I’ve been slowly working on illustrating my own Tarot deck about black cats.
I have a long way to go, but I’m nearly done with the major arcana.
Here are some of my favorites:
I set myself a design challenge (as I often do). I wanted to limit the color palette and the brush styles to create a very consistent look.
And since each card focuses on black cats, it forces me to think deeply about symbolism and design to make sure the meaning of each card is clear and each design is unique.
But there’s still a lot of variety coming through. It’s not all class, or all silliness - just like cats
I have a forearm tattoo of the cats in this one ☝️
I’m so happy with how both of these two managed to feel dark, but adorable at the same time.
And then there’s this one absolute diva:
Most of these used my own feline friends for reference.
There are more but I don’t know yet how many I want to share online. If I can actually complete the entire deck I would love to have it made. But I have a ways to go, so for now I continue to chip away, one card at a time.
[Image ID: Screenshot of part of an AO3 chapter listing. Chapter 3 was published 2015-04-02 and Chapter 4 was published 2025-12-15, 10 years, 8 months, and 13 days later. /end ID]
once again needing to remind some people that mispronouncing foreign words isn't just about not knowing how to say it; if your language doesn't have that sound, in many cases you can't hear it properly. You won't be able to hear yourself say it wrong because you probably can't distinguish between the sounds a native speaker can. It will sound right to you and you will be wrong.
Most languages use relatively similar sound inventories overall, but make distinctions others don't. And the way the our language centers work is they group these sounds together, allowing us to recognize that things within a given range constitute a recognizable phoneme. If your languages groups together sounds another language makes a distinction between, your brain cannot tell.
So everyone on those posts congratulating themselves for looking up pronunciation and saying "It's Not That Hard?" Surprise, you might have still got it wrong and can't even tell. You can look up the IPA chart and still flub it completely because what sounds right to your brain and what a native speaker will understand are totally different things!
"I might have butchered that, please let me know" is sometimes an excuse for lack of research, but it is, unfortunately, also a much more accurate self-assessment than confidently fucking it up after mouthing along to a wav file a few times.
This is one of the reasons that, historically, many people would take on or be granted new names if they stayed any length of time in another culture; it's very common for the names from one language to simply not map to the sounds of another!
this just in apparently; accents are just affectations and every ESL person who has ever struggled to understand or pronounce a word is a lazy white person
(I first need to say that it is folly to overexamine a slogan, and the slogan as it stands is never intended to be examined; it is a tool for provocation and a rally to do better, and can never be “incorrect.” I am not criticising the intention of the slogan.)
When Black Americans have addressed the genuinely shameful failures of white Americans to pronounce Black names, it is, firstly, absolutely necessary. This has been done in the past with the slogan, “white people can pronounce Tchaikovsky and Schwarzenegger.”
This is intended to highlight the entirely correct point that white Americans have made more efforts to address names that are considered “foreign” and “difficult” but are associated with “white” cultures, than to address Black names. The slogan is provocative, useful, and highlights the hypocrisy of white Americans. It is a challenge to do better. Because Americans often perceive z’s and v’s to be “foreign” and “difficult” it is an especially pointed dig.
However. Let us briefly lump together Americans, all English-speaking Americans of various backgrounds dialects, into one American lump and stand back.
Respectfully: you HAVE to be American to believe that Americans have learned to pronounce “Tchaikovsky” and “Schwarzenegger” correctly.
Although Americans firmly and confidently believe that they can take on “Schwarzenegger,” German speakers… don’t. That’s just not how you say those sounds. One particular letter gets mangled.
It isn’t even an accent problem; you can say it correctly with a strong American accent. The American reinvention of “Schwarzenegger” represents a failure to understand how German sounds work, which is fine - hey, they’re “difficult” and “foreign” - but it is paired with total unearned confidence on the part of ALL Americans of ALL dialects that “of course we know how to say it. It’s a celebrity who was on the TV, he’s a governor, that’s how everyone says it.”
If you listen to Arnold saying HIS OWN NAME, which he does, you can tell that AMERICANS ARE NOT EVEN SAYING HIS NAME LIKE HE DOES. Even British people land a better attempt. It is a function of American cultural hegemony that Americans do not notice this. It is an inherently American view of the world to believe that a consistent, confident mispronunciation of someone’s name is a respectful, educated and correct handling.
(Tchaikovsky is interesting because it’s an Anglicisation of a French version of the spelling of Чайковский, which was possibly settled on because it was the easier way to get English speakers to perceive it. American English tried a different version in his own lifetime, as you can see below, but which would have led to Americans putting a “cow” in it.)
Again, it doesn’t cancel the slogan, the slogan is good-quality - but it shows how this is invisible to those who have not learned otherwise.
Outside of America, all Americans are perceived as American together, and Yanks join the ranks of English speakers. English speakers are famed around the world for having the same “bash and mangle it into something that sounds similar, and insist that it’s correct, because you don’t hear the difference” approach.
It will help in learning other languages to try. It will help a lot to take the loss with grace and accept correction!
Although the OP sort of accidentally implies that you “can’t” hear certain nuanced sounds - it is entirely possible to distinguish and perceive most nuanced sounds even in extremely nuanced languages, with intention and attention and training, especially with the guidance of a native speaker. Even if you can’t get it perfect it is still possible to improve and worthy to try!
IMO of the most fascinating ways for an English native speaker, especially an American one, to understand this is to watch how Mr Yang teaches Chinese students how to use American handling. “Soften up on the K sound” “throw in a little SpongeBob to it” you will suddenly hear things you probably weren’t ready to hear.
English Class #learnenglish #chinese
Here is a British person making a respectful attempt at Schwarzenegger, followed by Schwarzenegger saying it himself. One person has a British accent, and Schwarzenegger’s Austrian accent is considered distinctive to German speakers, but ideally, once you try to notice it, even if you are American, you should be able to hear what Americans are doing wrong.
My boyfriend, again blending together fanfiction tropes: So what if when you finally find your soulmate, that’s when you discover if you’re alpha or omega, right?
Me, hands shaking as I frantically search for pen & paper: KEEP TALKING
Boyfriend: YES THEY ARE. They communicate via pheromones— LIKE ANTS.
Me: So back to the soulmate thing….
Boyfriend: You could trick them into following orders and thinking they’re dead by spraying them with a spritz bottle. I think they need a queen.
Me: So back to the soulmate thing…. Seems hellish!
Boyfriend: Not really. If being around the other person is what triggers the changes, if you want to go back to normal… all you need to do is leave.
Me, writing: (You found your soulmate. It’s changing you in scary ways. All you need to do is leave… how difficult would it be to leave? What pressures exist to stay?)
group shots of all the mash guys + klinger are so funny because he just looks exactly like what some obnoxious online chud would throw in to make fun of so-called forced diversity. but he's already in there and everyone loves him
When you pick up a sword for the first time you will be slow and awkward. This is frustrating, but refuse the temptation to try and become a “faster” fencer. Chasing after speed is like trying to catch smoke. If you try and pursue speed, all you will accomplish is haste. Haste is the enemy of 1st class fencing.
Speed is a lie the untrained mind tells itself when it sees an action it cannot follow. The truth is a combination of timing, control, and fluidity. Fluid motion, even done slowly, will always arrive before a hasty strike. Control will allow you to move without wasteful motion that will slow you down. Timing will eliminate the need to move fast almost entirely. There is no need to get somewhere fast so long as you get there at the right time.
This is true for plenty of other things too!! When you’re learning anything that involves moving your body, don’t forget that quality of movement is more important than speed!
in the dueling arena, female black rose duelists wear the prince's clothes: this gendered expression of power, which is so significant when utena does it outside the symbolic space, becomes natural, even from the most mundanely feminine women. I say mundanely feminine to emphasize that these are not women who feel any angst about being women. kouze, wakaba, keiko, kanae, and shiori may be tortued, they even may be tortured about the how the nature of their womanhood affects their relationship with other women (shiori being the most obvious, but think also of how any friendly relationship kouze may want from anthy is affected by the fact that she is another women in akio's life, or how keiko is targeted by nanami in a way nanami would never target a man, or how wakaba's feelings about anthy stealing saionji are clearly a projection of how she feels about anthy stealing utena which she cannot verbalize because she's been raised to center male attention), but they never turn toward their own womanhood as the fault in the situation.
shiori, unlike juri, does not wish she were a man in her relations with juri. wakaba does not realize that it is masculine power which makes saionji and utena "special." kouze does not wish that she could inherit directorship herself. and yet, they still wear a man's clothes when they attack anthy for their woes. their one claim to specialness, to power, to autonomy, is in the clothes of male authority. unlike juri, nanami, and utena, however, they do this under a psychoanalytic trance: they are far from realizing this desire consciously. the black rose duelists will never get what they want because they do not realize that their only autonomy within the patriarchy comes though imitation of (juri and utena) or proximity to (nanami) male power.
what is so interesting about rgu is that this dance with masculinity/princehood that the women in the show do could so easily be painted as a kind of freudian penis envy: the more "mature" ("enlightened"?) female characters (juri and utena) are the ones who emulate masculinity the most, who are the most upfront about the fact that they wish they were a man in their dealings with other women. compare juri with tokiko: juri's desire for masculinity, her frank analytic understanding of her lust for shiori, are what make her a duelist, while keiko's passive femininity makes her so insignificant utena doesn't know her name. however, ikuhara makes it clear that this understanding of the power of masculinity under the patriarchy is not real maturity, and in fact takes duelists even further from graduating ohtori. akio, the embodiment of a powerless child taking refuge in this abusive masculine authority, will never leave the school and never grow up. it is the realization that masculine authority will always be toxic which allows duelists to mature. nanami spends most of the show as the most childish duelist, the one who is years and years from graduating, but once she realizes that her proximity to touga's power (the masculine safety of the patriarchal family system) will never serve her, she becomes clearly one of the most enlightened among them. the black rose duelists are so pathetic and hopeless in their dueling attempts not because they do not want to be men, but because they do not even realize that the world that they want to impress so badly wishes they were. juri, touga, saionji, and utena (for most of the show) trap themselves in an attempt to become what ohtori wishes they were: real men, princes. nanami and anthy, a little wiser in their way, accept that they will never be able to achieve this perverse ideal but, instead, attempt to find security by clinging to the coat tails of those in power.
dios presents the fantasy to the students of ohtori, the hope, that this power can be absolutely good, absolutely protecting, and absolutely eternal. a man has the power to stop something bad from ever happening again. when touga is a man like akio is, he will have absolute control over anyone who might hurt him and be absolutely safe. when utena is a man like the prince is, she will be able to save herself from the coffin and be absolutely safe. when anthy has a man like dios was, he will be able to keep the entire world away from them and they will be happy.
it is only by rejecting this power entirely, by recognizing that the prince is an impossible dream, that they can escape. utena realizes this when she sees that anthy will always be victimized by male oppression. on some level, this is the realization that the rose bride (who is every woman) will always be abused by the patriarchal society-- on some level, utena's realization is a theoretical one. but on a truer level it is the realization that anthy will always be abused. this is what it is to really love a woman as another woman: to realize that the way the world hurts her is so intolerable that it is better to enter the vast unknown than to abandon her in exchange a perfect, white picket fence life. to fall into the nothingness, the empty map of lesbian desire, and hope she will follow. it is better to free her and die than to live happily when she is trapped without you.
the best joke scp is the one where the scp itself is just typical mediocre normal scp fare (dark matter bracelet that kills people) but the joke is that the scientists behave like scp community members instead of actual scientists
I swear if one more person comments on the poly culture post about interplanting wheat and walnuts with allergy handwringing or, worse, Loud and Confident wildly incorrect assertions, Without reading the comments where I clarify that this is not a reasonable danger, I am going to climb a tree and throw green walnuts at them:
They are heavy and fist-sized.
The proteins that cause allergic reactions to tree nuts are in the kernal.
It is not a difficult mechanical process to screen out fist-sized objects from wheat.
Further, wheat is harvested in June or July (winter wheat) or in August (spring wheat)
Walnuts are harvested from September through November.
There is functionally no danger of cross contamination.
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2087
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