There are no strange creatures

Let’s give it up for 500 notes.

got a machine for cutting stickers that instills the same curiosity and hunters deadly instinct. Here he is telling me the sticker cutting machine belongs to him actually. You can’t tell but he’s purring maximum loud in this photo

@kittybroker

Highly impressive kitty printer technician a real smart one! Get the printer kitty now for only $49.99!

shoutout to @nintendowiimote for tag, can’t just live it hidden

My latest cartoon for New Scientist

mutuals feel free to do this

I love this lil guy he looks so happy ;_;

@markscherz Do frogs enjoy "showering"? He looks very pleased.

basically, yes. They drink through their skin, and they need quite a bit of water, so in a dry environment they're very happy for some 'rain'

when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing

it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river

ACTUALLY

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style. 

Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.

A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin. 

Tumblr English should literally be treated as its own language, because it does not follow the rules of any form of formal written English, and yet it does have its own consistent internal rules. If you don’t think that’s cool as fuck then I don’t even know what to tell you.

i love this post

This is super cool! Also idk if this has any relevance whatsoever but if you wanna have an argument inside one tag you cannot have commas in it so that’s a real existing constraint that has forced tumblrites to construct commaless sentences and perhaps this has helped in adopting the custom into posts as well ok I have no idea if this is what’s happened just I think it’s a reasonable assumption there might be a connection

^this.

The tags are absolutely a factor. You want someone to take a breath in the middle of a sentence, you start a new tag. You want to have, as seen here, this removable piece between commas (does it have a name?) - you have 5 tags in this sentence alone. And sometimes you just

pause in the middle of a sentence…

and let your voice

trail away

look at all you precious brilliant nerds nerding about language you make me so fucking happy omg

language is this constantly evolving thing tbh, it doesn’t remain the same unless it’s dead and the people who used it gone so seeing the evolution of the language used on tumblr is literally so fucking amazing i want to cry with joy at it

because we also add in words from other languages, or make entirely new words up as additional terms to denote something (see ‘tol’ and ‘smol’ in relation to ‘tall’ and ‘small’) and this is constant. we are doing this daily without any sort of breathing space because there’s millions of us on this hellsite and we are constantly talking and so the language changes day-by-day until we have general, universal rules for what to do in a post, what to add in our tags, how to add it, why we add it, what we mean by it

we’ve created a language in the same way our ancestors all did: by building on the ones that came before and changing them to suit our needs and our system

and that’s fucking awesome okay

awesome

I love this so much and language is so great and I’ve noticed the lack of punctuation thing recently, even on twitter, and used it for like a specific kind of rhetorical effect. idk it’s so fun I fucking love linguistics and the evolution of language

I also loved that the following one-word responses all sound drastically different out loud and showcase different reactions:

What?

What.

what

THIS POST IS TWELVE YEARS OLD?!?!?????

Woe, aberrations be upon ye.

Hey listen to the way this man talks to his fish thank you

(via @SmudgeTheInsultCat over on Mastodon)

@friend-crow origin story

NEW LORE JUST DROPPED

I will never not reblog this.

I saw this question posed on tiktok, but I think Tumblr would really enjoy it too.

If a fae creature offered to give one million dollars for a bone chosen at random, how many bones would you allow them to take?

Light clarifications; The fae is not the one choosing the bones. The bone is taken at random. Each bone, no matter the size or importance, is worth a full million dollars. You must also declare the exact number first, you can't go bone-by-bone. You either say 2 or you say 10, you can't work your way up to a higher number. The bones are removed instantaneously, and the money is given immediately as well. You will not get in government trouble for acquiring the money.

Tell me in the tags/replies how many bones you'd let the fae take. And as always, reblog for bigger sample size.

if you want to test your luck, this site lets you choose a random human bone :) https://randomlistgenerator.com/human-bones

@ltwilliammowett have you seen this?

#the painting is Rembrandt's storm on the sea of galilee#which is part of what makes this so cool to me!#the original was stolen in the 90s and has never been recovered#so this is one of the only ways you can even experience seeing it (tags via @profmeowmers)

ASCII art 10,000

“It’s something to do” sIR—

Dumbasses: AI is good actually because it means the poor poor disableds can finally make an art!

Top G Paul Smith: look at this cool squirrel I made entirely on a typewriter :)

Our Lady of the Damp and Rain

Look upon this mighty work! Our Lady resplendent in gold!

Edd’s big mistake.

He was floating near us and enjoying himself, until he realized he floated about 10 feet away from us and was gripped with UNRELENTING PANIC.

#TurtleTuesday :

Hunt Slonem (American, b. 1951) Turtle Tondo, 1986 Oil on canvas, D 36 in. (91.44 cm)

marker practice p7/59 quetzalcoatlus