me: if I become the evil overlord I will never harm my minions
[5 years later]
highly throwable imp: hoohoohee
me: hmm
Just checking in with the chuckable imp union, how's negotiations going?
it's really up in the air right now
Random worldbuilding for nothing in particular: Dwarvish last names.
When dwarvish workers and artisans first came to human cities for work, humans soon noticed that all dwarves seem to have last names ending in the same suffix. Soon enough they put together that these names don't go by families, but by occupation. Blacksmith is a blacksmith, Goldsmith is a goldsmith, a mason is called Stonesmith and carpenter a Woodsmith. And a horse breeder is called a Horsesmith.
(While humans would classify dwarf horses as ponies, dwarvish languages have no separate words for "horse" and "pony" and insist that dwarf horses are called horses since the way humans say "pony" seems degoratory.)
The word that humans previously assumed meant "smith" is simply the dwarvish blanket term for "one who works with their hands to manufacture/maintain." Humans originally started referring to any random dwarf they don't know with simply the suffix in a dismissive "they all have the same names anyway" sort of way, but in dwarfish society addressing someone you don't know in this way, "hey you, Craftsman" is considered perfectly respectable.
Once more dwarf society began to pour into human lands, humans noticed two other types of last names: -Trader, and -Commander. Traders are sellers, peddlers, merchants of all sorts, and while first encountering Silktraders, Goldtraders and Spicetraders might lead one to think that they are a class above -Smiths, they are not. Any street hawker, peddler or common grocer is just as much a -Trader as a merchant of kings is.
There are dwarfish jokes about how a farmer who grows vegetables and then goes to the town to sell them is a Turnip-smith at home but a Turnip-trader in the city, but getting the suffixes mixed up is a serious offense. Calling a dwarvish doctor a "seller of healing" instead of a "crafter of healing" would imply that they do their occupation for financial profit instead of a sacred calling, and is a stab-worthy insult. And they won't stitch you up afterwards.
The -Commander class is as one would expect, for leaders and commanders. The chief of a village or head of a clan is often known as "[clan name] commander", but more often it is the title for military officers and government officials. A centurion is called Hundred-Commander, a higher officer is a Thousand-Commander. The master of a spy network is "Commander of Secrets" and the national chief accountant is "Commander of Coin".
While dwarf societies are technically speaking autocracies with a single leader, humans have yet to reach an agreement about how to translate the leader's title. Most settle for "chief", as king/queen/emperor/empress would require knowing the current ruler's gender, and dwarves consider such information a matter of extreme privacy. The official dwarvish title of the ruler is "folksmith", "one who works with their hands to make/maintain a people".
This might be unpopular but I’m not going to use simpler vocabulary in my writing if it’s out of character for the narrator. If my POV character is a botanist, he’s going to call a plant by its name. If you don’t know what it is you can either Google it or move on just knowing it’s a plant of some sort.
I don’t like this trend of readers being angry that not everything is 100% understandable for them. I want my characters to be believable as people and sometimes people use words people outside of their field will not understand. That’s not a bad thing.
You don’t have to understand every word to get the gist of what’s happening. I’m not going to slow down an action scene to describe every weapon because someone might not know them by name. They can just assume it’s a weapon because that makes sense in the context of the scene.
I just had a debate with myself over using the word mezzanine, wondering if I should describe it instead. Ultimately I decided the character would call it a mezzanine, and therefore readers could look up a new word if they didn't know.
It's how I learned words like myriad as a seven year old reading Lord of the Rings for the first time, why would I steal that experiance from someone else by simplifying language?
I don't know about y'all, but books are how i know my vocabulary in the first place
I guess I always assumed death was this automatic thing that just happens when you’re either 99 years old or terminally ill but especially both, and now I’m a little worried there’s some part of it I’m missing. Did I have to go check myself in at the graveyard at some point? I didn’t do that. If somebody there needs me to show some ID or fill out a form to be allowed to die, I can. I can swing by this afternoon if that’s it. Or if somebody else can authorize it, please just tell them for me, “Jimmy Carter says he’s good to go.” If they need it, my password for everything is Peanuts8.
yeah man Macklemore has good takes on Israel. whatever
who the fuck said "let's ask this guy what he thinks about Jews"
being trans in the UK right now is so very strange, you're able to go to a mainstream high-budget arts and/or science institution and find beautiful acknowledgements of your history and respectful inclusion of current lives and projects and politics that's based in well-researched community-minded testimony and statistics, but then the government and healthcare industry is all but openly admitting that they want you to disappear off the face of the earth, based largely on the ravings of one terminally online author, a few disgraced academics and comics, and their far-right antisemitic misogynist racist american evangelist friends on a site run by a billionaire megalomaniac. i go to some positive visibility celebrating bodily autonomy that makes it seem like we're moving forwards on the same day as the cass report is released and everything is on fire
"we need less sanitized queer stories" yall keep saying fucking she-ra romanticizes abuse. you couldnt possibly handle less sanitized queer stories
"we need less sanitized queer stories" youre the one saying the locked tomb series is bad because you dont like the prose. based off of a quote from goodreads of all places. that was dialogue, not even the actual prose.
people keep reblogging only the first half of the post when the addition was the original post. ok
girl help. 4k notes
"she-ra fumbled its message" no! crucially, it didnt! it had the same message as the original she-ra show, which is "this lady is a superhero and is going to do superhero things like save the planet" and she did do that!
"oh but catra never apologized for what she did and they just let her join the good guys" thats a perfectly normal thing in childrens media, and the only reason yallre calling it out is because its queer and you want the perfect unproblematic queer media to exist. except that even if it did you would all find ways to nitpick it, which is the whole point of this post!
Also, notably, she did apologize. They just think it wasn't good enough.
They absolutely could not handle more nuanced media.
can we please pretty pleasr reblog this version,
This is a distance of roughly 625 miles and we are going to assume that the speed does not include the time penalty of Spain having a different Rail Gauge than France.
At 890 miles of rail you can get New York to Chicago which would be the ideal first route, but what can you get with 625 miles that makes more since than Columbus?
Well at that distance you can get Raleigh-DC-Philadelphia-NYC- Boston
With intermediate stops in Richmond, Baltimore, New Haven, and Providence
That is a route that is not only good, but has potential to be one of the most used rail lines in the world if it were at high speeds and a cheap price
How about putting some more rails, especially high speed, out here in the midwest, so those of us stuck out here can travel without hours in a car or spending hundreds on a plane ticket?
I guess another route of equivalent length would be St.Paul-Madison-Milwaukee-Chicago- -Indianapolis-louisville
I remember when Obama put aside the money for a rapid light rail system from Chicago to Minneapolis. And the loathsome then Governor of Wisconsin gave the money back, and blocked the project.
I am super against light pollution, and have been for decades
but I am also super annoyed by the way it's framed as "without light pollution you can see how beautiful the night sky is" way more prominently than it's framed as "hey, did you ever stop to think of how much energy/resources/money are literally wasted by having so much light shine up into the sky?"
so people get the idea that light pollution can only be remedied by eliminating all night-time light, which would make being outside at night very inconvenient, instead of by making night-time light shine only on the ground where, y'know, the people who need it are
The mildest example of what OP's talking about in Dunedin, Aotearoa:
This is just with the streetlamp equivalent of using lampshades. Imagine what truly directional city lights could achieve?
Reblogging this again cause light pollution actually have negative health affects on humans and wildlife. We weren't meant to live in a world constantly bathed in light.
a lot of you need to be a lot more chill about cishet passing people and couples still being part of the queer community
its happened to a friend recently and ive seen plenty of people including streamers/youtubers etc have the same thing happen over and over again, where they put the LGBT label on their streams or a pride flag in their bio and then they get people demanding to know every detail of their identity.
if you see a guy online with his girlfriend and he has a pride flag in his bio and your first reaction is to question whether hes even allowed to put that there, log off. the guy could be bi, could be trans, could be nb, could be literally any queer identity at all and it doesnt matter. its none of your fucking business. he could also just be an ally showing support, its none. of your. business.
you are not the queer police and it is not your job to make sure everyone in the queer community has the properly documented justification for being part of it. touch grass. you need to be normal about not knowing everyones labels and identities and about people keeping those private.
cishet passing people have always existed and will always exist within the queer community, they are our family and belong with us.
You are not the queer police!
also! queer people have been having kids for quite a number of years now! that guy could be the cishet-iest dude in the world but have been raised by lesbians, just like my oldest son!
this gatekeeping is poison. it is poison. stop it. you can't gatekeep the community without excluding people who need it.
And if someone says "well, I can tell by looking at them" maybe take a good look at who else is using that kind of language.
if shes your girl then why have i slowly been replacing her parts until there’s nothing left of her original body? is she then still your girl?
They ship of theseus’d my girl
Can’t have shit in Detroit
this actually perfectly demonstrates the transitive property of memes: you can replace a meme piece by piece until it only structurally resembles the original, and it is, in fact, the same meme.
call that the meme of theseus thesis
tumblrites can have a little intertextuality as a treat
my naym is ship and when i’m broke the broken part from me they toke
replace the part had been the plan but in the morn hand door car man
*me shoving transitive properties into my purse* sorry, I have to go
We owe the reddit refugees an apology for making them see posts like this
no we don’t this shit is enrichment in their new enclosure
*slaps roof of Tumblr* This baby can fit so many rare vintages, you just have to go deep enough, there are some great memes in the cellar, come see
*puts this post in a tank right by the main entrance for the Tumblr Association for the Conservation of Memes*
leftists pre october 7th: watch out for fascist pipelines!!! dont let outside agitators co-opt your protest!!!
leftists now: how dare you!!! thats my emotional support fascist pipeline and outside agitators!!
I just want to make this abundantly, vividly, and brutally clear: if you say "We are Hamas" or "Resistance by Any Means!"
What I hear from that is that you are saying that you would be willing to rape a 14-year-old girl hard enough to break her pelvis and kill her in the process because she was born a Jew in a place you don't think she should be allowed to exist in.
That is what these phrases actually mean, and I will treat you accordingly if you use them or if you are comfortable around other people using them.
I don't care what you think they mean or whatever you want to claim you meant by them or whatever doublespeak meaning you want to retroactively impose on them.
That is what those phrases translated into reality actually looks like.
You do realize that breaking into and occupying an administrative building while destroying property and wearing costumes is exactly what the rioters did on the January 6th attempted insurrection, right? Naming specific governing officers they hate, saying they “can’t hide,” claiming they’re justified because they’re the good guys fighting against the evil people in power.
The January 6th rioters were crazy because what they did was crazy. Not just because they thought Trump won the election.
I get that it’s university government buildings rather than US government buildings, but it’s a really, really clear echo. These protestors are not better just because you think they’re right.
Sure didn't take long for the "we believe anyone should be punished for wrongdoing" crowd to stop believing anyone should be punished for wrongdoing.
You, a heroic paladin have successfully slain a fearsome dragon. But the dragon warns you that death is but a door, and dragons don’t die, they reincarnate. You paid it no mind….until your son was born with golden, slitted eyes.
curious friends and family: hey why does your kid have golden eyes
paladin who for sure fucked the dragon instead of killing it, thinking fast: dragons uh. reincarnate. surprised you didn’t know about that. it’s a common fact that i definitely did not make up. no further questions
Found my 53yo very-much-not-online father in the kitchen today meticulously arranging cutlery on the countertop and i was like 'what are you doing' and he looked up at me with the world's most shit-eating grin and said "Your mother told me this is how you rick-roll the Youth" and i looked over and it was fucking. Loss.jpg.
i must stress that he's never seen the original comic. My mother simply showed him the shorthand symbol and he memorized it. As far as he is aware this is just a fucking hieroglyph that deals instant psychic damage to everyone under the age of 30
