"I say you're asking me to follow you into Mordor, which, if I'm totally straight with you, I think is a really bad idea. But, uh, the Shire...the Shire is burning. So Mordor it is." - Eddie Munson, Stranger Things
Ever feel like a fish out of water? Meet the giant mudskipper (Periophthalmodon schlosseri). Believe it or not, this fish needs to breathe air and spends a decent amount of time on land! Found on the muddy shores of mangroves in parts of Southeast Asia, it uses its pectoral fins to “skip” or “walk” across mudflats.
When people assume Celtic = Irish I get a strong urge to stab myself in the eye.
No no no no no no.
Sit down we must have a conversation.
There were 6 Celtic nations.
Éire, Cymru, Alba, Kernow, Breizh, and Ellan Vannin.
Ireland, Wales, Scotland, Cornwall, Brittany, and the Isle of Mann respectively.
They’re all related, but not the same. They all have different languages descended from a similar group, Irish (Gaeilge), Scottish (Gàidhlig), Manx (Gaelg), Welsh (Cymraeg), Cornish (Kernowek), and Breton (Brezhoneg). Some are more widely spoken than others, for example Welsh is still commonly spoken in Wales, whereas hearing Cornish in Cornwall instead of English is rare.
All Celtic nations have varied mythology and culture.
Irish Mythology is different from Breton Mythology, and even Welsh and Cornish mythology (arguably the most related Celtic Nations) have subtle differences to each other. I wish I could add more about the cultures at this time but my knowledge of Celtic nations is primarily made up of the history and languages of those regions, particularly Cornwall.
You might have notice that England and English are missing from this, because the English descended from Anglo-Saxons, who were German invaders that came to the isles right around the Fall of the Roman empire in the 5th Century, erasing the Celtic influence in what is now England.
So what this all really means is that Celtic is an umbrella term, and just because it’s Celtic doesn’t mean it has anything to do with Ireland at all. So don’t assume that just because someone’s talking about something Celtic that they’re talking about something Irish.
Furthermore there are currently six modern Celtic languages divided into two families. The Goidelic or Gaelic languages: Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx, which are all descended from Middle Irish; and the Brythonic languages: Welsh, Cornish and Breton all descended from Common Brythonic. It should be noted that both Manx and Cornish are revived languages, that is they effectively died (There were no living native speakers) for a time, but revitalisation efforts amongst the communities to learn the languages as second languages resulted in children picking up the languages as their first language, thus returning the languages to living languages with communities of native speakers. Although all of the languages are growing in number of speakers at each count, only Welsh is not counted as being endangered. This revitalisation is part of why the written form of Manx is so different to that of its sisters, despite the close similarity of the spoken form; its spelling is designed to make sense to a native English speaker, whereas Irish and Gaelic use a more traditional phonetic spelling system which only makes sense if you are used to the concept of a séimhiú being represented by the letter h. The Manx for “Isle of Man”, for example, is “Ellan Vannin” whereas the Irish name is “Oileán Mhanann” while the spelling is very different the actual pronunciation is almost identical. Both refer to Manannán mac Lir of the Tuath dé Danann, an ancient race of supernatural creatures, often interpreted as a christian retelling of the ancient Gaelic gods.
Also, depending on who you ask, there’s a seventh Celtic nation! It’s Galicia, a region in northwestern Spain. Opinions are divided as to whether it’s Celtic enough to “count”, but here are some sources for further reading:
BBC: Where is the seventh Celtic nation?
Spain Then and Now: The Celts in Spain
Journal of Interdisciplinary Celtic Studies: Celtic Legacy in Galicia
University of Pennsylvania Museum: The Modern Celts of Northern Spain
…and I can’t help but link to my own post of the beautiful song “Va unan,” sung in Breton and Spanish by the chorus “L’Ensemble choral du bout du monde” with the Spanish guest vocalist Jesús Cifuentes from the band Celtas Cortos.
It’s easiest to think of the difference between Goidelic and Brythonic languages as q-Celts and p-Celts. Take the word ‘son of’, for instance, which we’ve all seen in names like MacDonald or MacGregor. Mac. That’s a q-Celtic word, Goidelic, ending in a ‘c’. In Welsh, which is a Brythonic or p-Celtic language, the same word became ‘map’ or ‘ap’. So where the son of Donald in Scotland became MacDonald, in Wales the son of Rhys became ap Rhys became Prys became Price or Preece. Same original root, leading to a very different linguistic end.
Specifically that represents different results of the Proto-Celtic *kʷ. Proto-Celtic had no /p/, the PIE phoneme *p having been lost, while the PIE *kʷ was preserved. In the Brythonic branch, *kʷ became /p/, essentially filling the gap that was left by the loss of the original PIE *p, while in the Goidelic languages, this merged with /k/ (it remained as a separate sound in Primitive Irish (4th - 6th century CE) and had its own letter in Ogham which is transliterated as q), and thus still had no /p/ sound. So, using the example above, both map and mac descend from Proto-Celtic *makʷos “son”
Due to the lack of /p/, Primitive Irish adapted /p/ in loan words as kʷ, which results in a number of cases where early Latin loans with p have a c in modern Irish, for example, cáisc “Easter”, ultimately from pascha and clann “children, offspring” from Latin planta, originally meaning a shoot or sprout from a plant, hence metaphorically offspring, but in later stages the /p/ sound was borrowed along with loan words
In addition to the Goidelic and Brythonic branches, there was an extinct Continental branch, spoken in mainland Europe (despite being spoken on the continent, Breton is not classified in that branch, being descended from a post-Roman immigration from Britain). The relationship between the three branches is a matter of some dispute. Today, most linguists believe that Goidelic and Brythonic are more closely related to each other than either is to Continental, and thus they divide the Celtic languages into Insular and Continental, with Insular in turn divided into Goidelic and Brythonic. However, some linguists believe that Brythonic is more closely related to Continental Celtic languages. As the Continental branch also had the kʷ -> p change, those two are grouped together as “P-Celtic” in this view, being opposed to “Q-Celtic” which is the Goidelic branch. That shared development being one of the arguments for their close relationship
This sound change is not uncommon, however, and is thus no longer considered a strong argument for grouping Brythonic and Continental, and there are other traits held by Brythonic and Goidelic and not shared with Continental that are considered stronger arguments. Interestingly, the same kind of division happened with the Italic languages. Latin and its closest relatives preserved PIE *kʷ while the Osco-Umbrian branch merged *kʷ into *p. Eastern Romance (Romanian and its closest relatives) also changed Latin kʷ and gʷ into p and b, e.g., apă “water”, from aqua, thus, it could also be thought of as a sort of “P-Romance”
An amazing explanation for smudged ink I came across in an October 1, 1897 letter from Rachel (a teenage girl in finishing school in Philadelphia) to her cousin Jack at Yale.
I'm pretty sure that Noah Webster and George Merriam never met in real life, and also, there's a 45 year age gap. But what if ... ? If we allow for some minor historical inaccuracies, we could really get this ball rolling.
i could do a great one of those “get ready with me” morning routine videos. like hi welcome to my channel everyone! first thing i do when i wake in the morning is i step outside and i take a deep breath and i get real high and i scream from the top of my lungs what’s going on—
if your website's cookie popup only allows accept all and edit cookies and i have to click the edit button to reject your cookies then i fucking hate you
I find it so deeply fascinating that there are medieval and possibly even ancient texts (I can't remember specifics rn but I definitely saw one from early medieval Europe recently) that are like "oh if only I lived in an earlier age when there was literal magic in the world"
I feel like nowadays people project that back ONTO the middle ages, but even back then they were like "there used to be magic and now it's gone"
Yes! Because it's not a goal to be achieved, but a cycle!
Instead of seeing the house as clean/not clean, it helps a lot to see cleaning as a constant upkeep of your environment. Taking care of your home, and of yourself, is a good thing!
(still unlearning the guilt and anxiety associated with cleaning. it's an uphill battle.)
I’m reposting this with a link to some sources from the OP, btw; I’m sorry for not tagging them, but Tumblr won’t let me and I’m guessing it’s a privacy settings thing.
I worked at a Starbucks and some customer at the walk up came to complain there was a lady selling tamales in the parking lot and we were all like “oh whoa really?” And literally all of us left the store to buy bags of tamales
when the tamale dude comes through our neighborhood, both of my partners basically run out the house to go get some (the only reason i do not is bc of celiac)
The enshittification of solar (and how to stop it)
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I'm only a few chapters into Bill McKibben's stupendous new book Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization and I already know it's going to change my outlook forever:
McKibben is one of our preeminent climate writers and activists, noteworthy for his informed and brilliant explanations of the technical limits – and possibilities – of various climate interventions, and for his lifelong organizing work.
Here Comes the Sun is a capstone on several years' worth of surprising, infuriating and inspiring newsletter articles, particularly about the unheralded, unanticipated, and unbelievable growth of solar. Everything else might be utterly fucked, but solar is going great.
In McKibben's telling, everything about solar is going better than anticipated. Solar efficiency is increasing exponentially with prices falling through the floor. The material bill for solar is also in freefall. Everything surrounding solar is going amazing, too. Battery capacity is improving even faster than solar generation, and the best new batteries use the incredibly abundant element sodium (not lithium) to store those useful electrons. Long-haul transmission lines are crisscrossing the world.
Hyper-reliable electric cars keep getting cheaper, and the batteries are lasting much longer than we used to think they would. Some of these vehicles are nigh-miraculous, from the ebikes that get 5 miles to the penny, to the world's heaviest EV, a dump truck that shuttles to a quarry atop a hill where it is loaded with rocks, then regeneratively brakes its way back down the hill, accumulating enough charge to get back up to the top again (a perpetual motion machine!). Heat pumps and induction tops are actually more efficient than burning natural gas – in other words, it's cheaper to convert sunshine into electrons and electrons into heat than it is to just burn gas:
Then there's the capacity. China's solar capacity growth is insane – the solar equivalent of a new coal plant is coming online every eight hours. But it's even more intense in poor regions of the global south, like in Pakistan, where a legion of installers have learned their craft from Tiktok videos set to songs from popular musical films, leading to one of the most rapid electrification rollouts in human history. The closer a country is to the equator, the more sense solar makes, of course, so solar is sweeping some of the poorest countries in the world, liberating them from the need to attract foreign currency they can use to buy dollar-denominated barrels of oil.
Everything we thought would be a solar bottleneck turns out to be a feature, not a bug. Perhaps you've heard that solar is unsustainable because it competes for agricultural land, making starvation the price of clean energy. Wrong: solar provides shade for many crops that have been withering in the soaring heat of a climate-wracked world, and limits evaporation, reducing the amount of water needed to produce food crops. What's more, the cooling effect of that soil-retained moisture helps keep the shade-providing solar panels within their optimal operating temperature, increasing the efficiency of their power generation. And of course, every time someone switches from hydrocarbon fuels to solar, they reduce the demand for ethanol, and a third of America's corn goes into making this stupid, wasteful fuel additive (and corn is America's most prolific crop). That's land that can be given over to growing useful food crops. Solar is increasing our agricultural yields, not competing for farmland.
Then there's the material bill for solar: a recurring (and legitimate, and worthwhile) concern about electrification is that it comes with a vast material bill that will necessitate massive extraction projects. There's good reason to worry that the copper, lithium and conflict minerals needed for planetary solarization will come at the expense of the despoilation of habitat, the poisoning of indigenous people, and the ruination of miners.
Happily, this, too is turning out to be a tractable problem. First off, because the material bill for solarization just isn't that big when compared to the amount of fossil fuels we consume every year. To create the batteries we need to keep the whole world's lights on when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing, we will need to extract one seventeenth of the amount of minerals we burn every year in the fossil fuel system:
And while some of those materials will have to be replaced – necessitating more extraction – most of them can be recycled. The biggest bottleneck in recycling complex manufactured products like batteries is that it's energy intensive, but solar makes energy cheap. We're starting to see solar-powered solar-panel recycling operations that recover 99% of the materials in used up and superannuated solar panels, and use those materials to make new, modern, super-efficient solar panels:
And holy smokes is solar going to provide us with lot of cheap energy. Materials scientist Deb Chachra's book How Infrastructure Works estimates that we could give every person in the world the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, only colder) by harvesting 0.4% of the solar rays that strike the Earth's surface:
The last time I spoke with Deb, she waxed lyrical about how all that too-cheap-to-meter energy will make it possible to recover materials from old energy systems that weren't designed to be broken down and re-integrated into the material stream at their end-of-life, and how it will also allow us to economically make new devices that are designed to be broken down and re-used when their duty-cycles end.
Solar is a technology, not a fuel. Every generation of it is cheaper and better. There's so much low-hanging fruit for solar conversion. In Saul Griffith's Electrify, he offers lists of simple, tried and tested tweaks to safety codes that dramatically reduce the cost of installing and maintaining solar:
That's the good news. You probably know about the bad news: Donald Trump explicitly promised the fossil fuel industry legislation that he would kill renewables if they donated $1b to his campaign, which they did:
Money talks and bullshit walks. When Texas Republicans introduced state legislation requiring power companies to install a new fossil fuel plant every time they added new solar capacity, the bill died in a roar of opposition from rural, Trump-voting Texans who didn't want "DEI for natural gas":
There's nothing about renewables that cuts against the aesthetics or values of the conservative movement. Generating your own power on the roof of your own homestead (or with a clip-on panel attached to your apartment balcony) is fully compatible with the ideal of a sovereign individual, not beholden to a government-regulated power monopoly.
Solar also fits neatly within the idea of Christian Dominionism, that "God gave man all the things of the Earth." An existence dependent on setting fire to a dwindling supply of critters that died millions of years ago leaves a lot of value on the table. If God wants us to breed chickens to have vast drumsticks and breasts, why wouldn't He want us to capture the hyperabundant sunshine He sends our way every morning at dawn? Why would we limit ourselves to this inefficient, inconvenient and expensive ancient garbage?
What's more, solar is cheap – over the past year, we've crossed a threshold, and solar is now substantially cheaper than coal, natural gas or oil. It's getting cheaper still, with no bottom in sight. No wonder solar deployment is growing exponentially. Exponential growth is notoriously difficult to really get your head around, hence the ancient parable of the chessboard and the grains of rice:
Some of McKibben's critics have fallen into the same trap as King Shihram, failing to appreciate how fast the small absolute magnitude of an exponentially growing number can grow to engulf the world:
But the fossil fuel industry understands exponentials, and they're freaking the fuck out. Unluckily for them, their champion Donald Trump is singularly bad at making the case against renewables. Trump's big line for getting people to hate offshore wind is this bullshit story he tells about turbines confusing whales:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66928305
Earth to fascist: your people seriously don't give a shit about whales dying. If you're going to make up a story about wind turbines killing some kind of charismatic macrofauna, at least pick something deranged Maga freaks pretend to care about, like eagles or some shit.
Same goes for Trump's story about the environmental hazards of solar panels, that "rabbits get caught in solar panels":
But unfortunately, Donald Trump isn't in charge of ratfucking the solar transition. That role will fall to much smarter people from the fossil fuel industry, the same people who masterminded decades of climate denial. They're scarily good at their jobs.
From the fossil fuel industry's perspective, the problem with solar isn't that it's different from oil and coal. Big Carbon isn't shy about capex – they're always blowing millions on cool, eye-wateringly expensive new gadgets for sucking old dead things out of the land and sea.
The problem is that the sun shines everywhere. The fossil fuel industry is many things – ardent génocidaires bent on the extinction of the human race for profit – but what they are above everything else is rent-seekers.
The whole point of an extraction economy is to control a key factor of production so that other people need to come to you in order to do everything else. The ideal oil economy consists of a series of holes in the ground surrounded by people with guns, owned by a cartel that chokes off supply to maximize profits while leaving a highly visible share of the world's population shivering in the dark as a warning to anyone complaining about their prices.
Fossil fuels are valuable because they are a chokepoint on the entire productive economy. Anyone who's seen the Mad Max documentaries knows how this goes: even the most mid, paunchy, straw-haired boomer with volcanic bacne and shitty dress-sense can seize power over the whole population if he controls the supply of one of life's essentials.
The fossil fuel industry is a magnet for people who love a chokepoint. These people are born tollboth operators and they never stop hunting for turnpikes. They are landlords for ancient corpses, charging the whole world rent to keep the lights on. They are chokepoint-trophic. You can't be a warlord amid plenty – why would anyone get down on all fours and volunteer to be your footstool if they can get everything they need over the next hill?
I think there's a collision looming between these rent-seeking missiles and the ever-cheaper, ever-better solar world. Eventually, these garbage people will stop trying to halt renewables, and they'll start looking to own them.
You can already see the first stirrings of this: the more daring carbon barons are starting to flirt with geothermal and nuclear, and they're awfully fond of hydroelectric. Whatever the merits or demerits of these technologies, they have the (dubious) advantage that they are amenable to rent-extraction. To put up a dam, you need to own the land around the river. To run a nuke, you need to own a uranium mine.
Even geothermal is ineluctably place-based: there are lots of places where a borehole will hit something hot and bubbly, but it's an expensive proposition with a big, fat capital moat that limits competition. Anyone can slap a solar panel on their roof – but you can't dig a geothermal borehole in your back yard with a garden spade.
It's hard to find a chokepoint for the sun, but you know what has a lot of chokepoints? Technology. Remember, solar isn't a fuel, it's a technology. When big companies use technological chokepoints to screw their customers and competitors, we call that enshittification:
There's already tons of enshittification that's oozed into the cleantech sector. EV manufacturers like to boast that their cars are "software-based." Practically speaking, that means that when the manufacturer goes bust, all the cars sitting in inventory are permanently bricked:
Tesla is the greatest enshittifier the automotive world has ever seen, with scams that make Dieselgate look like amateur-hour. Imagine selling an EV and charging a monthly subscription fee to drivers who want to access more than half the charge in their batteries:
Residential solar inverter companies like Solaredge require an internet connection and shut themselves off after a protracted period of no-contact with the company's servers:
As with the solar revolution, the solar enshittification revolution is just getting started. There are so many ways that a "smart" device can be remotely downgraded. There's a "smart" sous-vide wand that got a mandatory software update that deleted its most popular features and turned them into monthly subscription "upgrades":
There's no (legal) reason that Samsung or LG couldn't do the same thing to the new induction top you spent thousands of dollars to buy and install (or built a custom kitchen around).
If I was a Big Oil company, I'd be investing heavily in the control systems for EVs, solar inverters, induction tops, heat pumps, smart thermostats, and anything else that depends on an internet-connected computer to operate. I'd flood every sales channel, offering zero-money-down installations with teaser zero rate loans and I'd do exclusivity deals with landlords and property developers. I'd get states and city councils to pass "safety" laws requiring grid coordination using a proprietary protocol and/or authentication token. I'd ship products that were compatible with open protocols, and later push mandatory updates to them that flip them to using proprietary controllers, like Chamberlain did with virtually every garage door opener in America:
I'd also be pushing the narrative that all this cleantech stuff is already enshittified – by China. I'd be out there shrieking about the possibility of China shutting off everyone's heat pumps in the dead of winter, or bricking every solar inverter if America doesn't back away from supporting Taiwanese independence.
It wouldn't even be (entirely) wrong. There are a hell of a lot of creepy things that a nation-state can do if they export critical, internet-connected infrastructure to the whole planet. Just ask any farmer who owns a John Deere tractor – every one of which is killswitched, meaning Donald Trump could order Deere to shut down a nation's entire agricultural sector:
The Tiktok ban provides a template for how this could be rolled out: gin up a moral panic about sinister foreign control over a key aspect of daily American life, then force a sale to one of Trump's billionaire cronies:
Trump could easily flip the whole cleantech sector to a consortium of US oil companies fronted by, say, Rex Tillerson. If you can't beat 'em, expropriate 'em.
I raise all this not to alarm people who are as excited by McKibben's news as I am, but rather, to game out the likely response of our sworn enemies so that we can get ready to fight them. These rent-seeking chokepoint obsessives have one move: corner a market and squeeze. They've been ratfucking renewables for decades because it competed with their existing racket.
But they aren't emotionally committed to setting fire to old dead things – they're just nature's most compulsive toll-booth operators, and they're sure as shit going to be looking for ways to stick toll-booths in our renewables future. Big Tech has shown them how to do it. So this is just another reason to defeat enshittification, which we must do anyway.
I had this freshman tell me she “couldn’t” audition because she was too scared of the stage, and might have a panic attack. I asked how she felt about walking around onstage in costume and not saying any lines. That was fine. I was like okay awesome let’s lay some groundwork now and maybe senior year you can have like three lines!
I remember this kid who came into an audition and froze up, just couldn’t speak. Competent reader and speaker but when people were watching she couldn’t do a thing.
We cast her anyway, in a chorus role. Offered her lots of support and encouragement and kindness and grace.
At the next audition she whispered. Anyone who had never seen her before would have thought she was the most nervous kid there. But the directing team was abuzz afterward. Did you see? She did it! Once or twice I could actually almost hear her! Amazing.
Got cast again, in a chorus role. She’d been making friends with the other kids, and they offered her encouragement too.
And the next audition we said wow I can hear her! She’s speaking! Let’s give her a handful of lines! She can do it!
Anyway as a mentor in the performing arts these things are huge wins for me. Some kids are competent and confident performers at 7 or 8 almost by nature. Others, even much older kids and adults, have to make progress by inches. But progress is exciting! The only place to go is up!
I'm sorry, is this... Is this implying there's no DYE in that rug? All raw wool in its natural colours? She fucking bred the sheep to get the colours she wanted over the course of ten years!? Holy shit.
Edit: this has gotten a huge amount of traction (fibrearts tumblr is a, uh, tight-knit community it seems!) so I am adding this note to state that I checked Lola Cody's website and can confirm: There is no dye in her work. She uses exclusively hand-spun Churro wool sheared from her home-raised sheep flock. It's all natural colours!
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