Manneken Pig @mnpig-blog - Tumblr Blog

purge of 2002? of 2012? what ARE those?

Oh, how quickly the past is forgotten.

They are part of the reason A03 is a thing now. Not the whole reason, but part of it.

The Great Purges of 2002 and 2012 are when ff.net got a wild hair up their ass about THINK OF THE CHILDREN and nuked any fic posted on there that was explicit. Thousands upon thousands of nc-17 smutfics were lost.

It’s what led to the creation of alternate hosting sites for smutty fic…AdultFanfiction was the one I went to…but thousands of fics would never be recovered.

systlin

Shit like the Great Purges and the Strikethrough of Livejournal eventually led to fans banding together to create A03, which I would have absolutely KILLED for when I was 15.

persephonebooklover

Back up ao3 was created by fans?

systlin

It’s…right on the main page.

fanfictionanthology

I love this because I will bet you that persefv has read that bit we are all so inundated with hyperbole and advertising that says that the consumer is somehow in charge of whatever product they are shilling that we all just assumed this was another sales tactic.

naryrising

But we’re not even… selling anything… *quiet sobs*

wrangletangle

No ads. No subscriptions. No data selling.

We are the definition of “what it says on the tin.”

elfwreck

Is there any way to spread this info?

THE OTW WAS CREATED BY FANS SO WE’D HAVE AN ARCHIVE THAT WASN’T SUBJECT TO CORPORATE REVIEW.

Nonprofit, so that nobody could ever say, “this isn’t making enough money; it’s getting shut down.” (See: Geocities, Quizilla, Figment, G+.) With lawyers involved and a firm awareness of the legalities of fanfic, so nobody would decide “we’ve gotten a nasty letter from a megacorporation with lawyers, so we’re hiding because we can’t afford to face a lawsuit. (Jedi Hurtaholics, Trevizo’s Millennium site.) With teams, so that an argument between co-mods didn’t result in the destruction of a whole archive. (Gryffindor Tower, Detention.)

AO3 IS OUR SITE.

It is by fans, for fans. Fans do all the coding. All the legal paperwork. All the abuse/tos violation complaints. Fans make all the choices about policies. Fans decide how to run the fundraisers. Fans write the blog posts. All the volunteer staff are fans; all the people who train them are fans. Fans wrangle all the tags.

(And the other OTW projects, too. Fans manage the entries at Fanlore. Fans run the Open Doors project. Fans publish Transformative Works and Cultures.)

EVERYONE WORKING FOR THE OTW LOVES FANDOM. Wants it to survive. Wants it to be awesome for everyone.

(Knows that it can’t be awesome for everyone; some approaches to fandom just clash hard. But they strive to minimize those clashes as much as possible, because they love fandom.)

AO3 is not some company that decided, “we’ll make a site for fanfic and then…” I don’t know what people are thinking is the reason. Money? Data harvesting? Tax shelter? Amusement and pity?

Nope; AO3 was fans saying, “Livejournal sucks; we’re tired of this fucked-up ‘rebuild every three years’ garbage; WE NEED TO OWN THE DAMN SERVERS.”

That’s the “of our own” part of the name. OTW isn’t a “them” running the site “for us.” It’s “us” making places for “us” to share what we love with others of “us.”

dirtydragonthoughts

This this this.

I was there for all of that shit, and AO3 is a godsend. If you enjoy or create fanworks, support AO3, donate if you can, and remember why it’s there in the first place!!

olderthannetfic

Fandom history really does get lost quickly. For current 20-something fans, AO3 has always been there.

iguanamouth

please do a comic of that xmas tree tweet. i beg you iguanamouth

hhhah ahahhahah

thechargrey

A little tip for parents with children in school (or for children in school to show their parents)

My mom gave me and my sister two days every semester that she called “mental health days.”

Those were days, that for ANY reason, and without having to tell my mom the reason, we could skip the day of school. We’d just tell her we were taking a mental health day and she’d call the school and let them know we were not coming in.

#1 This helped keep our grades up by lowering our stress levels. I never got a C in any grade school class. The majority of my classes I received A’s. I also took 4 AP classes and they were not weighted. Trust me, it made a difference.

#2 I never felt the need to skip school. I knew if I ever wanted to or needed to my mom would help me.

Your kids are young and need time to recover. They need some days where they can do nothing but stay in bed for no reason. They need their own space where their privacy is respected. It will make a huge difference.

buckwildbarrelracer-deactivated

Will do this when I have kids

mossman-making-stars

I would like to add something to this for the teachers too! (I may have already told this story on tumblr but OH WELL I’m telling it again)

One of my math teachers in high school had a policy called The Red Beanbags of Don’t Bother Me. He kept a pile of red beanbags on his desk, and at any time of the day you could go over and take one. From that point on, as long as you were in his classroom with a beanbag on your desk, no one could bother you. He wouldn’t call on you to answer problems, no students were allowed to talk to you, and perhaps most importantly, no one could ask why you took a bean bag that day. The only caveat was that if you used the beanbag more than three times in a semester you had to go talk to the school counselor about it.

I only used the beanbag a handful of times during those 4 years, but it was a godsend when I needed it. I knew people who would camp in his classroom during lunch (or even skip class and stay there all day) under the protection of the beanbag. As a teacher there’s not always a lot you can do for a student suffering mental illness/emotional abuse/ other struggles, but giving them some space and privacy in your class can make a HUGE difference.

tumble-duh

^^ that story is perfect

molly-ren

hey what's up with the "!" in fandoms? i.e. "fat!" just curious thaxxx <3

I have asked this myself in the past and never gotten an answer.

Maybe today will be the day we are both finally enlightened.

molly-ren

woodsgotweird said: man i just jumped on the bandwagon because i am a sheep. i have no idea where it came from and i ask myself this question all the time

Maybe someone made a typo and it just got out of hand?

stevita

I kinda feel like panic!at the disco started the whole exclamation point thing and then it caught on around the internet, but maybe they got it from somewhere else, IDK.

The world may never know…

molly-ren

Maybe it’s something mathematical?

michaelblume

I’ve been in fandom since *about* when Panic! formed and the adjective!character thing was already going strong, pretty sure it predates them.

hosekisama

It’s a way of referring to particular variations of (usually) a character — dark!Will, junkie!Sherlock, et cetera. I have suspected for a while that it originated from some archive system that didn’t accommodate spaces in its tags, so to make common interpretations/versions of the characters searchable, people started jamming the words together with an infix.

(Lately I’ve seen people use the ! notation when the suffix isn’t the full name, but is actually the second part of a common fandom portmanteau. This bothers me a lot but it happens, so it’s worth being aware of.)

nentuaby

“Bang paths” (! is called a “bang"when not used for emphasis) were the first addressing scheme for email, before modern automatic routing was set up. If you wanted to write a mail to the Steve here in Engineering, you just wrote “Steve” in the to: field and the computer sent it to the local account named Steve. But if it was Steve over in the physics department you wrote it to phys!Steve; the computer sent it to the “phys” computer, which sent it in turn to the Steve account. To get Steve in the Art department over at NYU, you wrote NYU!art!Steve- your computer sends it to the NYU gateway computer sends it to the “art” computer sends it to the Steve account. Etc. (“Bang"s were just chosen because they were on the keyboard, not too visually noisy, and not used for a huge lot already).

It became pretty standard jargon, as I understand, to disambiguate when writing to other humans. First phys!Steve vs the Steve right next to you, just like you were taking to the machine, then getting looser (as jargon does) to reference, say, bearded!Steve vs bald!Steve.

So I’m guessing alternate character version tags probably came from that.

raincityruckus

100% born of bang paths. fandom has be floating around on the internet for six seconds longer than there has been an internet so early users just used the jargon associated with the medium and since it’s a handy shorthand, we keep it.

sassafrassarah

Absolutely from the bang paths–saw people using them in early online fandom back in 1993 for referring to things.

taraljc

I had been doing it for a very, very long time but never actually knew the actual name for it. This is exciting! I like learning things.

systlin

Egypt, 3,000 BCE; “Hey if you let electric eels shock you it helps with pain.”

The Modern Era, 5,000 years later; “Hey wait, we can use electricity to interrupt nerve signals and relieve pain.”

The ghosts of two ancient Egyptian doctors, giving each other a high five of vindication; “Took ‘em long enough.”

arandomblackbook

Also The Modern Era, 5000 years later; “We don’t need science to ease pain. I got homeopathy and essential oils.”

The ghosts of two ancient Egyptian doctors; “Oh my Gods, Karen, do some research.”

evolution-incarnate

Electric eels don’t live in Egypt though

They live in South America

systlin

My bad, electric catfish, got ‘em mixed up.

evolution-incarnate

it is a much funnier mental image for it to be this funky chunky fish

systlin

Egyptian doctors, 3,000 BCE, pointing to a pool with one of these bois in it. “Yeah go stand in there and your arthritis’ll feel better.”

Ancient Egyptian with bad knees; “You’re shitting me, right.”

Ancient Egyptian doctors; “Did we fucking stutter.”

rudjedet

[This is a long story, for the TL;DR scroll all the way down.]

So I’d never heard of this before, and I decided to see if I could find anything concrete about this. After some digging I found two papers from a seemingly legitimate source on this subject. These come from the Academia profile of one Rosalind Park M.A., B.Sc., who has authored a good deal of papers on astronomy in Greco-Roman Egypt. The one that’s most pertinent to this alleged use of live electric catfish in Egyptian medicine as pain treatment is “Ancient Egyptian Headaches: Ichthyo- or Electrotherapy?”

In her abstract she starts by saying that she’s going to speculate whether or not certain treatments in Egyptian medical papyri are to be taken as early forms of electrotherapy. She does this by comparing these treatments to later treatments in Greco-Roman times, looking at existing translations and suggesting possible new translations.

The treatment she gives in this paper is Ebers 250:

My translation of this treatment is as follows:

Another [remedy] for illnesses in the side of the head: head of catfish fried in oil, apply to the side of the head for four days.

The most important words for this discussion are nar, catfish, snwx, to boil/to burn/to fry, and Hr mrHt, in oil.

Ebers 250 is a remedy for disease(s) in the side of the head, which Park takes to be migraine. That’s a reasonable assumption, considering “side of the head” is specificied here. However, she finds it highly improbable that the Egyptian physician would sit down and fry up an entire head of catfish as a treatment. Instead, she suggests that the translation should be read differently.

Her argument is that snwx should not be read as a verb, “fried”, but rather as an adjective, “frying”. Though she does say that we can only make guesses as to how the Egyptians viewed the concept of nature’s electricity, she then states that snwx might be “the best-fit technical word the Egyptians could come up with for the related concepts of ‘electrophysiology’.” (2007: 4) Her reasoning behind seems to in part hinge on the Arabic word ra’ad, which fishermen nowadays use to describe this fish, and which means “thunderstorm” or “lightning”, and that a different electrically charged fish native to Egypt is allegedly used as a hieroglyph in the word for “thunderstorm”, hAhAty, which I am unable to locate.

Park then goes on to suggest the following amended translation and rewording:

Head of the frying-Narfish (or the fish which causes ‘to fry’) applied to the migraine sufferer’s head (once every) 4 days.

In her view, the catfish needs to be alive and was to be applied to the head of the sick person in a form of proto-electrotherapy.

Straight off the bat there are two major problems with her translation and subsequent conclusion. The rewording is not the biggest issue - in general, it’s not frowned upon to take liberties with a translation in order to attain a more legible result, though I personally think in medical translations it’s for the best to stay as close to the source material as possible. However, in her reworded translation Park completely emits the words “in oil”, which make up half of the treatment, thus changing the entire contents of the remedy.

That’s a massive red flag. If I put “in oil” back in, while taking her interpretation of snwx as an adjective into account, I get this:

Another for illnesses in the side of the head: head of frying-catfish in oil, apply to the side of the head for four days.

That’s a lot more ambiguous still than her “reworded” translation with half the remedy missing.

The other glaring problem with this is the phrase “[snwx is] the best-fit technical word the Egyptians could come up with for the related concepts of ‘electrophysiology’.”

“Frying” to refer to the concept of electricity or electrophysiology is an English idiom, and there is absolutely no evidence the Egyptian language made use of a similar idiom. Park’s additional suggestion that we need to consider the words Arab fishermen use to describe this fish is extremely tenuous. I could accept the words “numbing” or “stinging” as a possible technical fit, but I need a hell of a lot more evidence to accept “frying”.

I reject Park’s conclusion that the verb snwx in Ebers 250 should be read as an adjective, and therefore points to the possible existence of a type of proto-electrotherapy. She claims her rewording is a “more lucid” interpretation of this remedy, citing that it seems improbable a physician would fry up a fish head to cure migraines. Considering that the Ebers Papyrus lists a remedy for trouble passing urine that requires cooking/frying a document in oil and rubbing the stomach with it for a number of days, it doesn’t sound all that improbable to me. I’m also very opposed to attempts at qualifying Egyptian remedies by terms such as “lucid”, because they bypass the Egyptian point of view and engage in modern bias.

I’m currently unable to find any remedies in the medical papyri that use live, electric catfish in an unambiguous manner that could be said to be a form of proto-electrotherapy. Greco-Roman sources do seem to be using live electric catfish, but Greco-Roman Egypt is a whole different ballgame from Egypt-5000-years-ago. There are recipies that involve catfish, but these specify a particular part of the catfish to be used. When a medical papyrus gives a part of an animal to use, they mean only that part. When they write “rub the balls of a black ass against the belly”, they certainly don’t mean “lift up the entire live donkey and hold him dick-first against the patient”.

TL;DR: There is, to my knowledge, no evidence Pharaonic Egyptian physicians from 3000 BC onward used live electric catfish to treat afflictions such as migraine, gout or arthritis. There may be some evidence that Greco-Roman era physicians did use live electrically charged fish in their medicinal administrations, but this isn’t enough to indicate a one-on-one “they did it too” connection. And if you are going to suggest a new translation that fundamentally changes the content of a text, please remember to use all the important words.

thatlittleegyptologist

Just because I’m a nerd, and I’ve discussed this with @rudjedet after I couldn’t give up on whatever the hell hAhAty was, I did some digging on my own.

First off, the reason Sonja and then myself had such a hard time tracking down hAhAty was because Park had not used the correct transliteration: using the h (normal h) instead of X (h with a line under it). Therefore, hAhAty should read XAXAty and has the translation of ‘tempest’, which is congruent with Park’s assertions.

However, when it comes to Park’s assertions that the ra’ad fish is yet another ‘electric fish’ in the Nile that could perform this task I have some serious reservations.

For a start let’s name the fish that Gardiner transliterates as XAt, and calls Oxyrhynchus. For Egyptians this was the Medjed fish; the fish that was supposed to have eaten the penis of Osiris when Seth cut him up and chucked his body in various parts of the country. It’s associated with ‘bad things’ metaphorically like ‘corpse’ and ‘widow’ as it’s the fish related to the Osirion myth. The Egyptians liked their cultural throwbacks in word design! In modern terms, we know this fish as Mormyridae, or ‘Elephant fish’, because it has a little ‘trunk’. This fish does have a very weak electric current which it uses to sense its surroundings in turbulent waters (Nile cataracts). From what I can tell it’s not strong enough to do anything to a human, let alone cure a headache if applied directly to the head.

So she can argue the toss about it being ‘electricity’ but the elephant fish is used in so many other words that have nothing to do with ‘lightning’ that the metaphor would need modern knowledge of how thunderstorms work to actually fulfil its purpose. The only reason that fish is used in the word for ‘thunderstorm’ is that the elephant fish and thunderstorms are associated with Seth (he fed a penis to that fish, and he also was said to cause storms), and therefore it’s a cultural metaphor to link ‘storms’ with Seth and not a case of ‘this fish has an electric current’. The entire premise of the paper is on very shaky ground as it is, and it’s only taken Sonja and I some brief research to prove it entirely unfounded and full of modern bias that distorts the Egyptian record to show something that it does not.

rudjedet

Hi we’re Egyptologists on Tumblr and when we read a bad paper we sink our teeth into it.

rudjedet

Going back to the actual contents of Ebers 250 real quick, and how Park thinks the original translation is nonsensical because who on earth applies a fried catfish to the head in order to cure a migraine - I just realised that we probably should not look at the catfish as the main ingredient, but at the oil.

I also mentioned the Ebers remedy for a person who has trouble passing urine, which is cooking/warming a document in oil and rubbing it into the belly. Now, in both cases (and many, many more Egyptian remedies), the original phrasing is ambiguous for us modern people. But considering the nature of Egyptian medicine, which was empirical, with a good portion of its treatments being manually therapeutical, I’d propose a slightly different reading of either treatment.

To wit, it’s not the catfish head that should be applied to the head, or the document to the belly, but the oil in which either has been cooked.

Then it makes perfect sense even to us, and Park needn’t worry about it not being “lucid” enough to cook a catfish to cure migraines. The catfish (or the document) is the ingredient that passes its effectiveness onto the oil (the ingredients chosen for recipes like this are almost always metaphorical or religious), but it is the oil itself with which the ailment is treated. The original word used for “apply” is “gs”, which can also be translated as “annoint” or “smear”. Manual massage with oil imbibed with an ingredient that has a specific religious connotation is a fair interpretation of the original remedy, and one that could have had an effect. Perhaps not in the case of migraines, but tension headaches, or upset guts, might have found relief from a massage with (warm) oil, regardless of what had been cooked in that oil beforehand.

This is also supported by many other recipes in which parts of the body are massaged by ointments and unguents in order to effectuate a cure. I think that’s a far more reasonable explanation than electrotherapy-by-fish.

And this is also why it’s so important to not leave entire ingredients out of a translation.

systlin

This is fascinating. I was taught the ‘Egyptians used electric catfish for primitive electro-therapy’ thing in school as fact, and tbh this is even cooler.

mnpig-blog

Not where I thought my tumblr experience would go today but this is super interesting. Thanks Egyptologists of tumblr!

sixpenceee

This is glorious and even thought it doesn’t fit in the range of all the paranormal, I MUST share

It works like this: You tell Kitestring that you’re in a dangerous place or situation, and give it a time frame of when to check in on you. If you don’t reply back when it checks your status, it’ll alert your emergency contacts with a custom message you set up.

It doesn’t require you to touch anything (like bSafe) or shake your phone (like Nirbhaya) to send the distress signal. Kitestring is smarter, because it doesn’t need an action to alert people, it needs inaction.

MORE INFORMATION

crybourg

reblogging because this is seriously amazing.

softcore-boyfriend-deactivated2

This shouldn’t even be an app this should be an integrated feature into all phones on every OS

camyberry

Ok, guys. Thi is really important. You have to reblog that and read the whole article.

This will never happen to me. You can’t tell. Otherwise, if you don’t want to do for yourself, maybe among your follwers someone need this information.

I’m a man, i don’t care. You should care the more. What if it was your sister? Again, spread the word. There may be someone needingths.

You can never tell. As far as we can’t handle back maniacs, PLEASE, prevent yourself <3

brainbubblegum

To new, inexperienced drivers:

so idk if they teach you this in drivers’ ed class or whatever, but if you see someone in the opposite direction flashing their high beams at you, they’re NOT being a dick. they’re saying, “SLOW DOWN, I just saw a police car back there”.

If I hadn’t known that today, I wouldn’t have noticed the police car hiding in its fox hole and gotten a ticket for going 20 over the speed limit. and I’m glad I don’t have to pay $80 for a dumb mistake!!!

badgerofshambles

In deer country this is also used to warn others about a herd up ahead. In either case, the double flash means that some nonsense is occurring and ya gotta slow down!

hiccup-queen

Double-flash also means “turn on your headlights”. Basically, if someone’s flashing their brights, pay super-close attention and figure out what’s going on.

annchovi

They could ALSO be flashing them to tell you to turn YOUR brights off because you’re blinding them! It’s common courtesy to turn your brights off for oncoming traffic, but not everyone knows this~

kyraneko

I’ve also seen it used to warn of an accident ahead. Basically anytime someone flashes their brights at you, if your own lights are 1) on, and 2) not on bright, you can take it to mean “slow down and pay attention for the next stretch of road particularly.”

Whether that’s for a speed trap, a herd of deer, or four fire trucks, two ambulances, and a dozen squad cars all clustered around what used to be two vehicles, slowing down and paying attention is good for you and can save you a lot of money and/or heartache.

plotsjotsandespressoshots-deact

Remember in 1993 when Jurassic Park was like…the end all, be all of special effects?

suicunesrider

not gonna lie that still looks intimately real

drtanner-dickery

I’m still somewhat convinced that someone sold their soul to create the special effects in Jurassic Park because that shit is over 20 years old and it still really, really holds up, better than the stuff in a lot of current movies, even.

Fucking witchcraft, man.

fanboyingoverdemigods

fucking look at this shit though

mauridianhallow

Literally see this post flying around with a few different responses added to the bottom each time so I’ll say it for this one myself:

THEY ACTUALLY BUILT A GIANT MASSIVELY DETAILED FUCKING ANIMATRONIC T-REX FOR ALL OF THIS THAT’S WHY THE EFFECTS ARE SO GOOD. CAUSE IT AIN’T CGI. AND IT AIN’T GUY IN A COSTUME. IT’S A BIG FUCKING ROBOT DINOSAUR. AND EVERY PART IS DESIGNED TO MOVE. IT COST LIKE HALF THE BUDGET OF THE FILM.

mizushimo

amazing

shadowthorne

And they had the film it in small increments, especially in the outdoor scenes, because the rain fall kept soaking into the ‘skin’ of the rex and would slow down and mess up its movements. So they would stop filming and have a crew out there drying off this massive, fake dinosaur, and then they’d start filming again until it was too wet. Repeat until the end of the scene.

mad-dyspunktional

They used animatronics and detailed costumes for most if not all of the dinosaurs in the first movie.

The triceratops for instance, was also animatronic.

And the raptors were dudes in suits. I shit you not.

datneeks

One of my favorite anecdotes I’ve read on tumblr is how the t-rex robot from Jurassic park would malfunction while it was drying out. How did it malfunction, you might wonder?

Motherfucker randomly started moving.

So apparently if you were on the jp set you would sometimes hear people screaming bloody murder even though they were all well aware that it was a giant animatronic puppet and wouldn’t actually, you know, eat them.

muck-raker-deactivated20181222

(link to said post about malfunctioning t-rex)

alessariel

Did not know this, had to reblog for awesome movie history insights.

brainsforbabyjesus

So, I knew about the animatronics bit but I did not know the raptors were guys in suits and the malfunctioning t-rex sounds terrifying.

And i just googled malfunctioning t-rex and was not disappointed. Apparently in order to put the skin on over the steel frame a guy had to crawl inside the t-rex while it was turned on and glue the skin down. And if somebody turned the t-rex off or the power went out the guy in the t-rex stood a very real chance of getting mangled and killed by the hydraulics.

So of course, the power goes out.

And this guy is still in there gluing the skin down.

Apparently the way to survive getting sheered to death by huge sheets of metal while you’re inside a giant t-rex robot is to curl into a ball and hope for the best.

And this guy hoped for the best and got it.

Some other people on stage pried open the t-rex jaws and glue guy crawled out of its mouth and was totally okay.

alessariel

This is getting better and better.

red-dirt-roads-deactivated20161

I think they only had like 6 minutes of CGI

teslasturtle-deactivated2023011

I’m just waiting for the T-Rex to come to life and leave its stand.

perspectivemax-deactivated20181

@spinosaurus-the-fisher is this the kind of content you love?

myloverhammurabi

Realism comes at a cost, it seems.

gorsime

i mean ok but why has nobody posted this:

myloverhammurabi

It’s a three piece raptor suit.

flamingbluepanda

Old movies had the best special effects

skafuller-deactivated20180122

The thing about this that gets my special effects nerd going is the fact that EVERY single dinosaur was sculpted by artists based on the current existent archeological evidence of the time.

witwitch-deactivated20160508

@jurassicparkandrecreation

senkirowolf

@shepfax

prettyarb

Even better than that, this movie ADVANCED our best understanding of dinosaurs at the time. They were blowing out a budget bigger than anything Hollywood had ever seen, and along with employing almost the last hurrah of incredible physical FX, they had a bank of those newfangled digital SFX computers. Nobody’d ever really created convincing dinosaurs in a movie before. It’d all been stop-motion animation, and even when the models were exquisitely crafted, you could just tell there was something OFF about them. Spielberg wanted THE BEST DINOSAURS EVER, and he figured on using the cutting edge of digital modeling and animation technology to build them for him.

So they got hold of some of the best paleontologists they could find and said, “We want you guys to take this tech that your labs could pretty much never afford and use it to build us the most realistic, accurate dinosaur models the world has ever seen.”

The paleontologists knew an opportunity when it bit them in the ass. They plugged in everything they knew about dinosaurs, all the skeletons and their best guesses about soft tissue and all that. And when they’d created those dinosaur models, they had the computer start moving them as they realistically would with anatomy like that. One guy took a look at those walking t-rexes and velociraptors (really utahraptors, but whatevs, fam), and he said, “Wait a minute, I’ve seen movement like that before.”

He called up film of a chicken walking. Everyone in the room said, “Holy shit.”

Prior to 1989, the idea that birds were descended from dinosaurs existed–we knew about archaeopteryx, we knew there was some minor connection there–but the idea that DINOSAURS LIVE IN THE MODERN WORLD AND THEY ARE CALLED BIRDS was not pre-eminent. Jurassic Park changed our scientific understanding of dinosaurs.

bastlynn

That paleontologists’d be Kevin Padian. Who is awesome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Padian

thistherapylife

This post just gets better and better with time

angrylittlesliceofpizza

this ties up neatly with that timeline

veryfunnymemes

uncleromeo

for this wondering where to cop. I work with my hands and regularly get cuts and scrapes and I love these

they also come in mid tones.

babygirlgirlgirl-deactivated202

This is nice :)

jusjuju1k-deactivated20190903

✊🏾

randomawe

There’s also a black owned company called Browndages!

They come in a number of different shades as well 🥰

thisisevak

Rebloging for the black owned company

languill

It’s sad how much of what is taught in school is useless to over 99% of the population.

There are literally math concepts taught in high school and middle school that are only used in extremely specialized fields or that are even so outdated they aren’t used anymore!

flavoracle

I took calculus my senior year of high school, and I really liked the way our teacher framed this on the first day of class.

He asked somebody to raise their hand and ask him when we would use calculus in our everyday life. So one student rose their hand and asked, “When are we going to use this in our everyday life?”

“NEVER!!” the teacher exclaimed. “You will never use calculus in your normal, everyday life. In fact, very few of you will use it in your professional careers either.” Then he paused. “So would you like to know why should care?”

Several us nodded.

He picked out one of the varsity football players in the class. “You practice football a lot during the week, right Tim?” asked the teacher.

“Yeah,” replied Tim. “Almost every day.”

“Do you and your teammates ever lift weights during practice?”

“Yeah. Tuesdays and Thursdays we spend a lot of practice in the weight room.”

“But why?” asked the teacher. “Is there ever going to be a play your coach tells you use during a game that requires you to bench press the other team?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then why lift weights?”

“Because it makes us stronger,” said Tim.

“Bingo!!” said the teacher. “It’s the same thing with calculus. You’re not here because you’re going to use calculus in your everyday life. You’re here because calculus is weightlifting for your brain.”

And I’ve never forgotten that.

c-is-for-circinate

THIS.

When it’s taught right, learning math teaches you logic and how to organize your brain, how to take a problem one step at a time and make sure every step can bear weight before you move to the next one. Most adults don’t need to know integrals, but goddamn if I don’t wish everyone making arguments on the internet understood geometric proofs.

Scientific concepts broaden our understanding of how the world is put together, which does not mean that most adults ever really understand how light is refracted through a lens or why spinning copper wire creates electricity–and they don’t need to. But science classes in general are meant to teach the scientific method: how to make observations and use them to draw conclusions, how to test those conclusions, how to be wrong and grow stronger from it.

History isn’t about dates and names of battles, it’s about people, patterns, things we’ve tried before and ought to learn from. It’s about how everything is linked, how changing one circumstance can lead to changes in fifty others, cascading infinitely. Literature is about critical thinking, pattern recognition, learning to listen to what somebody is saying and decide what it means to you, how you feel about it, and what you want to do with it.

Some facts matter: every adult should know how to read a graph, how global warming works, some of the basic themes and symbols that crop up in every piece of fiction. But ultimately, content is less important later in life than context.

The good thing is, students who learn the content are likely to pick up at least some of the context, some of the patterns of thinking, even if they don’t realize it. (The unfortunate thing is how the current educational system prioritizes content so much that a lot of students, and a lot of adults, don’t see the point in learning either, and teachers are overworked and held to standardize test grading scales such that it’s hard for them to emphasize patterns of thinking over rote memorization, etc etc etc, but that is a whole different discussion.)

moi-ennepe-deactivated20251213

thank u <3

crazy-pages

Yes, It Is Just Like The Nazis

Hey so remember Anne Frank? The Jewish young girl who hid in an attic and was killed by the Nazis? The emblematic person we think of when we think of victims of the Holocaust?

She did not die in a gas chamber or in a death camp. She died in a ‘temporary’ detention center for the mass deportations which preceded the death camps. She was in that camp because a patriotic neighbor ratted her out to the German deportation force. She died, not of a bullet to the back of the head or choking on gas, but of typhus. She contracted typhus because the Nazis couldn’t realistically deport people at the rate they wanted to, because before the death camps their infrastructure couldn’t handle the sudden influx of ethnic minorities they had decided to imprison, and because they didn’t care about the consequences of that so their deportation detention centers were unhygienic and prisoners were underfed and overcrowded.

And she was picked up by the deportation force not because she was an illegal citizen but because, just like the US is doing with asylum seekers, she was part of a formerly recognized class of citizens who were legally redefined to lack citizenship by a new administration.

Anne Frank is exactly like the children who have already died in the United State’s detention camps. Exactly. Down to the very last detail. There. Is. Not. A. Single. Difference.

So unless you want to fucking tell me that Anne goddamn Frank was not a victim of the Holocaust, y’all can shut the fuck up with that “stop making concentration camp comparisons, you’re diminishing the suffering of the Holocaust” bullshit.

fandomsandfeminism

Its also worth noting that her family TRIED to flee to the US and was denied. She was in that camp partly because the US refused to let her refugee family immigrate.

perplexingly

Daughter of a gun (ﾉ´ヮ´)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧ No idea if such a thing existed but surely there had to be girls born on board in the Age of Sail?

queenofeden

*puts on obnoxious historian hat*

*clears throat*

there were actually tons of women and girls on board ships during the age of sail and it’s really cool history that no one!!! ever!!! talks about!!!

like captains of merchant ships used to bring their wives and children on board for long voyages all the time (and of course there were plenty of well known female pirate ship captains, and women cross-dressing as men, and prostitutes that more people seem to know of)

there’s actually a really amazing story of one woman, Mary Ann Patten who was the wife of the captain of this ship called Neptune’s Car. Captain Patten decided that he wanted her onboard with him and she was super about this and learned all about navigation and sailing and everything. so this one voyage they’re going around the tip of south america when her husband gets sick and is bed ridden with a fever right as the ship sails into one of the worst storms any of the crew had ever seen and it looks like they might lose the ship or have to stop

so you know who takes over??? the first mate???

no.

MARY

she took over the whole crew and sailed that ship through freezing water and pack ice and had it coasting smoothly into the san francisco harbour like it was nothing. and she did this all at age 19. while pregnant.

at one point the first mate tried to get the crew to mutiny against her but they all rallied with her and told him to shut the heck up because she obv knew what she was doing.

there’s a great book about women in the age of sail called ‘female tars’ by suzanne stark that i cannot recommend enough and has way more amazing stories and insights about the myriad roles women and girls played aboard ship during that time period.

(sorry i totally didn’t mean to hijack your post i love all of your art and this is gorgeous i just got over excited sorry sorry sorry)

gehayi

We need links!

Female Tars: Women Aboard Ship in the Age of Sail by Suzanne Stark

Hen Frigates: Passion and Peril, Nineteenth-Century Women at Sea by Joan Druett

Hen Frigates: Wives of Merchant Captains Under Sail by Joan Druett

Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700-1920 edited by Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling

Petticoat Whalers: Whaling Wives at Sea, 1820-1920 by Joan Druett

Sea Queens: Women Pirates Around the World by Jane Yolen

Seafaring Women: Pirate Queens, Female Stowaways and Sailors’ Wives by David Cordingly (Also published as Women Sailors and Sailors’ Women: An Untold Maritime History)

The Captain’s Best Mate: The Journal of Mary Chipman Lawrence on the Whaler Addison, 1856-1860 by Mary Chipman Lawrence

piss-pirate

Climate change is like someone comes up to you and tells you your super strict aunt is visiting, but your house has seen 3 parties over the weekend and is a mess. You’re not quite sure if the person is serious or not, some people say ‘QUICK! We need to tidy the house NOW! She’ll be here in an HOUR!’ and other people say ‘Your aunt isn’t visiting, it’s all a huge lie, and besides, the house is still habitable!’

Sure, you can work around the pizza trodden into the carpet, maybe lay a rug over the teenager vomit, wear shoes so the spilled beer doesn’t soak into your socks.

But if you spend a little time and effort cleaning the house, even if your aunt isn’t coming, you still have a lovely clean house! If you keep measures in place to keep it clean, no more wild parties, a few storage baskets, invest in a roomba, it’ll stay clean for when your children live there too.

And if your aunt is actually coming, and you DON’T clean the house, you’re totally and utterly and without question, fucked.

wizardshark

By the way during this whole extended metaphor your aunt is, at that very moment, knocking on the door. And people are still yelling that she’s not actually coming

languill

It’s sad how much of what is taught in school is useless to over 99% of the population.

There are literally math concepts taught in high school and middle school that are only used in extremely specialized fields or that are even so outdated they aren’t used anymore!

flavoracle

I took calculus my senior year of high school, and I really liked the way our teacher framed this on the first day of class.

He asked somebody to raise their hand and ask him when we would use calculus in our everyday life. So one student rose their hand and asked, “When are we going to use this in our everyday life?”

Several us nodded.

He picked out one of the varsity football players in the class. “You practice football a lot during the week, right Tim?” asked the teacher.

“Yeah,” replied Tim. “Almost every day.”

“Do you and your teammates ever lift weights during practice?”

“Yeah. Tuesdays and Thursdays we spend a lot of practice in the weight room.”

“But why?” asked the teacher. “Is there ever going to be a play your coach tells you use during a game that requires you to bench press the other team?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then why lift weights?”

“Because it makes us stronger,” said Tim.

And I’ve never forgotten that.

c-is-for-circinate

THIS.

moi-ennepe-deactivated20251213

thank u <3

sonseulsoleil

anyways the version of much ado about nothing starring catherine tate and david tennant as beatrice and benedick is a Classic. david tennant’s benedick is FULL chaotic dumbass, and catherine tate’s beatrice is past being full of rage and is completely done with everyone from the very beginning. plus, they just work off each other so well.

not to mention the costumes and props. benedick in drag? BENEDICK IN JORTS AND A SUPERMAN SHIRT? beatrice wearing a suit? beatrice swaggering around with a beer in her hand, while benedick sips on pink, fruity cocktails? benedick writing his love song to beatrice on one of those stupid little electric keyboards? unparalleled artistry.

carbonmonoxidepoisoning

nothing makes me happier than this moment

sonseulsoleil

oh absolutely ICONIC. and the fact that he gives his whole monologue after whilst covered in paint. “love me? [beat, looks down at his paint covered self] why?” truly how shakespeare intended it

I also love this. what a way to kick things off.

[Image Descriptions: Three images of David Tennant as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. Two gifs of him wearing cut-off jean shorts and a superman shirt, smearing paint all over his chest and face. One still image of him sitting in a golf cart covered in union jacks with his feet up on the steering wheel, sort of hanging off the thing. He’s wearing a military uniform. This is Benedick’s entrance in the play. End description.]

thewollfgang

#anyone got a link?

Part One

Part Two

Enjoy!

hydro-homies

Faking a major event would require thousands of people. Try managing a project. getting twelve people to do what they are supposed to, on time, without blabbing early, is nearly impossible.