please note that while progenitor, guardian, spawnpoint etc are all respected titles, they are more the equivalent of mother/father than an affectionate nickname you would scream through the house multiple times a day. gimme something we can use people
i was going to add something else to this but instead i got to thinking and i was like huh. what could you use.
in most languages the word for ‘mother’ usually starts with an M, because phonetically [m] is one of the easiest sounds for a newborn to make when they start babbling, and mothers tend to be the one most around the child. so in my mind that crosses M off the list, because it’s automatically associated with a feminine figure
similarly, ‘father’ tends to start with D, T, P, or B. (phonetically these sounds are very close together; [p, b] and [d, t] are all only different because of being voiced or unvoiced.) these are also phonetically easy letters and ones kids pick up on earlier.
now the hard sounds for kids are the following: [ɹ, d͡ʒ, tʃ, θ, ð] or in normal speak: the English R, the “j” or “dge” sound in “judge,” the “th” sound in “thigh” and the “th” sound in “the.” and we don’t want kids unable to say their parent’s name for years, so those are also off the list.
additionally, it’s easiest for young kids to just repeat the same sound twice rather than figuring out the tongue gymnastics of putting different sounds together, which is why kids will say Ma-Ma or Da-Da and not Ma-Mo or Da-Po. and we’ll want to stick with low back vowels like “ah” and avoid ones like the hard “i” or “ee.”
so what does that leave us? when we want a sound kids can learn easily and early but don’t want to just put a funky spin on “mama” or “dada”?
my suggestions: G, K, W, L. i personally lean towards W and L. they’re called liquids, since they’re the consonants that kind of aren’t consonants, and kids (and ESL learners) will tend to swap out the English R for a W or L until they can learn the R.
if i ever have a child, they’ll start calling me Wawa. then when they get older, they’ll call me Wala, or maybe even Wally.
and then, once they’re finally phonetically developed, they can call me by my true title as their nonbinary guardian for their 18+ years:
Want an alternative for when you’re writing essays that have to remain in third person so you can’t say “you” and you’re talking about a hypothetical person, and traditionally you were taught to use “his or her” but that pisses you off because what about people who use other pronouns?
Not all teachers let you use they/them when referring to a single person if that person’s pronouns are unconfirmed, however you can actually use “one”, “one’s”, “oneself” etc
I’m bad at explaining this but I can give examples of sentences if that helps, because this doesn’t work for every situation
It's also worth noting that English uses "one" as a pseudo-pronoun so often that you're also allowed to make it plural.
Also, 7th edition APA officially uses the singular they. So, if your prof is being pissy about it, they technically can't do anything, so long as they allow that format.
People, especially games, get eldritch madness wrong a lot and it’s really such a shame.
An ant doesn’t start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness.
Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does.
It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then…
It’s an ant again.
Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters.
Online 3D experiment by Ikaros Kappler which is described as a “Extrusion/Revolution Generator” ….
Created with three.js, you can alter the bezier curves and angle of the form, and is designed with 3D printing in mind (models can be exported and saved, as well as calculated weight in silicone).
I’d usually post this to my NSFW blog but this is making me laugh so unreasonably hard that I can’t fucking breathe and therefore deserves to be on my main blog
I see a lot of talk about how neurodivergence evolved and stayed in the gene pool because it was somehow ‘useful’ to our ancient ancestors. While I don’t necessarily disagree with this theory, I would like to propose an alternative. A theory that we already have physical evidence for. Humans just love each other and care for each other. Don’t you think that a species that cared for it’s people while they recovered from broken bones, or nursed their elderly well beyond their ‘usefulness’ would leave a member out because they didn’t make eye contact, or couldn’t stay focused on a particular task, or whatever other trait you associate with neurodivergence? I really don’t.
Sure, maybe it was useful to have someone around who didn’t mind making arrowheads all day, or who knew absolutely everything about all of the local flora and fauna, or who keyed in on every little distraction. At the end of the day, though, these people weren’t kept around because they were useful, they were cared for because they were loved.
(i’m only surprised it finally happened in arizona; my money was on australia.) please rest assured this is very uncommon. hold on, I’m gonna take the opportunity to infodump about a special interest:
Spider x Scorpion Sex
ok so: spiders and spiders are occasionally observed mating in the wild. it makes a weird sort of sense: they are both arachnids with surprisingly similar mating rituals, so if two species have similar sizes and markings, a male performing a mating dance can end up attracting a cross-species partner. this happens particularly in times of lowered sexual competition, where for whatever reason there are fewer same-species partners to choose from. I guess if you’re horny enough, a strong healthy mate with the right number of legs (8) is all anyone can ask for. Personally, if i was a horny little spider looking to get some, I would still be concerned by the fact that scorpions eat spiders. But then again both groups include species that practice sexual cannibalism, so maybe that’s not such a turn off.
Unfortunately, spider/scorpion sex remains very much the exception to the norm. there just aren’t many areas where spiders and scorpions (of similar size, shape, and physical attributes) share territories, and have a sex ratio imbalanced enough to spur cross-species copulation.
Finally: when it does happen, spider/scorpion sex almost never results in offspring, for a couple of reasons:
a bunch of species aren’t genetically compatible, fertilization just isn’t possible
so far, the only documented instances of spider-scorpion offspring have come from unions of female spiders/male scorpions, so it’s probable that intercourse between male spiders/female scorpions just doesn’t result in viable eggs, for whatever reason.
side note: i’m actually really disappointed about this, bc it’s very possible we could have gotten two distinct types of hybrids per combined species, the way Ligers (female tiger/male lion) are distinct from Tigons (female lion/male tiger).
also spider-scorpion hybrids* are sterile (or at least the ones bred in captivity have been so far.) infertility is quite common among animal hybrids. it’s the reason mules (horse-donkey hybrids) can’t reproduce. the consequence is that itty bitty baby spider-scorpions probably aren’t going to grow up and start massive colonies families of their own, sadly.
(*here i need to make a correction to the original post: the correct term is “spider-scorpion hybrid” not “scorpion-spider hybrid”)
For all these reasons (rarity of naturally occurring spider/scorpion intercourse, the unlikelihood and infertility of resulting offspring, etc) almost all documented instances of spider-scorpion hybrids have been created in labs by artificial fertilization. (though it is funny to think about scientists sitting around a glass cage trying to encourage a reluctant scorpion to do a sexy little dance for his spider lady friend. you got this bro!)
Finally, it’s quite difficult to recognize a spider-scorpion in the wild, and even more difficult to verify its parentage without genetic testing. “Spider-Scorpion Hybrid” doesn’t refer to just one species or phenotype: appearances differs wildly based on parental species. And this is the most exciting thing about spider-scorpion hybrids: there’s no way to 100% predict what a new hybrid will look like before it hatches! Some have tails, some have pincers, some spin webs, and some do none of that but still manage to be terrifying!
And with over 45,000 known spider species and almost 2,000 scorpion species in existence (and more being discovered all the time) that makes *pulls out my high school graphing calculator*
Nature is fascinating and I hope you live in deep unease and suspicion for the short remainder of your days!
Photos below the cut! (of the hybrid discovered in arizona, and others selectively bred by researcers)
Mark Hamill is like the Tony Hawk of cartoon voice actors; in spite of the fact that he’s been doing it for decades and has played some of the most well known characters in some of the most popular shows around, everybody is still absolutely flummoxed to learn that their favourite character was voiced by Mark Hamill.
I am beside myself with this information. Absolutely dumbfounded. Spent my lunch break nearly crying in confusion and/or relevation reading a wikipedia article
I think my favourite is the short where Joker (voiced by Mark Hamill) teams up with the Trickster (voiced by Mark Hamill) to kidnap famous voice actor Mark Hamill (voiced by Mark Hamill), only for the villainous duo to be defeated by Swamp Thing (voiced by Mark Hamill).
Literally I’ve seen this post so many times and only now having watched the short do I also know that Mark Hamill assists in his own rescue by doing the voices of the Joker and Trickster to trick them into fighting and driving onto grass where Swamp Thing can capture them.
What’s really wild is that the native people literally told the Europeans “they walked” when asked how the statues were moved. The Europeans were like “lol these backwards heathens and their fairy tales guess it’s gonna always be a mystery!”
Oral history from various First Nations tribes in the Pacific Northwest contained stories about a massive earthquake/tsunami hitting the coast, but no one listened to them until scientists discovered physical evidence of quakes from the Cascadia fault line.
Roopkund Lake AKA “Skeleton Lake” in the Himalayas in India is eerie because it was discovered with hundreds of skeletal remains and for the life of them researchers couldn’t figure out what it was that killed them. For decades the “mystery” went unsolved.
Until they finally payed closer attention to local songs and legend that all essentially said “Yah the Goddess Nanda Devi got mad and sent huge heave stones down to kill them”. That was consistent with huge contusions found all on their neck and shoulders and the weather patterns of the area, which are prone to huge & inevitably deadly goddamn hailstones. https://www.facebook.com/atlasobscura/videos/10154065247212728/
Literally these legends were past down for over a thousand years and it still took researched 50 to “figure out” the “mystery”. 🙄
Adding to this, the Inuit communities in Nunavut KNEW where both the wrecks of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were literally the entire time but Europeans/white people didn’t even bother consulting them about either ship until like…last year.
“Inuit traditional knowledge was critical to the discovery of both ships, she pointed out, offering the Canadian government a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when Inuit voices are included in the process.
In contrast, the tragic fate of the 129 men on the Franklin expedition hints at the high cost of marginalising those who best know the area and its history.
“If Inuit had been consulted 200 years ago and asked for their traditional knowledge – this is our backyard – those two wrecks would have been found, lives would have been saved. I’m confident of that,” she said. “But they believed their civilization was superior and that was their undoing.”
“Oh yeah, I heard a lot of stories about Terror, the ships, but I guess Parks Canada don’t listen to people,” Kogvik said. “They just ignore Inuit stories about the Terror ship.”
Schimnowski said the crew had also heard stories about people on the land seeing the silhouette of a masted ship at sunset.
“The community knew about this for many, many years. It’s hard for people to stop and actually listen … especially people from the South.”
Indigenous Australians have had stories about giant kangaroos and wombats for thousands of years, and European settlers just kinda assumed they were myths. Cut to more recently when evidence of megafauna was discovered, giant versions of Australian animals that died out 41 000 years ago.
Similarly, scientists have been stumped about how native Palm trees got to a valley in the middle of Australia, and it wasn’t until a few years ago that someone did DNA testing and concluded that seeds had been carried there from the north around 30 000 years ago… aaand someone pointed out that Indigenous people have had stories about gods from the north carrying the seeds to a valley in the central desert.
oh man let me tell you about Indigenous Australian myths - the framework they use (with multi-generational checking that’s unique on the planet, meaning there’s no drifting or mutation of the story, seriously they are hardcore about maintaining integrity) means that we literally have multiple first-hand accounts of life and the ecosystem before the end of the last ice age
it’s literally the oldest accurate oral history of the world.
Now consider this: most people consider the start of recorded history to be with the Sumerians and the Early Dynastic period of the Egyptians. So around 3500 BCE, or five and a half thousand years ago
These highly accurate Aboriginal oral histories originate from twenty thousand years ago at least
