zylaa reblogged
capybara
Guinea big.
In Japanese, they don’t say “moon,” they say “tsuki,” which literally translates to “moon,” and I think that’s how language works.
Hey its been at least 9 years anything changed?
nope! all quiet on the linguistic front. i am a girl now though
INSTAGRAM | ETSY | DEVIANTART
Lammergeier Dragon art doll
SOLD
This doll designed and made by me fully from scratch. Inspired by beautiful bird called Bearded vulture.
Super sculpey, faux fur, feathers, wire+plastic armature, primer, acrylic paint, varnish. Posable neck has plastic ball-and-socket armature inside. Tail and wings are also posable and has wire armature inside. * Size: Doll is around 73cm / 29 inches total length
zylaa reblogged
girl help I'm getting they/them'd by well-meaning people who don't know what a tomboy is
This feeling is strange and complicated. On the one hand it's legit quite cool that nonbinary pronouns are becoming more widespread! On the other, I've spent my whole life pursuing interests and hobbies and ideals that weren't seen as particularly feminine, and when I was younger this was a major source of bullying and stress alongside some generalized misogyny taking the form of "you can't do or be anything you think is cool because you are innately inferior and to do otherwise means violating your nature," and it took me a while to conclude that this was just straight horseshit top to bottom and I could do whatever I wanted and present myself however I wanted without in any way being Not A Girl, and now it's like the exact same concept has flipped sides and is coming from a point of theoretical validation but still calculates out to "that's not very ladylike of you, you must be something else". anyway she/her thanks gang
I think it's like. the understanding that the gender binary is a small part of a much wider space of identities is separate from the understanding that a lot of that gender binary is a false dichotomy that artificially walls off universal human experiences behind specific pronouns and while the first concept is gaining wider understanding the second is lagging a little, which means "I am a girl and I like doing boy things" reads as "oh I've heard about this, you must be one of the Others who don't do the binary" rather than "the concept of 'boy things' is stupid from the jump"
just to be 100% clear
what this post is NOT talking about: using they/them pronouns for someone you don't know, aren't sure of, hasn't had a chance to introduce themselves, etc.
what this post IS talking about: my highly personal experience seeing some people "correcting" my commenters that were using she/her pronouns for me, because, despite me exclusively using she/her pronouns and saying so whenever asked, through no action of mine they had gotten the idea that I was using "they/them".
girl help I put a nuanced personal experience on the reading comprehension website
zylaa reblogged
zylaa reblogged
But there was a period of friction, when “hello” was spreading beyond its summoning origins to become a general-purpose greeting, and not everyone was a fan. I was reminded of this when watching a scene in the BBC television series Call the Midwife, set in the late 1950s and early 1960s, where a younger midwife greets an older one with a cheerful “Hello!” “When I was in training,” sniffs the older character, “we were always taught to say ‘good morning,’ ‘good afternoon,’ or ‘good evening.’ ‘Hello’ would not have been permitted.” To the younger character, “hello” has firmly crossed the line into a phatic greeting. But to the older character, or perhaps more accurately to her instructors as a young nurse, “hello” still retains an impertinent whiff of summoning. Etiquette books as late as the 1940s were still advising against “hello,” but in the mouth of a character from the 1960s, being anti-hello is intended to make her look like a fussbudget, especially playing for an audience of the future who’s forgotten that anyone ever objected to “hello.”
Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch
Posts that remind me to nerd out about the intricacies of historical fiction writing
This isn't historical fiction, but period fiction, but I remember having a jarring OH reaction when discovering something that's just a standard part of English now was less than a hundred years old by reading a book. the book was Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers, published in 1930, and in the first chapter a judge is speaking:
‘It is not necessary for him, or her, to prove innocence; it is, in the modern slang phrase, “up to” the Crown to prove guilt...’
There are several particularly good examples of this in books by Frances Hodgson Burnett, who lived in both the UK and the US and several times depicts characters from those two places encountering each other. For example, The Shuttle was published in 1907 and has this delightful passage of two British characters encountering an American:
“Upon my word,” Mr. Penzance commented, and his amiable fervour quite glowed, “I like that queer young fellow—I like him. He does not wish to 'butt in too much.' Now, there is rudimentary delicacy in that. And what a humorous, forceful figure of speech! Some butting animal—a goat, I seem to see, preferably—forcing its way into a group or closed circle of persons.” His gleeful analysis of the phrase had such evident charm for him that Mount Dunstan broke into a shout of laughter, even as G. Selden had done at the adroit mention of Weber & Fields. “Shall we ride over together to see him this morning? An hour with G. Selden, surrounded by the atmosphere of Reuben S. Vanderpoel, would be a cheering thing,” he said. “It would,” Mr. Penzance answered. “Let us go by all means. We should not, I suppose,” with keen delight, “be 'butting in' upon Lady Anstruthers too early?” He was quite enraptured with his own aptness. “Like G. Selden, I should not like to 'butt in,'” he added.
And the more I see historical examples of people encountering novel expressions that are utterly unremarkable to us now, the more I think, you know what, I might as well approach language change with gleeful delight rather than a fussbudgety sniff.
zylaa reblogged
zylaa reblogged
platforming palestinian joy is just as important as sharing the suffering they're enduring during this genocide. despite continued displacement and bombardment, you cannot steal their joy and spirit. happy birthday to this sweet baby 🖤🇵🇸 may they grow up to see a free palestine
this beautiful baby is the son of ibrahim abu raida, the 25 y/o executive director of the al nasser charity in gaza, an organization working to distribute food to the displaced. they have many different ways to donate linked on their instagram (linked above) and also have a personal gfm to help with their own rebuilding efforts that is over 80% of the way to its goal.
zylaa reblogged
The "If you were over 6 feet tall and living in Wellington in 2001 you didn't have a choice my dude" is killing me, like I'm just picturing the LOTR casting directors running around Wellington with a measuring tape, black-bagging tall guys and shoving them into vans.
"You're a Lord of the Rings extra now."
"No! Please! I have a family! I'm supposed to work the closing shift at the Pita Pit tonight!"
"You serve at the pleasure of the Steward of Gondor now."
I love that video where the guy is like "It wasn't hard! You'd stumble out of a pub in Wellington after a few, and wake up to find Sir Peter Jackson himself fitting an uruk prosthetic over your head."
zylaa reblogged
i really like looking at google image searches for “firemen rescuing cats” or something because you get super cute pictures like
AND THEN THERE’S THIS ONE
mufasamonsta
“THAT’S RIGHT TWAS I that set the house ablaze!!!”
Dying.
Every fucking time I know what’s at the bottom and every time I still lose my shit.
I’m so happy this post is back again asdlkfjsa
HAPPY TEN YEARS TO “TWAS I THAT SET THE HOUSE ABLAZE”
zylaa reblogged
Scientists at UC Riverside have demonstrated a new, RNA-based vaccine strategy that is effective against any strain of a virus and can be used safely even by babies or the immunocompromised. Every year, researchers try to predict the four influenza strains that are most likely to be prevalent during the upcoming flu season. And every year, people line up to get their updated vaccine, hoping the researchers formulated the shot correctly. The same is true of COVID vaccines, which have been reformulated to target sub-variants of the most prevalent strains circulating in the U.S. This new strategy would eliminate the need to create all these different shots, because it targets a part of the viral genome that is common to all strains of a virus. The vaccine, how it works, and a demonstration of its efficacy in mice is described in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “What I want to emphasize about this vaccine strategy is that it is broad,” said UCR virologist and paper author Rong Hai. “It is broadly applicable to any number of viruses, broadly effective against any variant of a virus, and safe for a broad spectrum of people. This could be the universal vaccine that we have been looking for.”
Source: news.ucr.edu
zylaa reblogged
Favorite thing about Dracula Daily so far is that yesterday I read a post that had in-depth, well-researched analysis that could easily be mistaken for a published literary criticism of Dracula, except it casually makes a passing reference to "the polycule" without feeling the need to elaborate
Valerio Minato's photo that won the Astronomy Picture of the Day Contest by NASA on December 25th, 2023.
In the picture: the moon, the Monviso Mount and the Basilica of Superga (on the Superga hill) outside Turin are all aligned. it took him 6 years to take this shot (and I take it as an example to never give up on your dreams).
zylaa reblogged
The thing about wanting to write smart essays is you truly do have to read books to do that, and the thing about reading books is that it is way harder now that I am not 17 and smartphoneless
Genuinely humiliating to read in 25 minute chunks because a decade of having a feelgood device in my pocket has turned my brain to cheese
zylaa reblogged
Beatrix Potter(1866-1943)
Illustration for 'The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies', 1909
Source: britishmuseum.org
Corn in all its colors!