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[lgbt-tiktoks]

Caption: [So, you're nonbinary. You've got your nouns figured out, you got your pronouns figured out. What could possibly go wrong? Until, there's a formal setting. You have to use a title. You don't have a doctorate! So you go online, you look "what are gender neutral titles", "nonbinary titles" and everything everywhere says "mx". It's fine. You just don't feel like its right for you. So what do you do?

Hi I'm Tuse, I'm nonbinary and I'm a huge linguistics and history nerd. And I want to share some alternate options for nonbinary titles. Let's start with what we already know. Mister and Missus. Those are the base gendered titles in English. Mrs. comes from Mistress. So, mister and mistress. The ending of those "-ter" and "-tress", those are the modern English forms of the Latin tor and trix.

So one great option is just removing the gendered ending. So just "Mist". I really like this because its simply, to the point. I like to shorten it with "M". But my favorite option is- Latin didn't have two grammatical genders. Latin had a neuter gender. And so, the neuter equivalent of "tor" and "trix", is "trum". So "Mistrum".

I really like this, I use it for myself. I like to shorten it as "Mm". And I really like it because it is unambiguous. It is very clearly not mister, not mistress, not missus, and not miss. That's what I like to use for myself. I love exploring other options for nongendered titles and nongendered language in general.

We have a tendency to come up with one option and then expect everyone who doesn't fit into the two binary options to use that third option. And we don't have to do that. If you have other options for what you like to use as your title as a nonbinary person, I would love to hear it. Please share!]

Note: Because this was being commented a lot on the original video, of course these work in English and not necessarily other languages. That doesn't mean that they can't be helpful, just that they might only be helpful in English.

[fictionadventurer]

I love that Jules Verne asked the question "What kind of person could circumnavigate the world in 80 days?" and decided that the answer was not a groundbreaking explorer or genius inventor, but a guy who's really, really, really obsessed with train and boat schedules.

[oqmemphis]

my final paper for my CS degree was literally "how can we algorithmically optimise for the fastest possible circumnavigation route on commercial flights?", which incidentally required me to adopt a very good working knowledge of what flight options are available at what times (and also led to me accidentally memorising several hundred airport codes)

[oqmemphis]

incidentally the fastest possible route seems to be about 51 hours, if you're working from 2022 schedules like i was. if you use current schedules and are very optimistic about how quickly you can transfer between flights, you can maybe get it down to around 48 hours (also known as 25 millivernes).

[fictionadventurer]

The very best thing about tumblr is that you can make a post about a 154-year-old novel and get responses like this.

[word-for-today]

Word for today: milliverne

One one-thousandth of eighty days, equal to just a hair past 1hr55min

[digby-official]

a somewhat less useful unit of measurement: the megajules. equal to 20,000,000,000 leagues under the sea

[blackbearmagic]

one time I saw a photo of a skinned whale/dolphin flipper on reddit or something and I've just never recovered

there's just. A paw in there.

[gallusrostromegalus]

One of the most spiritually profound moments of my life was when I was sixish and at a natural history museum with my parents that had a whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling.

I remember my dad picking me up to sit on his shoulders (possibly one of the last times he did that because I was getting too big to hold there for long) so I could be close to it's flipper because he wanted to show me something. He had me hold up my arm parallel to the whale's, and explained that we had the same bones, pointing to it's scapula and humerus and radius and ulna and so on while poking the same bones in my skinny little arm, all they way down to the tips of my fingers and it's own.

And in that moment, I could suddenly see how the whale and I were the same animal, just stretched and shrunk into different proportions by nature. There was an entire exhibit with skeletons of different animals and we went through all of them, picking out the hands and faces of all of them on myself.

I had never felt such a profound connection to the world around me before as I realized on a visceral level that not only was I related to all these creatures, they were very literally my distant cousins, and that in a way, they were me from back then and I was them from now, and we all were others still from the future.

Every living thing on earth is your cousin. The most distantly related humans are your 50th cousins. Chimps are your several thousandth cousins. An octopus is your 25 millionth cousin. Trees are your billionth cousins. You and I are surrounded by family. And that makes me feel profoundly loved.

So thanks dad, for pulling your shoulder a bit to show me that I am part of the universe. I love you too.

[uss-emberprise]

[sasukechannel]

where's that native meme that's like "lol you worship the sun lmao" and they respond "ok. the sun is real"

[karafina]

hello i have this

[teaboot]

Get-A-Load-Of-This-Guy Cam

[ongoing-catastrophe]

I make the same face every time theres some documentary talking like "the ancient Egyptians believed the Nile river was sacred" and i'm like....well yeah? Its kind of like, the only reason their entire society exists? Seems pretty reasonable to me

[p-clodius-pulcher]

“Madness may be temporary, but the isolation it generates is permanent.”

- in reference to Ajax and Dido, from Greek Tragedy in Vergil’s “Aeneid” by Vassiliki Panoussi

[mariacallous]

[the-library-alcove]

My grandfather was in the Częstochowa concentration camp. When they could hear the guns of the Red Army off in the distance, a Nazi truck full of Jewish preteens entered the camp, because the driver made a wrong turn and went into the work camp instead of the extermination camp up the road.

Let me emphasize that--the front lines were so close that they could hear the weapons being fired and the artillery shells going off, but rather than supplying their men at the front, or evacuating their own people, or any of a thousand other military necessities, the Nazis' hatred of Jews was so all-consuming that killing a truckload of Jewish children had higher priority to them. Killing thirty Jewish children was more important to the Nazis than anything that they could do to help fight the war they'd started.

[penny-anna]

like many people have said this better than me but no it IS odd that we've come to think of potatoes as so quintessentially european that their presence in historical fantasy where they're anachronistic doesn't jar. and yes people are trying to have the trappings of post-colonial europe without engaging w the icky colonialism part and yes people are neglecting to imagine what a european cuisine without potatoes would be like.

[penny-anna]

im fully in favour of 'let people have fun w their fantasy world' but is considering how the potatoes got there in the absence of colonialism not a fun exercise? maybe every year the dragon riders go on a great transatlantic potato pilgrimage

[penny-anna]

perhaps a good way to sum up the issue here is:

if you put potatoes in your medieval european style fantasy world people will by and large not find it jarring and accept it as a normal fantasy trope

if you put, say, black people in your medieval european style fantasy world a whole demographic of people will get very angry and accuse you of breaking their immersion

this is in spite of the fact that black people were a lot more common in medieval europe than potatoes.

[datura-inoxia]

Wait didn't @elbiotipo go on a crusade about this very same thing? If I remember correctly there was a ton of potatoposting and even a lady who had a crash out because her hobbit-adjacent creatures "couldn't have coffee" or something.

[lynnimaybe]

People asking why Artemis II matters, lemme tell you

1. First woman to enter deep space, Christina Koch, went as a mission specialist to help test the preventative measures against the radiation that causes cancer in the ships, and primarily affects women. It affects men too but less so. Christina's literally so inspiring to me.

2. This mission and further Artemis missions are testing safety concerns to help push the boundary of what we've been able to explore up to this point. Safety is the primary purpose of the trip. This is the first step to exploring Mars and further planets! Including Europa (my beloved.)

3. Before this, only 24 humans have ever entered deep space. Of that 24, 5 are alive today and they're all in their 90s. We very much needed a newer trip to help confirm or change whatever information we had from years and years ago. Having 4 living testaments of space exploration is a very important part of keeping said exploration alive.

4. Even though it wasn't the primary purpose of the trip, we've gotten so many rare pictures! Including my favorite "Hello, World" taken by commander Reid Wiseman:

It's the second photo EVER to have a fulll illuminated Earth hemisphere, the first being "Blue Marble". All other photos of the Earth have been spliced. Blue Marble was taken during the day and Hello, World was taken at night (the exposure has been lifted for clarity). It's my new favorite photo, it's so beautiful.

[analytically]

Can astrologers use astrological charts to understand people's character and lives? Our new study put astrologers to the test

Astrology is very popular — both Gallup and YouGov report that about 25% of Americans believe that the position of the stars and planets can

Astrology doesn't seem to work.

[intimate-mirror]

[performativezippers]

Some highlights:

Astrologers helped design the study

No one did better than random chance, even though they only included people in the study who are experienced with astrology and stated that they expect themselves to do better than random chance

They gave every astrologer a set of 50 things about a person and 5 birth charts to choose from. They weren’t even coming up with the chart themselves!

After taking the test, most thought they nailed it. Zero out of 152 did better than 5 out of 12. None nailed it

Astrologers who rated themselves highly experienced (“world class experts”) did the same or worse as those who said they have limited experience. Both performed the same as random chance

This is hilarious

[o-craven-canto]

That's got to be the funniest graph ever published in a paper

[proteusolm]

The Ojibwe nailed it. Wawa is exactly the right name for a goose.

[haha-cluck]

Our language is so right about so many animals. One of my favorites is the word for wolf: Waawoono (Wah-wu-no). That is absolutely the noise that wolves make lmao

[deaths-accountant]

Citations could be so awesome without copyright. Imagine just being able to click on a footnote and it takes you to the exact section of another book being quoted. Imagine how much that would do for stemming misinformation.

[ojibwa]

every time i remember that photo of the little inuk girl with her puppy i engage in inconsolable hysterics

[ojibwa]

this is it. this is the photo of all time

[supreme-leader-stoat]

SNUG

[wrenchinator-central]

Comfy even

[makingqueerhistory]

Why We Need a Queer History of the Holocaust

For LGBTQ history month, HWO are very pleased to republish Anna Hájková's piece on the need for a queer history of the Holocaust.

Homophobia has had a far-reaching impact on historical memory. At a basic level, there are next to no queer Jews in Holocaust histories. If you find any, they are usually deviant figures. But more importantly, homophobic prejudice has come to shape all the oral history collections of Holocaust survivors around the world. The large USC Shoah Foundation has over 52,000 interviews with Jewish survivors; next to none of them speak about same-sex desire. This does not mean that none of them were queer – I know for a fact that some of them were. But they did not dare to bring it up in the interview given the heteronormative framing of the inquiry. With missing testimonies, it is as if these people never lived and haven’t left a trace, which for survivors of a genocide is a devastating fate. [...] Let me be honest, even in the context of Holocaust studies this is a hard research. Some people will tell you that queer history is irrelevant and should not be written about. They believe that homosexuality is dishonorable to the reputation of Holocaust victims. Sadly, these lines of enquiry have sometimes led to painful personal attacks on myself; I have had my professional path, research integrity, sexual orientation and family history attacked. But more often, I have been able to change people’s opinions and to show why should we strive for a less judgmental and more inclusive history.

[drowninginredink]

Apparently today is Loving Day, named after Richard and Milford Loving, the interracial couple whose lawsuit against the state of Virginia resulted in interracial marriage becoming legal in the United States. And so this day was made as a holiday for interracial relationships. I think that's very cool and deserves a tumblr post. Happy Loving Day to everyone in interracial relationships!

[beautifulscreaminglady]

Photographs of the Lovings by Villet Grey

[werewolf-transgenderism]

irritating as fuck when people get mad at Black people existing in premodern historical fiction/fantasy media. like first of all, you're racist. and second of all, you are acting as though Black people didn't exist in premodern Europe which is simply false. especially when we're talking about the Mediterranean, like what the fuck do you people think is along the southern half of the Mediterranean Ocean?? everyone's on boats, there are GOING to be interactions with Black people in Northern Africa, and there are GOING to be Black people in Mediterranean Europe. stop being stupid. your imagined homogeneous white European past is not historical reality, get over it you massive losers

[valtsv]

today i learned that there are cave paintings of bats and i think you all deserve to see them

[kave-elott-ne-szolj-hozzam]

These are from Australia & show a bat that is probably now extinct. The bat depictions were found on a sandstone wall protected by overhangs, near Kalumburu.