some beetles cant fly but they dont mind. they are more armored than agile and in certain situations this is desirable
turns the page of my textbook. what eelse is there to learn
the common ancestor of all current day beetles was a sect of philosphers in ancient greece that took to creeping secretly within the earth as an ideal lifestyle
btw because i know a lot of ppl like this franchise, The Last of Us’ creator Neil Druckman is a straight up zionist who was donating to israel as recently as this month. he also has explicitly stated his inspiration for the second game in the franchise was inspired by his thirst for revenge on Palestinians. The whole second installment is, in his words, drawn upon the ‘israeli-palestinian conflict’. so like. maybe stop supporting him and this stupid franchise.
Fun fact about the early Catholic church is that, despite spending generations being persecuted by the Roman empire, it took less than 15 years under Theodosius I to go from “the empire is Catholic now” to “and also every other religion is banned.” You can literally read St. Augustine move from “state religious persecution is unacceptable” to “state religious persecution is cool actually” over his lifetime as Catholicism came to power. I’m sure there’s no broader lessons to be learned there
If y’all can’t boycott Starbucks and McDonald’s what use are you really? Because these aren’t places that you NEED (do not bean soup this post I’m so serious) what do you have that’s a NEED from Starbucks?? Exactly.
the reason this is the best website for social media is because its a ghost town where no one is paying attention so you can say shit like “death to all military” and be answered only by the howl of the wind as it sweeps another layer of sand against the side of your house. you can stand proudly in your front yard thinking about a beautiful world where “death to all military” happens. sometimes a picture of a beautiful killifish floats by and you can collect it. look here it comes now
i love how theres no rules for pronouncing words in English, you literally just have to learn and hear someone say every single word
if anyone is wondering why this is, it’s because they stopped teaching American children (and many British) the rules (which exist, and have been standardized and written down for centuries) sometime at the turn of the 21st century. if you are gen x or older, have English degree-holding parents, and/or had any really old teachers who were still teaching into the “fuck grammar” era of public schooling, you unlock a special level of English comprehension where you can pronounce 99% of words perfectly without ever hearing them at all, as well as the ability to code switch to a higher-“class” dialect of English at will, which is extremely important for any social interaction where you have to deal with people who are judging you for such a thing, which happens a lot more often than you’re aware of unless someone has already told you about it. usually no one tells you about it unless they’re teaching it.
there were a lot of reasons for the shift, most of them can be blamed on Reagan and Thatcher (like everything else). it was pushed through to school curriculums and popular culture as a “de-snobbification” of english education where everyone’s regional and ethnic accents would be normalized and accepted, what actually happened is that language gaps between rich and poor kids was crowbarred farther apart as you could no longer learn to talk, write, or read fancy in a free public school, leaving only the wealthy kids who got tutors and private schools and educated parents with a formal English education able to choose to code switch or to struggle considerably less in college when professors usually start expecting you to know grammar and etymology already and don’t think it’s their job to fix your high school teacher’s fuckups. (it is, but that’s a different post)
this is why almost everyone on YouTube is speaking only approximate English (see the #youtube grammar tag) a lot of the time and one of the big reasons people with average hearing and reading and processing function have started needing subtitles a lot more in the past ten years, when they didn’t before
this gets brought up on Tumblr a lot, see prior discourse about cursive not being taught anymore (not actually a good thing, prevents you from reading anything handwritten before 1990, bad for handwriting ergonomics especially for hypermobile people [see: why do so many hypermobile and autistic people get into fountain pens]) and the new yorker article about “vibes based literacy”.
anyway the lesson here is every time the education establishment announces they are about to make education “less formal” and that this will benefit “everyone”, because hooray we all thought learning cursive and sentence diagramming and Greek word roots was boring, right? what they are actually announcing is that you will still be judged for not being able to use those formal skills, but now only rich people will be able to learn them from tutors as basic education becomes increasingly privatized.
specifically on the topic of pronouncing words, a conlang nerd sat down and brute-force compiled a numbered list of rules for correctly pronouncing english words that gets it right for nearly every word 23 years ago (the date explains why his phonetic transcription is so weird, sorry)
[ID: a tweet by samariumisback that reads, “this comes after the ministry of health in gaza made multiple requests to international institutions to reveal the nature of the weapon used that has been melting the skin of the wounded. they also requested information on suitable treatments. palestinians in gaza have been…” and the rest cuts off. The tweet shows an image of white text on a black background from the Ministry of Health in Gaza, dated 24th of October, 2023. The text reads, “We declare the complete collapse of the health system in hospitals in the Gaza Strip.” lilearthquakes quote tweets with, “to be clear, this new unfamiliar weapon is heavily suspected to be NAPALM twitter.com/ samariumisback…” end ID.]
Okay so for those unfamiliar, Napalm is an incendiary weapon that clings and burns whatever it touches. It generates carbon monoxide and pulls oxygen from its immediate environment, which can cause suffocation. Not only is it hot, but even slight contact can cause second-degree burns. It also violates internationa law btw. {source}
please can we do inbox trick-or-treating this year. can we make that a thing on tumblr. please please please please please
literally all it entails is sending people “trick-or-treat” asks and people answering those asks with pictures of candy or those silly spooky plastic toys or whatever else you would give a trick-or-treater. please. please can we have some whimsy
Reminder to get your ask in if you want a little halloween treat
something I think is relevant when talking about how Israel is targeting journalists - people seem to forget that the organizers and people in iconic photos from the Ferguson protests have all ‘mysteriously died’
The iconic photo of a man in a US shirt throwing a tear gas canister back at the police? He’s dead. under suspicious circumstances. One of the lead organizers was found dead tied up in a trunk of a car and it was ruled as not a homicide. The list goes on
It didn’t all happen immediately. But they’re gone now.
fascist governments use fascist tactics.
Here’s a link to the article in the Rolling Stone about it.
