This is long overdue, I think, but from now on I will no longer answer anonymous asks related to race or ethnicity.
If you don’t want my followers to know who you are, you can just pm me or request that I answer privately. If you don’t want *me* to know who you are, tough shit.
If you don’t want to reveal your main, you need to include your sideblog’s url.
i need to start collecting novelty lighters or i'll fucking die
i need every single one of these urgently
I have this one :)
utterly spectacular. endlessly charming. magnificent beyond magnificence.
you know who really needs Aral Vorkosigan’s lecture on honor vs. reputation? ZUKO.
For anyone unfamiliar with the Vorkosigan series, here’s the lecture in question:
“Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself. […] The friction tends to arise when the two are not the same. […] There is no more hollow feeling than to stand with your honor shattered at your feet while soaring public reputation wraps you in rewards. That’s soul destroying. The other way around is merely very, very irritating.”
Nothing makes me more emotional than Pakistani people’s comments on India’s moon landing 🥺🥺
Everybody knows that Europe is bullshit, but it's always fun when people cite plate tectonics as the reason why Europe is bullshit, because delineating the continents in terms of tectonic plates gives even more ridiculous results than delineating them in terms of geopolitics. If we're going by tectonic plates, Somalia is on a different continent from the rest of Africa and half of Japan is part of North America.
Thinking about those egg tubes
For those confused in the notes, these are mostly sold to restaurants. Egg salad and egg garnish in retaurant food needs to look attractive; ever notice how if you get a salad in a lot of these places, the pieces are always perfect slices with white on the outside and yolk in the middle? Most of a sliced egg doesn't look like that because of the shape that the egg and yolk is, so if they were just boiling and slicing eggs, they'd have to throw out more than half the egg if they wanted their slices to look nice.
These tubes are just made of normal eggs but boiled together in along tube shape. This way the whole thing looks pretty except the ends. That's more egg per egg! They also store and transport easier than separate eggs, and because they're sold precooked they save a lot of boiling and egg peeling time in the kitchen and result in a far more consistent product, cooked to perfection. Slicing up a big egg tube is much faster and produces better results than the kitchen staff having to boil and peel eggs themselves each time.
TIL about tube eggs. :)
And Sparta was not militarily excellent. Its military was profoundly mediocre, depressingly average. Even in battle, the one thing they were supposed to be good at, Sparta lost as much as it won. Judging Sparta as we should – by how well it achieved strategic objects – Sparta’s armies are a comprehensive failure. The Spartan was no super-soldier and Spartan training was not excellent. Indeed, far from making him a super-soldier, the agoge made the Spartans inflexible, arrogant and uncreative, and those flaws led directly to Sparta’s decline in power.
And I want to stress this one last time, because I know there are so many people who would pardon all of Sparta’s ills if it meant that it created superlative soldiers: it did not. Spartan soldiers were average. The horror of the Spartan system, the nastiness of the agoge, the oppression of the helots, the regimentation of daily life, it was all for nothing. Worse yet, it created a Spartan leadership class that seemed incapable of thinking its way around even basic problems. All of that supposedly cool stuff made Sparta weaker, not stronger.
This would be bad enough, but the case for Sparta is worse because it – as a point of pride – provided nothing else. No innovation in law or government came from Sparta (I hope I have shown, if nothing else, that the Spartan social system is unworthy of emulation). After 550, Sparta produced no trade goods or material culture of note. It produced no great art to raise up the human condition, no great literature to inspire. Despite possessing fairly decent farmland, it was economically underdeveloped, underpopulated and unimportant.
Athens produced great literature and innovative political thinking. Corinth was economically essential – a crucial port in the heart of Greece. Thebes gave us Pindar and was in the early fourth century a hotbed of military innovation. All three cities were adorned by magnificent architecture and supplied great art by great artists. But Sparta, Sparta gives us almost nothing.
Sparta was – if you will permit the comparison – an ancient North Korea. An over-militarized, paranoid state which was able only to protect its own systems of internal brutality and which added only oppression to the sum of the human experience. Little more than an extraordinarily effective prison, metastasized to the level of a state. There is nothing of redeeming value here.
Sparta is not something to be emulated. It is a cautionary tale.
at their communal tables, spartans ate nutritious but bland food, sometimes described as soup or gruel. asimov relates there was a contemporary greek joke, of course spartans don’t fear death, if all you have to look forward to is gruel every day, death seems preferable.
i posted similar thoughts on livejournal back in the day, i watched 300 and laughed out loud in the theater.
I think it’s only fair that two thousand years of idolising the Spartans is followed by two thousand years of roasting them to heck.
This.
The idea of dragons in modern times is so fun because imagine a hot summer day on your vacay and go to use the hotel pool and staff is like "valued guests we regret to inform you that the pool area is out of service at the moment, we apologize for the inconvenience"
And people like "wtf why" looking out their hotel room window and there's this. This dragon just curled up in the pool chilling, literally, cooling itself down
Some of the staff are trying to gently shoo him away and the dragon does a soft little "rrrrrr" like a grumpy cat and a warning puff of smoke and they're like "fuck it i don't get paid nearly enough for this" and no ones using the pool today sorry!
coworkers walking by my desk this morning: uhhh what is THAT
me: a spear
coworker:
me:
coworker:
me: oh, sorry, did you want more information than that?
Spear!
(feat. the sparkly pink backpack purse I bought for a costume and now use all the time)
you aren't obligated to ever label your sexuality btw. you can just have sex, hang out with people, and fall in love. labels can be useful, for both navigating what kind of relationships you desire as well as political organization. but if identifying yourself as something is debilitating, you are under no obligation to use that label even if you definitionally "align" with that label. nor are you obligated to tell everyone (or anyone) about your sexuality. you can also wear labels like a fun hat, and put it on & take it off whenever.
Do you love the song Butchered Tongue? Pay attention to these lines here:
So, may I draw your attention to the The Official Languages Act 2003 (Section 9) Regulations 2008 (S.I. No. 391 of 2008).
ok stay with me
In 2008, the Irish government passed legislation that made it mandatory for road signs in Ireland to have both Irish (Gaeilge) AND English names on them (or, in Gaeltacht areas where Gaeilge is still the first language, only in Irish). Here’s an example:
The Irish, or Gaeilge, is always above the English and italicised. This is because that while Gaeilge and English are both official languages of Ireland, Gaeilge is the ‘first’ official language
However, while it was technically only legislated in 2008, bilingual road sings in Ireland had been extremely common for decades prior to it officially being made law. In fact, the first bilingual signs date back to the early 20th century - before our independence from Britain!
In Tom Spalding’s book Layers: The Design, History and Meaning of Public Street Signage in Cork and Other Irish Cities, he found that the first recorded bilingual street sign was in Blackrock, Dublin (An Charraig Dhubh, Baile Átha Cliath). Their local council in 1901 rolled out yellow and black bilingual road sings as part of the Gaelic Revival.
The Gaeilc Revical was a period of time in Irish history that saw a huge resurgence of Gaelic art, sport, and language. Literature was written by Irish people about Irish history, current affairs, and folklore. Traditional Irish music was learned and played again. Gaelic games (Gaelic football and Hurling) spread across the country. And Gaeilge, our language, was to experience an incredible revival.
Despite Ireland’s long colonial history, Gaeilge actually remained the majority tongue until the early 19th century. However, a combination of teachers beating children for speaking it at school, the genocide of the famine wiping out mainly poorer communities more likely to speak Gaeilge, and the knowledge that speaking English unfortunately provided more opportunities than Gaeilge, the language was almost killed off. (This is shown most clearly after the 1800 Act of Union that meant Ireland was ruled directly from London, with no parliament in Dublin).
Although these maps make for grim viewing, Irish is so very far from dead. Our children learn it from the ages of 4-18 in school (though I believe it can and should be taught better, but I digress). Gaeltacht communities are still going strong particularly in the west of the country. There are more Irish-language schools (gaelscoileanna) than ever before.
And every day as we pass by road signs that display Gaeilge proudly, it is as a result of decades, centuries of people refusing to stop speaking our mother tongue despite incredible violence.
I am far from a fluent Irish speaker, despite my 14 years of learning the language in school. But what Gaeilge I have, I have proudly.
(The work isn’t over, however. I do not feel knowledgeable enough to speak on Northern Irish efforts to implement more widespread bilingual signage but anyone who wishes to share some info please do!!)
I'm so curious, is there any zoo in Lackadaisy?
If yes, what exactly do they keep there?
Yes.
Marmosets.
