@lavaeolus As someone who wouldn't be here had their (Jewish) grandparents not been active members of the resistance, and who is here despite the fact that the vast majority of their "good and polite" neighbors did jack-all to help them, and couldn't even be trusted to keep their mouth shut most of the time … fuck that shit.
My brother and I have a game where every time we run into a coat of arms or unusual flag in the wild we snap a photo and send it to the other. The challenge is to identify it, and if possible even geolocate it. It's like GeoGuessr but for heraldry. We've gotten pretty good at it.
After doing this for a few years I have come to sort of want my own coat of arms (without the aristocratic / lord / monarchy bits of course). So here's my first attempt.
Blazon: field maroon, domestic cat sejant erect with bicycle wheel or.
100% here for no algorithm. But, a filter that shows my boosts only once would be great. Maybe if n *different* people boost the same thing show it to me again so I know it's popular. But I don't need to see the same thing 3, 4, 5 times a few days apart. Ironically it starts to feel more like I'm looking at an algorithm feed because instead of seeing toots in chronological order, my feed gets cluttered with older stuff. I don't want to turn boosts off entirely, though, because sometimes they're interesting.
It's Thanksgiving in the U.S. so once again I am here to tell you about Tisquantum. Did you ever wonder how the pilgrims communicated with the Wampanoag they encountered? Maybe you just assumed they used simple hand gestures (because that's how you communicate with “savages”). 🙅♂️ NOPE!!! When the colonizers landed out strolled Tisquantum, who greeted them in perfect English!
Tisquantum was abducted and enslaved in 1614. He lived first in Spain and then in England. Then in 1619 he sailed back home, serving as an interpreter, only to learn that everyone in his home village had died of disease. He eventually moved in with a neighboring band which is where the settler colonists met him. He ended up being an important diplomatic link between them and the locals.
From there the dealings and double dealings between the various local bands, Tisquantum, and the the settlers gets complicated. There is a lot of history there full of actual people with complex motivations. The bidirectional interaction between “new” and “old” world often get flattened into a single point, with a clean before and after. But there is so much more there!