There’s a theory that early Europeans started saying “brown one” or “honey-eater” instead of “bear” to avoid summoning them, and similarly my friend has started calling Alexa “the faceless woman” because saying her true name awakens her from her slumber
English has an avoidance register used in the presence of certain respected animals, which sounds fancy until you realize it’s spelling out w-a-l-k and t-r-e-a-t in front of the dog.
Iceland does! They are the illhveli, literally “evil whales”, and they live to kill you. They love nothing more than killing and eating humans and sinking their ships. Their greatest enemy is the steypireydur (that’s blue whale to you), which is the greatest of the good whales and the protector of sailors.
All evil whales are, well, evil. So evil that if you speak their name at sea, they will hear it and home in on you. So instead you use all sorts of euphemisms for their names. Also if you try to cook their meat it literally disappears from the pot. That’s right, they’re so evil, you can’t even eat them.
They include such types as the hrosshvalur (horsewhale), with big eyes and a red mane and tail. This is probably the best known and most feared of the lot.
The raudkembingur (redcomb) is especially cruel and bloodthirsty even by illhveli standards. If you manage to escape it, it will die of frustration.
Good luck escaping the mushveli (mousewhale) though, it has legs! And will clamber onto the beach in pursuit!
Or what about death from above? The stökkull (jumper) leaps high into the air and pile-drives boats to pieces.
Meanwhile the skeljungur (shellwhale) sits in the path of boats and lets them get wrecked on its shelly hide…
… while the sverdhvalur (swordwhale) slices through boats with its dorsal fin.
The katthveli (catwhale) is relatively harmless though. It meows.
The same can’t be said of the lyngbakur (heatherback), a classic island fish that lets sailors get on its back and then dives, taking them to a watery grave.
The nauthveli (oxwhale) on the other hand specially targets cattle, attracting them into the sea with its bellow before tearing them apart.
How can you avoid all these murderous whales, like the taumafiskur (bridlefish) here? Any of a number of ways, including getting a steypireydur to help. There are substances, ranging from angelica to sheep dung and chopped fox testicles, that they find abhorrent. And you can distract them with loud noises and barrels.
For more, I assure you this link will answer all your questions.
one of my absolute favorite genres is “a comedy that makes you laugh out loud and then completely wrecks you emotionally” like I love looove when something is genuinely hilarious but also punches you in the gut with sadness, grief, or loneliness. so many people underestimate the comedy genre and don't realize how powerful it is when it's used to explore serious topics
pesto is great for many bites but to me it’s always been a kind of samey indulgent experience in a specific way where if you happily eat your way through a large enough portion there will hit a point where you will very suddenly experience something called “pesto remorse” which i have just invented
my wife tried to do the thing where you pull a tablecloth really fast and the dishes stay in place but instead of a tablecloth it was a towel and instead of dishes it was our poor long suffering cat that was just trying to sleep on said towel. poor baby got whipped across the room fast enough that its meow got dopplered into meeeeeeOOOWWwwwwww
people in books and tv shows are always getting so upset they throw an untouched meal in the trash. that would never be me. i'd receive the worst news of my life and still be like Let me put this in the fridge.
Hi! I don't know if you'll see this but do you still ship/write frostiron?
Hi anon! I don't still write it and I really don't think I ever will again due to losing my passion for the characters and not liking the direction of the MCU (is the gentle way of putting it), but I've still got very fond memories of it.
I'd like to finish reading some WIPs I was following before I edged out of the fandom one day though – they were good fics!
I think one of the funniest things I’ve accidentally taught my parrot is yelling “WHAT?”
The best part is that if he says something weird and and someone else says “what???” he usually repeats what he just said.
Like just now, I was cooking in the kitchen and he heard me boiling water so he asked “you wanna noodle?” but I couldn’t quite hear him so I yelled “WHAT” and he repeated “you wanna noodle?”
The thought of this parrot declaring “I get a peanut” for good behaviour like he’s stating an immutable natural law that must never be disputed is sustaining me through this day. I was a good parrot. I get a peanut. That is how it is. That is how it always has been.
That’s exactly what he means when he says it. It’s not a request. It’s a statement of fact. These days he says it preemptively as a way of ensuring that he will be paid for his efforts. Like if you ask him to step up somewhere or go back in his cage he’ll say “I get a peanut” before he does it to make sure you agree to give him one.
He used to get really angry if he did something expecting a peanut and we said “no, no peanut” because he’d been really rude (bitey, screechy, generally hostile body language) about it previously or he’d already had a whole bunch of peanuts. Since he’s started saying “I get a peanut?” beforehand, if we respond with “no peanut” he generally just decides not to do it.
He often announces something like “step up and get a peanut?” if he’s already had a bunch of peanuts and he knows he’ll have to do something to earn one. Unfortunately, he also causes trouble (furniture destruction, usually) explicitly for the purposes of suggesting “Ripley go back and get a peanut?” when we scold him, because he knows we’re going to want him to go back in his cage, and he always wants a reward for going back in his cage.
We do literally refer to him “holding the couch hostage” when he decides he’s going to make holes in the cushions until we attempt to bribe him to go back into his cage.
being in a small fandom is like being given a bone, chewing on it until you're done with it, burying it in your backyard, and then digging that same chewed up bone months later to continue chewing on it, and then the cycle just repeats.
this is especially true for small fandoms that you know won't be getting any new content, so you just have to consume the content you've already consumed thousands of times before.
So you know how lots of birds just find humans really sexy? Like how they're constantly trying to seduce humans, and if you have pet birds there's whole guides for how to not give your bird mixed signals and make them think you're their mate, and how they keep trying to drive off the partners of their owners/carers as rivals
And people who own or live near these types of birds just kind of have to live with this, like they just gotta accept that that's how birds are and work around it
I like to think that that's how gods feel about the tiresome human propensity to worship them at the drop of a hat
There are lyrebirds on the mountain pass I take to get to uni every day. The male lyrebirds apparently think motorcycles are the height of sexiness because around spring I always have to careful for the lyrebirds standing in the middle of the bloody road doing their song and dance routine at me.
Sir, yes your dance and collected sounds is very intriguing but I am the wrong species and just trying not to run you over!
If you think about all the bird features that the average bird is likely to think of as an important bird feature, we have most of them (except for the species that like big ornate tails). We're one of the rare species of non-birds that are bipedal, and we have 'wings' although we don't use them to fly, and we walk and move and look at things in a relatively birdlike fashion. Also we are massive to a bird, and very often very colourful, and make a wide variety of interesting vocalisations. And while some humans are cruel, most humans interacting directly with birds (not hunting, which tends to be from a distance) treat them well.
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