Reblog to let the demon come to you. Like to enlarge their power.

CIPHER CULT KICKSTARTER DOWN TO THE LAST 17 HOURS!

(as of 11:00 pm EST on Thurs. March 21st. Meaning, it should end between 4:00pm-4:30pm EST on Friday, March 22nd. I don't know the exact time that it will end.)

The most important piece of info in the latest update (from tonight) is:

Campaign backers are often used to being able to add items to their pledge after the campaign ends, when they are confirming their pledge. However, the above statement makes it sound like NOW, before the campaign ends tomorrow (Friday 3/22/24) is the ONLY time you will be able to add on any of the extra items shown above.

This is pretty crucial info! So if you have pledged and were thinking about adding on later, NOW is the time to do that.

doomed yaoi, doomed yuri. someone kill me with rocks please

Interspecies kissing my beloved. Species that show affection through biting, species that literally don't have mouths so they just ram their forehead into yours like a touchstarved cat.

Species with specially produced venom that makes giving kisses a bit difficult, but a human s/o can kiss them like there's no tomorrow, and they very much would appreciate if you did.

Species that don't do the snuggly bits of a relationship, but they make sure to taptaptap you on the shoulder at least once a day as a reminder of their affection.

Just any kind of alien or monster that looks at humans kissing and decides they want in somehow.

“how dare you say we piss on the poor” is perhaps THEE best piece of vernacular to come out of tumblr dot com in the past decade. along with “what were you doing at the devils sacrament” (cheeky. inspired. relevant in every context) and “harold, they're lesbians” (timeless. funny as hell. gay)

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.

This is the hot tumblr discourse that I’m here for.

2024 Leverage Rewatch:1x5 The Mile High Job I now pronounce you man and wife.

kurt vonnegut, being good at things is not the point of doing them.

Got a bunch of requests for Wen Ning so here’s the babygirl himself

birthday comic for wen ning 🏹

it’s still april 11th in my time zone. this counts

my dead goth son and his friendly neighborhood personified concept of insanity

Send me something to think about

baby elephants

(source)

Maglor

🔹 Someone else's fiction cannot cause you physical harm.

🔹If someone else's fiction is causing you emotional or psychological harm, or distress, you can put it down and not read/watch it.

🔹Your emotional well-being is not the responsibility of fiction writers.

🔹Someone else's fiction is not about your personal trauma.

🔹When reading or watching fiction, you always have the power. You can always stop. You are never reading fiction without your own consent.

🔹Fiction writers are not responsible for other people's mental health.

🔹The content of a piece of fiction does not reflect on the morality of its author.

🔹Just because someone writes about bad things happening, doesn't mean they want those things to happen.

🔹Don't like? Don't read.

-a writer's only job is to tell their story. they have no responsibility to you for how it makes you feel. you chose to consume the story. so those are your feelings that you need to take ownership of.

-discomfort is not the same as harm and acclimating yourself via fiction to strongly unpleasant emotions such as sorrow, indignation, and disgust will make you stronger and healthier

-however if you are repeatedly triggering yourself by engaging with media that makes you miserable you should probably recognize that it's up to you to stop hurting yourself

"Someone else's fiction cannot cause you physical harm."

Incorrect.

It can definitely hurt you when I hurl it at your head when you complain to me about what I'm choosing to read and how immoral it is.

ophelia..

I find myself wondering about orca predation of cattle.

WET BEAST WEDNESDAY

the primordial serpent