oh my god this New Yorker article about the Titan holy fucking shit fuck???

Some notes: 1. the electrical system was designed by engineering undergrads who were working as interns. 2. because it is illegal to take passengers on an unclassed experimental submersible, they called the passengers "mission specialists" & instead of buying tickets they made donations. 3. the satellite beacon was held onto the outside of the sub with zip ties. 4. when Lochridge (the whistleblower) quit, Stockton Rush asked HIS FINANCE DIRECTOR if she wanted to be the pilot and she was like "sir I am an accountant" and the experience of having her boss ask his accountant to be the pilot made her so freaked out that she ALSO quit the company 5. the carbon fiber used to make the hull was bought from a deep discount from Boeing because it was past its expiry date for use in airplanes

AND MUCH, MUCH MORE

Michael “I’m Batman” Keaton

me: “yeah I dated a guy in high school who came out as gay. it was before i knew i was a boy so needless to say it didn’t work out”

coworker: “damn dude was preordering”

other things this coworker (who is a cis guy) has done/said:

—got confused about why I’d never been a boy scout because he forgot i was trans

—told me he was gonna get top surgery scar tattoos to match me after i get mine

—laughs at all my trans jokes, even if they’re supremely unfunny

—calls me big dog (and him little dog) even though he is about as tall as two of me

— “I can’t believe she would say that transphobic thing to you. In June? Pride month?”

Once I said "My gender is whatever's funniest at the time" and my coworker stops dead in his tracks, turns slowly and says "So are your pronouns honk/honk?" killing me instantly

The most beautiful footage of strangers dancing in public… https://twitter.com/Thorayaaa/status/1660180658646568967

its like a real life version of that children’s song with the magic bridge that you had to dance across

Highlights: --all the old people --one dude who starts doing the Cotton-Eye Joe and has the steps on lock --quinceañera girl with a dress bigger than the circle --lots of kids but particularly the dude who's doing the helicopter with his little girl --an entire section of Millennials doing dance moves I recognize, oh the nostalgia

Demon and angel (or two idiots)

Dang it guys

we only ever talked about HALF of why these scenes were a big deal, like I just realized this today and my heart is going insane.

It’s not just that Crowley’s pissed at Gabriel for treating who he thinks as Aziraphale this way, the last thing he says to the people about to kill him is a benign and peaceful wish to see them again.

And like- this is Crowley trying to replicate Aziraphale to a T. So he legitimately just sees him as this endless well of compassion, someone who is always warm and accepting. It’s not just their friendship throughout the years, he remembers Aziraphale’s kindness on the Eastern Gate. When the angel had absolutely no reason to trust this random demon who just slithered up next to him. Crowley knows that he’s loved. Maybe not like that quite yet (although he’d be very wrong), but he knows that around his friend he’s always welcome and safe.

And Aziraphale?

Well he just thinks Crowley’s the coolest fucker alive, like he is laying it in THICK and enjoying every second. Listen to that charisma, look at that smirk. These are traits that are typically only appreciated in the context of how good it makes Crowley at tempting, a job he hates. But Aziraphale doesn’t see someone manipulative or regard this persona as signs of his “demonic nature”, he just sees Crowley. Someone charming, fun loving, and cute.

This is when we get to know precisely why they love each other, what exactly they see in the other.

eminem’s got about lyrics about how the secret service interviewed him, so a journalist FOIA’d info about eminem from the secret service to fact check his rap

it turns out the secret service investigated eminem because of lyrics threatening trump and ivanka

and they really did interview him

and when one of the secret service agents started reading the threatening lyrics out loud eminem started rapping along 

and they noted that

@afloweroutofstone​

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6515270-LEOPOLD-Secret-Service-FOIA-Eminem.html enjoy

I’m sorry to report that this is a W for Eminem

Camels chilling at the beach in Morocco

Unrestrained summer fun

This is my primary ds9 takeaway

we think of this comic so often in my household that we knew what we had to do for the next birthday that was coming up

elementary month, week three → favorite relationship: marcus bell x joan watson x sherlock holmes

Tom Cruise as Jack in Legend (1985) dir. Ridley Scott

Tumblr Code.

This is an absolute tumblr relic. I feel like an archaeologist right now. This is incredible that this is on my dash.

date of origin: 2nd of july, 2012.

Bro what it’s the second of July 2020. Happy 8th anniversary of this classic tumblr post!!!!

And now its 10th. Yay!

I almost told someone at the aquarium that I liked their shoelaces, but then I noticed their whole general vibe and outfit and was terrified that they would say “thanks, I stole them from the president”. So I chickened out and just said I liked their tattoo. 🙈🤷‍♀️

Always go for it

I have p.s. I like your shoelaces in my dating profile

All you gotta do to deflect is, “it’s an old meme/if you know, you know”

been reading cicero's rant about words being given obscene meanings and i don't think i've ever seen a latin sentence that made me burst into such immediate and violent laughter before

had a couple people be like "i have no idea what this means" so to clarify: the word penis in latin originally meant tail and only later got the sense of, uh. penis. so this is cicero complaining that nowadays all these hooligans are using the word "penis" for naughty purposes

Thank you for this post, I will be showing it to every boomer who ever complains about how the kids these days are butchering the language.

Which is especially funny because the Romans had a very rich vocabulary for being rude. And a lot of it got very well preserved, unlike some other ancient cultures where the only people who could write were scholars and priests and the like, who weren't going around talking about slurs all that much. Not the Romans. We have a city full of rude graffiti that got preserved when the nearby volcano asploded, and poets like Catullus who loved to get FILTHY. He wrote poems about love and lust, for men and women, and he wrote poems about people he fucking hated, and he spared no invective.

So the Latin has a bunch of rude words, we still know about them, and the hilarious thing about this quote is that it's an ancient Roman complaining about a word for penis... And it's the one WE STILL USE, SOME TWO MILLENNIA LATER.

I sorry Cicero, you lost this battle, hard.

He could have been complaining about peniculus (little brush), mentula (prick), sopio (penis), vomer (plowshare), verpa (hard on/ literally penis with retracted foreskin).

But nope. He picked the one word that ended up in English.

BTW one of my favorite things about English vocabulary that you can't not see once you realize it's there: there was a period in Englandwhere the upper classes spoke romance languages and the lower classes were germanic, before this all melted together into the Frankenstein's monster we call English

So English has a lot of cases where we have two words for the same thing, but one is formal and medical and polite, and the other is rude.

Why is copulation clinical and fucking rude? Because "copulation" is Latin and "fucking" is germanic. Same goes for "feces" and "shit", "vagina" and "cunt", and so on.

Interestingly this goes for some other words too, in a way that makes sense if you think about it. You know how we have different words for some animals and the food made from those animals? Like, "cow" vs "beef", "sheep" vs "mutton", "deer" vs "venison".

It's the same thing! Just not always going back to Latin, sometimes it's just to old French. The animal is germanic, the meat is romance/Latin.

Why? Well, think about it. You've got a class system. You've got upper-class rich people eating their fancy meals, and a bunch of poor working class people raising the animals on the farms. The animals get germanic names, and the meat get romance names, because Lord Snooty What'sHisFuck only ever sees a cow when it's cooked up and on his plate. So he calls it "beef", since he speaks something like French, and the guy who raised Tasty Betsy called her a "Cow" because he speaks something like German.

English has centuries of linguistic classism built into our very vocabulary! And it's really neat to notice and see how prevalent it is.

BTW to get back to Latin, another fun thing about how their assorted dirty words worked is that it implies a lot about their value system, and how they saw gender and sexual roles. See, they had a real thing about what we now would call "top" vs "bottom". We still have some of that, of course, but we tend to make it more gendered, and more about straight vs. gay.

The Romans didn't think "gay" was an insult. They did have a word for that! But they did use "cinaedus" as an insult, and the closest term we have is "cocksucker". Except they didn't really imply the homosexual nature of that insult... For them it was just about being the bottom in oral sex. "cocksucker" or "pussylicker", it's all the same. Similarly they had "irrumo, irrumare", which means "to make someone suck your cock", which is an expression of dominance. Again, it's not about the possible homosexuality: it's the topping.

And similarly, they had "pathicus", an insult that means something like the f-slur. But as always, it's not about homosexuality, as that's fine: it's about being the bottom. One of the worst slurs you could call a Roman man was one that meant he let people fuck him in the ass.

The bottom line (no pun intended): Linguistics are always interesting because they tell you so much about the culture that speaks that language. Romans had a culture-wide hang-up about topping and bottoming, and to this day English has a big formal/informal divide in our vocabulary because of who won The Battle of Hastings in 1066.

The bit about English having two sets of words is a linguistic phenomenon called a stratum. English adopted a wide array of Norman and Latinate terms - many of the more technical and clinical terms were actually adopted directly from the Latin used by scholars, which is why you'll also see them in other languages like German - which settled themselves in as a formal stratum. It also has a couple of others with more restricted uses, eg. a Greek stratum mostly used for science and an Italian stratum mostly used for music.

This is not something unique to English or even European languages. Thai has an extensive Indic stratum stratum drawn from Pali and Sanskrit that dominates formal vocabulary in a similar way to English's Romance stratum. Bahasa melayu has both an Indic stratum and an Arabic one, covering domains such as government and religion respectively. Japanese has an extensive Classical Chinese stratum, preserved in the on-readings of kanji.

Rewatching the winter soldier for the bazillionth time and truly, what I love about it, are the “everyday” heroes who tried to do the right thing:

This movie was about every person having the same energy as Steve Rogers; every person can be a hero if they choose to.

This movie is somehow more relevant in 2019 than it was in 2014.

kept tags: #winter soldier now feels like such an outlier#partly because.... think about it. where's everyone else in infinity war or endgame? i mean *everyone else.* the public. people.#age of ultron. civil war. infinity war. endgame. they all reduce nonpowered bystanders to pure collateral damage.#at least in the first avengers film they showed cops and firefighters trying to help fight and protect#but in everything after that? all the team movies? everyone but the heroes are just there to be menaced or killed#there's no brave civilians#there are barely any civilians at all#the streets and parks were totally empty in the earth fights of infinity war#'oh but it's a cosmic struggle you can't have somebody from brooklyn throw a tire iron at thanos'#uh buddy#that's steve rogers right there#that's the essence of his character and of so many heroic characters#I don't care how cosmic the stakes are#give me an underdog's fight or fuck off basically#give me nonpowered people who just happen to give a shit about their neighborhood and or world#give me brave civilians#give me the old german guy who told loki to go fuck himself#they demonstrate that the world is more than superpowered squabbles: it's a society worth fighting for.

Duuuuuuuuude, those tags. 😍

The Fugitive (1993)