You were granted one wish, you chose immortality. That was 47 million years ago. What was the human race has evolved into something you haven’t recognized in eons. You’ve tried, unsuccessfully, to kill yourself so many times that you’ve stopped trying. Then you hear a voice behind you…
evidence that ancient paleolithic venus statues were made by women who were examining their own bodies and sculpting them from their own point of view, not, as previously assumed, exaggerated features from an outside perspective
i took a pic of me watching the pickle rick episode to piss people off but like somehow i managed to take the pic so that the frame on the tv was…. a different frame to the reflection on the desk?
cursed image
this is the most fucked up scenario that accurately depicts that movement of photons through space and time
Einstein would be so upset that you proved his theory in one moment, cause in his day it took fuckin months to setup an eclipse pic to prove relativity n you did it by accident, in ur living room. congrats.
this is actually called the rolling shutter effect!! the camera captures images in a rolling fashion, from the top to the bottom. so objects that are moving fast like a car, or a airplane propeller, or frames on a tv being reflected will always look distorted. the closer to the top of the image you get, the further back in time it represents, just by a few split seconds. all this means is that the frame reflected on the table was probably the one right after the one on the tv, and it changed before the camera’s rolling shutter had time to get to it.
here’s some more pictures with the rolling shutter; remember that the top of the image just represents a fraction of a second earlier in the action
rolling shutters also move side to side in some cameras, leading to more spooky imagery
throwback thursday: those plant scientists in the early 90s who were tryin to make a purple flower more purple for retail greenhouses by throwing more “make more purple” genes into the genomes but when the plants would bloom they would bloom pure white with no pigment, turns out that they accidentally discovered the plant RNAi virus defense (that wouldn’t be properly described in any organism until like 2006, when some other scientists would win the nobel prize for it) that was thinking the “make more purple” pigment genes they were inserting was a virus and was reacting to it by just rapidly destroying all the pigment genes in the plants’ genome, turning them white instead of purple lmao
OKAY WAIT I WANNA TALK ABOUT THESE AMAZING BABS FOR A HOT SECOND
okay so like. for a long time, this species was like, IMPOSSIBLE to grow in captivity. this is a REALLY important step in the protection of exotic plants like villosa, because as soon as the plant can be grown and bred in captivity, its value goes down on the black market, meaning that poachers are less likely to damage the natural populations. with nepenthes (asian carnivorous pitcher plants) like the babs here, this is even more important because 1. these plants have male and female individuals, so if too many of one sex is taken a population can become inbred very easily and 2. these plants are HIGHLY spectated to the point where one species might be native to like, ONE ridge on ONE mountain and NOWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD. which brings us to these especially toothy babs.
heres the challenge: Villosa is a highland pitcher plant, meaning that it grows in mountains, in the cold. and this species grows in unusually cold temperatures. so like, it’ll only grow in conditions that are between 75-80 degrees F during the day and between 40-50 degrees F at night– this is because Villosa is native only to two mountains in Borneo at and elevation of 3,200 meters.oh, and they also have very specific feeding, light, and humidity requirements, so add that to the list. it also just so happens to be one of the most valued and sought after pitcher plans in the world for its beauty (general market prices today range around $100-$150 based on the plant’s size and the seller).
so like, yeah. rare plant. hard to grow. habitat is at high risk for damage by poaching because of demand.
and then in 2003, the International Carnivorous Plant Society publishes a paper in it’s newsletter. It’s written by a horticulturalist named Jeff Shafer. He figured out how to grow Villosa in cultivation.
he put it in a chest freezer.
behold, the amazing and exotic high tech technique that has been used widely since 2003 for growing villosa and it’s relatives by professionals, nurseries, and hobbyists alike: buying and repurposing a straight up chest freezer by rigging it with fans, lights, control panels, and misting systems. nowadays, some people even go farther. the species is still listed as vulnerable under the IUCN, but it’s been doing well in cultivation ever since!
(you can read Shafer’s paper on it here. he describes all the exact conditions that the plant lives at and how he pulled it off lol)
e) he might be called Tim but that might be short for something
– Timmos
– Timotheus
– Timiron (yeah just add “Ron” when in doubt)
– Tiroth
– Timarimos
Congratulations your Tim both has a cute nickname and a full name that sounds vaguely badass, or if not badass long-winded and unnecessary enough to be a Fantasy Name™.
Also try to make the syllables sound like their personality. A suave and socially smooth character could maybe not have any hard ‘r’ or ‘br’ or ‘tr’ in their names. Etc.
Saving for future reference and because of the glorious Monty python gif
This is really nice because you get interesting names WITHOUT making them ten syllables long and entire unpronounceable.
take old english names prior to the norman conquest. wulfric.
if you like, shorten them. atheldryth->audrey, theldry, eldry.
A REAL LIST OF ACTUAL NAMES AND THEIR (approximate) PRONUNCIATIONS: Siobhan — “sheh-VAWN” Aoife – “EE-fa” Aislin – “ASH-linn”
Bláithín – “BLAW-heen”
Caoimhe – “KEE-va”
Eoghan – Owen (sometimes with a slight “y” at the beginning)
Gráinne – “GRAW-nya”
Iarfhlaith – “EER-lah” Méabh – “MAYV” Naomh or Niamh – “NEEV” Oisín – OSH-een or USH-een Órfhlaith – OR-la Odhrán – O-rawn Sinéad – shi-NAYD Tadhg – TIEG (like you’re saying “tie” or “Thai” with a G and the end)
I work with an Aoife and I have been pronouncing it SO WRONG
As someone who is trying and failing to learn Gaelic, I feel like is an accurate portrayal of my pain.
This is the Anglicized spelling of a people who really fucking hate the English.
No, no, this is the orthographic equivalent of installing Windows on Mac.
The Latin alphabet was barely adequate for Latin by the time it got to the British Isles, but it’s what people were writing with, so somebody tried to hack it to make it work for Irish. Except, major problem: Irish has two sets of consonants, “broad” and “slender” (labialized and palatalized) and there’s a non-trivial difference between the two of them. But there weren’t enough letters in the Latin alphabet to assign separate characters to the broad and slender version of similar sounds.
Instead, someone though, let’s just use the surrounding vowels to disambiguate–but there weren’t enough vowel characters to indicate all the vowel sounds they needed to write, so that required some doubling up, and then adding in some silent vowels just to serve as markers of broad vs. slender made eveything worse.
They also had to double up some consonants, because, for example, <v> wasn’t actually a letter at the time–just a variation on <u>–so for the /v/ sound they <bh>. AND THEN ALSO Irish has this weird-ass system where the initial consonant sound in a word changes as a grammatical marker, called “mutation,” so they had to account somehow for mutated sounds vs. non-mutated sounds, which sometimes meant leaving a lot of other silent letters in a word to remind you what word you were looking at.
And then a thousand years of sound change rubbed its dirty little hands all over a system that was kind of pasted together in the first place.
My point is, there is a METHOD to the orthography of Irish besides “fuck the English.” The “fuck the English” part is just a delightful side-effect.
I love it when snarky quips lead to real info.
One of my favourite modern holdover examples of this is the not-uncommon but not-that-common Scottish surname ‘Menzies.’
How is that pronounced.
No, wrong.
It’s pronounced ‘min-gus.’
This is because of the now-lost Scottish letter
Ȝ, written ‘yogh’ pronounced kinda like zog.
Douglas Adams is the best when it comes to describe characters
they need to teach classes on Douglas Adams analogies okay
“He leant tensely against the corridor wall and frowned like a man trying to unbend a corkscrew by telekinesis.”
“Stones, then rocks, then boulders which pranced past him like clumsy puppies, only much, much bigger, much, much harder and heavier, and almost infinitely more likely to kill you if they fell on you.”
“He gazed keenly into the distance and looked as if he would quite like the wind to blow his hair back dramatically at that point, but the wind was busy fooling around with some leaves a little way off.”
“It looked only partly like a spaceship with guidance fins, rocket engines and escape hatches and so on, and a great deal like a small upended Italian bistro.”
“If it was an emotion, it was a totally emotionless one. It was hatred, implacable hatred. It was cold, not like ice is cold, but like a wall is cold. It was impersonal, not as a randomly flung fist in a crowd is impersonal, but like a computer-issued parking summons is impersonal. And it was deadly – again, not like a bullet or a knife is deadly, but like a brick wall across a motorway is deadly.”
And, of course:
“The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.”
the one that will always stay with me is “Arthur Dent was grappling with his consciousness the way one grapples with a lost bar of soap in the bath,” i feel like that was the first time i really understood what you could do with words.
I will reblog this every time I see it because these are some of my favorite sentences in the English language.
so i just googled the phrase “toeing out of his shoes” to make sure it was an actual thing
and the results were:
it’s all fanfiction
which reminds me that i’ve only ever seen the phrase “carding fingers through his hair” and people describing things like “he’s tall, all lean muscle and long fingers,” like that formula of “they’re ____, all ___ and ____” or whatever in fic
idk i just find it interesting that there are certain phrases that just sort of evolve in fandom and become prevalent in fic bc everyone reads each other’s works and then writes their own and certain phrases stick
i wish i knew more about linguistics so i could actually talk about it in an intelligent manner, but yeah i thought that was kinda cool
Ha! Love it!
One of my fave authors from ages ago used the phrase “a little helplessly” (like “he reached his arms out, a little helplessly”) in EVERY fic she wrote. She never pointed it out—there just came a point where I noticed it like an Easter egg. So I literally *just* wrote it into my in-progress fic this weekend as an homage only I would notice. ❤
To me it’s still the quintessential “two dudes doing each other” phrase.
I think different fic communities develop different phrases too! You can (usually) date a mid 00s lj fic (or someone who came of age in that style) by the way questions are posed and answered in the narration, e.g. “And Patrick? Is not okay with this.” and by the way sex scenes are peppered with “and, yeah.” I remember one Frerard fic that did this so much that it became grating, but overall I loved the lj style because it sounded so much like how real people talk.
Another classic phrase: wondering how far down the _ goes. I’ve seen it mostly with freckles, but also with scars, tattoos, and on one memorable occasion, body glitter at a club. Often paired with the realization during sexy times that “yeah, the __ went all they way down.” I’ve seen this SO much in fic and never anywhere else
whoa, i remember reading lj fics with all of those phrases! i also remember a similar thing in teen wolf fics in particular – they often say “and derek was covered in dirt, which. fantastic.” like using “which” as a sentence-ender or at least like sprinkling it throughout the story in ways published books just don’t.
LINGUISTICS!!!! COMMUNITIES CREATING PHRASES AND SLANG AND SHAPING LANGUAGE IN NEW WAYS!!!!!!!
I love this. Though I don’t think of myself as fantastic writer, by any means, I know the way I write was shaped more by fanfiction and than actual novels.
I think so much of it has to do with how fanfiction is written in a way that feels real. conversations carry in a way that doesn’t feel forced and is like actual interactions. Thoughts stop in the middle of sentences.
The coherency isn’t lost, it just marries itself to the reader in a different way. A way that shapes that reader/writer and I find that so beautiful.
FASCINATING
and it poses an intellectual question of whether the value we assign to fanfic conversational prose would translate at all to someone who reads predominantly contemporary literature. as writers who grew up on the internet find their way into publishing houses, what does this mean for the future of contemporary literature? how much bleed over will there be?
we’ve already seen this phenomenon begin with hot garbage like 50 shades, and the mainstream public took to its shitty overuse of conversational prose like it was a refreshing drink of water. what will this mean for more wide-reaching fiction?
I’m sure someone could start researching this even now, with writers like Rainbow Rowell and Naomi Novik who have roots in fandom. (If anyone does this project please tell me!) It would be interesting to compare, say, a corpus of a writer’s fanfic with their published fiction (and maybe with a body of their nonfiction, such as their tweets or emails), using the types of author-identification techniques that were used to determine that J.K. Rowling was Robert Galbraith.
In an earlier discussion, Is French fanfic more like written or spoken French?, people mentioned that French fanfic is a bit more literary than one might expect (it generally uses the written-only tense called the passé simple, rather than the spoken-only tense called the passé composé). So it’s not clear to what extent the same would hold for English fic as well – is it just a couple phrases, like “toeing out of his shoes”? Are the google results influenced by the fact that most published books aren’t available in full text online? Or is there broader stuff going on? Sounds like a good thesis project for someone!
Toeing out of one’s shoes may be a fanfic trend, but toeing them off is in the Oxford English Dictionary:
[Image description: A screencap of the Oxford Dictionary’s web page for the word “toe.” The first definition for the verb “to toe” is [with object and usually with adverbial] push, touch, or kick with one’s toe: ‘he toed off his shoes and flexed his feet.’ ]
How it mutated from common usage “toed off” to fanfic usage “toed out” is a mystery that has been lost to time, but I felt like pointing out that it’s not something fanficcers invented out of whole cloth.
@deadcatwithaflamethrower This seems like the sort of discourse you’d be happy to jump in on…thoughts?
Well…the internet has sped up the evolution of language and word definitions and useage at a pace where linguists are basically screaming “WAIT WAIT WE CAN’T KEEP UP WITH THIS SHIT WHAT THE HELL GUYYYYYSSSSSSS–”
Take yes and yeah.
Yea. Yeh. Yas. Yis. Those last two? Those are very, very new, and yet they are EVERYWHERE. Before global communication, new terminology didn’t spread that fast.
Plume de Lynx 