PR's Tumblrdome
art blog(derogatory)
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祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Love Begins
Kiana Khansmith
Xuebing Du
wallacepolsom
sheepfilms
Keni
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trying on a metaphor
Monterey Bay Aquarium
DEAR READER
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Stranger Things
$LAYYYTER
tannertan36
taylor price
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@sessifet
i'm reading a book about seventh century northumbria and you've heard of the tiffany problem but let me tell you there is nothing quite like reading through 350 pages calibrating for names like Oswiu and Æthelfrith and Paeda and Ecgfrith and Eanflæd and then getting smacked in the face with the fucking Bishop Chad
Some of the categories for the NYT Connections fills me with hatred and wrath. What do you mean “dog breeds with the first letter changed” i’ll kill you
Fury. Rage. Flames on the side of my face.
Hey absolutely come the fuck on
#The other categories? Fun and challenging. Purple? Utter nonsense. Why can't this category be challenging without the weird-ass gotcha psychic mindmeld tactic that's totally at odds with the rest of the puzzle?
Have you watched the new Disc-ney movie, RinceSide Out? It teaches kids about emotions by showing them what goes on inside the head of the average wizard wizzard.
Discworld Heritage Post
I understand WHY, ethically and practically, you can't just keep whatever animal you want as a pet, but I also think that I, personally, should be allowed to adopt a colossal squid
I'm glad you asked! it is easier to relocate a human than to relocate a colossal squid, so the plan is for me to walk into the ocean and never be seen again
endlessly funny that some pets will just decide they are service animals now without any training or feedback from humans. babygirl no one hired you. you do not have a license for this
I’m not talking about humans pretending their untrained pets are service animals so they can bring them places they shouldn’t be allowed. I’m talking about my dog, who took one look at the two people with severe ADHD time-blindness and executive dysfunction who adopted him and was like, “Great. I am your Watch Dog now, as in, dog who functions like a watch. That is, if your watch was a seven-pound furby that could run this house like the goddamn navy. I will catapult myself onto your chest and nip at your hands when you fail to get up and Do Things in response to my incessant whining that it is Time For You To Eat Lunch/Get Out Of Bed/Go Exercise/Take Your Meds/Etc Now Now Right Now. This is a service I provide for to Helping You. No, you cannot opt out of the Helping You. Do not attempt to resist the Helping You.”
⬆️ Trained Professional
My cat knows when I should stay in bed and screams at me until I do and then sits on me so I don't get back up. If I do get up she follows me and screams until I sit down again
She knows by sniffing my mouth first. Which she does at least once a day
When I am struggling to eat she'll do her "I need food" act even when her food is full until I eat
@thebibliosphere I think we've found Holly Mop's people
Some beloved critters really take the ‘companion’ role so seriously they train themselves to go above and beyond to the point where you’ll find yourself being bullied into lying down by a 10lb Shih Tzu. And then they’re right. You were getting a migraine. (It’s me. I’m in bed with a migraine with a 10lb Shih Tzu lying on top of me.)
The Glass Dress
These women.
Hand bead wove
with a hand needle
AN ENTIRE 1840′S DRESS
OUT OF.
SEED BEADS
how the shit do they have less than a thousand subscribers
633,000 beads. One by one. BY HAND.
It weighs 28 pounds
It took three and a half years and I am floored they got it done that fast
I was looking up pictures of albino, melanistic, and otherwise colour-atypical animals as reference for something, and I had never thought of how fucking funny an albino seagull would look like. Like they're mainly white anyhow, you wouldn't think that it'd make that much of a difference, and I think that's the reason why it does. Like all the other albino birds look eerily angelic, pale etheral entities carved out of living ivory, and this motherfucker right here is just. nakey.
like. sir? any particular reason why you took your pants off?
@elodieunderglass for your leuscism channel
I love it! That’s what I love about colour morphs, they make you think about it the animal in a different way
my ducks? in a row. the elephant? addressed. my goose? cooked. my eggs? in several baskets. the bigger fish? fried.
Your monkeys ?
those aren’t mine.
recollections
things english speakers know, but don’t know we know.
WOAH WHAT?
That is profound. I noticed this by accident when asked about adjectives by a Japanese student. She translated something from Japanese like “Brown big cat” and I corrected her. When she asked me why, I bluescreened.
What the fuck, English isn’t even my first language and yet I picked up on that. How the fuck. What the fuck.
Reasoning: It Just Sounds Right
Oooh, don’t like that. Nope, I do not even like that a little bit. That’s parting the veil and looking at some forbidden fucking knowledge there.
How did I even learn this language wtf
I had to read “brown big cat” like three times before my brain stopped interpreting it as “big brown cat”
I’m kinda reading “brown big cat” as “brown (big cat)”, that is, a “big cat” - like a tiger or lion or other felid of similar size - that happens to be brown. “Big brown cat”, on the other hand, sounds more like a brown cat that’s just a bit bigger than a regular housecat - like a bobcat or a maine coon cat or something like that.
yeah, a brown big cat is almost certainly a puma. a big brown cat is probably a maine coon.
yeah, if you put the adjectives out of order you wind up implying a compound noun, which is presumably why we have this rule; we stripped out so much inflection over the centuries word order now dictates a huge amount of our grammar
Just looked up why we do this and one of the first lines in this article is, “Adjectives are where the elves of language both cheat and illumine reality.” so I know it’s a good article.
Things this article has taught me:
This same order of adjectives more or less applies to languages around the world. “It’s possible that these elements of universal grammar clarify our thought in some way,” says Barbara Partee, a professor emeritus of linguistics and philosophy at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Yet when the human race tacitly decided that shape words go before color words go before origin words, it left no record of its rationale.
One theory is that the more specific term always falls closer to the noun. But that doesn’t explain everything in adjective order.
Another theory is that as you get closer to the noun, you encounter adjectives that denote more innate properties. In general, nouns pick out the type of thing we’re talking about, and adjectives describe it,” Partee told me. She observes that the modifiers most likely to sit right next to nouns are the ones most inclined to serve as nouns in different contexts: Rubber duck. Stone wall.
Rules are made to be broken. Switching up the order of adjectives allows you to redistribute emphasis. (If you wish to buy the black small purse, not the gray one, for instance, you can communicate your priorities by placing color before size). Scrambling the order of adjectives also helps authors achieve a sense of spontaneity, of improvising as they go. Wolfe discovers such a rhythm, a feeling-his-way quality, when he discusses his childhood recollection of “brown tired autumn earth” and a “flat moist plug of apple tobacco.”
Brain scans have discovered that your brain has to work harder to read adjectives in the “wrong” order.
TL;DR: No one knows why we do this adjective thing but it’s pretty hardwired in.
@deadcatwithaflamethrower Linguistics tidbit.
Since it’s never credited, this is from Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence, and just one reason why I think it’s required reading for anyone interested in prosecraft. Every page is this useful.
Eugene gets me
HAPPY LIMINAL SPACEMAS, COUCHES
My wife’s idea of decompressing after the busy holiday was to rearrange every piece of furniture in our home is this an ADHD thing or just a her thing
I’m not complaining the way she’s done it is much better than it was it’s just like how is this your idea of a relaxing weekend
Listen I don't get to decide when the drunk elf that is my executive actually does the functioning but when he does we have a SMALL WINDOW OF TIME before he finds the schnapps again and we're done
yes this exactly
So to me, there are spoons (general energy cost) and carnival tickets (specific energy cost).
Spoons can be used pretty much anywhere.
Carnival tickets are only good for the carnival, and it’s only in town for a limited amount of time.
So like, if I get “kitchen cleaning” carnival tickets, I can’t use that to clean my bedroom, that’s not where the carnival is.
hang ten indeed friend
That's too many types of blade to be good at throwing
me personally i just don't think anyone needs headlights powerful enough to light up twelve miles of road at a time
No hiding these tags
“Your ancestors are amazed at all your spices!”
“Your ancestors are impressed that you are an educated woman!”
“Your ancestors are proud that you are thriving in spite of what society did to them and you”
It’s all very sweet! But! Necromancy! Is! Still! Illegal! Your ancestors are going back in the ground!
Stop resurrecting them to show off!
so happy and free
this is going to be a silly reblog but i have kind of a fixation on animal qualia and the idea of an animal's umwelt, so i ended up wondering whether pudding was actually "enjoying" this.
which meant i went and read about snail brains.
here's the bad news, at least by human standards:
snails do not have anything like a centralized brain. their nervous system is made up of small clusters of neurons (ganglia) that mostly handle very local tasks. they don't have a cortex, they don't build big integrated models of the world, and they almost certainly don't experience things like appreciation, anticipation, or savoring.
pudding is not looking at the sky and thinking it's beautiful.
snail eyes are basically light sensors - they can tell bright from dark, but not form images. snail "taste" is done through chemoreceptors on their tentacles and around their mouth. those receptors don't produce flavor the way ours do; they just detect chemical compounds and sort them into "approach," "ignore," or "avoid."
so there's no evidence that snails enjoy food, or wind, or views, the way mammals do.
and that does sound kind of sad. but then i thought that maybe we are asking the wrong question.
snails do have valence. they detect aversive things (like salt or dryness) and withdraw from them. they detect non-aversive or beneficial conditions (like moisture) and stay extended. when pudding is stretched out like this, it means his nervous system is basically saying "this is safe; nothing is wrong."
if we define pleasure not as our human experience of dopamine and reward chemicals but instead as "the absence of aversion" - a state where the organism is open to its environment instead of defending itself - then this does count as something positive, even if it's extremely nothing like human enjoyment.
pudding isn't appreciating the wind. but his body is registering humidity, safety, and the ability to keep functioning, and that matters to him in the only way his nervous system can make things matter. he does not think "this is great, this is awesome, i love the weather", because he doesn't think in the way we do at all, but the neurological action in his ganglion tell his body that he is safe, that the moisture is an acceptable level, that it's not too dry or windy, and that there's nothing imminently threatening.
i think a lot of the sadness comes from assuming that a good life has to look like ours: full of enjoyment, meaning, and aesthetic experience. but a snail isn't missing those things. its world just isn't built to include them.
snails don't have a sense of flavor. they don't even have tastebuds. this seems like a gimme, right? but again that might be asking the wrong question about what "taste" is. biologically speaking, it's chemoreception. we taste sweet because it indicates high value, high calorie sugar molecules. we taste salty for salt, umami for proteins. so in what way does pudding's chemoreceptors differ from ours instrumentally? we can say "by our human perspective, pudding can't experience "preference" or "savoring" or "anticipation of delicious food"", but from pudding's perspective we have radically overengineered ourselves for the task at hand. pudding can tell what's salty, what's high value, what has the chemicals he needs. the functional outcome is that he can discriminate food souces based on their composition. is that not taste?
so maybe the point isn't "this is sad because he can't enjoy it," but "this is a reminder that minds come in radically different shapes, and value doesn't have to be rich to be real."
one good thing about december on this hellsite is that this gif will be making its rounds again
