Dr. Alexander Zawacki
@AChillGhost
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lecturer @ the university of Göttingen | medievalist - ghosts, the supernatural | multispectral imaging scientist
Joined May 2009
You’re British man. It’s like a four hour drive. Just go find out.
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You joke but I’ve seen Europeans emotionally overwhelmed by the realization that yellow school busses are real.
it's weird visiting american grocery stores because you'll just stumble across famous products you recognize. and they're often just shelved in the store like any other product, no fanfare. ran into this one while visiting nyc in 2011
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Congratulations both for finishing amd for very possibly being the first person in recorded history whose dissertation will be read by someone who is not their mom or on their committee.
Thrilled to say I passed my viva with no corrections and am officially PhDone.
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You all need to stop abbreviating “Secret Service” like that.
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You cannot imagine the disappointment that came from imbibing absinthe propaganda like this for years and then finally trying and finding out it just gets you really drunk.
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Not taking this sort of criticism from Brits sorry. I’ve heard how you pronounce literally any Spanish word.
just discovered how americans pronounce niche, need a moment.
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You can just log onto this website and get ratiod by the Holy Roman Emperor
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The shift from “have” to “of” is probably unstoppable but man I hate it.
Today is a miscarriage of justice. Donald Trump should NOT of been found guilty.
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Probably the worst part of premodern literature is coming across lines like “Of course, everyone knows the tale of Borble, that hero of ancient days, so I shall not weary the reader by repeating it here*”. * Editor’s note: no accounts of Borble have survived.
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Real ID is the most American thing that's ever happened. A Patriot Act-era requirement that has been delayed to next year, every year, for 20 years, because Americans simply cannot be bothered to get one.
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Grad school.
They need to invent the opposite of a gym. You go there and you just get more frail and sickly. Maybe instead of lifting you just sit in a cold dark room and starve.
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Man that is really not how I would expect the relative densities of those two liquids to play out.
finally finishing the day strong with a Gonster
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Britain is a fascinating place. I had not previously understood that a state could suffer from clinical depression.
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Single? Simply roam the country, aimless, landless, like some form of horny ronin.
Here's my advice to single American men who feel hopeless about ever finding a good woman to marry:. Take a month or two between jobs and drive across the USA. Stop at every gas station and truck stop, and eat every meal at diners during non-rush hours. Avoid cities; stop
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It’s extremely funny that as soon as COVID was even halfway over we all implicitly agreed to never talk about it again. Seems to be the default human response to plagues. You can read all of English literature from the 14th century and have no idea the Black death happened.
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Everyone flipped on this pretty hard once they all saw Canada giving the homeless strychnine and the Netherlands euthanizing anorexics.
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Lots of Germans love (a weird, romanticized, incredibly racist idea of) Native Americans that they got from Karl May novels and they get really upset if you tell them it’s incredibly racist.
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700 years ago this kind of question would’ve occupied the best theological minds for a generation and produced at least three schisms.
Jewish friend asked me a very funny legal question: “Can you break your Ramadan fast during the eclipse since technically it gets dark?” I had to hand it to him, I didn’t think of that 😂😎🌞🌆.
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Mandela effect stuff is mostly unsustainable as a concept once you remember how many people memed themselves into believing “sweet summer child” existed before Game of Thrones. That said the Fruit of the Loom logo used to have a cornucopia and reality has been rewritten.
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God German has the worst learning incentives of any language on earth. “But you can read Goethe in the original” brother I don’t even want to read Goethe in translation.
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At what point do you as a scientist start asking “is this stuff ontologically evil”
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I have a self-sustaining jar of germs that I’ve been cultivating for twelve years and I can’t bring it to Germany because customs forbids the unlicensed international transport of Slime
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Genuinely impressed by how bad the new window in Westminster Abbey is
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Everyone rags on the “somehow Palpatine returned” line in RoS but never mentions that the message he broadcast for the galaxy - the inciting incident for the entire film - is not actually in the film and was in fact an event in Fortnite.
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Blade Runner 2049 is the ultimate male fantasy film (a man comes to briefly and falsely believe that he is deserving of love).
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Every millennial I know has a story about smoking salvia and spending five thousand years in the nightmare dimension from Event Horizon.
something I miss about the late 2000s is salvia. It was a part of culture in a subtle way and smoking it sent you straight to fucking hell.
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The first time I was ever in Germany I met a nun who spoke no English, and I spoke no German, so we sort of hobbled through a conversation in Latin, to the total surprise of both of us.
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The Green Knight has a fair number of shortcomings as a film but it’s really rare that a movie manages to approach the sheer alien strangeness of much medieval literature.
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I want to stress again how many Germans believe they hold a position of enlightened moral superiority not despite the fact that their grandfathers were Nazis but because their grandfathers were Nazis.
@aprebrue @giulio_mattioli dude, I AM from a perpetrator family and grew up with Nazi relatives. I KNOW their speech, don't you dilute yourself to think you can lecture me about not recognizing fascistic or Nazi propaganda when I hear it.
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This is going to sound insane but there are 700 movies that you legally can’t screen on Good Friday in Germany. It is also illegal to dance tomorrow in 3/4s of the country, with penalties up to €1,500.
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9% of Americans have a “very or somewhat favorable” of the Black Death.
Here's what Americans think about a range of things and concepts associated with the European Middle Ages — as you can see, it's a mixed bag!
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Good. The movies should be as weirdly hostile to the audience as the books are. 57 unbroken minutes of this should be a lecture on groundwater hydrology and its effects on desert ecosystems.
The official DUNE: PART TWO runtime is 2 hours 46 minutes according to Japanese film rating org.
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Lmao.
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German healthcare isn’t so bad but you need to actively bully the doctors into giving you medicine. Just full on dumb American “I will cause a scene in this emergency room if you do not give me something non-homeopathic this instant”.
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Almost impossible to overstate how much Tolkien would hate this.
Grok's recreation of some of the most captivating moments of J.R.R. Tolkien's Silmarillion:. It tookk 15 minutes and the results are surprising. A thread 🧵. 1. Laurelin and Telperion, the trees of Valinor
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It’s not fair that once you learn a language you have to keep practicing it or your skills atrophy. It should stay permanently unlocked.
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brandon has gone completely off the rails. he is ascending.
BREAKING: White House issues new policy that will require, by 2026, all federally-funded research results to be freely available to public without delay, ending longstanding ability of journals to paywall results for up to 1 year. Coverage coming on @ScienceInsider.
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While that is weird I’m not sure it’s weird enough to occlude the inherent weirdness of “nativity scene made of doors”.
saw this nativity scene made of doors and they gave mary a doggy door WHYYYY WHY WHY
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Only parts of Pennsylvania are suitable for human life as much of the region is saturated with dark ley lines, the miasmatic auras of dead gods beneath the hills, and other such psychic turbulence.
considering how densely populated and historically economically developed both the acela corridor and the great lakes region is, it's crazy that just no one lives here
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we gotta stop this thing where we pretend mental illness just makes you weird and quirky and bad at sending emails and could never cause any actual bad behavior.
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Having any idea what’s going on church politics is modernist. Real medieval catholics didn’t even know who the pope was. Sometimes there were two popes. for a while there was no pope. One time there were three.
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The words of the prophets are written on the library walls
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@theperfcat We are eliminating the formal viva, thesis defense now consists of arguing with 20,000 of the the worst people on twitter.
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Remember the six month period on here when leftist twitter had to pretend that him dressing like your unemployed uncle all the time was cool and good and possibly a revolutionary act.
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@crittysmittage The red solo cup has some kind of borderline religious significance that I still do not fully understand.
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9th century poem by a monk about his cat
People forget how truly new the very delicate pet thing is and how little greatest generation and older cared about pets. Once you get past the boomers, it is a different world with different values. They would be considered very cruel and cold to most people today.
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nuclear bombs creating mysterious crystal pentagrams is a bit on the nose, don’t you think
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American Christians believe that upon death their heart is weighed by George Washington. If it is heavier than the quill used to write the Constitution their soul is devoured by Benedict Arnold.
VIVEK RAMASWAMY: “When we face our founding fathers in the afterlife and they ask us what sacrifice did you make for your country we better have a damn good answer for them.”. 🔥🔥🔥.
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“We don’t understand why this burst into flame in the freezer” i do. It wanted to kill you. Next question.
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@EduardHabsburg I’m working on my courtly flattery, really hoping for some kind of sinecure at the embassy.
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computer why is buffalo diocese strapped for cash.
St. Anne’s Church, Buffalo, NY. Permanently closed. Sold to the Islamic community for $250,000 who are converting the historic church into a mosque.
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I think it’s great that Netanyahu is worried we’ll coup him. We should coup one of the client states every 18 months or so to keep them in line. Britain in particular has been a little uppity lately.
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@NathanTrout @josephcoward Most of you guys don’t even say kwassawn but ours is still better than your guacamole.
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There are whole academic books and articles wondering why Chaucer never really mentioned the plague despite living through multiple significant outbreaks and the answer is that it really sucked and no one wanted to think about it again.
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is he uh. allowed to say that
Pope Francis rants against ‘delinquent’ priests who withhold absolution.
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@jrobhaha They do that in Germany too. Sometimes the kids are in little wagons that the teachers pull. Extremely cute.
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@GuduleMartens @Glinner If people are getting euthanized for mental illness and anorexia, as they are, then it isn’t hard enough.
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lovely example of anti-homeless architecture pretending to be quirky contemporary art
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A german once explained the European idea of red solo cups to me as signaling that “you are no longer in reality. You have entered a mythical zone”.
one very cool thing is europeans coming here and realizing that everything they see on tv — yellow school buses, red solo cups, diners where waitresses serve you coffee from the pot — are real.
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Man post-Roman Wales was wild. You could become an immortal king forever inhabiting the shadowy borderland between myth and history by briefly controlling an area roughly the size of Bergen County, New Jersey.
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ive had both of those. what the hell is this website. every day someone tweets "has anyone ever seen a man in a red car?! didnt think so" and gets 40k likes.
i just randomly thought about this but has anyone ever had a male english teacher or a female history teacher ?? like i’ve never seen one.
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If I don’t take adderall I experience all past and future events simultaneously like Dr Manhattan.
tiktok ADHD videos are getting truly wild. “time blindness” has gone from “easily losing track of time; often late; trouble planning schedules” to “ADHD brains have no concept of temporal sequence, cannot form memories, and view the future as senseless chaos”.
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Lots of people replying to say “it’s because the modern stuff doesn’t have wormwood in it.” The modern stuff *does* have wormwood in it, at similar levels to the old stuff, and there’s no evidence that wormwood caused the hallucinations reported in the 19th century.
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Everything I have said in German in the last 12 months
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JESUS: Love thy neighbor, and-.JOHN: BEHOLD, THE THOUSAND-HORNÉD BEAST.JESUS: John.JOHN: ALL SHALL ROT IN BOILING BLOOD.JESUS: Johnathan.
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Here’s my advice to single American men who feel hopeless about ever finding a good woman to marry: . The riverine towns are unready for an attack by water. Come at night, come in storm. Let their first warning be the burning of their watchtowers. There is gold in their churches.
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Her: Sprechen sie deutsch? . Me: nein, es tut mir leid. Sprechen sie Englisch?. Her: ach, nein. Me: uh…Latine scis?. Her: …ja?. Me: Salve, soror!.
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Learning about the movies you’re not allowed to show in Germany on Good Friday
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Catholicism is really special, very few other churches have to deal with what are essentially rogue wizards.
Self-professed archbishop known for ‘healings and exorcisms’ denounced by Rome. ✍️ Crux Staff @Crux:.
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a thread of archeological finds from pre-Christian Britain that creep me out.
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@wheatfrom You guys had like fifteen years of Tory government and a very high salary in the UK is now comparable to a Dunkin Donuts manager in Ohio. You’re in deep trouble brother.
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@krillyboy Worse than that. When I was a waiter in wales I would regularly get people ordering jalapeños (jah-lah-PENN-oh).
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I dreamt that orca whales could speak, and when ending a conversation with them it was customary to say “may we meet in the New Jerusalem”.
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Similarly psychiatrists no longer use Jung because too many patients were reintegrating their psyches with the fullness of the collective unconscious leading to several of what the American Psychiatric Association called “Dune type situations”.
few know this but freud actually got ppl thru therapy process v quickly. weeks, months. thats why therapists dont use freud anymore. not bc hes unscientific (whole field is unscientific, replication crisis etc etc) but bc his stuff works too fast so you cant make as much money.
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Yeah it rules. One of the better m books I’ve read in a while
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@ladygreenkirtle “I’m looking for the man who killed my father” - at least a conversation starter . “I’m looking for a nubile IHOPess” - escorted out by the police.
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@DukeeB69785 @MatthewSitman Painting their faces red was a really nice touch. Really sold their commitment to authenticity.
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not kidding about this
they’re right. the cheesecake factory is a ritual space oversaturated with esoteric meaning. it’s Karnak designed by pre-9/11 American Boomers.
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@TheBajaDragoon In germany we don’t have air conditioners or clothes dryers and we pay taxes to the Church, it’s absolutely a land of peasants.
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Even at the time you could see this coming. There was a tweet in like April(?) of 2020 to the effect of "When this is over I am never going to think about it again. I will pretend not to know that you're talking about if you bring it up".
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