Effervescence

Fiona on Lana

hey, uh. what the shit

Not to be a hopeless romantic, but was anyone going to tell us that 2023 was the year scientists were able to visualize quantum-entangled particles for the first time and they literally look like yin and yang??

Full article published in Nature Photonics here, though I read a lay reader friendly explanation here!

Bothering the beast

I asked one of my (male) friends to stop using the phrase “man up” and he has been using “fortify” for the past two weeks instead and it’s just a little thing but honestly it makes a difference

and tbh it’s also pretty funny when I start to deflate in the library and he leans over and goes “FORTIFY”

not people thinking they can escape heartache. avoiding it at all cost is itself a form of it

still. after all of it. mostly, i want to be kind

One time this man approached me in a bar talking in Spanish. So I assumed he was Spanish and we started speaking, we had a whole ass conversation and at some point he was like. So what part of Spain are you from? And I said well I’m Italian actually. What part of Spain are you from? And he was like. I’m Greek.

One time I was in Argentina and I was so tired of trying to speak Spanish because I’m not very good at it lmao so I broke into exasperated English and the retail seller girl quickly understood me and engaged me in conversation. We talked for a while, she introduced me to a makeup brand, and then I decided to buy it. While she was packaging the purchase, she asked me if I were from the US or perhaps the UK and I just said “oh no I’m Brazilian hahah” and she looked me straight in the eyes and said, in clear Portuguese, “I’m Brazilian too”

When my dad went to China on a work trip, his Mandarin speaking wasn’t great but his listening was fine (his first language is Cantonese) and he encountered a German guy who had moved to China to work. My dad knew how to speak German because he studied it in university (but wasn’t great when it came to listening to new vocab he hadn’t studied before), and the German guy knew Mandarin because he lived and worked in China, so they had a conversation where my dad spoke to the German guy in German and the guy responded in Mandarin. I’m sure it confused a lot of their coworkers who just saw the Asian guy speaking German and the white guy speaking Mandarin.

Some years ago, I worked for a manufacturing company that had a service depot in China.  One of the engineers from the main office here in the US spent most of his time at the depot.  The problem was that he didn’t speak *any* of the various Chinese languages, and no one at the depot spoke any English. They all, however, spoke Spanish.

I love the world

I was working at a fast food restaurant and a very lost Sikh man showed up in a turban. He was a bit overwhelmed by the food choices.

One of the ladies from the kitchen nudged me away from the cash “I got this”, and another lady quickly took over at the grill. Lady at the cash was… Tamil? Maybe? The lady at the grill was Nepalese. They chatted with the Sikh man, told him what food options met his dietary/religious constraints, and reassured him that the food was made properly. He left feeling happy and welcome in my city.

After he left they told me that they were all speaking Hindi, which was a second/third language for all of them.

We should have this everywhere forever

René Lalique, Diadem of pearls, diamonds, gold and enamelwork, ca. 1903 (Schmuckmuseum Pforzheim)

Sierra Petrocelli

tiktok is such an awful app, it's almost designed to feed you misinformation and expose you to insane discourse. unlike beloved tumblr, the app that feeds me misinformation and exposes me to insane discourse

No, no, no, you see on tiktok an algorithm feeds you misinformation. On Tumblr I feed myself misinformation from my charcuterie board of hand-selected unhinged mutuals.

None of that mass market junk. Only artisanal, small batch, sustainably cultivated, fair trade horseshit.

All this about not getting to see John Lennon on twitter but I think the real tragedy is that Freddie Mercury never had an instagram

@9tokyo’s archive