Damage prediction on pears during transportation.

bad and naughty children get put in The Pear Wiggler to atone for their crimes

calling every gnc cis person you see an "egg waiting to crack" even as a joke is not cool or funny at all actually it is extremely invasive and weird and you are just reinventing gender roles but making it "progressive"

is it just me or is this is an extremely weird thing to say about a random stranger based on nothing but a snippet of an eavesdropped conversation

last time i made a post abt this i got fucking eviscerated lmao but that’s prob bc i had the audacity to mention how this intersects with race and ethnicity, how y’all LOVE to forcibly feminize east asian and jewish men then ignore centuries of harmful stereotypes you’re playing into.

Its absolutely a weird and invasive thing to say. Especially because non-binary people can choose to present in mixed ways instead of androgynously. Especially because everyone should be allowed to choose scents, colors, products, patterns, and clothing that they LIKE, without it having to be based on gender. Because masculine people should be allowed to smell like flowers or wear pretty things if they just fucking want to.

This is something I noticed a TON on Twitter and fucking hated it.

As soon as a man is the LEAST bit feminine, or what white western society perceives as feminine, he will be called a trans girl. And I obviously don't have anything against trans girls or recognizing yourself in others and shit, but like

You fucking can't destroy gender roles by rigorously enforcing them.

Stop calling every cis man who likes "girly" stuff a woman. Y'all know this is also homophobic as shit, right? Y'aal know that's also MISGENDERING, RIGHT??

Let people like what they like. A guy who likes skirts and nail polish? Cool. Unless HE HIMSELF says otherwise, he's a guy. Stop this shit.

Real people are not your blorbos to project your experiences onto. If you relate to something that a cis person does, that just means that a cis person is relatable to you, which is not, in fact, a bad thing.

And yeah, the gender discussion is the main thrust here, but also where's that post about how fucked up it is to treat fictional characters like real people and real people like fictional characters

Also while this shit is by itself harmful to cis people and that alone matters, it also fucks up trans people. People who actually haven't come to terms with being trans can be pushed further away from coming to terms with it by being told they definitely must be an egg. gnc trans people can be fucked up by having someone say they're definitely the other gender because the person saying it doesn't know they're trans.

Both of these can absolutely happen indirectly by internalizing the general shit people say too so even if you're not making those jokes or whatever to their faces, you're putting them in the faces of other people who can't parse their sense of self. I'm not a man because I prefer men's deodorant, I am because I am. I'm not a woman because I like playing as girls in video games sometimes, I just think the characters are cute or interesting.

Your gender isn't your taste in clothes or scents or whatever the fuck other shallow thing and all this shit does is make people self conscious about embracing the things they enjoy. Not because being trans is a bad thing to be, but because it fucking sucks to have other people insist they know you better than you know yourself.

France: hundreds of years with baguette -- DID NOT INVENT BANH MI

Vietnam: less than 100 years with baguette -- INVENTED BANH MI

ANOTHER WIN FOR VIETNAM‼️‼️‼️‼️

🇻🇳🇻🇳🇻🇳🇻🇳🇻🇳🇻🇳🇻🇳🇻🇳🇻🇳🇻🇳

I saw this on quora and thought it was cool and wanted to share it on here.  Its a long read but crazy.  Its from Erik Painter

They did try. And they did capture Navajo men. However, they were unsuccessful in using them to decipher the code. The reason was simple. The Navajo Code was a code that used Navajo. It was not spoken Navajo. To a Navajo speaker, who had not learned the code, a Navajo Code talker sending a message sounds like a string of unconnected Navajo words with no grammar. It was incomprehensible. So, when the Japanese captured a Navajo man named Joe Kieyoomia in the Philippines, he could not really help them even though they tortured him. It was nonsense to him.

The Navajo Code had to be learned and memorized. It was designed to transmit a word by word or letter by letter exact English message. They did not just chat in Navajo. That could have been understood by a Navajo speaker, but more importantly translation is never, ever exact. It would not transmit precise messages. There were about 400 words in the Code.

The first 31 Navajo Marines created the Code with the help of one non-Navajo speaker officer who knew cryptography. The first part of the Code was made to transmit English letters. For each English letter there were three (or sometimes just two) English words that started with that letter and then they were translated into Navajo words. In this way English words could be spelled out with a substitution code. The alternate words were randomly switched around. So, for English B there were the Navajo words for Badger, Bear and Barrel. In Navajo that is: nahashchʼidí, shash, and tóshjeeh. Or the letter A was Red Ant, Axe, or Apple. In Navajo that is: wóláchííʼ, tsénił , or bilasáana. The English letter D was: bįįh=deer, and łééchąąʼí =dog, and chʼįįdii= bad spiritual substance (devil).

For the letter substitution part of the Code the word “bad” could be spelled out a number of ways. To a regular Navajo speaker it would sound like: “Bear, Apple, Dog”. Or other times it could be “ Barrel, Red Ant, Bad Spirit (devil)”. Other times it could be “Badger, Axe, Deer”. As you can see, for just this short English word, “bad” there are many possibilities and to the combination of words used. To a Navajo speaker, all versions are nonsense. It gets worse for a Navajo speaker because normal Navajo conjugates in complex ways (ways an English or Japanese speaker would never dream of). These lists of words have no indicators of how they are connected. It is utterly non-grammatical.

Then to speed it up, and make it even harder to break, they substituted Navajo words for common military words that were often used in short military messages. None were just translations. A few you could figure out. For example, a Lieutenant was “one silver bar” in Navajo. A Major was “Gold Oak Leaf” n Navajo. Other things were less obvious like a Battleship was the word for Whale in Navajo. A Mine Sweeper was the Navajo word for Beaver.

A note here as it seems hard for some people to get this. Navajo is a modern and living language. There are, and were, perfectly useful Navajo words for submarines and battleships and tanks. They did not “make up words because they had no words for modern things”. This is an incorrect story that gets around in the media. There had been Navajo in the military before WWII. The Navajo language is different and perhaps more flexible than English. It is easy to generate new words. They borrow very few words and have words for any modern thing you can imagine. The words for telephone, or train, or nuclear power are all made from Navajo stem roots.

Because the Navajo Marines had memorized the Code there was no code book to capture. There was no machine to capture either. They could transmit it over open radio waves. They could decode it in a few minutes as opposed to the 30 minutes to two hours that other code systems at the time took. And, no Navajo speaker who had not learned the Code could make any sense out of it.

The Japanese had no published texts on Navajo. There was no internationally available description of the language. The Germans had not studied it at the time. The Japanese did suspect it was Navajo. Linguists thought it was in the Athabaskan language family. That would be pretty clear to a linguist. And Navajo had the biggest group of speakers of any Athabaskan language. That is why they tortured Joe Kieyoomia. But, he could not make sense of it. It was just a list of words with no grammar and no meaning.

For Japanese, even writing the language down from the radio broadcasts would be very hard. It has lots of sounds that are not in Japanese or in English. It is hard to tell where some words end or start because the glottal stop is a common consonant. Frequency analysis would have been hard because they did not use a single word for each letter. And some words stood for words instead of for a letter. The task of breaking it was very hard.

Here is an example of a coded message:

béésh łigai naaki joogii gini dibé tsénił áchį́į́h bee ąą ńdítį́hí joogi béésh łóó’ dóó łóóʼtsoh

When translated directly from Navajo into English it is:

“SILVER TWO BLUE JAY CHICKEN HAWK SHEEP AXE NOSE KEY BLUE JAY IRON FISH AND WHALE. “

You can see why a Navajo who did not know the Code would not be able to do much with that. The message above means: “CAPTAIN, THE DIVE BOMBER SANK THE SUBMARINE AND BATTLESHIP.”

“Two silver bars” =captain. Blue jay= the. Chicken hawk= dive bomber. Iron fish = sub. Whale= battleship. “Sheep, Axe Nose Key”=sank. The only normal use of a Navajo word is the word for “and” which is “dóó ”. For the same message the word “sank” would be spelled out another way on a different day. For example, it could be: “snake, apple, needle, kettle”.

Here, below on the video, is a verbal example of how the code sounded. The code sent below sounded to a Navajo speaker who did not know the Code like this: “sheep eyes nose deer destroy tea mouse turkey onion sick horse 362 bear”. To a trained Code Talker, he would write down: “Send demolition team to hill 362 B”. The Navajo Marine Coder Talker then would give it to someone to take the message to the proper person. It only takes a minute or so to code and decode.

I love what humans can do with language.

— We Should Not All Be Feminists by Frances Wright

yea.

Thinking about the two (male) coworkers I had a few farm jobs ago, one of whom was a very well spoken and politically knowledgeable self reported socialist who was nevertheless urging me to stay silent about the lower wages I was receiving so I didn't compromise his job. The OTHER one was a foulmouthed nineteen year old who didn't know what trans meant (but listened VERY well when I talked about it) and was absolutely up in arms about the wage inequality, and honestly any injustice in front of him. I'll let you guess which if them I'm still in touch with

id: three tweets from Lillian Boyd, @herelieslill, that read:

the roger ebert "what is this thing trying to accomplish and how well does it pull that off" metric of critical eval is such an effective and healthy rule to follow while consuming works and genres and styles outside of your wheelhouse

i am a picky and inveterate hater at my core and i recognize this! but it's no way to go through life if i never try and work around it, either as someone working in publishing or as someone who absolutely needs to consume media every moment i'm awake

("this piece of media adequately accomplished what it set out to do, but also the thing they wanted fucking sucks and i hate it and i hate them for making it" is also a good and reasonable position to take)

Frog-legged leaf beetle, Sagra buqueti, Chrysomelidae

Photos by Frank Deschandol // Instagram

Shared with permission; do not remove credit or re-post!

anybody know what to do with it all

this always

handmade trilobite bandanas now listed in my shop! printed and dyed by me

lol THIS ENDED UP BEING SO LONG but it's such a cute story opening that I had to draw Watson roasting Holmes's messiness for the newspaper and Holmes skillfully maneuvering his way out of having to do chores. It's all canon, even the indoor sharpshooting, except for the bit about the cold bath.

canon text under the cut:

stand_down.mp4

ITS GREAT LAKES AWARENESS DAY!!!!!

On this excellent day, be aware that this is the largest group of freshwater lakes in the world, covering over 95,000 square miles and reaching depths of over a thousand feet. They are beautiful freshwater seas.

Also when you die in these lakes, the very cold, oxygen-poor conditions at the bottom preserves you perfectly for all eternity. You will not rot and nothing will eat you. You will exist for as long as the Great Lakes do. Many shipwrecks still have the crew on board. Be Aware.

🤣😭Now presenting: the trailer for Dropout's newest series, 'Dropout Presents'.

Dropout Presents is a series of live recorded specials that include stand-up, improv, and solo performances from Dropout cast members like Brennan Lee Mulligan to comedians like Hank Green and Chris Grace.

Directed by Jonah Ray Rodrigues and featuring beloved LA venues like Dynasty Typewriter (Hank Green), the Elysian Theater (Bigger!, The Big Team, From Ally to Zacky, Courtney Pauroso: Vanessa 5000, and Chris Grace: As Scarlett Johansson), and The Nocturne Theater(Adam Conover), each show will have a behind-the-scenes featurette to give viewers a look into the process of creating these live specials.

The series will premiere with Hank Green’s stand-up special “Pissing Out Cancer" and will be followed by additional specials set to release throughout the rest of the year:

📌Adam Conover: Unmedicated

📌Bigger! with Brennan & Izzy (featuring Brennan Lee Mulligan and Isabella Roland)

📌The Big Team (featuring Ify Nwadiwe, Carl Tart, Zeke Nicholson, Lamar Woods, Ronnie Adrian, and Ishmel Sahid)

📌From Ally to Zacky (featuring Ally Beardsley, Zac Oyama, Jacob Wysocki, Talia Tabin, Oscar Montoya, Victoria Longwell, Kimia Behpoornia, and Devin Field)

📌Chris Grace: As Scarlett Johansson

📌Courtney Pauroso: Vanessa 5000

My grandfather and my godfather (a beloved neighbor and dear family friend) had a long standing bet- for one dollar- about who would die first. Both of them being slightly pessimistic (in the funny way), they both insisted that they themselves would be the first to die. Any time my grandfather had a health scare, he’d gleefully call up my godfather to boast that he’d be passing “any day now” and he was sure to win the bet. It was a big family joke and they were always amiably sparring and comparing notes about who was in worse shape, medically speaking.

When my grandfather was in hospice care dying of liver cancer, my godfather was quite ill also. It took him great effort to make the journey to see his dying friend. As he came into the room, supported by a family member, he shuffled to my grandpa’s bedside and silently handed him a dollar bill. He was ceding his loss of the bet, as they both knew who was going first. My grandpa had been in quite bad shape for a while and was no longer able to speak but let me tell you he snatched that dollar with unexpected strength and literally laughed aloud. He knew exactly what the gesture meant and he couldn’t help but find the humor within the grief. It was the last time any of us heard my grandpa laugh, as he passed shortly after.

When I talk about my appreciation for “dark humor” I’m not so much thinking about edgy jokes, but rather the human instinct to somehow, impossibly, both find and appreciate the absurdity that is so often folded into the profound grief of life and death. When I tell this story I think it kind of perturbs people sometimes, but it’s honestly one of my favorite memories about two men I really deeply admired. I could never hope for anything more than for my loved ones to remember me laughing until the very end, and taking joy in a little joke as one of my final acts.