[psikonauti]

Fumi Yanagimoto (Japanese,conteporary)

母とナナの時間 (Mom and Nana time)

woodblock print

[eightyonekilograms]

How far back in time can you understand English?

An experiment in language change

Nifty little language game here.

I can read back to 1500 with basically no difficulty

at 1400 I have to read slowly and carefully, but I can understand all of it save a couple words

at 1300 I can still comprehend most of it if I read slowly, but a much larger percentage of the words are unfamiliar to me, even with context

1200 and earlier are almost totally unintelligible

[asexualeros]

many people would be happier and feel less broken if we de-centered romantic relationships but idk if queer people are ready for this discussion. simply because if you are traumatized and soft conversion therapy’d out of expressing romantic desire, the idea that romance is not important is traumatic. and then there’s the pervasive family of origin trauma. if your partner fulfills the ache of unconditional love that you never felt growing up, you understandably will want to prioritize that relationship. plus there’s the pervasive sexual shame.

which means that people who are aro and ace kind of have to navigate a soup of other people’s trauma that we trigger by existing, and definitely trigger by taking up space and CERTAINLY trigger by offering observations like this one.

[asexualeros]

this post has apparently resonated with a lot of people. i have been checking the comments & tags and a lot of people have shared this experience with me. i’m so glad you saw something of your life reflected here.

so, i just want to say, i think the blame here lies squarely on the shoulders of cishetero amatonormativity. end of the day, we are all being crushed by forces that say “you should be this way, or no way at all”, and then actively erect barriers to other ways of life.

for the people that react with anxiety or dismissal toward other-other ways of being, i ask you,with love, for self reflection.

if you have been less than your best and most generous self toward ace and aro people in the past because of very real trauma, you can be different going forward. i highly encourage you to simply read the tags of this post and listen to what other people have said. sit with it. and then ask what you could do differently next time.

if you are ace and aro and have shared here, thank you. it means a lot to me, and i am sure it means a lot to others as well.

[femalegothic]

one of the most important tweets ever twote

[climbingthefloors]

good god.

[aro-ace-culture-is]

Aroace culture is hating that straight people can’t be normal about children. If a toddler has a friend that’s the opposite sex, they’ll be like, ‘ooh, is she your girlfriend?’ Karen, Jayden is three years old and he cried yesterday because he found out that worms don’t have legs. Let kids be kids, and don’t force your heteronormativity on literal toddlers.

.

[wholesome-animal-images]

Before and after images of Animals Growing Up

[ultrafacts]

@wholesome-animal-images

[anthonyhurd]

What’s your number 1 take away from 2025? Mine is clearly this: We’re not going anywhere.

[k-wame]

[aspec-quilt-project]

Aspec Quilt Square Links

use the number/letter grid to find out more about any squares you're interested in by clicking on the links below! I highly recommend looking through; so many of these squares are accompanied by thoughtful messages with credits to wonderful creators :)

A1 | A2 | A3 | A4 | A5 | A6 | A7 | A8 | A9 | A10 | A11 | A12 | A13 | A14 | A15 | A16 | A17 | A18 | A19 | A20 | B1 | B2 | B3 | B4 | B5 | B6 | B7 | B8 | B9 | B10 | B11 | B12 | B13 | B14 | B15 | B16 | B17 | B18 | B19 | B20 | C1 | C2 | C3 | C4 | C5 | C6 | C7 | C8 | C9 | C10 | C11 | C12 | C13 | C14 | C15 | C16 | C17 | C18 | C19 | C20 | D1 | D2 | D3 | D4 | D5 | D6 | D7 | D8 | D9 | D10 | D11 | D12 | D13 | D14 | D15 | D16 | D17 | D18 | D19 | D20 | E1 | E2 | E3 | E4 | E5 | E6 | E7 | E8 | E9 | E10 | E11 | E12 | E13 | E14 | E15 | E16 | E17 | E18 | E19 | E20 |

[blignick]

[calliopeprelude]

best guess (2025) – lucy dacus

[hellocloudyart]

Hello friends, I'll be trying my luck here. Here's a lucky black cat to start with!!

->PRINT

[coquelicoq]

don't you hate it when you accidentally buy the low-fat version of something? was putting away my groceries and noticed the packaging that proclaimed "only 5 calories per serving!" like that was some kind of positive. you're telling me i just spent 4 dollars on 20 calories??? well fuck man what am i supposed to do with such a dinky amount of energy?

[havingapoemwithyou]

from let July be July by Morgan Harper Nichols

[uovoc]

English has different words for mouse and rat but in Chinese they're both the same creature (laoshu) so I asked my mom well how do you differentiate between mice and rats. She, clearly having never felt the need to do so, was like uhh big laoshu and little laoshu I guess. Then I went online to see how the difference between (the English words) "mouse" and "rat" was being explained to CN->EN learners and there are numerous articles delving deep into the analysis. Bigger vs smaller, indoors vs outdoors, cute and favorable connotations vs evil and ugly, tail length, fear factor, emphasis on the fact that you cannot call it a "computer rat." Much thought is being expended on this little mystery of the English language

[xiangqiankua]

Last time I was looking for an apartment, the guy showing me a room that opened directly to the alley was like 你怕老鼠嗎？and I, hoping to distinguish mouse vs rat, asked 大的還是小的? To which he replied, with great satisfaction: 都有!😃

[sladeofyaupon]

Translation: "Are you afraid of rodents?" "Big ones or small ones?" "We've got both."

[goopi-e]

@probably-ace-ok This is beautiful.

[jv]

I'm always utterly confused by the difference between Ravens and Crows, since we only have a word for both in Spanish.

Also, I'm very confused by the lack of difference between "búhos" and "lechuzas" in English, like if both things were even close to being similar.

[magess]

Can you illustrate with photos?

[jv]

Do you mean lechuza/búho?

Yup!

[the-pithy-aaaaah]

Oh we just give owls long multi word names so the buho is a great horned owl (even if it's not and it might not be) and the lechuza is a barn owl

[jv]

Yeah, but that's the thing, for you folks those are two categories of the same type of bird. For me they are different types of birds, like an eagle and a falcon, or a magpie and a blackbird.

I guess it's the same thing with ravens to me: I know about the differences: it's just what I've learned to see ravens and crows as variations in the same type of animal.

[jv]

@akasanata

Oh au contraire, mon ami. Maybe the Spanish from the Americas had lost the differences, but the euro Spanish is insanely specific about this type of prey bird, to the point that you need to be an expert to know what to use. This a list of prey birds that are smaller than an eagle and relatively common in iberia:

- halcón

- milano

- cernícalo

- alcotan

- gavilan

- azor

[vaspider]

In Yiddish & Hebrew, there's one word for both doves & pigeons. טויב, toyb, plural טויבן, toybn.

However, Yiddish has different specific words for the mother of your son's spouse and the mother of your daughter's spouse, and a specific single word which means "both sets of parents of a married couple." IDK why that's what I thought of, but I think it's cool. There's also a single word that means "the youngest person in a particular family."

[silvergryphonart]

Not sure if this makes it better or worse but dove/pigeon is known to be an arbitrary distinction in English; it has no connection to scientific classification. The common domestic/feral pigeon is descended from the rock dove. Whether a bird is called a pigeon or a dove is pretty much the choice of the person who named it, often based on size or aesthetics. Yiddish gets it right

[vaspider]

It's pretty much - not fully consistent, but largely so - that larger species are usually called pigeon (origin: French) while smaller and more delicate species are called doves (origin: Old English/Norse). So it's more common to hear "rock pigeon" vs "mourning dove" and "turtle dove."

They're all Columbidae the same way that a raven and a crow are both Corvidae, yes, but there is a general logic to which word gets used for which. Whether it's wrong or right, idk.

[whodoyouthinkithinkiam]

Not as cool as animals, but this reminds me of a time one of my coworkers casually mentioned another of our coworkers having brown hair, and a third coworker, whose first language was Spanish, said, "David's hair isn't brown! It's, uh, castaño. What's castaño in English again..."

She looked down at her computer screen, then back up, looking quite annoyed. "How can that also be brown? They're not the same colour!"

[elodieunderglass]

Bread-coloured hair is apparently in French, châtain clair, and, in Spanish, castaño claro,

a fact I learned far too late

[irithind]

The crow and raven distinction is insane in Polish. It took me a loooong while to learn which word is which and I still instinctively fuck it up. I used to ask both my students and friends:

What is crow?

Kruk

And raven?

... Kruk...

We have different words in Polish: "wrona" for crow and "kruk" for raven. The problem is that in Polish "wrona" is feminine and in English "crow" feels slightly more masculine (it's not as clear as English doesn't have grammatical gender but still) and with "raven" and "kruk" it's the opposite. But also "raven" is very clearly associated with "kruk", so usually our brain just short-circuits with translating those.

[whitepeopletwitter]