lavabendinggemqueen:

writing-prompt-s:

Cthulhu, as an eldritch being, sees humans as humans see insects; which is to say, harmless but inexplicably terrifying.

#cthulhu chasing humanity around with a shoe while crying

madlori:

ladyprydian:

canolacrush:

dream-cassette:

nuclearspaceheater:

ilzolende:

sonypraystation:

my favorite part of capitalism is the slippery slope of knock off cereal branding devolving from catchy, colorful names to literal descriptions of what’s inside the box

when youre describing your product as ‘spheres’ youve reached critical mass

No, this is great. Product labels focused more on explaining what the product is than on branding are good. I sure wouldn’t have guessed that some small circular cereal would contain lots of oats if they weren’t called “Fruity Oat Rounds” unless I specifically went around looking for oat-rich cereals.

Also, store brands are great. They’re typically cheaper than name-brand goods without a significant corresponding drop in quality. Maybe they hire fewer branding consultants and run fewer ad campaigns and that’s why they’re cheaper? IDK.

It would all be worth it just for the global running joke of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! knock-offs.

Still waiting for someone to put out “Butter With Chinese Characteristics.“

Memories of butter

@ladyprydian

“Now you’re just some butter that I used to know”

I wasn’t gonna reblog this but that last comment had me literally falling out of my chair with laughter so here you go.

determamfidd:

nimthecat:

amidstthetrees:

violent-darts:

elodieunderglass:

Despite people in Canada/New England feeling a strong pride and sense of ownership surrounding moose, Europeans have the exact same moose. English speakers completely fucked up the naming conventions for the animal because we fuck EVERYTHING up. 

The Eurasian elk is the exact same animal as the moose. It is Alces alces. Here is a depiction of a Swedish soldier riding a moose into war in the 1700s.

Figure 1. The Swedish army used moose as cavalry animals at various points in history. I don’t know what the armored boar is all about.

However, the English caused a lot of confusion by originally calling it an “elk.” This comes from the older English word eolc/eolh, which shares roots with elhaz/algiz, which, if you know your runes, is the antler-looking rune ᛉ. 

So the English had moose, they just called them elks. But there haven’t been any moose in the UK since the Bronze Age, so the English just started using the word “elk” to apply to “really big deer” – and they forgot that there was a specific animal they used to call “elk.” 

Today, modern people from the United Kingdom have overwritten their own understanding of “elk” with Elk (USA), which are wapiti (Cervus canadensis). 

This is a wapiti, which everyone calls “elk” now:

Figure 2. The wapiti, or elk 

(Cervus canadensis)

“Hmmmmmmm,” British people may be saying right now. “That is a vaguely familiar animal. I feel like that is a STAG. I feel like it needs to be selling me a bottle of whiskey.”

YES. The wapiti is very similar to the UK’s red deer. This is what UK people call a “stag” : 

Figure 3. A stag, or British red deer (Cervus elaphus) – actually slightly less red than the wapiti.

The explanation for this is that the UK colonizers found the wapiti in the USA, but the problem was that red deer were rarely seen by the common people at that time, so they thought they were Unusually Big Deer. And so the colonizing bastards said “Hey, what are these, Nigel?” and Nigel was like “IDK, stags?” and they were like “Yeah but they look really big, don’t they?” and Nigel was like “well, what about calling them big deer, then” and they called them “elk” which at that point had come to mean “big deer” in English. 

Cervus elaphus (name meaning: deer deer) and Cervus canadensis (name meaning: Canadian deer) are very similar animals, and many people muddy the waters by calling Cervus elaphus an “elk.” The word ran all around the world, and American influence meant that it is losing its own definition in its own land. 

Cervus canadensis

are also found in Asia, where the subspecies are called wapiti, from the Shawnee word meaning “white rump.” This is to prevent confusion. If you see one in Mongolia, you must properly call it a “Canadian deer, aka ‘white butt,’ from the indigenous North American word” to prevent this kind of confusion.

Figure 4. The global range of

Cervus canadensis, the wapiti, or elk. 

Okay. Enough about what happened to the word “elk”. The point is that other European countries have reasonable amounts of moose, which they call elk. The “Eurasian elk” is Alces alces, the moose. 

Figure 5. A Swedish army representative wearing Swedish flags and riding a Swedish moose. ALSO, SOMEHOW, THE MOST CANADIAN THING EVER

So when the English settlers colonized Canada and New England, they continued their long history of fucking the fuck up. But in the middle of this, they saw Eurasian elks, had no idea what they were, and went with the local Algonquin word “moose.” 

They also called the same moose “elk” at the same time, and went into a slight confusion where they tried to differentiate them into “grey moose” and “black moose” and “black elk,” but when the dust settled, the world was left with British-colonizers-turned-Americans applying random names to everything, and winning. Wapiti are now called elk, and now red deer are also kind of elk. Eurasian elk are now moose. Wikipedia attempts to explain the moose fuckups here and the elk fuckups here.

The word “moose” is Algonquin in origin. This is why it doesn’t pluralize like English words do. In English, the plural of “goose” is “geese” and thus many people feel that the plural of “moose” should be “meese.” However, “moose” is not an English word. If you wanted to treat it as one, you could remember that moose are hoofed animals of a specific class, and you could follow the rules already laid down for moose relatives: The English plural of elk is elk. The English plural of deer is deer. The English plural of sheep is sheep. You can call multiple moose “meese” if you want to. But that’s why it is the way it is.

Figure 6. The global range of moose, or Eurasian elk.

So there you have it. Moose are an important, scary and hilarious part of Canadian/New Englander culture, but they aren’t just ours – we share them with Eurasian cultures too.

Figure 7: a Russian moose farmer with a promising crop

Figure 8: Finnish people provide a dark warning. “Hirvikolari” is a specific Finnish word describing a road accident involving a moose. There are many dashcam videos of hirvikolari on the Internet.

And now think about all the amazing Moose News you have access to now! You can now enjoy stories of moose destruction, mayhem and general fuckery SO MUCH MORE when you realize they aren’t about deer:

Figure 9: every line of this story is perfect?

Actually, you know what?

 That’s still the most Canadian thing ever.

As someone born in Northern Canada, I vote we adopt “hirvikolari” post haste.

@rinkamari … how do we pronounce that one, as non-Finnish speakers?

In that one painting, is that an armored boar behind the moose?!!!!!
@determamfidd

is this telling me (amongst lots of awesome moose-related things) that Sweden had battle-pigs in the 1700s

Spock: The doctor just told me I only have 4 days to live.
Kirk: You’re sick?!
Spock: No. He just doesn’t like me.
Bones: [shouting] I’ll fuck you up on Tuesday!

xparrot:

lotesseflower:

shadowedhills:

shitifindon:

spaceshipoftheseus:

odditycollector:

I found my favourite del.icio.us explanation:

I learned a lot about fandom couple of years ago in conversations with
my friend Britta,  who was working at the time as community manager for
Delicious. She taught me that fans were among the heaviest users of the
bookmarking site, and had constructed an edifice of incredibly elaborate
tagging conventions, plugins, and scripts to organize their output
along a bewildering number of dimensions.     If you wanted to read a
3000 word fic where Picard forces Gandalf into sexual bondage, and it
seems unconsensual but secretly both want it, and it’s R-explicit but
not NC-17 explicit, all you had to do was search along the appropriate
combination of tags (and if you couldn’t find it, someone would probably
write it for you).    By 2008 a whole suite of theoretical ideas about
folksonomy, crowdsourcing, faceted infomation retrieval, collaborative
editing and emergent ontology had been implemented by a bunch of
friendly people so that they could read about Kirk drilling Spock.

from the guy who runs Pinboard, which took in some number of the fleeing users.

He also gave a talk about what happened when he *succeeded* at getting fandom’s attention during the exodus, which I didn’t see before just now, but its kinda funny to look at normal fandom culture stuff from the POV of an outside observer who didn’t mean to get caught in the middle.

this whole thing is super interesting

oh my god that talk is gold

There is no God, life has no meaning, it’s all over when you can’t search on the slash character.

Having worked at large tech companies, where getting a spec written
requires shedding tears of blood in a room full of people whose only
goal seems to be to thwart you, and waiting weeks for them to finish, I
could not believe what I was seeing.

The transcription of his talk is amazing, everyone who has an interest in fandom and platforms and the way we interact with the sites we use should read it. 

(As someone who ran a fandom newsletter at the time of the Great Delicious Disaster, this guy saved my fucking life – so much of that process was automated in Greasemonkey and independent user scripts, and after Delicious shit the pot we were able to move it over to Pinboard with relatively little issue. And then newsletters and LJ fandom in general went away relatively quickly, but that’s a different story. The point is, this dude was amazing when fandom needed someone to be amazing for us.)

But man, I feel like his talk should be required reading for anyone who runs an online platform that attracts fandom, or wants to attract fandom, or really just wants to foster community. 

I’m still haunting the ruins of delicious with my bookmarks all by myself – but the linked talk is genius ++good would read again.

Is there anything as great as collaborative documentation by fans?

Here you see a very stern admonition by some people not to slash me (that is, include me in erotic fiction).  
     
     

“Please don’t slash Maciej, he’s not okay with it, and we want him to like us.”

(I was totally fine with it!)

You see the debate and then someone plaintively cries “THIS IS
WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS”, and tries to argue that writing fic
about anthropomorphized bookmarking sites is not the same thing as real
person fiction (RPF), which is taboo in certain parts of fandom.
     
 

And then of course the inevitable happens, and someone writes fic about the document itself.  
     
     

Naturally the fic links back to the document, and someone
puts a link to the fic in the document itself, crossing the Internet
streams and dividing by zero

dogwoodbones:

Why Bones is never allowed to give the intro… 

Space, the final most horrible and terrifying frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. It’s 5-year mission: to explore the worst possible corners of the void, to seek out dangerous new diseases, and new civilizations that want us dead. To boldly go where no fucking sane person would ever fuckin’ go- damnit Jim, why the fuck are we even out here !?