"Phonoaesthetics isn't my thing so I can't explain why, but German is an inherently funny language," exhibit A
I love it because it was a choice. They could have put the whole title in English, THE QUEEN. They could have put the whole title in German, DIE KÖNIGIN. Anyone writing at the spiegle speaks English proficiently, it was not an accident they choose chaos.
"batmans only superpower is that he's rich"
no actually it's his empathy and kindness and his desire to always help people in need fuck you
like I'm not gonna be the bitch to argue with nerds but I fucking hate the fact that due to the awful writing of countless cishet white men the one thing that actually drives batman to fight crime gets forgotten. for fucks sake nowadays people write batmans hatred towards guns as a FLAW, because "if you just shoot the criminals there'd be no problem" as if it's not only the guns batman hates but what they represent - the power to irreversibly take a life. I love batman, but I love him because he's empathetic and kind and strong and uses his kindness and empathy to drive his strength. but cishet white men use him as a power fantasy because they like violence I guess
I honestly always find the term ‘spinster’ as referring to an elderly, never-married woman as funny because you know what?
Wool was a huge industry in Europe in the middle ages. It was hugely in demand, particularly broadcloth, and was a valuable trade good. A great deal of wool was owned by monasteries and landed gentry who owned the land.
And, well, the only way to spin wool into yarn to make broadcloth was by hand.
This was viewed as a feminine occupation, and below the dignity of the monks and male gentry that largely ran the trade.
So what did they do?
They hired women to spin it. And, turns out, this was a stable job that paid very well. Well enough that it was one of the few viable economic options considered ‘respectable’ outside of marriage for a woman. A spinster could earn quite a tidy salary for her art, and maintain full control over her own money, no husband required.
So, naturally, women who had little interest in marriage or men? Grabbed this opportunity with both hands and ran with it. Of course, most people didn’t get this, because All Women Want Is Husbands, Right?
So when people say ‘spinster’ as in ‘spinster aunt’, they are TRYING to conjure up an image of a little old lady who is lonely and bitter.
But what I HEAR are the smiles and laughter of a million women as they earned their own money in their own homes and controlled their own fortunes and lived life on their own terms, and damn what society expected of them.
Just wanted to add that the suffix -ster was originally specifically feminine, a means of denoting a lady known by her profession. Spinster = female spinner, baxter = female baker, webster = female weaver (webber), brewster = female brewer. If one of the ladies named Alys in your village was known for selling her excellent weaving, you might call her Alys Webster (to differentiate her from, say, Alys Littel who was rather short, and Alys Bywater who lived near the pond).
This fascinates me for many reasons, but especially in the case of modern families with last names like Baxter or Webster or Brewster. What formidable and well-known ancestresses managed to pass on those very gendered names to all their descendants, when last names were changing from personal “nicknames” into indicators of lineage among the middle and lower classes? There’s a forgotten story of a fascinating woman behind every one of those family lines.
Resource for the history of the -ster suffix here.
it’s crazy how i don’t know what any of you do for school/uni/work? who are you guys outside of tumblr? what do you work as??
I’m shook at prev tags ur a CHEF?!? Was NOT expecting that tbh-
i was legit thinking about this today - what do you guys do (if you are comfortable sharing) - are you in school (if so, what are you studying) ? taking a break? figuring things out? working (if so, what?)
i genuinely want to know (it makes me feel like i know you all that much more)
So this is a great time of year to ask and because it’s a very short step between this username and my real identity, I don’t mind sharing specifics.
I work for a company that creates the most popular building, fire, and safety model codes out there. What does that mean?
If your state or municipality or country wants to adopt building codes but they don’t have the budget/time/resources/etc to create them from scratch, they can use ours! We have a rigorous and transparent system to create and maintain these codes, and we update them every three years based on proposals made by our membership as well as the general public! We had Accessibility Standards built into our codes before the ADA was settled law and currently have really thoughtful discussions happening around climate change & sustainable building, energy conservation, wildfires and the wildland/urban interface, and more!
It’s a great time of year to ask because we are currently having our code change hearings. These are publicly livestreamed events where suggested changes to the code are debated and voted on:
Building and fire codes SAVE LIVES. They’re essential and much like labor laws, are often written in blood as we work to ensure that disasters never happen again.
We also have educational courses and certification programs so you, too, can learn to be a Code Official. Certified code officials work for governments making sure that plans and construction stays up to code, but they also work for standards organizations doing The Science that we rely on and for other organizations helping lobby various agencies on specific issues like water safety, and really all the issues I mentioned above.
This is GREAT work and the company I work for is dedicated to making sure that the whole process, from the creation of the codes to the building of buildings to the day-to-day enforcement to the eventual demolition of certain sites are done with the safety of the humans living and working around those buildings as paramount.
If it sounds like something you might be interested in, please don’t hesitate to reach out – if I can’t answer your questions I’ll happily put you in touch with someone who can.
And for the next four days, you can watch a bunch of dedicated professionals create the future of building safety at the webcast above!
Ted Lasso is a romance between trent and ted if you read it the right way, which apparently is james lance's way (x)
keep your knives sharp and your dick sucked. or whatever gerard way said
For which he was the first engineer to be called a “steely-eyed missile man”.
The full story is amazing.
So Apollo 12 was struck by lightning 36 seconds after liftoff, which caused a power surge for obvious reasons. Instruments began to malfunction, telemetry was garbled, and the Flight Director was about to order the mission aborted.
However, a year before, Aaron had been observing a test at Kennedy Space Center and noticed some unusual readings during the test. On his own, he dug into the data and equipment, and found that the weird readings came from the little known Signal Conditioning Equipment (SCE) system, and that it could be set to Auxiliary, allowing it to operate in low-power settings.
So he’d seen the readings of Apollo 12 before… and knew what to do. And gave the recommendation, “set SCE to Aux”, which was passed up by the Flight Director and CAPCOM to Apollo 12. They obeyed the order, and what looked like a disaster in the making–the freaking spaceship was HIT BY LIGHTNING!–was averted, as telemetry was restored, and Apollo 12 went to the Moon without incident.
Let me just repeat that:
The spaceship was hit by lightning, and this guy knew exactly which switch to flip to fix it.
Jewish mysticism has been heavily fetishized and appropriated by the occult community at large. This highly-complex subject is often passed around between goyiche practitioners with little to no cultural/academic understanding of what they're working with. Instead of learning through the proper channels, they learn from widely-antisemitic historical occultists who also didn't learn through the proper channels. Despite never bothering to learn how to speak, read, or understand Hebrew, many will tout it as an inherently mystical language carrying Ancient Jewish Truths in it and use it on everything. To make a long story short, it's cultural appropriation and antisemitism. So my Jewish ass decided to fuck around.
A short list of extremely-specific lesser-known mythical monster tropes which I didn’t expect to be super widespread:
1. Ogres which, when slain, spawn huge amounts of mosquitoes out of their bodies.
2. Humanoid horrors that lurk at the tops of cliffs and kick passerbies down off of the ledge so that their mates and/or offspring can kill them.
3. Depraved ex-human cannibals for whom one of their feet has rotten away into a spike of bone which they then stab people with.
4. Creatures which resemble pitiful old men and beg people to carry them but their legs are actually tentacle-like “straps” which they use to kill or enslave their victims.
5. Hairy ogres with axe-heads sticking out of their chests.
6. Grotesque female humanoids with enormous, pendulous breasts, one of which they throw over their shoulder. (That last detail specifically shows up more times than you would think possible.)
7. Flying detachable heads. Organs hanging down frequent but optional.
8. The “animal that cannot lie down,” i.e. a monster without joints in its limbs that, you guessed it, cannot lie down and has to lean on things.
10. So. Many. Backwards. Feet. Usually as a means of making trackers think they went in the opposite direction.
11. Swallowers. I.e., monsters that swallow huge amounts of victims but keep them inside in their stomachs before spitting them out when slain. Most famously present in Sub-Saharan Africa, but basically everywhere.
12. Bisected humanoids. Creatures with only half a physical body, cut vertically.
13. Headless monsters with faces on their chests.
14. Natal revenants. The undead remains of women who die in childbirth, usually as some sort of ghostly Succubus.
15. Female creatures with hollow backs, the main giveaway of their supernatural nature.
16. Living meteor demons that spread disease.
17. Chicken-snake hybrids.
18. Rattite-snake hybrids.
19. Parrot-snake hybrids.
20. Monsters that fly around in the atmosphere, and if you look at them you die. (Related to number 16.)
21. In arid regions, RAINBOW TASTE YOU. (Because it signals the end of much-needed rain and is therefore seen in a negative light and personified as something malicious.
22. Owl demons! Tend to be witchy/hag-like.
23. Succubi whose only giveaway of their monstrousness is a single hooved foot.
24. People cursed into becoming weird donkey-things.
25. River blockers. Monsters who block off water supplies in order to cause droughts, and must be slain for that reason.
26. Monsters who inflict some kind of seemingly unsurvivable body horror on you, before resurrecting you long enough to go home at which point you promptly die for reals this time.
And many, many, more, but I’m tired right now. Might update later.
I recognize all but a couple of these, but would still want specific examples for all of them
that crying “babe I’m so horny!” meme but the response references the queen’s funeral holiday
so by the “babe I’m so horny” meme, you mean
aya getting shouted at by her dad, which turned into
the crying anime girl meme, which has now apparently become
image language is wild
why does she look like a dog, she practically has a snout, do all anime girls look like that in profile, is the lack of nose an illusion
Starting in the early 80s, there was a transition toward more simplified noses, ultimately manifesting in the tendency around 2003 to draw characters without any noses at all. There are two reasons for this: one is that the nose is not very expressive most of the time (unless you’re showing, like, snot streaming from nostrils) so there’s no point in spending space and effort on them that you could instead use on the eyes, eyebrows, and mouth. The other is that “big nose” codes for “white” – and if noses are barely drawn, any noticeable nose at all counts as “big”.
The transitional stage – the level of nose simplification that’s been normal for most characters in most styles from the mid 80s to today (and in some works in the 70s, like those of Leiji Matsumoto) – is to show a nose as a slightly bent line. This is great because realistic noses drawn straight on are very complicated. When a character is drawn in profile, though, the nose becomes visible as a protrusion! Until the 90s this was a major difficulty whenever a character was turning their head: how do you draw a nose that doesn’t draw attention to itself, even if a character smoothly turns their head? The solution was to treat the nose as a slight protrusion in the contour of the character’s face.
This became normal because of the specific problems of animation, but because characters and stories are constantly moving between anime and manga, manga artists quickly adopted it, and it’s been normal for manga to draw noses in the style shown above since the 90s, even when the manga in question would never be adapted to animation.
While it can look funny out of context to somebody not immersed in the style, the underlying logic is actually an attempt to support telling more serious stories. In the 50s and 60s, when practically all manga was light comedy, the style was much more cartoony and characters had a wide variety of probosces, and characters often showed their emotions the same way that they’d be shown in looney toons: dramatic and physically-impossible symbolic mutations of the entire body. The “bishojo style” that is the primary stylistic influence for almost all anime and manga today is the synthesis of two movements happening in manga in the 70s: shojo comics, aimed at teenage girls, were beginning to get emotionally and intellectually complex (in part because the genre, being dismissed as trash, was not getting much oversight from editors and censors, and became a place where politically dissident women, many of them lesbians, thrived and did the artistic experiments that had been getting them kicked out of theater and literary magazines), and to support these stories that were focused in the inferiority of characters and their relationships, a style where bodies were simplified & faces were made larger and more expressive was developed; at the same time, some mostly-male manga artists were annoyed by the lightness and child-centrism of manga and started a movement for darker-and-grittier comics called gekiga, where characters were drawn with realistic proportions and both the style & content was influenced largely by American action movies. These two movements merged into the bishojo style, which was used to sell more complex manga to older teens and adults; “bishojo” means “beautiful woman” & reflects that these comics were sold to men through the sex appeal of attractive characters & to women based on their grace and fashion sense (or at least, that was how many people thought about it at the time). In this new bishojo style, it would be normal to have serious and grounded dramas – and suddenly seeing a nose pop out of somebody’s face can break immersion. (As late as 1995, some anime kept more realistic nose sizes and suffered for it – ex., Escaflowne.)
This is an example of “normal” manga in the 60s (Osamu Tezuka’s Metropolis). Note the noses & general proportions.
Here’s some gekiga:
Here’s some classic 70s shojo (They Were Eleven, a classic space opera):
And here’s some goofy-ass noses in the 90s, Escaflowne:
Noses and nostrils are sometimes shown, for comedic effect (FLCL):
But are often more likely to be omitted (Nichijou):
Quick addendum: the details of trends in stylization in anime are fascinating to nerds like me; if you want to read a few hundred pages about the cultural currents involved in fashions in breast shapes, I recommend the study “The History of Hentai Manga” by Kimi Rito, although (being released by Fakku) it’s not as academically rigorous as I would personally like.
Through the wind and the chill and the rain And the storm and the flood I can feel his approach like a fire in my blood
Might just write a story about a guy who has insane shit happen to him that he has to deal with.
Like going to the library and accidentally getting involved in a secret society that worships Cthulhu sort of craziness.
Like giving a woman at a restaurant the heimlich maneuver and inadvertently releasing the sea-parasite that was controlling her which now on the loose sort of craziness.
Like finding a pocket dimension full of soul sucking demons in an office building and having to find them an alternative food source or else they'll invade our world sort of craziness.
Will do.
As a consolation, I will give him an annoying and excitable teen girl sidekick.
Thought about this more
I'm imagining that the Protag never gets any notable powers of any kind. Learns to handle himself in a stressful situation I guess, but like that's it
But when he deals with that Cthulhu cult, there's like one dude who was super deep in the cult who left it after coming to his senses due to Protag's interference, and he's grateful
And a few weeks later, he does the heimlich on a girl at a restaurant and a horrible sea parasite pops out, so he calls up this guy he knows who used to worship the elder gods and asks how to deal with the sea parasite
And it Cult Guy is able to find out that this sea parasite has been hiding from its ancient enemy (who is a sky demigod) for millenia, and so Protag and the Girl he did the heimlich on (who has to be involved in this because she's intrinsically linked to the sea parasite now) have to find the sky demigod and enlist it's aid
And then he's kinda stuck with Girl, cuz now she Knows Too Much and can't Go Back To Normal Life, you know? And so she tags along (whether Protag wants her to or not) when he has a meeting with the leader of a tribe of soul-sucking demons to work out some deal so they don't eat his coworkers, and it's not going well but she does something klutzy and the demon finds it cute and it nudges negotiations in the right direction
Until it eventually occurs to him to ask Sky Demigod if he knows of any other dimensions with stuff that's kinda like human souls that these demons could eat, and Sky Demigod feels somewhat indebted to them for tracking down his ancient enemy...
I originally envisioned every story being a self contained episode but I think I like your idea of interconnected debts and favors between stories better.
Red paper clip
if i was a bug i would find you every lifetime just to die in your drink
to everyone asking me if this is a threat or an expression of love: yes
It’s not autism acceptance if you need to hear that it is autism in order to accept it.
Took me a minute to process what this says. But yes this, very much.
If something needs to be called The Right Word in order to tick your Internal Tolerance Box then it’s not acceptance it’s lip service.
