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[asha-the-confused-lolita]

I just had a discussion with my friend about fanfiction and how we tend to assume that women are the writers without any actual proof. Then I said, hey, I know fanfiction written by gay and trans dudes. But then I remembered, wait, I think I know one writer who just must be cis het based on his work. Anyway, all writers, be honest, who are you?

Please reblog if you're interested in the results.

If you have ever written any fanfiction, tell me your identity, pls

cis het woman

cis queer woman

trans het woman

trans queer woman

nonbinary person

cis het man

cis queer man

trans het man

trans queer man

other/prefer not to tell/see the results

[freedom-of-fanfic]

Oh please answer this poll, it might be semi-representative if the number of responses is high enough

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[wheeloffortune-design]

"you're not man enough, not feminine enough"

so gender is something we can fail?

that means gender is not genetic and absolute and unchangeable

but something we can build and perform, and fail at (the standards they set) but also redefine?

if i can fail at being a woman, does that mean i'm not a woman? so does that make me another gender?

[wheeloffortune-design]

i agonized for 15 minutes about the wording of my post and you manage to simplify it with a perfect mean girls reference

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[animentality]

[coldgoldlazarus]

[hbbisenieks]

tags by @etrianodysseyobsession-hd

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settle this for me once and for all

[ilovejohnmurphy]

is “chai” a TYPE of tea??! bc in Hindi/Urdu, the word chai just means tea

[corntroversy]

its like spicy cinnamon tea instead of bland gross black tea

[ilovejohnmurphy]

I think the chai that me and all other Muslims that I know drink is just black tea

[furryputin]

i mean i always thought chai was just another word for tea?? in russian chai is tea

[ilovejohnmurphy]

why don’t white people just say tea

do they mean it’s that spicy cinnamon tea

why don’t they just call it “spicy cinnamon tea”

[breadpocalypse]

the spicy cinnamon one is actually masala chai specifically so like

there’s literally no reason to just say chai or chai 

[tvalkyrie]

They don’t know better. To them “chai tea” IS that specific kind of like, creamy cinnamony tea. They think “chai” is an adjective describing “tea”.

[startedwellthatsentence]

What English sometimes does when it encounters words in other languages that it already has a word for is to use that word to refer to a specific type of that thing. It’s like distinguishing between what English speakers consider the prototype of the word in English from what we consider non-prototypical.

(Sidenote: prototype theory means that people think of the most prototypical instances of a thing before they think of weirder types. For example: list four kinds of birds to yourself right now. You probably started with local songbirds, which for me is robins, blue birds, cardinals, starlings. If I had you list three more, you might say pigeons or eagles or falcons. It would probably take you a while to get to penguins and emus and ducks, even though those are all birds too. A duck or a penguin, however, is not a prototypical bird.)

“Chai” means tea in Hindi-Urdu, but “chai tea” in English means “tea prepared like masala chai” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish “the kind of tea we make here” from “the kind of tea they make somewhere else”.

“Naan” may mean bread, but “naan bread” means specifically “bread prepared like this” because it’s useful to have a word to distinguish between “bread made how we make it” and “bread how other people make it”.

We also sometimes say “liege lord” when talking about feudal homage, even though “liege” is just “lord” in French, or “flower blossom” to describe the part of the flower that opens, even though when “flower” was borrowed from French it meant the same thing as blossom. 

We also do this with place names: “brea” means tar in Spanish, but when we came across a place where Spanish-speakers were like “there’s tar here”, we took that and said “Okay, here’s the La Brea tar pits”.

 Or “Sahara”. Sahara already meant “giant desert,” but we call it the Sahara desert to distinguish it from other giant deserts, like the Gobi desert (Gobi also means desert btw).

English doesn’t seem to be the only language that does this for places: this page has Spanish, Icelandic, Indonesian, and other languages doing it too.

Languages tend to use a lot of repetition to make sure that things are clear. English says “John walks”, and the -s on walks means “one person is doing this” even though we know “John” is one person. Spanish puts tense markers on every instance of a verb in a sentence, even when it’s abundantly clear that they all have the same tense (”ayer [yo] caminé por el parque y jugué tenis” even though “ayer” means yesterday and “yo” means I and the -é means “I in the past”). English apparently also likes to use semantic repetition, so that people know that “chai” is a type of tea and “naan” is a type of bread and “Sahara” is a desert. (I could also totally see someone labeling something, for instance, pan dulce sweetbread, even though “pan dulce” means “sweet bread”.)

Also, specifically with the chai/tea thing, many languages either use the Malay root and end up with a word that sounds like “tea” (like té in Spanish), or they use the Mandarin root and end up with a word that sounds like “chai” (like cha in Portuguese).

[iviarelle]

So, can we all stop making fun of this now?

[lyrangalia]

Okay and I’m totally going to jump in here about tea because it’s cool. Ever wonder why some languages call tea “chai” or “cha” and others call it “tea” or “the”? 

It literally all depends on which parts of China (or, more specifically, what Chinese) those cultures got their tea from, and who in turn they sold their tea to. 

The Portuguese imported tea from the Southern provinces through Macau, so they called tea “cha” because in Cantonese it’s “cha”. The Dutch got tea from Fujian, where Min Chinese was more heavily spoken so it’s “thee” coming from “te”. And because the Dutch sold tea to so much of Europe, that proliferated the “te” pronunciation to France (”the”), English (”tea”) etc, even though the vast majority of Chinese people speak dialects that pronounce it “cha” (by which I mean Mandarin and Cantonese which accounts for a lot of the people who speak Chinese even though they aren’t the only dialects).

And “chai”/”chay” comes from the Persian pronunciation who got it from the Northern Chinese who then brought it all over Central Asia and became chai.

(Source) 

[kaf-kaf-kaf]

This is the post that would make Uncle Iroh join tumblr

[formalsweatpants-casualtiaras]

Tea and linguistics. My two faves.

[thayerkerbasy]

Okay, this is all kinds of fascinating!

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[sporesgalaxy]

Vlad trying to be a better person is the funniest thing in the world to me

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[wolven91]

Cooking For Humans

Nepeltor loved cooking.

As an esquinine, she was drawn to the more pleasant hobbies in life, both for her own happiness and other people's, more so than the average being. She found great joy in being able to provide a service to others that caused such a positive emotional surge. As a strong natural psychic, she had the ability to 'sip' at strong emotions and enjoy them as a one would a drink.

Keep reading

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[tinyhatonapumpkin]

Do you know what I really hate? Everyone knows that carnivorous plants exist, but they only know of the ONE kind.

THERE ARE OVER 600 SPECIES OF CARNIVOROUS PLANTS. NEW ONES GET DISCOVERED ALL THE DAMN TIME.

Y'all be focusing on these guys

Originally posted by zombiejig

Who are like. The least efficient/effective hunters of the bunch!!

What about these freaky looking beauties??

Originally posted by exploderbutton

Sundews are so awesome that Charles Darwin literally said that he cares more about them than he does any other species!!

You’ve also go nature’s flypaper, the butterwort:

Then you’ve got your aquatic carnivorous plants that eat tiny FISH

Like the VFT of the water, the waterwheel plant

Or the fastest moving plant in the world! The bladderwort sucks its prey in so fast you gotta slow down the footage/capture it with a high-speed camera!! It practically looks like the prey teleports into the goddamn chambers!!

And look how freaky and alien it looks from the surface!!

And then there are the pitchers!! There’s SO MANY different kinds!!

You got your gorgeous sarracenia

And then there’s the expert hunter, the Cobra lily - a species that Darwin couldn’t wrap his head around. He couldn’t understand how natural evolution could make something so “perfect”!!

And then of course you’ve got your nepenthes.

The biggest of which can eat small mammals like mice!! It’s even had RATS fall into it!! (I will note though that it prefers insects, but is just able to eat larger prey bc of its size)

I could go on (I mean didn’t even talk about HOW these plants catch their prey!) But I think you get the idea.

Carnivorous plants are cool ok. Share the spotlight a lil bit.

[devlynblaise]

@chewybitart nom nom

[chewybitart]

God I want a green house I could keep some good jar babes in 😫

[gallusrostromegalus]

A note on the large Nepenthes (pitcher plants): While that was the understanding when the linked video was shot (with a sprightly young Sir David Attenborough!), recent evidence suggests Nepenthes do not prey on rodents- they have a symbiotic relationship with them where they essentally act as the rodent’s… toilet.

The plant gets easy-to-dissolve nutrients, and the rodent avoids marking up it’s territory as much, so predators can’t sniff them out.  The cases of drowned rodents typically occur right after heavy rainstorms, where the rodents probably took shelter in the plant and became trapped during the resulting downpour.

I say this because Nepenthes are wonderfully easy plants to keep that will thrive in a bathroom (they like the moisture from hot showers) and are perfectly content to live on miracle grow and any incidental house insects, you don’t need to purchase feeder mice for them.

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[pupyjpeg]

If you say "art" people just think paintings in museums, if you say "media" it's too vague and clinical, if you say "content" you sound like a YouTube terms and conditions corpo-ghoul, if you say "crafts", plural, it sounds like you mean macaroni art and hand turkeys, if you say "craft", singular, you sound like you sell pussy candles and migratory bird feathers on Etsy, if you say "creative expression" you sound like a lotion-handed Human Resources weasel straight out of a Mike Judge cartoon. How have we managed to completely drain the linguistic well when it comes to discussing individual and collective cultural creativity, aka Capital A Art. It's dire!

[cetaceanhandiwork]

ALT

[callmebliss]

Thingmakery

[zenosanalytic]

My response to this is just to be super pedantic, annoying, and relentless about the word's etymological history, in every possible context that I can. Like, for instance, "Art", from the Latin ars/artis, meaning "skill", which is what I use Art to mean: Anything that requires or can be improved by skill, is Art u_u

We can't beat all these dead horses back into shape if we don't TRY u_u u_u

Having said that Thingmakery totally fucking rules, dude

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[lovelylonelymoonlight]

Nothing funnier to me than dick going to therapy for like 3 months before going to Bruce and being like

“I don’t wanna be Batman”

And Bruce kinda just looks at him like “….okaaayy?? I didn’t want you to be Batman”

So dick has to go to therapy for ANOTHER three months so he can ask Bruce about That only for Bruce to be like, “who in their right mind would pick Batman over Nightwing??? When given the choice a world without Nightwing would be a nightmare”

And then dick goes home and cries because his dad is proud of him

[audreycritter]

op don't leave this in the tags

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[deathtoskinnyjeans]

A Twitter Thread from David Bowles:

[Text transcript at the end of the screenshots]

I'll let you in on a secret. I have a doctorate in education, but the field’s basically just a 100 years old. We don’t really know what we’re doing. Our scholarly understanding of how learning happens is like astronomy 2000 years ago.

Most classroom practice is astrology.

Keep reading

[stevviefox]

This is a very interesting read. They bring up how the aristocracy and just wealthy taught their kids - one on one tutors. Not possible personally, but the pandemic made the remote classroom on a large scale possible with app’s like ‘zoom’. There used to be the radio teachers out in Australia (school of the air). Local libraries often have spaces for a small group being homeschooled.

There is so much potential in online learning as well as the education system assigning resources to be open source for all enrolled.

This is really a great time to rethink and examine the possibilities. Maybe even on an international level.