I'm Neal: ney/neir/nim (pref) or they/their/them. He/him if you must. Triple A queer (Aromantic, asexual, agender). Late 20s. General nerd who also writes sometimes
odysseus tying himself to the mast but he's doing some proto shibari type shit to make his tits look really good and his crew isn't saying anything but it's kind of hard not to notice
So "currying" a furry animal means grooming or brushing it with a currycomb, which in turn comes from the Old French correier meaning "to prepare [something]", because you prepare a horse for riding by brushing it; it's most commonly applied to horses but you can get e.g. currycombs for dogs.
If I understand correctly, medieval French folk tales considered chestnut-colored horses to be deceitful and tricky; the Old French word for a chestnut or dun horse was fauvel, and so the Old French expression correier fauvel, literally "to brush the chestnut horse", meant lying or being hypocritical for personal gain. This turned into "curry favel" in 15th-century English, and then mutated into "curry favor" over the next few centuries as people forgot about the horse.
So "currying favor" is really "brushing the Horse of Lies", and the reason you can't curry goodwill, or love, or hatred, or even disfavor is that we didn't have Horses for those.
And it follows that we can gain the ability to curry other things by assigning them to Horses.
#google is backing you up on this (via @oldguardians)
I realize, looking back on this post, that regular readers of my blog may have thought I made this up. Making up a ridiculous etymology is certainly the sort of thing I might do; in fact I've been meaning to start a sideblog dedicated solely to sufficiently accurate etymologies, and have a notebook with dozens of them jotted down, I just haven't had the time to do anything with them.
But I want to stress that this is not one of those cases. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the very real etymology of the phrase "curry favor".
The Old French fauve or falve referred to the light-brown color that's sometimes called "fallow" in modern English, but since it also sounded similar to faux, meaning "false", it was also associated with deceit and trickery ; the idiom estriller Fauvel literally meant "to groom the fallow one" but idiomatically meant "to lie or trick people".
Then in the 1300s we get the French poem Roman de Fauvel, a satirical poem about a fauve horse, whose name is derived both from the color and from the fact that FAVVEL is an acronym of Flaterie, Avarice, Vilanie, Varieté, Envie, Lascheté (Flattery, Greed, Vileness, Fickleness, Envy, and Cowardice) - all the different vices that this horse embodies.
Fauvel (purportedly modeled after Enguerrand de Marigny [source], an advisor to King Philip IV) is a sinful, conniving, and very rich horse who has various religious and secular leaders fawning over him and brushing him; it was well-known enough that "grooming Fauvel" came to mean "sucking up to someone powerful" more than just "being evil", and when it was translated into English the grooming was translated as currying, which specifically is grooming a horse with a curry comb [wiktionary]. From this we got the Middle English expression "currying Fauvel", which then mutated via folk etymology (in the "reinterpretation of unfamiliar words as more familiar ones" sense, not the "people are wrong about etymology" sense) into "currying favor".
I'm bringing a "Because I only have one hand and it's not even the right one!" energy to this angst RP that's extremely good for my mental health. With just a dash of "you can't strangle a man one-handed" for texture
SO. I SAID THIS. AND BUDDY AND I HAVE DECIDED WE NEED A "one of these characters is a prince of the realm" AU. AND
We have:
A king who can't show emotions normally but knows everybody's business before they do and is UPSETTINGLY lethal
A member of the royal guard who is tasked with babysitting a member of the royal family who WILL NOT SIT STILL by another member of the royal family and has a "I'd follow both of them into hell, I just hope they never order me in opposite directions cause I don't know what I'd do" energy to him
A creepy shithead ambassador who thinks he can get away with p much anything cause his country is more powerful, and who's angling to marry into running a country
MY FRIEND HAS NOT READ THE QUEEN'S THIEF AND ALL OF THIS IS PERFECTLY IN CHARACTER FOR THESE ABSOLUTELY UNRELATED INDIVIDUALS AND I'M JUST OTL
Pathologizing: Hey sorry I yelled at you. I have this ADHD symptom called RSD that makes me really sensitive.
Humanizing: Hey, I’m sorry that I blew up like that earlier. In the moment I felt really attacked and overwhelmed and I reacted badly, but I know you didn’t mean to offend me with what you said, so that behavior is on me.
Because I just saw a post bitching about this one, I want to add: this post is saying that you need to take accountability for the way you hurt other people, even if it happens because of a symptom of your disability/illness. It's also saying that using terms (especially acronyms) that aren't common knowledge isn't a helpful way to explain yourself. It is NOT saying that you need to let people walk all over you because "your disability isn't an excuse."
If you're diabetic, you don't have to eat the honey glazed ham that will send you into a coma (their example). But you also can't yell at the person offering it and accuse them of trying to kill you. You can just say "thanks, but my body can't handle that kind of sugar intake, so I'll pass"
classicists will make the ugliest least functional website in the history of html and it will contain the entire library of fragmentary papyri of the works of aeschylus. for free
Look it's not my fault they're still using graphics i designed for the Perseus website when I was a grad student in 19 fucking 94 on a Mac LC with less memory than a modern thermostat
what I like about Yugi is that he is definitely in that "kind non-violent all-loving friendships-everyone" protagonist archetype but most of the time we expect those sorts of characters to wear their hearts on their sleeves or solve their problems via communication and understanding, whereas one of Yugi Muto's defining character traits is that he'd rather die than admit he has a problem. you can pour soup directly in his lap and he'll be like "oh that's okay ^_^" while internally burning with such an unquenchable incandescent rage at you that 30 minutes later his evil shadow self confronts you in a back alley and forces you to play something called Knife Pogs (a game he just made up that's like Pogs but the pogs are knives so every time you hit the stack a bunch of knives fly out and stab you in the kneecaps). so that's fun
Remember when Yugi's class lost their good school fair table to another class because a bully was a bit overbearing about it so Yami invented Gunpowder Air Hockey and blew him up? That was great. I don't think they'd introduced the card game yet at that point.
#dont forget the part about gunpowder air hockey where the puck was made of ice with a gunpowder core and it was on a hot plate#so A: every second spent with it in play it was melting#and B: every single hit chipped away at the ice#second favorite yugioh moment#only second to the taser torture scene#yugioh
The taser torture scene was so cool he fuckin fried those motherfuckers
#the burger hostage scenario was a personal fav as a youth#but gunpowder air hockey did rule
My favourite part of Gunpowder Air Hockey was just how unbelievably out of proportion the punishment was for the crime. The others were like "wow that's a bit much" but most of them could be seen as over-the-top attempts to protect people. But air hockey dude was like. It's a table at a school fair. Maybe let this one live.
Love From The Other Side by FOB always has me on the floor because "What would you trade the pain for? I'm not sure" is that scene in King of Attolia where Gen is locked in a room, railing against his gods for what happened to him, and Moira's like "Look. Would you trade your life now to get back what you lost?"
And he can't say yes, because even though he's never been more miserable in his life, the idea of having to watch the woman he loves slowly lose her humanity without him as an anchor is a fate worse than death to him
I'm bringing a "Because I only have one hand and it's not even the right one!" energy to this angst RP that's extremely good for my mental health. With just a dash of "you can't strangle a man one-handed" for texture
My favorite quirk of American English is that since we're constantly exaggerating, sometimes it's more intense to say something slightly less intense. Because like, it means you actually thought about it.
"you look great!" - normal. Anyone could say this. Could be true or could just be lying to be nice. Very normal expected thing to say to someone
"you look good." - gay as hell thing to say to someone.
You are trying to move into an apartment with your favorite Pokemon. The building is strict about which Pokemon are allowed inside but it’s super affordable. How hard do you think it will be to convince the landlord to let you keep it in the building?
Easy as can be, perfect apartment dweller
Might take some convincing
Basically a coin flip
It will be an uphill battle but I might be able to, while saying goodbye to my deposit
No increased rent, deposit or argument could convince any landlord to let us in
You are trying to move into an apartment with your favorite Pokemon. The building is strict about which Pokemon are allowed inside but it’s super affordable. How hard do you think it will be to convince the landlord to let you keep it in the building?
Easy as can be, perfect apartment dweller
Might take some convincing
Basically a coin flip
It will be an uphill battle but I might be able to
No increased rent, deposit or argument could convince any landlord to let us in
my senior english teacher told me that any scene with a woman in a cornfield in every piece of literature ever is about her journey to womanhood/pleasuring herself in the field and i just.... believed her
Watched Apex (2026) yesterday, and I enjoyed it, but my timing on that was SUPER bad bc I'm currently writing some elaborate ERP with a buddy where the characters regularly want to hunt and kill people for sport in addition to being fucked up in other ways, so really I was just setting myself up for disappointment that the movie didn't end with the two characters fucking each other in the wilderness or killing each other
the first chapter of Moby Dick rewritten in tiresome modern idiom
CHAPTER 1. Loomings.
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - it's none of your business how many - being mostly broke, and bored with the land part of the world, I thought I would sail around a little and look at the watery part of the world. I'm probably the most mentally healthy person you know. Whenever I feel my face getting grim; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself accidentally reading the ads in the window of funeral homes, and following funeral processions through traffic; and especially when I'm hangry, and only my extremely strong moral principles stop me from deliberately going out in public and methodically slapping people's earbuds out - then I know it's high time to get to sea, ASAP. This is my substitute for getting in fights. I'm too mentally healthy to kill myself; I quietly and considerately put myself on a ship and sail myself away instead. There is nothing surprising in this. Everyone feels exactly the same way, and if they don't, they're lying.
You think I'm lying? Exhibit A: a city. Go to your local coastal city. Everyone is looking at the water. They drive over from other neighborhoods just to come to the water. They make a day of it. They're not doing anything, they're just staring at the ocean. Why? Is it because they all work office jobs? No! Here come more of them! They cram themselves up to the edge of the water and stare at it. WHAT DO THEY WANT? WHAT ARE THEY LOOKING AT. Perhaps the ships themselves all packed together, each one with several compasses on it, creates some kind of critical mass - all of the small compass-magnets on all the ships in the harbor combining into one really big magnetic field - and the people get sucked into the field and trapped there. That's science.
Exhibit 2: the countryside with lakes in it. Every path you follow in the countryside brings you to some water, such as a stream. There is magic in it. If you take your standard fool with ADHD dissociating in the middle of a supermarket and put them outside and give them a shove, they'll automatically lead you to water (if there is any nearby) (try it). Another good experiment to try is to get lost in the great American desert in a caravan supplied with a metaphysical professor! Try it in the great American desert at home!
Yes, as everyone knows, meditation and water are a match made in heaven. Married forever. That's science.
Here's an artist who wants to paint you the dreamiest, most enchanting landscape. What does he put in it? Trees, meadow, cows, a cottage with smoke coming from the chimney, obviously. He will probably put a path in it and make lots of triangular mountains in rows and have them be different shades of blue (naturally.) But there's gotta be a stream in it. Go visit the prairies in June, and wade for forty miles through knee-deep through tiger lilies. What's missing from this picture? Water!
If Niagara Falls was made of sand instead of water, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why would a guy given a handful of cash have trouble deciding whether to buy a coat (which he needed) or go to the beach? Why are all the best, healthiest, sexiest and most mentally healthy people obsessed with the sea? (You get me.) When you were first on a boat, did you not succumb to VIBES? Consider ancient Persia. Consider ancient Greece. They understood about vibes, and also gods.
SURELY ALL OF THIS IS NOT WITHOUT MEANING.
And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all! You get me! You understand it now.
Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I get weird, don't you dare imply that I buy a ticket and get on a boat. I have never had money in my life. How dare you. Anyway I don't go as a passenger - that's bougie, and something boring people do. Passengers never have a good time. And although my C.V. is incredible - I go to sea SO MUCH, you guys, I have lots of experience - I don't go as a boss, or a cook. That sounds like far too much work. Hard work. Disgusting, respectable, bougie, and far too responsible. I can literally only look after myself. Do not ask me to look after ships or shit. In fact, I have only a vague idea of what a ship is. There's so many different kinds of ships - don't get me started and DO NOT GET INVOLVED. Also, I'm allergic to glory.
It's kind of attractive to go as a cook. I mean, I'm allergic to glory and there's some glory attached to the position of the ship's cook, but, like, you're not management-track and so it's still credible. But I don't really want to cook (say) roast chicken. I really fucking love to eat roast chicken. I'm one of the best at doing it actually. I really appreciate when people go out of their way to butter, season, baste and roast a chicken for me. Picture a roast chicken and I am Looking Respectfully at it. Maybe something more, maybe I'm worshipping it. Don't make this weird. If you want to get weird about my relationship with roasted chicken, why aren't you getting weird about the ancient Egyptians? They ate roasted hippos (look it up) and the pyramids were basically pizza ovens. So it's pretty hypocritical to think that I'm being weird about roasted chicken when I've never made mummies out of chickens or built a religious pizza oven dedicated to honoring them: check and mate, haters.
Anyway - I like to go to sea as a manual laborer. A simple sailor. Salt of the earth… er… sea. Yeah, true: as a job it sucks. They make you jump around, order you around, treat you like shit. They expect you to jump around the boat like a grasshopper. And yes, at first, this sucks. It's degrading, especially if you come from a middle-class family. Worse, it's awful if you've already had some kind of professional job before signing on to be the dirt on the boss's boots - like, if you went to college and worked as a teacher and actually got kids to pay attention to you, really feeling this connection to work/teaching/identity or some shit, and now you are just literally the scum on this captain's boots, in the lowest possible job in the world. It hurts! It hurts your dignity. But the hurt, and also the dignity, both wear off in time.
So what if some old bastard sea captain orders me - ME! - to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, compared to the shit in the Bible, compared to the shit in the news, compared to the shit everyone else has to take. Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. We're all just serfs under capitalism, right, so why not just be honest about it: I prefer the honesty. Anyway, however the old sea captains may order me about - slapping and punching of course - I have the satisfaction of knowing that it's the same experience everyone else on Earth has, but more honest. Everyone else in the world is being served the exact same way. Either in a physical or a metaphysical way - sometimes people get the shit beaten out of them in person, sometimes online, sometimes emotionally, it happens to you in EVERY JOB, you sign on to get pushed around and slapped in the teeth: so the point is that when you're a sailor, it's a clean and honest slap. All the workers of the world share the same universal slap to the face that gets passed round, one slap passed all 'round the chain, like paying it forward, but it's a slap; and we should all accept this Universal Slap as the price of living, and then offer each other healing back massages, brother to brother, and slap each other and then kissed the places we slapped, and be happy.
I could examine that but I'm not going to.
Anyway: I always go to sea as a sailor. I've said that already. You're welcome. BUT THE POINT IS, they pay you. If you're a passenger, they don't pay you, at least, not that I've ever heard of [citation needed] (do they pay passengers?? Is there a job I can get where I can be a passenger and get paid?? Look this up.) Yeah so passengers have to pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. (That's Adam and Eve. You get it.) But BEING PAID. GETTING PAID IS THE BEST. NOTHING COMPARES TO GETTING PAID. EVERYONE LOVES THAT SHIT. Which is surprising, since we also apparently believe that money is the root of all evil, and isn't there something in the bible about "no rich people can get into heaven," right? And yet it's universal, literally everyone loves payday. Ah! How cheerfully we send ourselves to hell.
Finally, I always go to sea as a sailor (I've said this already) because it's FRESH AIR AND EXERCISE. Okay so think about ships. Normally, bosses stand on the "bridge" thing, and because we're sailing a boat, the nose is going into the wind and the butt part of the boat is at the back. That's how wind works. But if you think about it, winds usually go in one direction more than other directions (unless the men have been eating beans and farting: it's Pythagoras, look it up) SO if you're a boss standing on the boss-deck, the wind is blowing FROM the sailors TOWARDS you, and YOU ARE ACTUALLY BREATHING THE AIR THAT SAILORS ALREADY BREATHED. The boss THINKS he breathes it first, but he doesn't. He gets the air at the BACK of the boat and sailors get the air at the FRONT. So it's better to be at the front of the boat (sailor) for health reasons. This is a metaphor for life and work, etc.
But I have smelled the sea lots of times as a paid sailor and WHY I should decide to go on a whaling expedition - ok so you know how there's an invisible police officer of the Fates who has me under constant surveillance, who secretly dogs me, and influences me in some unaccountable way? YOU get me. You know him. "The poor FBI agent tasked with reading my search engine history" YOU GET ME. Anyway, "Ishmael, why, after having a perfectly well-reasoned, and very smart of you, part-time job as a spontaneous random sailor, did you decide to escalate that to joining a WHALING EXPEDITION, which is worse in every way?" Well, ask my fucking secret FBI agent, he can answer better than anyone else. Including me. You get me. Also, obviously, this was predestined, part of the Universe's Grand Programme for its talent show, which was all scheduled way before our time. The concept of sending me on the whaling voyage comes in as a kind of interlude or solo between the main performances of the Universe's great talent show. I bet it was advertised llike,
"PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF THE UNITED STATES EMBROILED IN ONGOING LEGAL DISPUTE.
Whaling voyage by some guy called Ishmael.
BLOODY BATTLE IN AFGHANISTAN."
Like a commercial break in between the big acts. A filler episode. Lightens the load for everyone else. Though I can't explain why the stage managers - the Fates - chose such a shitty role for me, a WHALING VOYAGE of all things, when it feels like others were given magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces - it seems a little unreasonable at first. Why doth Ishmael get shat upon, etc. But then I think about all the circumstances, the plot points and motivations that were cunningly presented to me under various disguises - FBI agents, bouts of random hanger, gay awakenings, you get me - and you can see that actually, I was set up. And worse, between them all, these Fates and Circumstances conspired to make me believe it was all my own choice and good judgment. Is Free Will an illusion? Are my decisions bad? We will NEVER know because I, Ishmael, am just a little guy that the Universe plays head games with.
One of the ways the Universe tricked me into starring in this performance and then mocking me for it was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself (whaling expeditions usually contain whales.) Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then of course, if you have a whale, you have the wild and distant seas where the whale rolls around with his body-the-size-of-an-island; the dangers and nameless perils of the whale; whales are also found in interesting places I haven't seen; this all tipped me over the edge. Maybe normal people could've resisted, but I am tormented with an everlasting itch for obscurity. I hate everyone else's oceans. I want the forbidden seas.
You know The Horrors? Of course you do. You might be surprised that I, the most mentally healthy person you've ever met, a person who is self-aware enough to go to sea when they're at their fucking limits, a guy who likes fresh air and manual labor and normal things, is familiar with The Horrors. Well, you'd be surprised. I know what's good, I'm an extrovert. But I'm still quick to perceive The Horrors. And how I deal with the horrors is a very extroverted thing: I'm social with them, if they'll let me. It's smart to be on good terms with The Horrors. You should always be on good terms with your permanent neighbors. That's how extroverts deal with The Horrors, and I recommend it.
I think that's enough explanation for why I welcomed the whaling voyage. The great flood-gates of the wonder-world swung open, and in the wild figments of imagination that pushed me into doing it, the whales came marching two by two, hurrah, hurrah. They marched into my innermost soul in endless processions and occupied it, you see, I was quite helpless under this occupation - I consented to the haunting and the whales marched in to haunt me - and amidst them all was one grand shrouded white phantom, like a snowy mountain in the air.
You get it.
You know how it is, with whales.
(read the actual first chapter of Moby Dick here: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-h/2701-h.htm)
I have a question: the original Moby Dick, in its original linguistic and cultural context (you know all the dick jokes in Shakespeare that we don't pick up on any more because language has shifted? That kind of thing), was it THAT clear that the narrator has Something Wrong with him?
baratheonpilled
2087
dededos
kianamaiart
andulkaphoto
tangentwithtanner
annaxmalina
