N. Delphinus

Ramblings of a compact, overly analytical, often cranky fan geek. Expect everything from Harry Potter to critical analysis of popular media and the message it sends about society.

[awwww-cute]

[nellachronism]

FLY, YOU FOOLS.

[andywarnercomics]

In honor of Day of the Dead, here’s a repost of my comic about the San Francisco Columbarium and the man who spent 26 years restoring it.

This comic originally appeared on Medium at The Nib. Go check out my other work there.

[shortvideosandstuff]

[thefrogman]

Pandas don’t want to take their medicine [video]

[gael-garcia]

They asked me what the most bizarre thing that happened during Horns was. I immediately knew that the answer was when I drank anti-freeze. And then thought, “This is Twitter so I really like - I’m just gonna have to say that and then leave you to it” x x

[ro-s-a-spark-s]

Aaah! :)

[zay4ik]

[phoukanamedpookie]

PSA: Slash or femslash is not progressive or revolutionary by default.

It is not progressive or revolutionary to romanticize abuse between characters.

It is not progressive or revolutionary to whitewash a character of color.

It is not progressive or revolutionary to use LGBTQ visibilitiy to justify racism, misogyny, or other forms of fuckery.

It is not progressive or revolutionary to ignore race and gender when talking about the impact of slash and femslash ships.

It is not progressive or revolutionary for rape, sexual assault, and/or sex between an adult and a minor to be the basis of a slash or femslash ship.

It is not progressive or revolutionary to erase or downplay the racial and ethnic identity of an actor of color.

It is not progressive or revolutionary to not have a single-issue analysis of media and fandom.

It is not progressive or revolutionary to prioritize the agendas of white LGBTQ people over LGBTQ people of color.

It is not progressive or revolutionary to demonize a female character (especially a female character of color) to advocate for a slash or femslash ship.

[megaparsecs]

A reminder for today that supporting the idea that Oxford or Sir Francis Bacon or whoever wrote Shakespeare’s works is inherently classist and undermines the very essence of what makes Shakespeare great: the universality of his writing.

Shakespeare didn’t write to impress academics or to become reknown in literary circles, he wrote because he loved it and he loved acting and the theater, because he liked showing people up and he liked getting paid.

Shakespeare wrote a lot of plays where the main characters are noble, yes, but he wrote actors too — and teenage kids and poor grad students and nurses. His nobles aren’t memorable because they are grand but because anyone can relate to them, Hamlet’s not special to us because he’s a prince but because many of us can see our struggles in his thoughts and actions.

Do not let Oxfordians or Baconians take away what is special about Shakespeare: that he was an ordinary man writing plays not just for nobles or kings, for landowners or the highly educated elite but for ordinary people — for apprentices and butchers and merchant’s wives and maids. His company performed at court, but they also performed at the Globe, where you could get in for a penny if you didn’t mind standing in a crowd.

The Authorship Question isn’t really about discovering “who really wrote Shakespeare,” it’s about elitists being upset and confused and angry because the greatest works in the English language were written by the son of a well-off tradesman who never went to college. 

[amarguerite]

THANK YOU!

I would also like to add that a lot of the Authorship Question also arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of early modern English culture. A lot of the records that we have for Shakespeare are business-oriented because those were the sorts of documents that were considered important. It’s not a fundamental disconnect from the solitary genius baring his soul though poetry (an idea that emerged via 19th century Romantics— before Wordsworth, sonnets were not considered to be confessional in nature). It’s just a matter of what archives were important to early modern people.

There’s not an absence of evidence, there’s an absence of archive, based on what Shakespeare’s contemporaries thought was important to preserve. We know about as much about Shakespeare’s life as we know about other Elizabethan playwrights. (This podcast offers more poof of this. The lecturer wrote for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and mentions that only seven lost years for an early modern subject was considered remarkably good going.) It’s only because Shakespeare was glommed onto as a secular Jesus in the 18th and 19th century (and the rise of biography as a genre starting with I think Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson) that knowing more about his life became an obsession, to the point where there were famous forgers and people began to think that an absence of evidence that they and their 18th/19th century contemporaries would have preserved was proof of a conspiracy. 

As to the education argument— that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what English grammar schools were like during the Elizabethan era. The references and allusions in Shakespeare’s plays are perfectly consistent with the curriculum of a typical grammar school graduate. And speaking of the plays, they are fundamentally of the theater and for the theater. They flatter patrons (o hai there Banquo’s successively handsomer and kinglier descendants *cough*James I*cough), they play with what could and could not be done on a stage. They retell stories popular at the time (The Merchant of Venice is often considered to be a reaction to Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta). 

Shakespeare wrote for people like him— for people like us. Not people who preserved the same things we do, or who learned the same things we do, but people who felt the same as we do. 

[apriki]

top five *events in tumblr history*

honestly like the biggest change was when they took tumblarity away, like it just changed the whole vibe of this site. tumblarity was kind of like the activity page except it gave you a tumblarity ”number” and also ranked your blog in your country and also across the whole site and like, if you got a popular post your tumblarity would increase etc (this was back when getting a thousand notes on a post would make you feel like king shit, too). and like people were fucking OB SESSED with this number. they would post about it, bitch about it, like ‘i logged in and my tumblarity went down by 40??? wtf?? i hate everything’ and it got to the point where people weren’t posting things they wanted to, they were just posting things that they knew would get a lot of notes and increase their tumblarity? it was like this weird insular popularity contest, it was definitely a meaner environment, very competitive. and then they took it away in one of the fifty bajillion updates (this was when they brought in the ask box too, before that we were using formspring lmao GOD) and people just started to chill and actually enjoy what they were posting and stuff, it was a complete about face. and staff said they were going to bring tumblarity back BUT THEY STILL HAVENT IT’S BEEN FIVE YEARS broken promises, full of lies

the great 36 hour catastrophe of 2011 where tumblr was down for a DAY AND A HALF and people were FREAKING THE FUCK OUT lmao remember the tumbeasts? the what to do when tumblr is down site? flocking to twitter just to bitch about tumblr? Like back before this, tumblr was SO glitchy like it would randomly go down all the time and you couldn’t access anything (most likely because it was still on shitty servers designed for a start up, you know) but after this it got a lot less glitchy/more professional. They also changed the layout (rip post icons that had ripped page edges that all fit together) and made all these dumb changes - no links in asks, no commas in tags, tag character limit blah blah blah - and we were all pretty bitter

back when tumblr was a lot smaller than it is now, it used to go through these weird phases that people called ‘tumblr’s boyfriend’. and like everyone would become obsessed with one movie and just post about it CONSTANTLY. first it was 2009 stark trek (jesus CHRIST this movie fucking saturated tumblr. it was EVERYWHERE), then it was inglorious basterds, then inception (the mad scramble to get urls like ‘theextractor’ or ‘arthureames’ never forget), then the social network (we dont fucking talk about this) and it was impossible to avoid and like 80% of your dash would just be about this one movie. it’s not really like that any more - again, tumblr is so much bigger than it used to be - but fucking hell it was A LOT

when they lifted the gif limit from 500kb lmao go back like, pre 2011 on anyone’s blog and all the gifs are so fucking pixelated and awful because you had to like make the gif black and white or get rid of all the saturation to actually be able to post anything jfc

THE DAY WE DISCOVERED MISSING E AND THEN XKIT can you imagine a tumblr where you couldn’t blacklist anything? where you just had to use this site in its basic form? IT WAS LIKE LIVING IN THE WILD, THANK YOU XKIT GUY FOR CIVILISING US poor missing e, the myspace of tumblr extensions

also shoutout to the fucking sharks vs cats CLUSTERFUCK, they tried to have this sitewide competition about which animal was more popular and you like chose a side and your icon got like a shark or a cat ~makeover it was so bizarre

[1los]

[takealookatyourlife]

I have incorrectly been saying ‘burqa’ when I meant ‘niqab’ for maybe my whole life.

[dammit-sun-get-off-tumbler]

Relevant! During my deployment I have seen all four of these types of head gear, but I didn’t realize what the Chador was..I figured it was a modified version of a hijab…very interesting!

[somaperies]

I have a huge problem with this post, but let’s focus on what’s bugging me most:

Not obligatory in Islamic countries, unlike the veil.

This is blatantly untrue. For one thing, the veil is not obligatory in ANY Islamic country except for Iran and Saudi Arabia (due to both countries being theocracies). There is not a single country where the dominant religion is Islam that enforces the wearing of the veil. Using the word obligatory implies you’d be breaking the law if you go with your head uncovered, which is utterly not true.

Please don’t be part of the problem by spreading unchecked information, especially if you lack the cultural background for it.

[dorkery]

Aaaaaalso please note that the country with the greatest percentage of Muslims in the FREAKING WORLD, i.e. Indonesia, in the region which holds the LARGEST PERCENTAGE OF MUSLIMS IN THE UNIVERSE*, i.e. Southeast Asia (62% compared to the Middle East and North Africa’s arguably paltry 20% - larger even than the combined totals of the Middle East, North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa at 35%), does not make the headscarf compulsory.

Indonesia has had a woman president who didn’t wear the hijab. Many politicians in Malaysia don’t wear the hijab. Many queens, actual honest-to-goodness monarch-type queens, don’t wear the hijab. 

What you may have are schools and institutions in which the hijab is mandatory. These schools may be Islamic schools, the institutions may be mosques. Even within non-Islamic government schools, such as in Malaysia, it is compulsory for the girls to put on the hijab during Islamic instruction.

If you weren’t aware previously, we do have a dress code for prayer halls (which is meant to be the aurat in general, i.e. covering up your hair, until your wrists, until your ankles, etc) which is similar to dress codes for places of worship, like churches and gurdwaras and whatnot. 

And also, fyi, although the above are generic terminology, be aware that Muslims - as Muslims aren’t a, idk, MONOLITHIC SOCIETY - have different terms for different headgear, depending on where they are (case in point, I never knew to use the word hijab until I entered the US - it’s tudung and kerudung in Malaysia and Indonesia, respectively).

*We assume that most aliens are not Muslims until peer reviewed information proves otherwise.

[scienceyoucanlove-deactivated20]

As a 19-year-old sophomore at Stanford, Elizabeth Holmes decided to transform diagnostic medicine so she dropped out of college and used her tuition money to start her own company, Theranos. Ten years later, Holmes, pictured here holding a micro-vial, is on the cutting edge of medical technology — her new blood testing method allows hundreds of tests to be run using only a few drops of blood. And, Holmes’ methods are cheaper, faster, more accurate, and less invasive than conventional methods which often require a separate vial of blood for every test. As Holmes told Wired.com earlier this year, “I started this company because I wanted to spend my life changing our health care system. When someone you love gets really sick, most of the time when you find out, it’s too late to be able to do something about it. It’s heartbreaking… We wanted to make actionable health information accessible to people everywhere at the time it matters most. That means two things: being able to detect conditions in time to do something about them and providing access to information that can empower people to improve their lives.”

read more from A Mighty Girl

[assholemurphy]

but like, does anyone think about the slytherins that joined up as death eaters with the intent to gather information for like the ootp or da and nobody knew because their identities had to be protected and so everyone’s all thinking slytherins are bad and evil but in reality some of them literally have the riskiest jobs because it’s not like ol’ voldy would just outright kill them if he found out. can you fucking imagine what would have happened to them? what probably did happen to some? and some of ya’ll are still here shouting about how slytherins are evil and shit

[awwww-cute]

[ultrafacts]

Source For facts, Follow Ultrafacts

[deducecanoe-deactivated20161213]

Reblog the shit out of this, ok? Everyone was acting like he was some sideshow attraction while his fifteen min of fame ran its course, and look, he’s done A Thing. He is not an idiot, he is not just some stupid kid from the projects. He got his family out, and he helped other people. I know people say things need more notes as some kind of guilt thing. But no, this needs more notes. 13k is not enough.

[zoeuhura]

Didn’t he also become a kickass hairdresser and businessman? This dude is the best.

EDITED TO ADD: AND he launched a sex offender tracker app! hoooooly shit

[ssmmogg]

i always thought it was weird how people were making fun of a guy who saved someone from being raped and then warned people on the news to defend themselves against rapists, like, this dude is cool as shit

[tamorapierce]

I’m reblogging.  This guy has more than earned his place on the face of the earth, don’t you think?  More of us should follow his example.

[land-of-propaganda]

[babycakesbriauna]

Because God forbid a young, black male in America actually wants an education.

[mockiato-deactivated20200315]

Arrested for running while black

[voiceofnature]

Valais blacknosed sheep. Although the earliest mention of it dates back to 1400, this large, docile mountain sheep was first recognised as a separate breed in 1962. It has adapted particularly well to life in the high Swizz mountains and grazes even on the steepest, stoniest slopes. The black patches on its nose, eyes, ears, knees, hocks and feet and otherwise light woolly coats make it quite unmistakeable.

[sixpenceee]

A graduate student has created the first man-made biological leaf. It absorbs water and carbon dioxide to produce oxygen just like a plant. He did this by suspending chloroplasts in a mixture made out of silk protein. He believed it can be used for many things but the most striking one is the thought that it could be used for long distance space travel. Plants do not grow in space, but this synthetic material can be used to produce oxygen in a hostile environment. (Video)