T thing/ explain to me why Norwegian has two written languages.

psssh why you need t thing WHEN YOU HAVE ME??

Long ago the three Scandinavian countries lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed when the black plague attacked!

Norway was hit especially hard, the plague killed one third of the entire population. And who did the plague completely wipe out? Educated people. Because educated people, pastors, doctors, etc. are usually in a job where they help the sick or bury the dead. And what happens when you’re constantly around a bunch of sick people? You get sick too!

So because Norway was suddenly so much weaker, both economically and martially, and even academically, they decided to join up with Denmark.

An this is where Norway ceased to be a country. The great strong and fearsome viking kings were all but forgotten. Centuries of unions under either Sweden or Denmark had robbed Norway of land they had once conquered, like Greenland, Iceland, the Faeroe Islands, Skaania. All we had left was a thin strip of coast, Svalbard and Jan Mayen.

But then, 400 years later, the age of National Romance happened. Suddenly being nationalistic was a good thing. And the Norwegian people remembered who they once were. Norway was the poorest country in Europe. All the universities were in Denmark. All education was in Danish. If you were someone, you spoke Danish, not that barbaric noise called “Norwegian”. There is no Norwegian nobility, only Danish.

Suddenly France is on fire.

The Americans are declaring independence

Such beauty. Such impress. Such national pride to the people and for the people!

Then Napoleon came along and pulled all of Europe into war.

Denmark joined on Napoleon’s side

Sweden, who has never gotten along with Denmark, backed England up

When England won, Sweden, as one of the winners, wanted Norway

And in the one brief week, between Denmark relinquishing its hold and Sweden taking over, the Norwegians saw their chance and took it.

A couple politicians stuck their heads together and wrote a constitution in only a handful of days. This constitution was heavily influenced by the French one written during the revolution, as well as the American Declaration of Independence. The constitution declared Norway as an independent country, and ever since that day, May 17th, 1814, 17th of May has been known as the Norwegian Constitution day, our national holiday.

Unfortunately, however, the Swedes were not persuaded by a silly little piece of paper and took over anyway, but hey. We tried.

Luckily they were much more lax than the Danes and let Norway basically rule themselves, as long as they followed the law of the Swedish king.

The Norwegians never forgot their brief moment of supposed victory though, and only a generation or two later they staged one of the most peaceful freedom wars in known history and Sweden went “well fuck you, you can have that damn country of yours! Just leave us alone”

sixty years later we found oil and became the richest country in the world but that has nothing to do with the language

ANYWAY, so Sweden left Norway basically to its own devices, and the Norwegians decided they no longer wanted Danish to be the main language. They wanted Norwegian. Problem is, at that time, after 400 years of rule, there was no such thing as anything specifically Norwegian. So they had a dilemma.

One guy, Knud Knudsen, took the structure of the Danish language and mixed it with what he heard the people speak around him. He called it Bokmål

This other guy, this slightly more nationalistic guy, Ivar Aasen (we like him), travelled around the country and found the most isolated farms and villages. The places that had not been touched and influenced by the Danish rule over the past 400 years. These were the thickest and most unique dialects and accents. He mixed them all together and created Nynorsk.

Bokmål means Book-language and Nynorsk means New-Norwegian

Fun fact: They actually held a vote deciding what to name these two languages and Nynorsk & Bokmål won over Dansk-Norsk (Danish-Norwegian) & Norsk (Norwegian) by ONE SINGLE VOTE.

So here they had a problem

‘Cause you see Nynorsk was something that was REALLY Norwegian. Something the nationalists had been pining after for decades, centuries. And it was easy to learn for those whose lives hadn’t been ruled by Danish language for as long as they could remember.

But Bokmål was a mix of two languages, and you know what happens when you mix two languages: It is greatly simplified. This made it easy to learn and it was something “norwegian enough to pass”. It was much easier to go from Danish to Bokmål for those who lived in the cities and had written Danish all their lives.

And while Nynorsk was the one that embodied the goal of this whole language hunt, and the one most loved by the peasants, Bokmål as the “easy way out” for the people in the cities, for the educated politicians and journalists and doctors and pastors who spoke Danish, even though they identified as Norwegian

And this is where they came to a standstill

People who liked Nynorsk used it and refused to give it up for Bokmål

People who liked Bokmål used it and refused to give it up for Nynorsk

and.. well that brings us to today

Though over the years the two languages have slowly been drifting towards each other, becoming more and more alike, Bokmål has also been taking over because it is what is most commonly used in the media. Because the media originates in the cities after all.

Both T thing and I are partial to Nynorsk though we use Bokmål more often in daily life, simply because it is more practical.

And that is why Norwegian is actually two languages.

Had a weird political dream where a new party showed up and they wore white (since the other two wear red and blue). They claimed to be here for all Americans and when asked about foreign affairs the guy just shrugged and said he wasn't too interested in that.

After some time, posters for the "Federalcrats" as they called themselves began to pop up and it was stuff like those old political cartoons. One of the ones I can vividly remember had the caption "Hold em by the nose while we kick em in the ass!" And it was a picture if a very large Jeff Besos being held by his nose by a bunch of people holding "boycott" signs while one of the federalcrats was getting ready to kick him in the bum with a shoe labeled "proper regulation"

We experience events in association with an ongoing story about who we are, in which we struggle to achieve coherence and continuity rather than objective truth. Similarly, our memories do not consist of snapshots of our experiences; rather, we store our experiences in memory in connection with a web of associations that is consistent with our narrative. Further, each time we store or recall an event, we invoke and reconstruct ("re-member") not an isolated occurrence but the entire web of associations: our story. This storytelling is central to the protean self's capacity to shift shape while sustaining its inner form.

Lisa Capps and Elinor Ochs, Constructing Panic: The Discourse of Agoraphobia

google it

When I was in college, round about 2002 or so, I did a paper on hate groups that necessitated a couple of visits to Stormfront, a white supremacist website and message board. One of the pages on the site was a "children's page" operated by the child of Storrmfront's founder, which was a unique form of horrifying. But I also remember looking at a photo of the kid on the site and thinking, that poor fuckin' kid, what kind of chance did he ever have?

But it was just a paper and that was just a photo of a child I didn't know, so I turned in the paper and graduated and got on with life.

In 2016, @archwrites posted a link to an article by the Washington Post titled "The White Flight of Derek Black" (sorry about the paywall, Arch's post quotes some relevant parts here). I thought it looked like an interesting read: it was about a white supremacist named Derek Black and a group of campus activists at the school Black eventually attended, who set out to see if they could change his mind about race with radical kindness. In large part because of their work, Black eventually renounced white supremacy and became an antiracist.

And then I hit a photo in the article and gasped, because I recognized it. I'd seen the same photo on the Stormfront children's website. The kid I'd seen and pitied was grown up and had gotten out. Immensely satisfying to see.

But it was just a news story about someone I didn't even know, so I posted about how pleased I was to see it, and I got on with life again.

This morning, I woke to the news (sorry, it's the Daily Fail) that R. Derek Black, now 35, has just published a memoir, The Klansman's Son: My Journey from White Nationalism to Antiracism. And in the epilogue, they come out as trans.

I can't imagine better news I could have heard about them -- that they're out, they're thriving, and they're embracing themself.

Congratulations, kid. It's a great new photo.

[ID: A recent photograph of R. Derek Black, with long curly red hair, wearing a floral collared shirt and a red cardigan, smiling for the camera.]

Oh, fucking wow. I remember reading articles when they first got out.

I think it's a really important part of R. Derek Black's story that one of the watershed moments in their life was when Matthew Stevenson invited them to Shabbat dinner. Like, it wasn't just random students - it was a Jewish person willing to potentially put himself in the crosshairs of the family that runs/ran Stormfront.

That takes an incredible amount of courage.

How lovely for them, that this is where they are now.

It's all for you.

2022 MDZS/CQL paintings! except for the two square ones (which are on cold press paper), these are all gouache paint on the backs of postcards.

yes i posted this on my other blog but you know what it goes here too

PLEASE

I found out japanese fans are calling this the "american comic book-style marcille"

i'm WHEEZING LMAO

ITS GREAT LAKES AWARENESS DAY!!!!!

On this excellent day, be aware that this is the largest group of freshwater lakes in the world, covering over 95,000 square miles and reaching depths of over a thousand feet. They are beautiful freshwater seas.

Also when you die in these lakes, the very cold, oxygen-poor conditions at the bottom preserves you perfectly for all eternity. You will not rot and nothing will eat you. You will exist for as long as the Great Lakes do. Many shipwrecks still have the crew on board. Be Aware.

that last paragraph only applies to Lake Superior, the northernmost Great Lake! to be fair though, Superior is bigger than all of the other Great Lakes combined.

and that's not to say that the other Great Lakes aren't equally dangerous! each of these things earned the 'Great' descriptor for a reason, and the only reason they aren't all classified as inland seas is because they're not salty.

Lake Michigan in particular is really good at creating waterlogged corpses and hiding them in weird places, and every single Great Lake is full of shipwrecks and ghost stories.

and you know what? 10/10 I would let these things eat me anyways.

be aware!

fun optional addition, LAKE SUPERIOR VS THE EAST COAST

you could drown an entire small country in this thing

Hey! I don't like this!

obligatory rec of "the wreck of the edmund fitzgerald" by gordon lightfoot

and also this excellent video by caitlin doughty/ask a mortician

does anyone have good resources about women in the french revolution ? any sort is fine :3

There's also plenty of more academic JSTOR Articles, if you have access:

feel free to reblog & add other resources!

I’ve made this chart over women in the revolution with sources for everything in the description.

I’ve also already made quite a lot of other posts about individual women, but maybe you’re more interested in sources about women as a group in the revolution?

Please go watch Sex Explained on Netflix. Not only is it a great resource for the basic sex education that is sorely lacking in the U.S., but some of ya’ll need to take a deep breath and remember the difference between fantasy vs reality. This purity culture thing that we’re going through right now is directly harmful to responsible, healthy sexual expression. BTW this woman, Lisa Diamond, is a noted psychologist and has been pushing for greater understanding of womens sexuality as a whole.

!!!!!!!!!!!