we're not kids anymore.
Cosmic Funnies
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Kaledo Art
wallacepolsom
blake kathryn
official daine visual archive
cherry valley forever
Mike Driver
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trying on a metaphor
untitled
Janaina Medeiros
RMH
Origami Around
almost home
🪼
oozey mess
Love Begins
JVL
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@amollyakatrina
Queer people do not need to get into norse gods, queer people need dialectical materialism.
To be entirely honest I find the idea that queer people need spirituality at all quite insulting, and the unfortunately widespread insistence that there's some metaphysical spiritual element to queerness is rather counterproductive and (to put it bluntly) really fucking annoying.
proud victim of the tumblr accent. it's fading out of public consciousness as the tik tok accent takes precedence; a linguistic evolution that makes the tumblr accent 85% funnier to unsuspecting civilians. it's like releasing a disease on a non-inoculated population. coughing baby versus hydrogen bomb.
>no idea what a tumblr accent even is
>”oozes off of me like a thick miasma”
im angry at myself for walking into that so perfectly
the most disorienting thing thats ever happened to me was when a linguistics major stopped in the middle of our conversation, looked me in the eye, and said, "you have a very interesting vernacular. were you on tumblr in 2014?" and i had to just stand there and process that one for a good ten seconds
#i was in a car with a linguist i had never met before the car trip and like half an hour in he looked at me#after i finished describing a geology thing that was happening out the window and asked if i'd ever spent much time on tumblr#the fuckor of it all#and then we spent six more hours driving#it sure does leave linguistic markers! i'm not sure i'm good with it (tags via @thoughtsformtheuniverse)
it is one thing to be a linguist and another to be a linguist who knows enough of 2010s Tumblr to spot one of its enjoyers
Oh! @meret118 see above comment! The use of the word "enjoyers" instead of "users" or "bloggers" -> You left a comment a while back asking, "Does this just mean vocabulary words? Other than blorbo and sweet cinnamon roll etc, I can't think of what a Tumblr accent would be." I almost never see anyone use the word "enjoyer" anywhere outside of tumblr, but I see it on tumblr fairly frequently.
Another one is the verb "perceive" i.e. "don't perceive me" "I am perceiving" "I am being percieved." That's something that feels very specific to tumblr parlance.
There's the thing where people on tumblr have an emotional reaction to something and instead of, or in addition to telling you how they feel about it using emotion words, they will narrate a fictional action in the present progressive tense. "I am gnawing at the bars of my enclosure "I am kissing you on the mouth" "you are going into the soup" "you are getting all of the awards"
I once saw someone use that response format in ... I think it was a restaurant review, or a doordash review, or something like that. It was very unexpected seeing it outside of a tumblr post.
There are a lot of other tumblr linguistic quirks I can't currently remember off the top of my head, but I'll instantly recognize them if I see/hear them outside of tumblr. It's always a bit startling to see them out of context.
when I was in university one of my modules was about internet slang and for our grades project we had to compile and analyse a small database of 100 words used by a specific community of our choice. I chose tumblr and that's how I stumbled across Gretchen McCulloch's research and discovered that yes not only did tumblr have its own vernacular and syntax (as @lierdumoa demonstrates), it was at the time a crucible of slang and memes probably unrivalled by any other part of the internet. and it's stayed that way! even the very title is McCulloch's book because internet is an example of this specific phraseology.
sadly my project is lost due to the website being wiped from the university database after graduation and my then laptop having a major hardware failure. backup your backups people! but the crux of the entire module was that the internet is full of communities using language not only as jargon for specific purpose but also to signal membership in said community. I even wrote a bit about non capitalisation and punctuation useage as a visual cue on tumblr and how including information in the reblog body or the tags indicated different levels of importance or intimacy of thought
I am holding the side of your face and looking deep in your eyes and telling you that love is stored in the syntax, and that we are rotating words together all at once as we all nod at their new and baffling meanings. if the devils sacrament be tumblr then the devils gospel is our collective voice. thanks for coming to my tedtalk
.... you rang?
PDF | Internet users have filled pragmatic gaps left by the lack of intonation and paralinguistic cues of Computer-Mediated Communication by
was outside earlier and a bird Came Up, squatted down, fluttered it’s wings at me and opened its mouth like a hatchling begging for food (it was a grown female) so I went and checked the seed cube in the feeder and the thing was completely covered in mold. this is one of the weirdest things that’s ever happened to me. how did she know im the one in charge of the birdseed. How Did She Know To Pantomime Hunger At Me. Hello.
i have spent my afternoon confusedly getting dressed, driving to the store, purchasing a new seed block, driving home, washing the cage, and getting the feeder set back up. i don’t take this much care for my Own nutrition. ive been bullied into a grocery store run by a tufted titmouse. i feel so loved
@veradragonjedi
something you really learn from this site is that 'sounding reasonable' is a writing style you can just adopt while saying bizarre things, and if you just sound sure enough you are in fact the most reasonable person online about 80% of all users will just assume you are in fact so very reasonable, that your sources check out and you are drawing reasonable conclusions from them. You don't actually need to make sense.
If you use the right tone you can also, essentially without effort, convince people anyone who disagrees has evil motivations or convictions in some way. Convincingly performed indignation makes people very apologetic/makes them side with you because this is a very scary emotion to them (the userbase is terrified of being guilty or siding with the guilty). Doesn't matter what you're actually saying this applies in basically any situation. But you cannot use dated memespeak or writing styles popular on this site 2+ years ago because those annoy everyone and make you look stupid and easy to make fun of.
again it doesn't matter what you're actually saying. This site is all about tone. It's basically like talking to a baby or perhaps a small dog. it's about sounding cool.
because people here are always afraid you might have nefarious opinions hidden in a vaguepost i would like to clarify this annoyed post was in fact created after seeing very different posts on different topics by people who disagree and seem to hate each other all arguing essentially like this. rhetoric hater post not a vague post about an opinion you are currently siding with. at ease brave soldier of discourse.
I love roleplaying with asterisks why don't we do that anymore
You can say anything watch this *jumps* you just imagined me jumping didn't you. Now watch this *starts jerking off* awesome right? The asterisk holds the limitless imagination
I've discovered the worst game in human history. I call it Dog Toy Or Sex Toy, who wants in
How would this even be challenging? Are there dick-shaped chew toys?
Round One
Dog toy
Wrong! That is the Cloud 9 Novelties Silicone Mushroom Massager in Teal.
Round Two:
D-dog...toy?
World Heritage Post
The fear in the second one is like someone realizing that the Russian Roulette game is being played with Real Bullets
One thing I really like about how we use the affordances of tumblr is how reblogging yourself is used to break textposts up. It's not just a novel form of punctuation, it's effectively borrowing a structural trick from comics.
Space is time.
hi hello alert so that classic tumblr flowing jungle river post is now cited in a real book like an actual paper book and it’s called because internet and it’s all about the evolution of internet language and how TUMBLR DID THE THING and you can get it here
love using (!) excessively, like yes!!! i am so very excited!!!! right now!!!!! i love you!!!!!!
Whats a lichen if not a plant
(Note: writing this response with Capitals™ bc its long and kind of hard to read otherwise, I’m trying to do that more with my longer posts)
Either an ecological event or a superorganism, depending on how you look at it.
To explain this. like. we do not ‘know’ what a lichen is. We know like, what they are, or at least we’re getting increasingly closer to finding out everything that makes up a lichen, but lichenologists have really struggled to define it as like, A Sole Thing. Botanists and mycologists of the past thought lichens were primarily fungi, because when you dried one out and weighed it, most of the dry weight was fungus; this is why today we still name lichens based on their fungal components, while it turns out that the give and take of all organisms in a lichen are pretty much equal.
It’s a symbiotic relationship, we’ve known that for a long time, but now we know, for instance, that some fungi can pair up with different species of algae to make different lichens. How can we reliably name something after it’s fungus if that fungus can pair up with different things to make multiple different ‘species’? And as of 2016 we know that lichens can have up to four different players: a fungus, an algae, a yeast, and (in some families) a second fungus, previously thought to be parasitic on the lichen itself.
I will personally argue that lichens are an ecological event. To me, this theory gets down to lichen reproduction, which is….completely off the shits.
Lichens can reproduce in a few different ways, the simplest ones being 1. a piece of lichen breaks off and lands in a fitting environment, creating a new lichen that’s a clone of the mother system, and/or 2. a lichen has special organs that release specially-made ‘mini lichens’ that have the main components packaged together into little ‘spores’ (these organs are called isidia and soridia, and look slightly different), creating a similar result to #1 with a clone of the mother system.
Now, you may be wondering: ‘But lichens have sexual structures. can’t they have like, Lichen Sex™?’. Which. Like. This is where it gets wild, because it ties back to the ecological mystery of how lichens ‘make new lichens from scratch’ so to speak.
The thing is, those sexual structures don’t have the components paired together. They only produce sexually-made spores of the fungus, and if these spores land in the right conditions, they won’t form a lichen, they’ll form a non-lichenized version of that fungus. So, conventionally, as we currently understand it, the way for them to form a new lichen would be for two compatible spores- one algae and one fungus, or like, one algae and one fungus or one yeast, we don’t know how those other components fit into the equation yet– to meet in the right conditions, under which case the pair recognizes each other and starts to spontaneously go down an entirely different developmental path to become a lichen. Keep in mind that lichen and algae spores are like…everywhere in the air and in the world around us, just the majority of them don’t find the proper growing conditions and die, so this does happen enough to make all the lichens we see on a day to day basis.
But. There are agonizing mysteries about this process. For example:
-We do not know how the algae and fungal spores, when they meet, know that they’re compatible in the first place. Like, on a cellular level.
-We do know that after a certain point, the organisms involved are locked into their developmental path. They need to meet at an extremely young age (as spores) to become a lichen. If a mature fungus and a mature algae meet, nothing happens, even if they would have been compatible as spores.
-Science, to my knowledge, still has not yet been able to replicate the ‘lichens being made from scratch’ process in a lab. The spores will recognize each other and start developing on a microscopic level, and then they’ll just….stop developing and die, which is why we can only produce new lichens in a lab by growing sterilized fragments from old lichens. Whether or not we’ve just been like, missing all the ‘ingredients’ and you need a yeast or second fungus or something to finish the process, I have no idea.
In conclusion: Lichens are mysterious soups. Lichens, to me, aren’t a thing that lives, but more like a thing that happens between living things. It’s an event of several different things coming together to proliferate on a tree or a rock or wherever, and they are everywhere, and we do not know everything about what they are or how they work. Some people, again, will call them ‘superorganisms’, which isn’t wrong either, but I personally like to think about them in a weird like…..temporal sense? Idk man they haunt me every day of my life.
english's pronunciation rules are absolute bullshit poopoo made up crap but one of my favorite side effects of this in written english specifically is like. altering the spelling of a word in such a way that it's technically pronounced the same. but reads very differently when your eyes go over it in written form. and that sort of dissonance between the proper spelling and the altered spelling producing the same basic sounds in your brain creates an unprecedented level of comedy.
ingredience. creacher. both of these are pronounced essentially exactly the same but the altered spellings are just hilarious for some stupid reason. the english language is a disaster but at least whatever is wrong with it is REALLY funny.
pakige 📦
Honestly, I don't mind the proliferation of emojis in casual online communication because it makes my favourite sort of bit much easier to pull off. Saying patently absurd shit in a perfect deadpan used to be hard to convey in pure text, and now all I have to do is punctuate and avoid using little cartoons.
It's actually kind of fascinating how expressing the formal register in textual communication has shifted over my lifetime. In spoken communication, the formal register is mostly about grammar and vocabulary, and this was once true of text as well, but these days folks will often use very formal grammar in casual text, counting on the fact that they're not captalising the starts of their sentences nor ending them with periods to establish that they're speaking in the casual register – and conversely, doing those things can establish a formal register even when one's word choices are conspicuously casual. We've basically evolved a formal register which is only intelligible in written form because it relies entirely upon orthography.
To the fluent speaker of contemporary textual communication, "fuck" and "Fuck." are completely different sentences.
My favorite, because then you get people who sound formal when they might not mean to, or do it on purpose. Just the most formal, well-tailored maid dress cat girl declaring...
Like, you know, nya.
While my entire online persona is admittedly based on saying daft shit in the most formal register I can muster, to the best of my knowledge I am not nor have I ever been a catgirl.
I love it when people use "shrimp" to mean "beyond the human range". like "shrimp colors" but applied to other things. "shrimp emotions" "shrimp sounds" "shrimp morality", as if shrimp are living some kind of transcendent existence that humans can never comprehend
turns out... these little creatures are not so "shrimple" after all!
why'd I write this like I'm 74
u can pry my Special Capitalizations and random periods for like. dramatic effect away from my cold dead hands
every website has a specific posting style and when you post in that style outside of that website it almost always reeks. it stinks. however when someone types in greentext format outside of 4chan it is always acceptable perhaps charming even
do you understand
[publishing research thesis] lol is this anything
