odds&ends

can you imagine chuckling at none pizza with left beef and then living through the death of humanity and resurrecting a chunk of it and becoming a god figure to the new society you create and then 10,000 years later referencing it in conversation to a horribly traumatized teenager who has no possible frame of reference for this ancient meme that no one else alive has ever heard of

I want to assume this is what Dune is about when it isn’t about big worms and space shrooms, but Frank Herbert isn’t that cool.

Straight people think that either you know you’re gay from childhood or something big happens one day and you Realize (and it is like that to some of course) but lbr for many it goes like

or whatever

hear me out: a lotr game but you play as the ring, throwing yourself wantonly into the path of unsuspecting folk and slowly corrupting their minds as the game progresses

it’s a lovely morning in middle earth, and you are a horrible ring.

*lying in the bottom of river*

press Y to glitter seductively

SPACE TREKS THESE ARE THE VOYAGES OF THE STARPRISE ENTERSHIP

[ID: a decorated white cake. an image of the enterprise is in the centre, with writing in blue frosting around it. the writing reads “starprise entership” and is in all caps /end ID]

jane austen really just repeatedly said “the sexiest thing a man can be is kind, selfless, attentive and honest about his feelings” and, as always, she was correct every single time

She also said women should have financial autonomy and legal rights. :)

jane austen: men should be softer and kinder and women should be allowed to be witty and funny and independent

me: fuckin superb u funky little regency ladie

QUEENNNNWIGSTAN

#I WOULD HAVE SWORN SHE WAS RIDING AROUND ON A ROOMBA (via absentlyabbie)

@gay-impressionist and everyone else who might be curious: it’s all about the control they have over their muscles. Georgian dancers are renowned (at least in the theatre world) for having some of the most complex footwork— while the males are supposed to dance mostly through their feet and keep their upper half as rigid as possible, the female dancers are supposed to express themselves through their hands and heads only, their skirts concealing their walking/gliding.

What is happening is that Georgian dancers and ballet dancers are pretty similar when it comes to the effort they must use in order to show themselves as graceful on stage as possible, but while ballet dancers are using pointes to hold themselves on their toes during certain movements, female Georgian dancers wear shoes that have a bit of high heels and are, more or less, tiptoeing across the stage, with steps as small and quick as possible so the audience doesn’t have a chance to pay attention to the way their skirts spin everytime they take another step.

tl;dr The secret is that they are tiptoeing as fast as they can in the rythm of the music while keeping up the appearance that they are gliding across the floor.

I am not a Georgian, nor have I trained myself in their traditional dances, but I appreciate their culture’s dances so I thought I might explain what is actually happening (sorry if that didn’t make too much sense, I am not a professional dancer, just a very observant admirator).

That is very cool, and the explanation makes the dancing even more impressive! Thanks for the info!

On a similar note, when I read about some character moving so smoothly they appear to glide over the floor, I will be imagining they’re taking tiny fast steps.

@white-caged-bird   great, but you are incorrect. 

The dancer is INGUSH, the nation of the Republic of Ingushetia (in Russia), not Georgian (source).  And she lives in Kyrgyzstan. The dance in question is lezginka, which is kinda of a general name used by many cultures. 

Caucasus is huge and has more than 50 cultures and languages spoken, which are not limited to Georgian, and even if there are some similarities, they are not the same or interchangeable.

That is Gomez and Morticia Addams, you can’t fool me.

"But won't children be confused by all the LGBT-"

Yesterday I saw a mother with a baby carriage, being followed by a girl of about 4-6 years old on a bicycle. The kid started ringing her bike bell like RING RING RING RING RING RING RING, and the mother turned to look behind them to see whether they were being followed by a cyclist who desperately needs to pass them for the sake of everyone's safety.

And the little girl - who just rang the goddamn bell herself 5 seconds ago - also turned to look.

Kids are confused by everything at all times. They don't know jack shit. About anything.

i remember being like 8 or 9 and being told that my dad’s ex-wife was no longer diane and we were to address her as daniel now. my reaction: “ok.”

me and my brother later had a small discussion about whether that could happen randomly (conclusion: no, he probably had to file papers or something) and whether daniel should now be referred to as dad’s ex-husband (conclusion: yes but only to see the face he’ll make) but at no point did we find it like... alarming? the world is big and weird. we were used to it.

finding out a sorta-relative could just change genders off camera, as it were, was a whole lot less head-splodey than finding out there were no squirrels in australia!

There’s no what

Can you imagine the squirrels that would live in australia. What type of squirrel you would have to be to survive all the other shit australia has going on ecologically

That’s what kangaroos are: Australian squirrels

omg

REblog if you are Asexual, support Asexuals, or spend most of your time actually thinking about Superheroes.

This is it.

I need you guys to see the newest amusing music trend on tiktok.

Source

i love janice rand (twitter) [ID in alt text]

Three herons and a baby alligator | Source

They’re sand hill cranes, and that might be a spectacled caiman. This video is Extremely Florida™

Have you heard the good word about the Pembrokeshire walrus yet?

This walrus is fucken lost.

But Wales has lost its collective shit about it. They’re generally keeping its location secret to keep people away, but we get updates every day if it’s still here, if it’s happy, if it’s healthy. We think it was in Ireland about two weeks ago, which is interesting, because it is not actually native to Ireland either. Why is it here? No one knows.

It seems to like Pembrokeshire beaches.

I regret to inform you all that the walrus is a delinquent.

In attempting to climb aboard a dinghy in Tenby it capsized it.

It then proceeded to Tenby harbour where it tried to climb aboard a fishing boat.

Incredibly, this is not an April Fools

Today on English People RUIN Everything, a bunch of English tourists from Essex and Leeds broke covid-19 regulations and travelled to Tenby over Easter to try and see Wally (so named after Where’s Wally) and crowded him with jet skis and surfboards and stuff, so he’s not been seen since Monday. We don’t know yet if he’s moved to a secluded spot again, or left Wales entirely.

But, you know, I doubt we were going to have Wally for much longer anyway, since they need to head back home again at some point. Godspeed, Wally. May your fish be ever plentiful.

The English went back home and Wally came back to Tenby! We stan a true Welsh icon, folks.

Some facts about Wally:

This story on Wales Online claims she’s believed to be male, but then uses female pronouns. It also features a video of some Welsh people chatting about Wally, including a child whose first language is very clearly Welsh and by the end of his part is struggling to think of things to say about the walrus in English.

WALLY UPDATE!!

The Western Telegraph has opted for male pronouns, and is being very firm that Wally is male, although other news outlets are still all over the place. But what has Wally been up to the past few days?

What an Icon.

The photographer of this picture, one Amy Compton who has been Wally’s official photographer since the start, has been making these delightful Wally masks (inset). They sell for £5, of which £1 goes to Welsh Marine Life Rescue. If you would like your own Wally mask, contact her here!

My mother came for a visit today and we checked and Tenby is an hour away from me, so we went for a Lovely Day Trip to Find a Walrus.

Friends, I took the shittest photo there has ever been of a Walrus. But I absolutely did get to see em.

A lifeboat wandered by to check em out at one point, and ey just… sank. Just dropped below the surface like Homer Simpson moving backwards into a hedge. After a while the boat left, and Wally surfaced again.

I can now confirm that ey really, really likes blowing water around like a whale, and also kept eyeing up that buoy next to em.

Also, I had entirely forgotten how comically beautiful Tenby is, but that’s an aside

Time for a Wally Update!!!

It’s only a little one, but apparently we’re getting Serious about this walrus, lads - the police are now stepping in to say that anyone interfering with Wally (examples of this interference to date: throwing things at him, taking boats and paddle boards out to him, throwing fish overboard to tempt him closer, etc) is committing a criminal offence and we must send evidence of Assholes to them. So that’s fun!

Meanwhile, the tense stand-off between the RNLI and Wally continues over Who Gets To Use The Lifeboat Slipway. Here is a picture of Wally in full delinquent mode.

What a public menace.

Time for the weekly Wally news!

Here is the problem with 2,500 lbs of predatory sea potato using the slipway of a lifeboat station as a spa bed: sometimes, canoeists get in trouble near Stackpole and need rescuing and then some underwhelmed Welsh coast guard is going to have to try to chase said predatory sea potato off the slipway so they can launch the boat.

Here is the problem with that scenario: an underwhelmed Welsh coast guard basically views 2,500 lbs of predatory sea potato as a sort of ornery gelatinous cow, and so will try to do this with, and I am not making this up, a broom. But a ton of overgrown seal has no fear of brooms, so the attempt is not entirely successful under time-sensitive conditions while canoeists are actively drowning 10 miles away.

Solution? An air horn.

Which did work long enough to get the boat out, and then Wally clambered back aboard barely minutes later and fell asleep again. So trick learned, I guess.

Anyway, since I’ve apparently become Tumblr’s primary Wally journalist, I thought I’d go for a cheeky visit again today so I could report on their condition FIRST HAND (you’re all welcome, I have incredible integrity). Today I tried using a binocular over my phone camera with was extremely stressful and moderately successful - and I have two pieces of NEWS.

Two dinghies with divers aboard suddenly turned up and sailed right up to them. There are Welsh Marine Life Rescue volunteers everywhere, and one woman immediately yelled “YOU ARE TOO CLOSE. MOVE AWAY.”

Everyone on the cliff went silent. The boats went closer.

“YOU ARE BREAKING THE LAW,” yelled the beachmaster. “MOVE AWAY.”

Tumblrs, they did not.

“CAN YOU HEAR ME?” she yelled. “MOVE AWAY.”

At which point, the whole fucken cliff starts joining in, because Welsh people are Like That.

“Move away!”

“Leave ‘im alone, mun!”

“Move away, butt, what you doing!”

“He’s the size of an ‘orse, bois, can’t you see ‘im from here?!”

“Bloody move you fucks, you’ll scare ‘im away again!”

(That last one was, I swear, an eighty year old woman.)

The boats, suddenly being yelled at by a whole cliff of Welsh people, sailed away. Later, we followed the beachmaster who was now on a mission, and found her with a couple of community police officers ripping the shit out of the divers. It was very satisfying.

I mentioned my binocular and phone trick. It came in handy. At first it gave me some very satisfying shots for a distance picture on a phone camera:

But, you know, whatever.

But THEN I got this picture:

which I got 0.256778 seconds before that majestic Arctic beast of purest beautiful nature untamed FELL OFF THE SIDE OF THE SLIPWAY LIKE A CAT THAT GOT TOO CLOSE TO A TABLE EDGE

Wally was fine, the seagull to the right was traumatised.

This is not an update as such but my friend Chris who I took with me to get the scoop on Wally on Sunday had a real camera with him, and he has produced a WAY better photo than I did, and I want you all to see Just How Louche a Walrus is capable of looking:

Handsome boi

Okay, so this post went from 24,000 notes to 40,000 overnight, and I am getting a lot of important scientific queries about Wally! So I shall call upon my expertise as a skilled journalist of huge integrity and also a genuine, actual lecturer in environmental science to answer them all as best I can. I shall also use pictures.

1. When did this happen?

I have included many links in this thread to news articles on Wally, each of which is dated, so you can check those for accurate dates; but, xe turned up in Ireland in March 2021, and then made hir way to Pembrokeshire, Wales end of March. Xe reached Tenby a week or so later in April, and now refuses to leave. As of this update (6th May, 2021) xe’s still there and chillin’ - my friend Chris’ louche photo there was taken on Sunday the 2nd May. 

I shall date all updates from now on. Apologies for this uncharacteristic lapse in my journalistic performance. I have let Wally down.

2. “Oh my god do you guys call Waldo Wally?!??”

Folks!! Folks so many of you are doing this!!! But here’s the thing!!!

Where’s Wally is a British series and that’s the original name!!! It has been translated and regionalised around the world, and the name was changed in 28 of them!! A sizeable number don’t even sound like ‘Wally’!!! In France he’s Charlie! In Lithuania he’s Jonas! In Arabic versions he’s Fuḍūlī!!!

Yet only one nationality is repeatedly reacting with astonishment while assuming theirs is the one true original version!!! Guess which one!!! You have to stop!!! Especially the few who have responded with out and out swearing and aggression when I’ve explained!!! THIS POST IS ABOUT A WALRUS!!!!

3. Is Wally okay in Wales? Does xe need to leave/be moved?

Xe’s currently fine - an Arctic walrus can handle water temperatures of up to 15 degrees celsius, which West Wales is certainly currently accommodating. Xe was also distressingly underweight when first spotted fresh off the ice floe, but we’ve been monitoring hir health and xe’s roughly doubled hir bodyweight and is very healthy. I asked the fishmonger in Tenby if xe’s affecting the catch and the nice man said no and sold me a lemon sole for my mam. So right now, Wally is doing great, all needs met, with no real clashes with other stakeholders (i.e. fishers and that) except for, you know, the one (i.e. the lifeboat people).

However, high summer in Wales is warm enough that the sea will top the temperature threshold. So, we’re expecting Wally to leave by hirself in a month or so, if xe doesn’t decide to move sooner. Whether xe decides to swim all the way back home, or xe starts just moving north along the western coast and next turns up in the Isle of Mann or Scotland to continue hir holiday of the Celtic Ring remains to be seen. But, xe’ll do it hirself eventually, so it’s down to us to just keep hir happy and healthy for as long as xe chooses to stay.

4. I think Wally is female!

Yeah, maybe

5. I think Wally is male!

Very possibly

6. I think walruses have no concept of gender!

Almost definitely

7. What’s Walrus in Welsh?

They’re not native, so the Cymricisation “walrws” is getting a lot of use - but, Welsh is nothing if not poetic, so in official literature it’s “morfarch”, which means “sea stallion” or “sea knight” depending on your dialect.

8. Did they really use a broom and an airhorn on Wally?!

Here is a forlorn coast guard attempting to shift hir with a broom:

And here is the same coastguard attempting to shift hir with an airhorn:

9. I cannot believe this walrus is a delinquent!!!

Very well. Here is Wally’s criminal case file, including photographic evidence of two boarded boats and hir mugshot:

Update time! Datestamp: 10th May 2021. And as this post is becoming hellishly long, I think it’s probably best if I start using Read Mores after a couple of inches of scroll space. Uh, sorry about the rambling length, folks, I apparently just have a lot to say about a walrus and also many pictures.

Anyway, Wales is weathering a storm at the minute, so the sea is currently pretty rough - turns out, Wally likes staying out at sea during this time because they’re a sucker for a wave machine, and same, Wally, same, wave machines are banging. What this means is that they aren’t about much at the minute, but as the sea calms over the next few days the prediction is that they’ll return to the slipway, climb aboard and then drop spark the fuck out for a few days to rest.

SO, speaking of that SLIPWAY and the CRIMES of this delinquent…

Keep reading

Alright, gang, BRACE YOURSELVES because there’s a Wally update incoming!

And it may be the last! Or maybe not, it all depends on what Wally decides to do.

Anyway, it’s 26th May 2021, and to tempt you to click the Read More, I offer these two photos of Wally actually being induced to finally fucken move after the underwhelmed Welsh coast guard had the bright idea of spraying him gently with a hose to mimic rain:

Elegance and grace. What a majestic creature.

BUT, my friends, there have been DEVELOPMENTS!

Keep reading

OKAY SO I KNOW I SAID THAT WAS THE LAST BUT

Datestamp: 30th May, 2021. Uh, Wally has decided on more shenanigans, starting, I shit you not, with continuing that trip of the Celtic Ring by going even further south to fecking Brittany, in France, and yes! Yes, I did make that joke! I did not expect it to come true!! But here we are!!

In fact, he overshot Brittany and hit the town of Les Sables d’Olonne, a bit further south along the coast. Where, NATURALLY, he promptly found a brand new slipway to terrorise, and a brand new piece of maritime safety infrastructure to block.

French fishermen report that he seems “interested” in their boats, and we all know how that will end.

Except, it seems his crimes are starting to catch up with him. Warning for news of minor walrus injury under the cut (he’s fine, no pictures).

Keep reading

This walrus will not let me rest. Just let me rest, Wally. Let me sleep.

Datestamp: 3rd June, 2021. You’ll all recall that the last we saw of our hefty oceanic bandit, he got hit by a boat while trying to steal it in France, as he so often does. Oh no! we all thought. What if Wally is hurt! We hope he recovers! We hope he learns to leave boats alone, and also turns the fuck around and swims to cooler waters!

Folks, he has learned ZERO LESSONS.

HE’S IN LA ROCHELLE

Quote from the local Gendamerie: “Checked Friday, May 28th by the nautical brigade in the port of La Rochelle, this walrus has been uncooperative.“

HOT OFF THE PRESS (I am a journalist of superlative integrity, it is often said)

Datestamp 5th June 2021, and he’s in Spain. He’s in Spain. He’s headed for fucken Galicia after all, lads. He’s heading south. Given that my every joking prediction has so far come true, I’m terrified to make the obvious joke that he’s heading for Patagonia. GO TO SCOTLAND, WALLY. GO TO FECKING SCOTLAND.

Anyway, here’s a clip of him in Bilbao, northern Spain, and also, there’s some extra news: after months of back-and-forth and guesswork, we do now have concrete evidence of Wally’s sex, including photographs. NSFW pics under the cut.

Keep reading

Captain’s log, star date 14th June 2021, and he’s in Santander. No, not the bank. The Spanish city, capitol of Cantabria, which is interesting given that Cantabria IS A CELTIC NAME, so the journey continues. Asturias and Gallicia beckon.

Here is a picture of him having climbed aboard yet another boat.

And this article has a link to a video of him boarding a pier back in La Rochelle, to the bemusement of some French fishermen (side note, it is very endearing that the Western Telegraph, a Pembrokeshire newspaper, is still closely following Wally’s adventures).

WILL HE GO BACK NORTH?!? Well, let’s see how he feels once he’s done Galicia.

Do you love the colour of the walrus?

Anyway, folks I have MIXED news. The good news is, after spending a worrying month heading closer and closer to the equator and then vanishing for two weeks, our fave oceanic chongus has finally, mercifully, turned the fuck around! He’s coming back home apparently, and has turned up in the Isles of Scilly, a small chain of islands off the toe of Cornwall. Hopefully, he’ll take a week there to feed and rest and then continue his journey north. We may yet see him make landfall in Scotland.

Here’s the bad news:

HIS CRIMES CONTINUE.

Hot Walrus Summer

the desolation of smaug: a summary

STOP IT STOP IT NOW THIS IS SO VERY WRONG

#nothing like people in period clothing using modern technology