

shot off by Nuremberg which is so that was true yes that is true it was shot off although fascinatingly he uses a word that seems to be the only use of the word which was verhschlangen or something like that it was definitely schlangen because Google tried to translate it as snake and I was like I think a snake bit it off so I had to do a snake shot him a bit of searching about in order to find out what the fuck they were talking about but it was shot off with some kind of large gun so that's fair okay

And it like, he kind of shut off and then he talks about how it was dangling off and he had to find somebody to go and get him a doctor. And then he had two days where he was very sad. And then the entirety of his talking about it is that he was super sad that he was ruined as a soldier. And then he remembered that his father had once told him about a servant called Coppola who was an enemy of Duke Jorgen von Behn. And that's everything we know about that man. Yeah.

who only had one hand and had accomplished something in the field against the enemy just as quickly as everyone else and it occurred to me that I should call upon God and I would still be able to fight therefore I thought that even if I had an iron hand or whatever then with God's grace and help I would still be good in the field like a wholesome human being

And now that I have been fighting with fists, hands and arms for almost 60 years, I truly cannot say or believe anything other than that with the mighty, eternally merciful God has been wonderfully and mercifully on my side of me in all my wars, hands and arms.

I love that he's like thanks to God who by the way agrees with everything that I have done just in case you forgot. He's very merciful to me and not really any of the people who I fucked up. And with the power of God and my big iron hand I can still punch merchants in the face. He can. He's very happy about it. He doesn't say anything about quills and he never meant

never mentions his hand ever again the portrait your painting is not really of the warrior poet it's not a warrior he's not a warrior poet and his autobiography is quite like and then this happened and then this happened and then this happened it's not like delightful he didn't kidnap a bishop he kidnapped a count called count philip the second count of waldock eisenberg he was put on

put under an imperial ban twice. He was imprisoned at various points. At one point, hilariously, he was forced to join a rebellion. They were like, you are going to lead our rebellion. He was like, I don't want to. They're like, yes, you are. And then eventually he was imprisoned for a while. He was put under oath various times. And then he went and lived happily in his castle, which is true. He did buy a castle. I think he might have already had the castle, but he did have a castle. And it's

He had a nice life with two wives and he had nine children. Wow. Who I'm sure loved him very much. Don't know why we have added drunk off his ass. A thing that is hallucinated by this person who has turned him into an Elder Scrolls protagonist who is like drinking mead and rolling around. He paid the bribes. He does sound a bit like somebody...

D&D and refusing to let anyone else have a good time while they're playing D&D. He does sound like that person, yes, actually. He does sound like the guy who's like, I just fucking killed a merchant. And you're like, okay, but can we, okay, that's great. This is, this is... I kidnap him. From the autobiography, he approaches everything with a kind of pragmatism. I don't know

of like and then obviously I was in a feud with Nuremberg so I kidnapped a load of their merchants and then I sort of harassed them a bit but then they paid me 200 gold coins so I let them go and then I went and did da da da da da da da da and it's all very like self-justifying and like he was never a bad guy

He just found himself in a lot of situations where he was at war with people. What else are you going to do when you're in a feud with the city of Nuremberg? That you started. What do you want me to do? Of course I'm going to kidnap some people. Like, duh. He is profoundly unromantic about everything. And yeah, if anybody can tell me that he did write poetry, I will take it back. If there are German listeners there out there in the world who are like, actually in German, his poetry is very famous. Yeah.

Or like we didn't learn them in school. Then I will issue a formal correction. But currently, having read his quite boring autobiography, I think he's a more boring man than you think. His hand is cool. It's not that hand, which is cooler. No.

No. Yes. I think my problem with this is heroizing and turning him into a video game character. Like there is a desperation to make some people relatable in a way. Well, and I think he's... Because, you know, I have done some history at university. You have done history at university. And that makes me an expert. Having done one course in history, you know all the things. Yeah, exactly. I know all the things. But the thing that...

that they drilled into me immediately because I did my undergrad was in theology and then I went into history for my masters. And so I was sitting there going, I've never actually done history and I don't really know what it is. And so I had to write a whole essay about doing history is telling a story about the past. History and the past, not the same thing. You have to narrativize it in order to say what happened.

In that retelling, you get to make a lot of different choices about how you present things and how you talk about things and how you frame things. And the thing is, you can narrativize this guy. You can tell a story about this guy that is actually true, that is also very funny. Yes. That's the thing that I find annoying, is that he sounds to me like a very funny, like,

blockhead rugby player kind of like well obviously i fucking punched him yes and you're like have you thought about maybe solving any of your problems without kidnapping and he's like what all of my problems are to do with people not paying me to release them for being kidnapped yeah and you're like okay but it's not actually the only source of of money for example

you know yeah there's a fun there's a fun version of this there's also another fun version of a guy who so he never mentions his hand again in that autobiography and then when you look at his funerary monument that he built himself he has two hands in it so

So he obviously did not love that he had one hand and an iron hand. This is not something that he's like super proud of. He's not like, I am the man with the iron hand. I will punch you with my iron hand. He's like, oh no, this is very embarrassing. And therefore it's fairly funny to imagine everybody being like, that was a cool iron hand. Oh, the guy with the iron hand? And you'd be like, no. No, I've got other things. Yeah. Good.

I do other stuff. I've got loads of kidnapping. Do you want to hear about my feuds? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Or maybe like I'm going to make up a guy and pretend that it's him because that's what we do on Tumblr. That's what you do on Tumblr.

Yeah, maybe he's just got it blown off and was like, and it's like hanging off a thread. And then he sticks on his new one and gets right back to punching people. And he never mentioned it because it just it didn't slow him down. I mean, it doesn't seem to have slowed him down, except for that short period where he thought that he wouldn't be able to fight anymore. Two days where he was a bit sad because he thought he wasn't going to be able to fight someone. Yeah. And then he remembered other people. Yeah. You know.

God wants him to fight people, actually. Yeah, he does. So that's okay. And yeah, and God bless him. He did. He got 60 years worth of fighting people out of his life. Amazing. And then, as far as I can tell, lived fairly happily. Yeah. And made normal levels of drunk with his many children. He had like seven sons. So I imagine he was delighted. Perfect. And as we know from Henry VIII, there's no greater sign of God's love than a son. Yeah. Yep.

Look at you pretending that you know what I'm talking about. I do know what you're talking about because I just listened to Simon Sharma telling me about Henry VIII. Oh, very good. Yeah, so there. I do know what you're talking about. I just don't have any fun jokes about Henry VIII. I don't really like him, so I don't pay any attention. Nobody likes him. There was a YouGolf poll recently that was...

It was mentioned on the Rex Factor Discord. And he was like the second most unpopular king in English history. Really? The one that people have like the most unfavorable thoughts about, like more unfavorable. Okay. Okay. Because I was like, if they were voting for, were they voting for popular? Were they voting for unpopular? They were voting for unfavorable. Do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of this person? Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Because that's a little different, because if you were asking, I can imagine people going, one of the middle Georges has the...

the least amount of positive responses because everyone goes which George which George are we talking about no one knows anything about George II no yeah no the funny thing about it was that he did terribly but John and Oliver Cromwell did significantly better like they were solidly in the rhythm that's really good that's really good so there are people out there being like I don't know I think he had a point I kind of hate Christmas maybe if we'd nipped it in the bud yeah you know who does like Drogheda anyway okay

But yeah, so people don't like Henry VIII, which is fine. That's very funny. He's very bad. Anyway, Hero, did you enjoy our trawl through Tumblr history? I hope I was able to offer an insight into the Tumblr mind. Because I have been on that website for 14 years. Oh my goodness. Yes.

It's been 84 years. But at this point, I can't survive anywhere else. I go on Reddit sometimes by mistake and it frightens me. I can't survive. No, you're institutionalized now. It's best to stay. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, it's best to just get off. Just stay where you know what responses you're going to get. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Thank you for joining us. Thank you. Next time, Oliver is going to be joining us because Janina is still away. And Oliver is going to be answering a question from Tyler S., which is, what's the history of pop music and how did it contribute to K-pop? So Oliver is going to use his training to tell me about pop music, which I'm looking forward to. His training as a professional career boo? Yes. Amazing.

Amazing. People don't know this about Oliver, but he's obsessed with BTS. So...

No, he has professional training in musicology and audio things and music history and stuff. That makes more sense. That's funny though. I'm going to pull a Tumblr and believe the funny version of the person instead of the real one. Just make up a version of Oliver that is unrelated to actual Oliver. Exactly. I'm going to live in a world where that's true. A hero, tell us again.

Where do we find you and your award-winning podcasts? Where do you find me? I make podcasts under the name Monstrous Productions. If you go to monstrousproductions.org, you will find me and my podcasts. So Monstrous Agonies, we do fiction. I will say that quickly before people go, ooh.

I'm a non-fiction podcast enjoyer. Time to tune in. Monstrous Agonies is a late night radio advice show for monsters. And Travelling Light is somebody travelling around the galaxy and meeting aliens and talking to them. It's all very gentle, very chill. You should listen. They're very good. They are.

They are very good. And if you're on Tumblr, hit me up at Monstrous Productions. Yeah. Tell them your feelings about whatever it is that you talk about on Tumblr. Whatever it is. Weird nonsense. Yeah. We've got the Ides of March coming up. Oh, yeah. It's a national holiday on Tumblr. It is the national holiday. And I do love the memes. So...

That's fine. If you want to find us, then you can go to historyofsexy.com and then you can ask us questions or you can access our Patreon and you can give us a bit of money every month and then you get to access the Discord and bonus episodes. And what else do you get? You get a sticker that I will send you with my very own hands from, and I've got a stamp now. So everything gets stamped with an SPQR stamp, which I really enjoy doing. Yeah.

And those are all good things. I don't know why you wouldn't want them. And also you can support us, which is nice for all of the Sunday evenings I have lost to chasing rabbit holes. Oh, like you don't love it. I do love it. I do love it.

Yes, the hours pass and then I blink and I'm like, it's 11.30pm and I've been doing this since 2pm. Yeah, and you can find us there. And next time we'll be talking to Oliver. And thank you very much, Hero. And I know that this will not stem the flow of terrible things that have come from Tumblr, but maybe it has in at least 14 years.

I quite like it. I quite like the lies, you know. They're little fictions that waft past me in the breeze of my life.

like people telling telling me little fake stories about the world little fake they live in a different world to the rest of us yeah yeah with a girly pop ocean and a billion year old homer yeah and a left hand that's also a right hand it's quite dreamscapey really and where elder scrolls is basically just the middle ages yeah yeah it's delightful well thank you hero bye thank you emma bye

I'm done with the sea. Twinks who used Uru speak. This is great. Don't edit any of this out. This is vital stuff. Thank you. This is great. I think we should keep all of this in. Sad virgins who can't drive. What are you fucking talking about? Lick my arse.