The Human Dictionary

I write stuff and listen to a lot of music. I'm pretty chill, so say hi if you want.

[thehumandictionary]

Hi! I'm the Human Dictionary, or THD for short. I use any pronouns. I'm aroace and a huge music nerd. I write fanfic (you can find me on AO3 at TheHumanDictionary) as well as original works, although I will most likely not post either here very often. I mostly post/reblog mcyt, magnus archives, aurora, or writing stuff, and whatever random thought I'm having. Please feel free to send me asks or messages, I don't bite!

I also use the reblog bait tag for pretty much anything that says "reblog if" or something similar. It's nothing against the post, I just want to look out for people like me who can get stressed out by that sort of thing. It's a similar situation for it I don't reblog something like that- I'm not making a statement, that sort of post just weirds me out sometimes.

Warning: I WILL randomly start reblogging things from different fandoms en masse. You WILL know when I have seen a new movie, read a new book, or watched a new show. You have been warned.

I support all LGBTQIA+ people, and just generally am cool with anyone who is a decent person.

[cringecorp]

they say you can't pour from an empty cup but i've been doing it my whole life and aside from all of these mysterious ailments it's working out great for me

[bitchesgetriches]

How to Manage Your Burnout When the World Is on Fire

[malice-kingdom]

“Save Earth save Erid”

[parakeet]

just saw a 'comments' tab on someones blog you know where the following and likes tabs would be if enabled and it was just showing all the replies theyve made on peoples posts. this is fascinating when did this feature come out

[parakeet]

EMERGENCY - ITS AUTO ENABLED!

if you've made replies on posts there is now a tab on your blog showing every post youve replied to and your reply.

if this is not what you want, either go to your blog and click comments and disable it from there or just go to your individual blogs setting pages. just change it from blue to grey if you dont want everyone to see your replies AND the post you're replying to

PLEASE BE ADVISED that it is set to disabled for blogs that have not made any replies but it will turn ON if you reply with that blog in the future.! i just tested it with my main, which was greyed out but it turned on the moment i left a test reply

figured i'd get the word out bc i have not seen a single mention of this and i'm sure there are plenty of people who maybe comment on things they don't want on display for everyone to see on their blog lol. you can still look at your replies with it toggled off just no one else can, like locking the following and likes list

[thatdisasterauthor]

I believe it's only auto-enabled if you were already sharing your likes. If you had like sharing turned off, reply sharing should (should) also be turned off.

Probably best to still check, though.

[parad0xart]

Somewhere in a galaxy far far away, a pilot and his alien-piloted droid are hopping planets to explore to their hearts content

[parakeet]

just saw a 'comments' tab on someones blog you know where the following and likes tabs would be if enabled and it was just showing all the replies theyve made on peoples posts. this is fascinating when did this feature come out

[parakeet]

EMERGENCY - ITS AUTO ENABLED!

if you've made replies on posts there is now a tab on your blog showing every post youve replied to and your reply.

if this is not what you want, either go to your blog and click comments and disable it from there or just go to your individual blogs setting pages. just change it from blue to grey if you dont want everyone to see your replies AND the post you're replying to

PLEASE BE ADVISED that it is set to disabled for blogs that have not made any replies but it will turn ON if you reply with that blog in the future.! i just tested it with my main, which was greyed out but it turned on the moment i left a test reply

figured i'd get the word out bc i have not seen a single mention of this and i'm sure there are plenty of people who maybe comment on things they don't want on display for everyone to see on their blog lol. you can still look at your replies with it toggled off just no one else can, like locking the following and likes list

[thatdisasterauthor]

I believe it's only auto-enabled if you were already sharing your likes. If you had like sharing turned off, reply sharing should (should) also be turned off.

Probably best to still check, though.

[youcancallmez0mbie]

Just some problems I’ve been having lately haha

[azaablue]

the best fanfiction you've ever read was written by a woman in her 40s before she made dinner for her kids. it was written by a teenager after school when they should've been studying for a history test. and a barista came up with the idea while they cleaned the espresso machine and busser fact-checked it on their break and the post-doc edited between writing grant proposals and the nurse apologized for typos in the notes after a long shift and behind every drabble and one-shot and multi-chapter fic there is a person with a wonderful and interesting and chaotic life and it is such a privilege that we get to be apart of it because they decided to do this thing we all share, for fun.

[hacvek]

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

[olyia-stories]

@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this

[dragonpyre]

I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset

[serinos-kitt]

What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know

[dragonpyre]

Mordor.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!

[serinos-kitt]

So what is a rain shadow?

[lethalbutterfly]

Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.

[roach-works]

this is because, as clouds are forced upwards by rising land, they cool and dump their rain. so the side of the mountain facing the ocean (or an inland sea, or a great lake) gets all the rain as the clouds are squeezed out, and the opposite side gets nothing.

my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.

so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.

the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.

also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:

it's right at the edge of that snowbelt. and you see way more cities west of it than east, too.

[beatrice-otter]

#but again. mordor looks like that becaue sauron made it#and he's an ass

On a Watsonian level, sure.

On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.

I don't know enough meteorological history to know when white people figured out about rain shadows and added it to geology classes, or what would have been taught about volcanoes and such. But any education Tolkien got on the subject would have been in childhood/adolescence; his college education focused on the liberal arts, not the sciences, and his professional study was linguistics and the middle ages. So anything Medieval and earlier European authors wrote about he had a pretty good chance of knowing about. But not much exposure to modern science. So his science knowledge was probably limited to "what English schools taught at the turn of the 20th Century."

[whetstonefires]

I mean, it's true he didn't know about plate tectonics, but he did know what mountains look like, and that it's not normally That. And it wasn't his style to break that kind of norm without cause.

LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)

Mordor is a rectangle because Sauron is an asshole.

[beatrice-otter]

#the rain shadow thing otoh was undoubtedly total ignorance#but those mountains were made as the fortress of a demigod#too steeped in evil to understand beauty#it's *supposed* to look like something that Shouldn't Exist#like quite often this is something that happens in worldbuilding yes#things are arranged Wrong because a person doesn't grasp the underlying logic#but mordor is a bad example for the same reason it's an obvious one#it's So Very Wrong because it was designed to be wrong#to give you a bad feeling with how much it shouldn't look like that#if he just wanted it unapproachable on all sides it could've been in a caldera formation it didn't *need* corners#the corners were a choice#tolkien's job involved lots of looking at maps and things okay#meanwhile people whose lives revolved around the weather generally knew where the rain happened#long before it was formalized into 'rain shadow effect'#people not having The Science doesn't mean they don't have eyes and brains

[maryellencarter]

I wrote an entire paper in college analyzing the geology of the Misty Mountains and to a lesser extent the White Mountains (the Misty Mountains are easier because we get a cross-section via Moria). One thing I discovered that still knocks me for a loop when I think about it is:

Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?

I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.

There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.

Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.

(And as prev excellently points out, when Jirt made screwed-up geology it was very much on purpose. Mordor shouldn't be square! Mount Doom shouldn't be doing any of the things it does! A composite volcano shouldn't even have especially hot lava! Even the Gulf of Udun, the circular feature at the upper left corner of the square, shouldn't be like that -- perfectly round features should be impact craters or calderas, not The Mountains Just Do This In A Suspiciously Convenient Way. These are all the way they are because Sauron forced them to be, in defiance of the laws of nature. Remember, he's akin to Balrogs and was a Maia of Aulë -- he's a volcano spirit in many ways.)

[sunflowergardens-world]

Amazing work by the LoTR fandom, as always.

[mysteryteacup]

This also serves as an excellent example of why worldbuilding needs - more than realism - to be cohesive and work with the themes of your story.

[teathattast]

Happy Pride!

[gotyouanyway]

anything u think about YOUR life after 10pm is bs to be ignored. anything u think about a character’s life after 10pm should be posted about online and expanded on for paragraphs. :)

[rowark]

I swear, this post helps me break rumination cycles

When I catch myself ruminating late at night, I'm like "no, wait, it's past 10pm, that's reserved for thinking about characters only"

It works weirdly well, tbh

[pusheenthenerdcat]

how did it never occur to me that my "before 10pm is non-Character time for productivity's sake" has an inverse

[coloredlion]

Day ONE of filling this with aro and/or ace characters

Starting off strong with Ryland Grace from Project Hail Mary!! While he is not canonically aroace, I felt as though he’s really spearheaded the aroace community these past few months and helped many people feel seen and accepted :)

[murder-of-dipshits]

[deux-jee-ode-msm]

someone finally said it. thank you

[vampostingtime]

mermaid au where human apo befriends a mermaid pyro and pyro moves into her bathtub and the more they learn about each other the more apo wants to kill pyro's shitty situationship (scott)

[jackdaw-sprite]

Apo sees him at the docks sometimes while she's eyeing fishing boats to kill Scott Goldsmith in and he's always trying to cling to his dignity despite looking chewed on. It's concerning.

[vampostingtime]

LMAO YEAH

[vampostingtime]

been thinking about this again so have a plotline

apo goes swimming and finds a weird guy (pyro) who’s interested in her book that she brought to read at the beach. pyro is narrowly hiding the fact that he’s a mermaid from her

they become friends and learn about each other, apo hates pyro’s coven from the few and unsettlingly vague details he shares

owen convinces pyro that merfolk naturally enthrall people with their voice so apo can’t really care about him. scott is like yeah lol and also helps isolate pyro

next day scott and owen (maybe pyro is there at first. crypt parallel) go to drown apo but pyro saves her, apo takes pyro home

apo goes to legs for medical help from almost drowning, legs is with a now human-looking owen and through a comedy of errors (legs has a bite mark, owen is wearing legs’s clothes, neither knows the other knows about mermaids) apo thinks legs is hooking up with owen and legs reluctantly has to go along with this

owen tries to drive a wedge between legs and apo (maybe tells legs that apo kidnapped pyro, maybe just says that they’re lying to him), legs doubts this

pyro lives in apo’s bathtub, eventually they figure out the human disguise thing and pyro gets his little mermaid moment

legs gets got by owen lol (knocked out and dragged underwater to get forcefully turned into a mermaid. legs has a bad time in this au)

doommates to the rescue, apo temporarily gets a tail to go underwater

they get rid of scott and owen, shelby runs away and is upset by and confused about pyro

doommates take legs to shore and they deal with him being a mermaid forever now, whoops. at least they’re all friends

merfolk species notes

top halves look more human when above the surface but more fish like when underwater

survive off blood. usually fish but human blood gives them powers such as:

getting legs (the limbs not the doctor) temporarily, trade off is that they look visibly less human than they would if they were just on shore

no mind control so not quite sirens

drinking a little mermaid blood gives humans a tail + gills for a little, full turning is more unclear but it’s permanent and the whole shabang

[y2ksnowglobe]

Stratt: It is pride month, Dr. Grace. You know what that means. Grace: What? You want us to breed gay astrophage? Stratt:No. Don't be ridiculous, astrophage reproduce asexually. I only meant it is a good time to acknowledge those on the project who exist under the queer umbrella, including yourself because of your aroace identity. Grace: My what?

[revizyonist]

med people are so annoying "This family's 8 year old child who was about to go through a major surgery and kept crying that she was hungry so they pitied her and gave her food, she then had a heart attack in the surgery. They're so stupid 😒" girl they didn't know that could happen or why it happens. it takes so little time to explain to them that will happen instead of telling them "no food" with no explanation 10 times

[revizyonist]

"Before surgery, your body’s reflexes that protect your airway are relaxed by anesthesia. If there’s food or liquid in your stomach, it will near certainly come back up and go into your lungs, which can cause choking, a severe lung / heart infection or even a heart attack. That’s called aspiration, and it is life-threatening. It's hard, but it's only a single day to prevent near certain death. Not eating or drinking beforehand massively lowers the risk and helps prevent these life threatening situations under anesthesia." <- TIP: patients have brains which allows them to receive information just like you

[ancelineonline]

I have four kids. I’ve had one or another of them need some kind of surgical procedure that requires anesthesia four or five times over the past 15 years.

This Tumblr post is the first time someone has explained to me *why* I couldn’t feed them before those instances.

I’m not stupid. I understood that just fine. Hell, my kids would have understood that just fine. But no one bothered to tell us.

[bowditch]

i did know this before having kids (i have six). we have a kid that's needed multiple procedures requiring anesthesia. and every single time, i am asked multiple times if i'm sure he was not given any food or water after a certain point.

every single time i have had to say, "i understand that if he had food or water, he could aspirate it into his lungs under anesthesia. i am not lying to you." THEN someone would make a little note and i would stop being repeatedly asked.

not a single time was that risk explained to me. the only reason it came up was because i already knew. i still don't understand why it isn't standard pre-op counseling or pre-op check information, when me as a parent acknowledging the actual risk also put THE MEDICAL STAFF at ease because i conveyed that i had informed understanding as reason to not lie about giving my kid food.

"maybe some people will get nervous and refuse surgery" okay so they need more counseling about risks and anxiety, not less information in a way that actually does endanger their child or themselves!

[teathattast]