Alarm cock is this anything

they call it a rooster i think

happy that we're raising awareness but you can't make a post about this without mentioning that they collaborated for the sole reason of combining their last names like this

Big fan of all those other purple links and how “Associated prime” is untouched.

Environmental storytelling

It's in the eye of the beholder

this is so sweet

if he was still alive I know in my heart that Terry Pratchett would have done a bit about Igors and Igorinas doing gender confirmation surgery by now. going into a lab full of bubbling vials and picking out a penis from a tank the way you pick a lobster. that one, please. you gotta be careful though because they'll really try to upsell you into getting two or three installed. people going to the clinic as pairs and just having parts swapped out for a discounted rate. maybe you actually just trade brains, that's even easier. Igorth have already been doing that thurgery for thenturieth.

#one day an igor forgets the lock the cage and a pack of penises escapes into ankh-morpork#the watch spends the next three weeks rounding them up

how DARE you leave this in the tags (affectionate)

Everyone knew it was best not to look too closely at Igor's jars.

Vimes was beginning to wish he had looked more closely at the most recent additions before Igor came lurching up the stairs to inform him:

"They have ethcaped, thir."

"Escaped. What has escaped, Igor."

"Thome of my.. appendageth, thir."

"Appendages."

"Yeth, thir. Of the... intimate variety."

"Of the intimate..." Vimes trailed off as the dawning horror overwhelmed his vocal cords.

He rallied. "Igor. HOW have they escaped? They are not known for their... perambulatory abilities."

"Really, thir? I've alwayth found them to have a mind of their own at timeth."

Vimes was staying calm. Yes. That was it. He was staying very calm. Definitely NOT thinking AT ALL about how Vetinari and... Good lord, The Times, would react to marauding pack of penises. Would it be a pack? Or would they go off on their own?

"I wath exthperimenting with cuthtom grown oneth, you know. For thothe who cannot grow their own."

"Err... what? Of course you were. I mean. Very good."

Pictured: An Igor harvesting appendages

#[a loud crash is heard from the lab] #[another igor runs past with a giant butterfly net. stopping briefly at the door to shriek 'THE VULVATHS''] (via @the-wave-finally-broke)

It turns out to be a brilliant feat of advertisement, as the people too shy or uncertain to go visit Igor rightaway effectively get a chance to discretely window-shop in public.

An unfortunate side effect being that a small girl, denied of her rightful need to be a Horse Girl by the limitations of being a native Ankh-Morpork child[1], would have adopted one of the larger Appendages of the pack and named it Free Willy. Her insistence that she could understand her pet through a bond of mutual sympathy was both touching and troubling, as was her announcement that Free Willy did not want to be attached to a governing body and forced into service, saddled with clothing, or made to perform tricks for audiences. With no Igor having the heart [2] to take it from her, the child was allowed to keep Free Willy, who lived for five healthy years in her family’s pigeon loft and eventually passed away from natural causes after a battle with another fighting cock. The child went on to write a well-acclaimed children’s book, The Willy that Would Be Free, which was, necessarily, a pop-up book.

[1] where an ordinary working class child CAN form a magical bond with a horse, in the form of a pie, labeled as beef.

[2] ha

Look, it got longer.

So did Free Willy.

Discworld Heritage Post

ant grooming herself on my wrist, set to chopins nocturne in c-sharp minor b.49

[Video Description: (ant) The ant is Camponotus pennslyvanicus, the Eastern Black Carpenter ant, and she is a queen. She has no wings so had likely mated and is looking for a place to live. She is about 2cm long and glossy black with a shovel-shaped head and large gaster.]

Yeah i have a dark past (being 13). Just an absolutely horrible backstory (being 13). It would keep you up at night if i told you about it (i was 13 one time)

did lemony snicket write this

people say that the Spaniel is a gentle breed of dog. and yet, when accelerated out of this railgun at 2,500 m/s directly towards this group of orphans,

“fish don’t even know theyre wet” and? you don’t even know youre luft (air equivalent of wet)

This is a really good example of how we can just make up words that work. “Luft” is a perfect word for this it feels correct and we understand and can feel it.

Like it would’ve necessarily work with other words but “luft” is a combination of sounds that means luft (air equivalent of wet).

Thank you but the reason it works is because it is a deliberately chosen word!

The closest word we have in English for ‘wet but with air’ would be ‘aerated’, which is the past principle of the verb ‘aerate’. As a multi syllable Latin derived word, aerated wouldn’t feel equivalent to wet even if you just used it as an adjective in a sentence- so to have something that feels like ‘wet’ I looked for a monosyllabic air-related word with a German root.

As many have pointed out in the notes, ‘Luft’ means air in a lot of languages, because it comes from the proto-Germanic word ‘luftuz’. It’s also used in English as a chess term, and is a doublet of ‘loft’. Because it’s rare in conversational English but has the right etymology to evoke the idea of air and the texture of ‘wet’, it is very easily appropriated for the concept of ‘air equivalent of wet’.

official linguistics post

official fish post

“Commander Vimes didn’t like the phrase ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’, believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’.”

–Terry Pratchett, Snuff

Caves are weirder and more varied than you think

my followers can have some cave pics, as a treat

Good reference for writers

Blind velvet worm, Leucopatus anophthalmus, Peripatopsidae

Found in Tasmania and considered endangered. As the name implies, they have no eyes.

Photos 1-3 by ggiribet and 4 by sclerobunus

Happy Terry Pratchett Day! 🐢🐘🐘🐘🐘🫓🌎🌌🌌🌌

god I genuinely love this meme

almost none of the reasons why i support abortion rights have anything to do with babies. really it’s more about the fact that I think the government shouldn’t be able to force you to lend all your organs to someone else and change irreparably in the process. is a fetus a person? I don’t care! If it is a person, I don’t want anyone to be forced to host one against their will! If it isn’t a person, guess what? Nobody should be forced to host one against their will! What’s a soul? What’s a person? When does life begin? IRRELEVANT! A world in which the government can force anyone to manufacture an entirely new human body at the cost of their own is not a world I want to live in!

This is it! If it’s not okay for the government to roll up to your workplace and grab you and take you to a hospital and take out one of your kidneys to give to someone who needs it, or pull you into a van and hold you down to take a pint of your blood for someone who needs it, it’s not okay for the government to force you to carry a pregnancy! Life should ALWAYS be a freely given gift that we give to one another!

"tits" is too sharp a word for what it describes

Oh my god this story on Ask A Manager’s request for Machiavellian triumphs at work