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Chubby Animal

@cake-cow / cake-cow.tumblr.com

Dappled/Orchid AO3: Orchidaexa I like cute things. They/Them/Theirs or She/Her/Hers
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There’s that post that’s like ‘everyone should get into a tiny niche fandom at least once’ fully agree, that was really fun -- but I would like to add that everyone should get into a fandom where their opinions run counter to major fanon because it really teaches you about sticking to your guns and trusting your interpretation of the text without having to rely on peer validation

because WHAT are people talking about sometimes

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oldbronxlady
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wilwheaton

Do not cite the old magic to me. I was there when it was written.

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neil-gaiman

Sometimes I look at the Big Hair People in the comics I wrote back then and have to remind myself that, actually, they were, if anything, understated.

Okay but how did they all get their hair like this? I'd do anything to have this kind of volume.

It's permed, then heavily teased, then sprayed with about half a bottle of Aquanet while you blow dry the hair with your head upside down, then you blow dry the bangs while combing them higher and higher and spraying the other half of the can of Aquanet. You have to add so much hairspray that your hair feels lacquered.

I'm not even sure they make hairspray with that kind of hold anymore?

to get that kind of volume you have to be willing to put a hole in the ozone layer

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you hate that americans drive such large cars because they kill pedestrians, i hate them because they're aesthetically horrendous, we are not the same

everybody in the US is like "i want to buy a truck that makes me disproportionately likely to commit vehicular manslaughter and also looks like what would happen if vehicles could be inbred"

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mapsontheweb

The most popular browsers in different countries in 2012 and 2022.

Nope! When Chrome first came to popularity, people switched over to it cause it was “faster” (turns out, it just eats through your device’s CPU) but since then Firefox has upped its game in a major way. Chrome just doesn’t measure up anymore. Plus, nowadays Chrome is just a data harvester designed to show hyper targeted ads - so even if Firefox ain’t for you, it’s still worth ditching Google for a different browser.

Legit though I switched to Firefox and it’s so so so much better

i’m gonna keep reblogging this ad infinitum so yall might as well convert now

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dduane

Haven’t used anything but Firefox for years.

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I think I stumbled upon some kind of ichthyological forbidden knowledge. Opened up a book of names that were never meant to be read.

You've probably heard of "can-opener smoothdream", right? It's practically a meme by now.

But the thing is, it's a deep-sea fish. And deep-sea fish have historically not had English names because nobody drops them into the conversation over a hot cuppa. Sure, there's generic stuff like hatchetfish and barreleye, but when you want to refer to the actual fish you're probably saying such euphonious phrases as Diretmus argenteus, Sternoptyx diaphana, or maybe even Opisthoproctus soleatus.

So whence "can-opener smoothdream"? Certainly no non-ichthyologist has ever used that name. It's not even a direct translation of the scientific name Chaenophryne longiceps - that would be "long-headed gape-toad". Which to me is even cooler than "can-opener smoothdream".

But I digress. The "dream" bit comes from the anglerfish family Oneirodidae, from oneiros, "dream", because those marvelous fishes look like they came out of a dream (Pietsch, 2009).

Note that Pietsch (2009), more or less the anglerfish bible, uses English names at the genus level only. So Chaenophryne is the smoothhead dreamers genus but no mention is made of "can-opener smoothdreams". So no luck there.

Wikipedia, root cause of a lot of misinformation, has this to say.

"Longhead dreamer" is a far more accurate name. And in fact, despite Wikipedia prioritizing "can-opener smoothdream" (because it's funny?), the links listed use "longhead dreamer" and "smoothhead dreamer" as the name and "can-opener smoothdream" as an alternative.

So. Again. Where did "can-opener smoothdream" come from?

The answer, as it turns out, lies with McAllister (1990).

In the book A List of the Fishes of Canada, ichthyologist D. E. McAllister sought out to list every single fish known to Canadian waters, providing both an English and a French name.

And when there wasn't an English name, like for most deep-sea fishes, he arbitrarily gave them a name. And his names "differ in many instances from the widely accepted names" (Holm, 1998)

This had varying results. This is his name for one of the netdevil anglerfishes.

The humpback anglerfish or blackdevil anglerfish becomes a werewolf (????).

This one is just confusing.

The white-spotted lanternfish or Rafinesque's lanternfish instead becomes...

And most embarrassingly, the Mediterranean spiderfish gets saddled with something that "violates the tenet of good taste" (Holm, 1998).

This then is the original source of "can-opener smoothdream". It was invented by an ichthyologist in 1990, and has seen little to no use outside of how bizarre the name is.

Maybe McAllister's goofier names will catch on. Who knows? They certainly aren't very popular in the scientific community though.

References

Holm, E. (1998) Encyclopedia of Canadian Fishes (review). The Canadian Field-Naturalist, 112, p. 174-175.

McAllister, D. E. (1990) A List of the Fishes of Canada. National Museum of Natural Sciences, Ottawa.

Pietsch, T. W. (2009) Oceanic Anglerfishes: Extraordinary Diversity in the Deep Sea. University of California Press, Berkeley.

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reblogged

If you parry on the exact frame your partner cums inside you they will get pregnant

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hey boss i can't come in today it's a sunny day and there's a lovely breeze coming in through my window, yeah it's rustling the branches of the tree outside that's finally bloomed so it's pretty serious

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maamlet

changes my gender repeatedly during sex in order to trigger a stack overflow glitch that happens to turn you into a perfectly ripe strawberry the size of a human head

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reblogged

Shoutout to whoever it was who informed me a few weeks ago that some types of Zofran have stevia in them because I got to tell my doctor about it today, and he literally made this face behind his mask because he had no idea, and he is also stevia intolerant:

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Me, rocking up for my annual physical and my bucketload of weird health problems: so anyway [drops some new medical lore here]

Dr. Brandon who has been hanging on for dear life to the rollercoaster that's been my health saga since he saved my life in 2019, sweating nervously as he yet again learns something new about himself against his will: exCUSE ME?

Thank you for the warning. I go to my doctor who handles my Zofran prescription next week, so I'll talk to her then.

I have a laundry list of medications I have to take already. The fact I have to specify which generic manufacturers I can use on over half of them is obnoxious.

I feel you. It's a pain in the ass, constantly having to check ingredients. Fwiw, I've got an old (empty) bottle that doesn't list it on the ingredients, but my latest batch from a different manufacturer does.

So, y'know, before anyone panics and throws their meds away, check the ingredients on your bottle. It just never occurred to me to check my new Rx until someone pointed it out, and I had a "mother fucker" moment of realization.

So, for those in the notes wondering how it's possible to have an intolerance or allergy to stevia, I hate to break it to you, but bodies can react to just about anything in weird and unpredictable ways.

However, one of the main reasons people may react badly to Stevia is that it is not artificial, as some people seem to think it is.

Stevia is actually a plant (Stevia Rebaudiana) in the Asteraceae/Compositae plant family, which just so happens to be the same plant family as Ragweed, y'know, that little bastard that makes hayfever season so fucking miserable.

There are other components of stevia that a person may react to, but given how common ragweed allergies are, I'd bet a number of people are also sensitive to stevia due to the overlap.

So there you go. That's your 'fun' little tidbit for the day from your weird Auntie Joy with too many allergies.

Everyone in the notes right now @ ragweed:

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mycroftrh

Far worse, in my opinion, than the famous “he wouldn’t fucking say that” is “he WOULD fucking say that, as part of his facade, but you seem to think he would mean it genuinely”

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