this handsome-ass motherfucker is george gordon lord byron, romantic poet, ladies’ man, lords’ man, greek national hero, and all-around beautiful fuckup. yes, he’s dead. yes, he’s wearing a laurel wreath. yes, those bedsheets are artfully draped as fuck. don’t question it. this shit happens.
in january of 1816, byron’s wife left him, mostly because he was pretty terrible to her. a former lover of byron’s, lady caroline lamb, decided that this was a fabulous opportunity to ruin his life. (lady caroline lamb was… a lot like byron, actually. she liked to dress up as a dude, which byron found sexy as fuck, and be scandalous, which byron… also found sexy as fuck. after she and byron broke up, she made a huge bonfire in the english countryside, in which she burnt portraits of byron and things he had given her. then she had local village girls dance around said bonfire, singing a song of her own composition. contrary to popular belief, this song was not “we are never ever getting back together”.)
byron had told ms. lamb quite a lot of things he shouldn’t have; the most pertinent were that a) he was getting it on with a fuckload of dudes and b) he was also getting it on with his own half-sister, augusta. caroline lamb, being caroline lamb, told byron’s newly estranged wife. at which point the sodomy and incest made it into the divorce papers. at which point the entirety of england was suddenly talking about it.
soooooo amidst a cloud of scandal byron swanned off to switzerland with a cute young doctor (though not before throwing a goodbye party of viking proportions, which actually involved a cup made out of a real human skull that he had found on his grounds) and settled in a gorgeous house by a lake to do some artful lounging.
while byron had been sleeping with everyone in sight, percy shelley and mary godwin had been having troubles of their own. mary’s dad was a leftist radical, but wasn’t a big fan of his political followers (i.e., percy) coming around to sleep with his daughter. percy and mary did not give a fuck, and proceeded to make out on mary’s mother’s grave. this is literally true.
unfortunately, percy was already married, so he and mary proceeded to fuck off to switzerland with mary’s stepsister claire clairmont, whereupon they got their own house by the lake and decided to make friends with their new neighbor.
so, among byron, his doctor, percy, mary, and claire— well, mary and claire were not sleeping together, and i’m pretty sure the doctor was only sleeping with byron? but. apart from that.
other interesting events of those months were mary shelley inventing science fiction, byron hypnotizing the doctor into jumping off a balcony, and the doctor and byron sort of accidentally co-inventing what would become dracula.
it was a hell of a summer.
anyway, byron proceeded to get claire pregnant, and percy’s first wife died, and the doctor got pissy about being generally left out of everything fun and went back to england, and everyone sort of wandered over to italy and almost got arrested a few times, and then byron stole his baby from claire and stuck it in a convent, where it died.
then percy got caught in the middle of a storm and died, dramatically, and they burnt his body on the beach. mary got to keep his heart, which remained unburnt. they found its remains among her belongings when she died at the ripe old age of 53. it was very romantic. capital r.
and then byron decided it would be a great idea to help liberate greece from the turks, so he went to greece and got stuck in the middle of a fucking swamp doing literally nothing except giving people money and being sexy in order to get other english people to give greece money. and then he caught some fucking swamp disease, and his doctors were terrible, upon which he died.
there’s more— byron’s fake gay autobiographical poem, percy’s fondness for explosives, mary’s sassy feminist mother— but this has gotten long enough. i sure hope it’s been helpful, though!
mary’s sassy feminist mother? mary motherfucking wollstonecraft. nbd tho!
also ada lovelace is the spawn of lord byron so yeah there’s that too
HOW THE FUCK DID I NOT KNOW THAT ADA LOVELACE WAS BYRON’S DAUGHTER? LIKE, HOW IS IT POSSIBLE THAT I HAD NEVER LEARNED THAT? Dude, this whole family is amazeballs and should be canonized in an 8-part HBO miniseries called “BYRON RUINS EVERYTHING BUT SOMEHOW YOU DON’T CARE”.
This clique of what would nowadays basically be a bunch of mall goths are ultimately responsible for some of the most influential works of speculative fiction, on top of being the forebears of the first computer programmer.
There’s a reason Ada’s mom didn’t want her associating with poets.
Also check out this really amazing kid’s mystery (with slightly smudged timeline but the author explains it all in the afterward including the ridiculous entanglement of relationships)!
what was the first show y’all broke up with…you know like the first show you had that was your everything for a good amount of time and then it fucked up so bad that like you felt your heart breaking with sadness, disappointment and hurt and then you vowed never to see it again? i’ll start mine was shame/ess
what was the first show y’all broke up with…you know like the first show you had that was your everything for a good amount of time and then it fucked up so bad that like you felt your heart breaking with sadness, disappointment and hurt and then you vowed never to see it again? i’ll start mine was shame/ess
ARE computers flammable? I feel like they’re probably not?
This depends entirely on how much uncooked rice you have shoved in the floppy drive.
…Ok I feel like there’s a story behind this.
There is, yes!
After I quit school, I worked briefly as a computer repair tech. Going to people’s houses or businesses, fixing their various bugs, etc. While I would rapidly decide that field was not for me because of the one businessman who needed multiple “cup holder” replacements (you know, you push that button and that plastic holder thing with the hole comes out … I think it is technically call the “Cup Depository Tray”? CD, right?), he is not the most memorable encounter. No, that goes to one of the nicest ladies I ever encountered on this job.
She called us out because her computer had stopped turning on, and wouldn’t even make a noise when she tried to push the button. One day it had just shut off while she was using it and stubbornly refused to come back on, and could we please see what we could do to fix it?
So I go out there expecting some wire had gotten loose and there was no power getting to the machine or something. It happens sometimes if a machine gets banged around enough, or if someone fiddles with it wrong or is careless putting it together, computers are finicky like that. But as soon as I get to the box itself, I know it isn’t that simple, because of the smell. I have smelled computers with dust all up in them, that isn’t uncommon, but this is just vile and, more importantly, entirely new.
I am now more curious than afraid, so I open it up and there is a mass of goopy off-white mush spilling all over everything, parts of it are burnt to circuits, there is almost nothing untouched by the mass. But by far the worst off is the A drive. That is the obvious source of the problem, and the thing has … not “exploded”, but more burst from the pressure of whatever this stuff was.
So I ask the woman if she had used the floppy drive recently and noticed any problems, and she says no, not until the whole machine stopped working. But I come to find out what she used it for.
Turns out this woman was a devout Shinto practitioner and believed that her computer (among other things) had a soul that needed to be respected an honored. Which, fair enough. But she chose to honor it by feeding it a grain of rice every time she had to wake it up and disturb its rest. For years this kindhearted woman had been putting a grain of rice into the A drive every time she turned it on or woke the thing up from sleep mode. And eventually that was enough pressure to break the drive and start spilling out onto the internal bits, where the heat melted it all and caused no end of problems.
After that it was a simple enough thing to explain that there are better ways to honor and take care of your computer’s needs, what with virus scans or defrags and the like, but that poor device was entirely lost.
I guess the moral of the story here is that you can try your best to be good and still wind up hurting people? Maybe? Or else it’s that even the most horrible out of context problem isn’t nearly as frustrating as one middle aged jerk who won’t freaking listen when you tell him that CD trays are not for your dang coffee cups!
The end~
ok but im so taken with the fact that she was feeding her computer to apologise for waking it up?? thats so sweet????
On Sunday’s 60 Minutes, Julia, an autistic muppet, was introduced as the newest addition to the decades-old children’s television show’s cast.
After first appearing as Elmo and Abby’s playmate in a 2015 digital storybook for autistic children, Julia will be featured as a regular character starting in April 2017, Vulture reported.
The fact that Julia is a girl seems significant, as some researchers believe autistic girls are under-diagnosed. Read more (3/20/17 12 PM)
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