"i hope death is like being carried to your bedroom when you were a child & fell asleep on the couch during a family party. i hope you can hear the laughter from the next room"
One Nice Bug Per Day

#extradirty
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izzy's playlists!
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
YOU ARE THE REASON

ellievsbear
noise dept.

★
cherry valley forever
RMH
Noah Kahan
The Bowery Presents
🩵 avery cochrane 🩵

Product Placement

gracie abrams
taylor price
Sweet Seals For You, Always

PR's Tumblrdome
d e v o n

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@arpoling
"i hope death is like being carried to your bedroom when you were a child & fell asleep on the couch during a family party. i hope you can hear the laughter from the next room"
“bits to use in everyday conversations”
If you're writing anything involving cons, scams, heists, or morally questionable characters who are very good at lying, here are some free resources I've been using for research. Saving you the "why is this in my search history" anxiety.
1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.
2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.
3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.
4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.
5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.
Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.
Reblog to save for later. Your WIP will thank you.
the opposite of this is the conspiracy theorist I talked to who used the fact that people's eyes glaze over when he talks to them as evidence that the illuminati is poisoning us with the alex jones frog chemicals or whatever. Absolutely legendary self report
From "Who's Who at the Zoo," written by George Mazzei and illustrated by Gerard Donelan for The Advocate in 1979. Possibly the first recorded usage of the term bear to refer to a gay subculture.
Can anyone help me find the rest of this? The only references to it I can find online are to this page.
I found the date: "Who's Who at the Zoo?" July 26, 1979, The Advocate. A large library, or library in a queer area, probably has the advocate in their periodical collection. Possibly not digitized though.
Wait @cbpolt posted it on Twitter but it's been made private. Maybe they'll share with you if you ask? https://mobile.twitter.com/CBPolt/status/1535327694614933504
Edit no no here it is! https://www.out.com/today-gay-history/2016/7/26/today-gay-history-when-advocate-invented-bears?pg=full
Professor of Assyriology, Matthew Stolper, standing in front of the Colossal Bull Sculpture from Persepolis.
Every year, doctors at a hospital in the Yunnan Province of China brace themselves for an influx of people with an unusual complaint. The patients come with a strikingly odd symptom: visions of pint-sized, elf-like figures – marching under doors, crawling up walls and clinging to furniture. The hospital treats hundreds of these cases every year. All share a common culprit: Lanmaoa asiatica, a type of mushroom that forms symbiotic relationships with pine trees in nearby forests and is a locally popular food, known for its savory, umami-packed flavor. In Yunnan, L. asiatica is sold in markets, it appears on restaurant menus and is served at home during peak mushroom season between June and August.
i love bizzarely specific hallucinogens
The hospital treats hundreds of these cases every year. All share a common culprit: Lanmaoa asiatica, a type of mushroom that forms symbiotic relationships with pine trees in nearby forests and is a locally popular food, known for its savory, umami-packed flavor. In Yunnan, L. asiatica is sold in markets, it appears on restaurant menus and is served at home during peak mushroom season between June and August. One must be careful to cook it thoroughly, though, otherwise the hallucinations will set in. "At a mushroom hot pot restaurant there, the server set a timer for 15 minutes and warned us, 'Don't eat it until the timer goes off or you might see little people,'" says Colin Domnauer, a doctoral candidate in biology at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah, who is studying L. asiatica. "It seems like very common knowledge in the culture there." [...]
He and his team are still trying to identify the chemical compound responsible for the hallucinations in L. asiatica. Current tests suggest it is not likely related to any other known psychedelic compound. For one, the trips it produces are unusually long, commonly lasting one to three days after an onset of 12 to 24 hours, and in some cases even causing hospital stays of up to a week. Because of the extraordinarily long duration of these trips and the chance for prolonged side effects such as delirium and dizziness, Domnauer has yet to try the raw mushrooms himself. These mega-trips might help to explain why people in China, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea do not seem to have a tradition of purposefully seeking out L. asiatica for its psychoactive effects, according to Domnauer's findings. "It was always just eaten for food," Domnauer says, with hallucinations being an unexpected side-effect. There's another curious factor: other known psychedelic compounds also usually produce idiosyncratic trips that vary not only from person to person but also from one experience to the next within the same individual. With L. asiatica, though, "the perception of little people is very reliably and repeatedly reported", Domnauer says. "I don't know of anything else that produces such consistent hallucinations."
It kind of fucks with me that somebody killed ötzi the iceman because ötzi himself is like whatever but the silent presence of human hands that drew back the string of the bow that shot the arrow that killed him is crazy. the idea that there were various people involved in that situation and while one of them has had his last hours painstakingly reconstructed and studied to no end, the others now only exist insofar that an arrowhead had to get into his shoulder somehow. imagine killing someone and then suddenly your entire existence is only a vague shadow implied by the fact that you killed them. much to consider
Testing the mummified bone marrow of ötzi to figure out his ancestry whole time there’s definitely another person, maybe more than one, standing in the room with us but I can never see or speak to them because I only know them through the assurance that they were there too in the form of one single arrowhead. I hate prehistory so much it’s unreal
I hate it too tbh
history + last words
His friends were astonished, and asked the reason for his tears. "Do you not think," said he, "it is matter for sorrow that while Alexander, at my age, was already king of so many peoples, I have as yet achieved no brilliant success? - Plutarch, Life of Caesar
So much translation discourse just boils down to monolinguals not understanding that "coolness" doesn't translate across languages, and you need to re-add it manually on the other end.
Spanish and French understand the anglicism so just say "eso es muy cool" or "c'est très cool" if the context is not particularly formal
No no, not literally the word "cool" I mean the [concept of coolness]. Things that sound cool, poetic, funny, dramatic, etc in one language will completely fail to land if you simply go 1-to-1 word equivalents.
In the Japanese version of Fullmetal Alchemist, the antagonists are named after the seven deadly sins, in English. As in, rather than the Japanese word, "Greed" is still Greed in the original.
Because loan words from English are often pretty "cool", as with your Spanish and French example.
But this presents a problem, because, to give them a bit of flair, the antagonists are sometimes given a proper Japanese adjective along with their name, to make a sort of title of sorts.
"Greedy Greed"
The italicized part would be a Japanese adjective, and the bolded part is an English loanword. This is fine in Japanese, but would be totally nonsense in an English translation.
After all, it's common sense to keep the names the same, duh, and obviously the whole point of what you're doing is to translate the Japanese.
Greedy Greed. You cannot call him that.
You can't go 1-to-1. To keep the [concept of coolness], you have to identify what made the original cool, and then recreate it in the new language.
And here, we have a foreign word, and a native word, both meaning the same thing, paired together to give an antagonist a cool sounding title. So how do we do that in English.
Well, the seven deadly sins, being Christian and Catholic and all, have fancy names in Latin. Or well, they just sound fancy in English, because Latin was the language of intellectuals for a long long time.
And in fact, while we also have the word "greed", English has a fancier sounding word that means the same thing, but whose etymology comes from the fancy Latin. That might give a similar cool-loanword feeling, right?
Let's try it.
"Greed the Avaricious"
Oh yeah. That's definitely, undeniably, "cool".
a lot of you bitches don’t understand that i’m coming wait for me. i hear the walls repeating. the falling of our feet and it sounds like drumming. and we are not alone. i hear the rocks and stones echoing our song. i’m coming
Roses are red, that much is true, but violets are purple, not fucking blue.
I have been waiting for this post all my life.
They are indeed purple, But one thing you’ve missed: The concept of “purple” Didn’t always exist.
Some cultures lack names For a color, you see. Hence good old Homer And his “wine-dark sea.”
A usage so quaint, A phrasing so old, For verses of romance Is sheer fucking gold.
So roses are red. Violets once were called blue. I’m hugely pedantic But what else is new?
My friend you’re not wrong About Homer’s wine-ey sea! Colours are a matter Of cultural contingency;
Words are in flux And meanings they drift But the word purple You’ve given short shrift.
The concept of purple, My friends, is old And refers to a pigment once precious as gold.
By crushing up molluscs From the wine-dark sea You make a dye: Imperial decree
Meant that in Rome, to wear purpura was a privilege reserved
For only the emperor!
The word ‘purple’, for clothes so fancy, Entered English By the ninth century
.
Why then are voilets Not purple in song? The dye from this mollusc, known for so long
Is almost magenta; More red than blue. The concept of purple is old, and yet new.
The dye is red, So this might be true: Roses are purple And violets are blue
.
While this song makes me merry, Tyrian purple dyes many a hue From magenta to berry And a true purple too.
But fun as it is to watch this poetic race The answer is staring you right in the face: Roses are red and violets are blue Because nothing fucking rhymes with purple.
World Heritage Post
do not go gentle into that good night
be a bit of a bitch about it
can't in good conscience leave this out
stop what you're doing right now and look at archaic period terracotta fox scratching its head
ok you can continue
[Source article]
More echinoderm fun facts! Not only are echinoderms’ bodies mostly built using the head regions of bilaterian genetics, but they also have a distributed nervous system that all together acts as an all-body brain!
Excerpt:
With hundreds of different types of neurons, sea urchins express both echinoderm head genes and genes also found in the central nervous system of vertebrates. It used to be thought that echinoderms such as sea urchins, sea stars and sea cucumbers had a primitive nerve net, in which some of the diffuse neurons throughout their bodies may form ganglia that serve them as nerve centers, but not all decentralized nervous systems are created equal. The adult sea urchin nervous system is more like a brain that extends through the entire creature.
“The complexity of the sea urchin nervous system, as characterized by the diversity of postmetamorphic neuronal cell type signatures and their integration of diverse PRC systems, leads us to propose that the sea urchin nervous system in its entirety comprises an ‘all-brain’ rather than a ‘no-brain’ state,” the researchers said in a study recently published in Science Advances.
Echinoderms were previously dismissed as having simple nervous systems, like jellyfish, because they lack a centralized brain, but this assumption was mistaken. Analyzing gene expression in sea urchins further revealed that their most abundant cells are neurons. While the same genes are in charge of generating these neurons, there is a drastic difference between the neurons of larvae and juveniles versus those of adults, though some larval neurons are still present after they metamorphose into juveniles.
Okay, this is actually funny