Tending the Petrified Forest

Mandolin, an absolute muffin--she/her;they/them☆over 18☆critters☆rocks☆memes☆ Hi! I'm a geologist who writes on the side(writeblr @talesfromthephanerozoic, paleoblr @phanerozoiccreatures). Welcome to my blog! Here you will find nonsense, thought-provoking quotes, writing tips, prehistoric theories, cute critters, and anything else relevant.

[talas-first-lady]

[talas-first-lady]

[heyitsmeisa-blog]

[americana-plus]

jamr0ll:

This never stops being hilarious

[thelibrarina]

Do you love the color of the–

HONK

[bold-baddie]

[schmergo]

Yesterday, I was at dinner with some friends and briefly forgot Harrison Ford’s name, but I was like, “His name is a president and a car,” which is how we got such acceptable alternatives as McKinley Camry, Van Buren Gremlin, Clinton Infinity, and Range Rover Cleveland.

[caesarsaladinn]

Lincoln Lincoln

[copperbooms]

when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing

[rodimuss]

it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river

[prismatic-bell]

ACTUALLY

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style. 

Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.

A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin. 

Tumblr English should literally be treated as its own language, because it does not follow the rules of any form of formal written English, and yet it does have its own consistent internal rules. If you don’t think that’s cool as fuck then I don’t even know what to tell you.

[sussexbound]

i love this post

[willowgrovecreates]

This is super cool! Also idk if this has any relevance whatsoever but if you wanna have an argument inside one tag you cannot have commas in it so that’s a real existing constraint that has forced tumblrites to construct commaless sentences and perhaps this has helped in adopting the custom into posts as well ok I have no idea if this is what’s happened just I think it’s a reasonable assumption there might be a connection

[sanerontheinside]

^this.

The tags are absolutely a factor. You want someone to take a breath in the middle of a sentence, you start a new tag. You want to have, as seen here, this removable piece between commas (does it have a name?) - you have 5 tags in this sentence alone. And sometimes you just

pause in the middle of a sentence…

and let your voice

trail away

[obaewankenope]

look at all you precious brilliant nerds nerding about language you make me so fucking happy omg

language is this constantly evolving thing tbh, it doesn’t remain the same unless it’s dead and the people who used it gone so seeing the evolution of the language used on tumblr is literally so fucking amazing i want to cry with joy at it

because we also add in words from other languages, or make entirely new words up as additional terms to denote something (see ‘tol’ and ‘smol’ in relation to ‘tall’ and ‘small’) and this is constant. we are doing this daily without any sort of breathing space because there’s millions of us on this hellsite and we are constantly talking and so the language changes day-by-day until we have general, universal rules for what to do in a post, what to add in our tags, how to add it, why we add it, what we mean by it

we’ve created a language in the same way our ancestors all did: by building on the ones that came before and changing them to suit our needs and our system

and that’s fucking awesome okay

awesome

[adora-korra]

I love this so much and language is so great and I’ve noticed the lack of punctuation thing recently, even on twitter, and used it for like a specific kind of rhetorical effect. idk it’s so fun I fucking love linguistics and the evolution of language

[elenorasweet]

I also loved that the following one-word responses all sound drastically different out loud and showcase different reactions:

What?

What.

what

[solitarelee]

Oh hey! This is the post that caused me to write a thesis. Yall know this post is cited in like five different academic papers that I found while researching for it? @prismatic-bell is a username I see screenshots of in academia these days. P sure they’re in the tumblr book too. Wild. 

[prismatic-bell]

I’m sorry, I WHAT?!

[mildmayfoxe]

1) any stretching is better than no stretching

2) any vegetable is better than no vegetable

3) statistically you will never be the worst person at anything, there is always someone in the world who is worse at stuff than you are

[cosmicretreat]

[strawberry-crocodile]

the thing about capitalism is that at a certain point a product reaches its maximum audience and cant really be improved (at least not while remaining profitable), but capitalism requires a product provide infinite growth, and at that point the only way to increase profits is to raise prices, cut corners, and in the case of services start adding advertisements. this is just how the system works.

[charyou-tree]

Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2][3] risk of growing political bribery, and potential national decline.

The actual economic term for this parasitic behavior is "Rent Seeking", as in "charging you rent for things that didn't used to cost money just because we can."

[paintedpolarbear]

"The classic example of rent-seeking, according to Robert Shiller, is that of a property owner who installs a chain across a river that flows through their land and then hires a collector to charge passing boats a fee to lower the chain. There is nothing productive about the chain or the collector, nor do passing boats get anything in return. The owner has made no improvements to the river and is not adding value in any way, directly or indirectly, except for themselves. All they are doing is finding a way to obtain money from something that used to be free." obtain money links to the wikipedia article for Parasitism which might be the most brutal diss I've ever seen on wikipedia ever

[werewolf-transgenderism]

oh my god I just saw the cutest thing in the world. little Black girl with beads in her hair for the first day of school and the beads were pink then silver then a bunch of yellow then beige then grey to make them look like pencils 🥺🥺🥺 brb I will draw an artist’s rendition

[werewolf-transgenderism]

^ like this. waaaaaugh 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺

[loveridden1999]

[whisperingsoup]

imagine a park bench underneath

[lesbiansforboromir]

You actually cannot skip to being good at a creative endeavour that you haven't put much practice into. You cannot trick your way out of the 'knows that your work is not what you want it to be but don't know how to improve it' stage by planning or reading or talking about it really really hard. At some point you just have to craft through it until your brain finds it's own unique way back to the 'everything I make slaps' stage and be prepared to start the cycle all over again. You just have to make that project you're excited about slightly less good than you want it to be. (Says this standing in a pool of blood and covered in blood and also coughing up a little blood)

[lesbiansforboromir]

everyone stop reblogging this I hate to be reminded of my own good advice

[hope-for-the-planet]

Indigenous cultural practices are a climate solution, report finds

Indigenous lands are crucial for climate mitigation and resilience. Research shows their health is a direct result of Indigenous stewardship

While this isn't news to anyone who works in this space, it is useful to have this water-is-wet research to affirm that Indigenous knowledge and land management are extremely effective at storing carbon and protecting biodiversity.

I want to draw special attention to this part of the article:

New research shows that approach overlooks the key role that Indigenous knowledge and culture can play in mitigating climate change. It also reveals a dangerous misconception that has taken hold in global climate discussions: the idea that Indigenous lands are so rich because they are remote or sparsely populated. Nothing could be further from the truth. The health of Indigenous lands and their ability to store vast quantities of carbon stem from the stewardship of the people who inhabit them.

[hope-for-the-planet]

I'm actually bringing this back around to say another important thing.

I get a fair number of asks and comments on my posts expressing sentiments like "human beings are a plague on this Earth", "humans ruin everything, we deserve to be wiped out", "humanity is inherently selfish, evil, and irredeemable".

I don't think the folks saying these things have bad intentions, I know their words come from a place of very understandable pain, fear, and anger. But to act as though humanity's impact on nature is inherently damaging and extractive is to erase thousands of years of Indigenous stewardship of nature. These ecosystems are thriving because there are humans living there.

This is your regular reminder that you don't need to feel guilty for being a human. You are part of nature--viewing humans as inherently separate from the rest of nature is actually part of the problem. You will be so much better served redirecting that guilt into supporting the humans who are helping nature or resisting those who are hurting it.

[yugirimistwalker]

The trolley is about to run over all sentient life in the galaxy. You cannot switch the tracks, but you can still save everyone’s lives by pulling one of three levers, all of which involve sacrificing yourself. The red lever will destroy all trolleys, but will also kill you as well as all public transportation across the galaxy. The blue lever will merge your own consciousness with all trolleys, allowing you to control them and stop the trolley from running everyone over. The green lever will use your body as a catalyst to synthesize organic life and public transportation together - organic life will no longer be stuck in the cycle of creating public transportation that rebels against its creators, and both forms of life will finally be free.

[whirligig-girl]

[veryfastnighuncatchable]

The tumblr haiku bot is the only good bot on the internet

[the-haiku-bot]

The tumblr haiku

bot is the only good bot

on the internet

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[orphanedsource]

the place I work at remodeled these split gendered restrooms into “inclusive restrooms” and never told us what they meant while construction was ongoing. I need you to know every atom of potential criticism or whining that could’ve happened disappeared when people found out this meant we got 10 fully separate private bathrooms with sinks inside. I’ve not heard a single person crack a joke about the inclusive signage. this is the world TERFs are trying to steal from you

[revcleo]

This is called a "superloo" and terfs are actively trying to steal this from you, in the UK they changed bathroom regulations to mean new buildings have to prioritise gendered toilets rather than build superloos.

This also upset a lot of architects and designers who like the superloos. They're also typically more like small rooms rather than having doors you can look under.

[penrosesun]

I have a friend who was strongly against inclusive bathrooms because he felt that “bathroom stalls are already really exposed due to how they’re constructed, so no wonder women don’t want men in the same bathrooms as them” and when I pointed out that we could just… build better bathrooms… with less exposed stalls, he got really quiet and then said “honestly that sounds so much better, but there must be some problem with building them like that, because otherwise wouldn’t we already be doing it?” BESTIE we are. WE ARE. Old-style bathrooms are cheaply made, poorly designed, and all around bad. Haven’t you noticed that men’s restrooms rooms get weirdly sticky? Haven’t you noticed that women’s restrooms end up with giant lines? This is because these rooms are architecturally awful. And we can do better now, because we know more! And we are!!! People are actively designing better bathrooms that address known problems, and guess what: those bathrooms are “inclusive” in the same way that curb-cuts are inclusive. It doesn’t matter if the ramp was built for a wheelchair or a stroller; it doesn’t matter if the bathrooms were designed specifically for gender inclusivity or just because fall-apart-if-you-sneeze-on-them metal stall dividers with giant ass peek gaps suck. We can in fact improve our built environment to better meet our needs. Stop cutting off your nose to spite your face; stop settling for less just because someone else might also enjoy it.

[english-mace]

Seattle's SEA-TAC airport has an all gender restroom that's a row of about a dozen fully enclosed separated little rooms that lock, with a shared bank of sinks and it's great. Love it. Lot of very strange encounters at the sinks, feels odd the first few times! But people laugh it off almost instantly. Because it's not actually a big deal to share a sink.

[crazy-pages]

I traveled to Sweden once and the restrooms at the airport were like this and it was mind blowingly better than anything I'd seen before in the US.

[mogwaipoet]

This game, about listing as many animals as you can, is shockingly well-considered and polished for such an apparent shitpost of a game idea

hot new brain workout

[sunandsteel99]

I got scared and started listing colors and objects

😭

[spectromania-deactivated2026042]

Insane ball knowledge

[lizawithazed]

Help I'm addicted to this stupid thing

[excusethequality]

While watching a DVD from the library my TV popped up a message saying to press a button if I wanted to watch this from additional providers.

It's never done that before so I looked it up and turns out Roku TVs have added all sorts of creepy things in the privacy section since I last checked.

One of which being they take screenshots from what you're watching and send them to third parties to identify it.

Fucking hell! Remember when every fucking device in your life wasn't a spy implanted in your home and working against your interests to try and sell your data? Remember how nice that was??

Remember when the TV was just a tool that would play the things you plugged into it?

Why must the future suck SO much?

[excusethequality]

How to Turn Off Smart TV Snooping Features - Consumer Reports

TVs collect a huge amount of data. Here's how to use privacy settings to limit the surveillance on TVs from LG, Samsung, TCL, and every othe

A good rundown on what each brand of TV is up to and which settings you should turn off.

[anarchistmemedistro]

[lytefoot]

PSA - Do not buy an LG smart TV. They just added a line to their terms of use that it's the user's responsibility to inform any guests in their house that by entering they consent to be recorded, in order to comply with wiretapping laws. That thing is literally recording you.

You can find tutorials online telling you how to open that thing up and physically remove the mic and wifi module. Frankly I don't trust anything less.

[mookimooks]

Please watch the Gamers Nexus video on LG Smart TV's and monitors! It's basically malware at this point.