Headless Duck

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a duck not attached to its head, must be in want of a wife.

[smashpages]

Superman: The Stranger #1 (DC Black Label, September 2026) variant cover by Ethan Young

[mollyjames]

reworking an older character for my warmup this morning

[mollyjames]

[mollyjames]

thank you yes that's exactly correct

[mollyjames]

[hylianane]

functionally suicidal character saying “I would die for you” to their significant other and its like. I get the sentiment, honey, but if a hot dog vendor told me he’d sell hot dogs for me, I wouldn’t feel very moved now would I

[maseratus]

Now a functionally suicidal character saying “I will live for you”. Now that’s a dynamic I can sink my teeth into.

[mousidy]

now how about a functionally suicidal character saying "I will sell hot dogs for you"

[mousidy]

[bisthefairy]

Hotdog vender lays down their life to protect their suicidal partner, who then takes over the hotdog stand to carry on their memory...

[teaboot]

Names that are normal for old people but weird when you're a baby:

Bartholomew

Dolores

Norman

Harold

Magnolia

Names that are normal for babies but weird when you're old:

Maddison

Tanner

Skylar

Mckenzie

Logan

Names that are normal for old people and normal for babies:

Elizabeth

Mary

Michael

Finnegan

Peter

Names that are weird when you're a baby and weird when you're old:

Radish

Kerosene

Australopithecus

Anthill

Hedgemony

Names that are weird when you're normal:

Balthazar

Romulus

Clandestia

Persephone

Kremulon

Names that are normal when you're weird:

Al

[coolcomicbookcovers]

[weepingchoir]

you have a disgusting storytelling addiction

[atlas-prime]

It’s true. It goes back a long way, too. It all started when…

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

you're laughing. charles dickens had a son named plorn and you're laughing

[mediummarketpaperback]

HE HAD A SON NAMED

WHAT

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

Plorn

[mediummarketpaperback]

NICK I LOOKED IT UP AND SAW NOTHING OF THE SORT IS THIS A PRANK

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

technically his name was edward but everyone called him plorn

[mediummarketpaperback]

Edward “Plorn” Dickens. my god.

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

I have something worse

[mediummarketpaperback]

oh???

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

[mediummarketpaperback]

imagine getting stuck with the nickname Plorn

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

imagine getting sent to live in the Australian outback when you were sixteen

[mediummarketpaperback]

WHY WERE THEY SO CRUEL TO MY BOY PLORN

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

I have an answer to that one too

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

[cherishablematerial-deactivated]

[cogentranting]

The face of a man whose father nicknamed him Plorn.

[elodieunderglass]

Born without a groove 😔

[linguisticparadox]

[telomeke]

With each addition to this, I find myself nodding and murmuring, "Mm hm. The Plorn Dickens."

‌

[sarahreesbrennan]

justice for Plorn

Was ‘Dickens’ not burden enough

[lipstickchainsaw]

When you're unable to solve an IT problem at work, there really is nothing quite like having it escalated all the way up the ladder. With every step, there is a degree of smugness about how real my problem is, and that yes, I was right to have trouble with this.

[crowns-of-violets-and-roses]

You can get a minor version of this if one IT person solves it but they spend a bunch of time repeating things you’ve already tried and when they eventually solve it it’s by doing something you wanted to try but didn’t have the requisite permissions to do

[coral-skeleton]

Was in a situation where neither I, nor my boss knew what was causing the problem, so we ended up calling one of the head engineers, and ive never experienced anything quite as validating as the moment where said head engineer, after spending several minutes just staring at the problem, quietly said "what the fuck"

[technofinch]

The real world is crazy most of the people I work with don't even know what an oubliette is

[voldemo]

My friend really changed once she became a vegetarian 

[voldemo]

its like ive never seen herbivore

[ezekestiel]

i sighed so loud my mom asked me if i was okay and she’s two rooms away

[crimesagainsthughsmanatees]

[horreurscopes]

never forget the universal rule of the order of things: People Will Not Read It

[horreurscopes]

signs at stores? émail? menu ?? instruction ? post online ? caption with andswer to question ? group hand outs ??? street sign ??? no. The Written Word Is The Enemy

[lasrina]

#The number of compliments i have gotten for reading a thing

The ability to occasionally Read A Thing will make you a hero in your workplace, especially if it is for example an error message that tells you what you need to do differently, or instructions on unjamming a printer.

[stephaniematurin]

how dare you say we put jam in the printer

[berkelbites]

Ok reblogging this again because story time.

I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.

There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.

So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than "(software) is broken, help"

So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she's trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there's an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.

The error message basically says, "these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save."

So I take a few deep breaths.

Then I lie to her.

I message her back, saying "hey yeah, for some reason it's not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?"

She does.

I ask her if she still needs help.

She does not respond.

[samueldays]

I have similar story from tech support.

Client is reporting that Some Thing Program doesn't work. I ask if there's an error message with further information about what's not working. Client says "no". I go over and ask Client to open Some Thing. Client double-clicks on the icon for Some Thing, it starts to boot, an error message dialog flashes up on screen, Client closes error message before I can read it, Thing closes after the error.

"What did that error message say?" I ask.

"What error message?" asks Client.

I tell Client to open the Some Thing again and then not click anything else. Client opens Some Thing, error message appears, Client clicks it away again.

I tell Client to stand up, step away, and give me physical control of the computer. I open Some Thing, start looking at the error message without closing it, and Client says "You should close that." I tell Client that I am reading the error message. Client is apparently accustomed to treating error messages as a kind of spam email that should be deleted as fast as possible, and gets agitated that I'm reading it.

I read the error message. It tells me what the problem is. I fix the problem. Some Thing works now.

---

Later, I start thinking about how such an error message might perhaps be engineered to be more attention-grabbing and close-resistant as a way of making people read it. It's not important for some random program here, but there are more important systems (medical, etc) where it would be reasonable to demand the user's attention because people's lives depend on paying attention to the error message.

But then people with a perverted intellect would still be thinking about ways to avoid reading the message, like dragging it off edge of screen or hiding it behind another window. So maybe the dialog box could have an always-in-front feature to override other windows, and the alert could use the computer's hardware "beep" functionality that can't be switched off by muting the regular sound system, and keep beeping... shit, I realize I'm reinventing pain, and get philosophical about it.

[doccyuk]

Story from The Past about My Mum:

She was a computer programmer / analyst, a... Long Time Ago. Called in for a system she'd installed before, the office folk said they kept having problems where it Didn't Work Right (no error, a malfunction)

She investigated, and told them that could only happen if they did 3 specific things in a specific order, which they should not ever do.

So, she asked, did they ever do that?

No! Of course not, was the answer.

So she made a couple of small changes, packed up and said that should be fine, but they should call her if there were problems.

The next week

She had a call saying "We're getting a strange error message on the system, can you help?"

She said, of course, can they tell her the error?

And the message was:

"You Said You Didn't Do This"

[gaynfl-moved]

the x files is one of those shows that's like. the basic premise is simple enough. a man and his passion project. a woman sent to debunk said passion project. but what they don't tell you about is the yearning. and the longing. and the way that the yearning and the longing go along with the absolute nutty adventures they get into. and it's like. here's a show about aliens. and longing. and yearning.

[victusinveritas]

[black-crested-jaybird]

I always think of the description I saw years ago: Self-imposed deadlines don't help me, because I know the person who set them, and they're full of shit.

[37q]

[wilwheaton]

can i tell you a story?

Earlier today, a really fun memory surfaced that I wanted to share, because I haven’t had an opportunity to tell a story in a little while. It’s an older memory, so I’m sure some of the specifics aren’t entirely correct, but this is way I remember it. In the early 2000s, I worked on a couple of movies that were direct-to-DVD, low budget versions of successful, big budget movies of the moment.…

can i tell you a story?

[draqua]

There’s a difference between a female character who exists in a story and has a romantic relationship with a male character versus a female character who exists in a story to have a romantic relationship with a male character

[batman0539]

This.

[open-sketchbook]

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!

[just7frogsinapeoplesuit]

Individual language sounds are called phonemes by the way! Most languages have 20-50 different phonemes, though some have as few as 10 and some people count tonal languages like Mandarin as having over 200. English has 44.

The human brain learns to differentiate between phonemes in childhood, so if you weren't exposed to stuff like retroflex consonants as a kid you literally can't hear them yet! It's not your fault but it will take work to teach yourself how to hear and speak them. Foreign music, radio, and film are great for learning to hear new phonemes.

[chekovsphaser]

Additionally: marking what phonemes are distinct in a language is called "minimal pairs". Meaning, if you changed this phoneme for another, would the meaning of the word change? Generally, if your language doesn't include the phoneme as a minimal pair, you will have significant trouble being able to hear or make that sound. Like anything else, it can be trained, but it is not so simple as "just do it"/"just look it up".

For example, in English, you don't use the sound ɐ̃ (as in pão). I have yet to meet a native English speaker who can make that sound, usually they just default to a plain a. Even though, in Portuguese, pau (pau) and pão (pɐ̃ũ) are completely different words.

The name of the country Kiribati (kɪrɪbæs) is derived from the surname Gilberts. As in, it is literally the Gilbertese pronunciation of Gilberts. Because their language lacks phonemes for G/L, the name uses the best approximation possible.

Now, that's not to say that you shouldn't try, but just be aware that your Nguyen is probably not the way that it's actually pronounced, and an effort/your best shot is worth a lot. And if someone wants to use a different or 'Westernized' name just fucking go with it.

[just7frogsinapeoplesuit]

I forgot to mention in that first reblog: there are over 800 phonemes worldwide! Humans can pronounce around 600 different consonant sounds and 200 different vowel sounds.

Also, the reason English is such a nightmare to pronounce/spell phonetically is because we have 44 phonemes but only 26 letters. Most languages with a written alphabet have one specific letter or letter combination for each phoneme but we don't.

[parasocialanxiety]

For any given language combination, there's likely to only be a couple sounds that you will never be able to hear, but there are often countless that you can't hear yet. There are countless phenomic rules in your language that contradict with the other language. "Why is that so hard?? [Your native language] has that sound!" Yes, but it cannot put it at the end of a word with no vowel behind it. Yes, but it cannot be combined with that next consonant. You can't hear these well enough to reproduce them either, until you can. And that will take a lot more familiarity than the time it takes to look up a pronunciation, and training of your mouth to reproduce it.

And that's if you can actually, accurately find consistent answers when you do look it up. My own home county and its towns are mispronounced frequently on the local news and weather. They're getting that shit wrong one single county away.

If you're listening to someone mispronounce your native language, you might not even be able to accurately diagnose what the other person did wrong. Sometimes people will claim some phoneme was mispronounced when the problem was the stress was so wildly incorrect that that part of the word sounded wrong, so you assumed it was the phoneme itself. If a native speaker can't correct it, how is are people supposed to figure out the correct pronunciation themselves?

When people act like this is an English speaker only problem, they're telling on themselves. You're either not noticing when this happens in other languages, or you're not listening to other languages at all. Which isn't something to be ashamed of, until you're shaming people for being monolingual. I promise people are pulling the same "I hope I'm saying that right" in other languages. Are adding sounds they don't even hear themselves adding. Are saying something almost correct and then correcting themselves to something wildly wrong.

Here on Tumblr specifically people like to pretend it's a monolingual English speaker only problem. But they're still perpetuating ideas that it's simply a matter of effort and intellect, and you know who that hurts most in the English speaking world? People who speak English as a second language.