Shark Enjoying some sea grass.......
[video description: a shark swims very close to the ground which is covered in seagrass. Its belly touches the grass and it rolls around in the grass a little. Multiple remoras are attached to the shark. The caption reads “Shark Enjoying some sea grass” in green cursive. Soft piano music plays in the background. End description]
i found another really good G-rated pompeii graffito. a normal polite beginning of letters was "if you're well, that's good, I'm well". this woman wrote on a wall:
To Alexander from Livia. If you're well, I don't care very much. If you're dead, I'm rightly glad.
Four ways to divide France into two equally populated parts.
And a world with fewer languages isn’t only a world with more limited means of communication. It’s also a world with fewer stories and folk tales, fewer hagiographies, fewer poems, myths, and recipes, fewer remedies, fewer memories.
Fennelly, Beth Ann. “Fruits We’ll Never Taste, Languages We’ll Never Hear: The Need for Needless Complexity”
This echidna, in Australia, had been seeking ants in red earth. by Rod Waddington
Imagine thinking that wanting straight people to be accepting of gay people is a "trap" and not like, literally THE entire goal of the modern LGBT rights movement since its inception
okay. this is in response to me saying “respectability politics is a trap.” which it absolutely is.
but i’ll give you the benefit of the doubt here. let’s define respectability politics, shall we?
several people who are more well-spoken than me have talked about this. to quote this article on the subject:
Respectability politics is a school of thought that utilizes respectability narratives as the basis for enacting social, political, and legal change.
Respectability narratives are representations of marginalized individuals meant to construct an image of the marginalized group as people sharing similar traits, values, morals with the dominant group.
essentially, respectability politics is when people in a marginalized group (queer people, disabled people, people of color) wish to be accepted by the majority, and thus present themselves in a way and behave in a way that the majority deems acceptable - and pressure others in their marginalized group to do the same. for example:
(I’m using examples I’ve seen in the queer community because I’m queer; I know this happens a lot in communities of color, but I am not qualified to speak on that at all.)
this stems from a desire to be accepted by the majority; for the purposes of this discussion, straight people. we hear straight people say things like “i could never date a bi person, they’re all cheaters” or “i don’t mind gay guys, don’t just shove it in my face” and “why don’t lesbians act like women if they love them?” and, in response, some people go, “i don’t act like that!! you can accept me! i fit in! i’m respectable, i’m not like those guys, they embarrass us!”
there’s also a lot of people saying, “don’t reinforce the stereotype.” as if it’s OUR fault straight people stereotype us.
so this leads to shaming within our own community:
and that all boils down to:
and that’s the real problem: telling other queer people, “it is YOUR fault you’re not accepted, YOU aren’t acceptable, YOU reinforce these stereotypes, YOU should try and be more respectable, more normal.” and the thing is, “normal” is defined by the majority. THEY decide what is acceptable behavior for us. and guess what?
most of the time, that boils down to, “It’s fine if you’re different... as long as you’re as close to what I deem normal as possible. As long as I can’t tell you’re different.”
in the queer community, this sort of thinking has led to the exclusion of butch lesbians, femme gay men, nonbinary people, non-passing trans people, trans people in general, people who use any pronouns besides she/her and he/him, bisexual people, ace people, aro people, pan people, polyamorous bisexual people, people who have an active sex life, sex workers, people who have changed how they identify, and countless others. these people get shoved aside by the Good Respectable Gays, who are eager to say, “We’re not like them, we’re just like you!” in order to be accepted by the mainstream. and it still doesn’t work. even the most macho, would-never-guess-it gay guy is bound to face some level of oppression or otherness at some point in his life. it doesn’t matter how much he fits in, how much he distances himself from the Unacceptable Queers; it won’t work 100% of the time. how’s that for a punchline?
there is no point in trying to file off the “unacceptable” parts of our community just to please straight people.
so when people say lil nas x is bad, actually, because he “reinforces the stereotype” of gay people going to hell and thinking a lot about sex or whatever, they’re playing right into respectability politics. why can’t he just talk about his sexuality in a normal way? why can’t he express himself in a nicer way? why does he have to use that imagery? why does he have to make straight people uncomfortable?
lis nas x is a gay black man who grew up being told he’d burn in hell for being gay. and he made an awesome song with a legendary music video saying, “fine. i’ll go to hell, just like you want, and it’ll be great. i’ll take the damn place over and make satan fall in love with me. and i’ll have a great time doing it, because i’m proud of who i am, and i won’t apologize for it or be ashamed of it anymore.”
to see that and wring your hands, worrying that a straight person will see it and decide to be homophobic about it, and pinning the blame for that on nas is missing the point.
every time we as a community make ourselves lesser or change the way we present just to be accepted by the majority, they move the goalposts, and someone else gets left behind. and the beautiful thing about the queer community is that there is a place for everyone who is left out in the cold by the straight, cis majority.
“We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” was the rallying cry for a reason. we’re different, you think we’re weird, you think we’re deviant, you don’t get us, and that’s fine, you don’t have to get us. we’re not going anywhere. get used to it.
respectability politics is a game you cannot win. so stop playing.
Okay but magpies when they do this
[footage of the inside of an ordinary Eastern-European home, taken with a handheld phone camera, the man filming is walking from the living room to the back door of the house]
man, narrating in russian: Every fucking year, this time of the year, the pond at my backyard gets infested. What do ponds get infested with? Frogs? Poisonous weeds? Geese? No. Not my pond.
[The man opens the back door, stepping out into a garden. Three or four nude, human-like figures dash from the borders of a pond back into the water.]
man: Rusalki! I don't know where they come from or how they get here, and I can't afford to hire an exterminator every year. I can't let my cat outside anymore. Last year a rusalka managed to drown a whole deer in my pond, the stench was unbearable.
[He walks as he speaks, approaching the pond. There are several eerily beautiful female beings peering at him from under the surface, their long hair floating in the murky water. Their eyes are gleaming in an unhuman way. The man holding the camera stops to film them.]
man, calm and deadpan: What the fuck are all of you staring at. Get jobs or something.
[One of the rusalki, smaller than the others and clearly not a fully matured adult, slowly reaches out of the water with her white, thin hand, grasping his ankle. He appears unconcerned.]
man: You can't drown me, you little idiot. You're too small. Shoo!
[A loud thud startles the rusalki, making them scatter. A second thud makes it clear these are the approaching footsteps of something massive. The man turns around and points the camera at what appears to be a house, walking past above the treeline with chicken-like legs]
man, now yelling: IF YOUR HOUSE SHITS ON MY YARD AGAIN I SWEAR TO FUCKING GOD-
This post is a joy and a delight.
this is the energy
Okay I HAD to do this was just perfect
[Del compte d'Instagram parlars.mallorquins.]
Translation:
Prehistory: Paleobalear
Language or group of languages spoken in Mallorca during the islands' prehistory. It has a pre-indoeuropean substrate and was brought by the different migration waves who came from the coast of Catalonia and the Gulf of Lion.
Roman period: Latin
Italic Indoeuropean language. The Roman Empire brought it when it conquered the island in 123 BC. It gradually contaminated and replaced the indigenous language. In the end, it became the hegemonic language. Many indigenous people adopted Latinized names.
Dark centuries: Vandalic language and Latin
Vandalic: Eastern Germanic language. The Vandals occupied the island in 455 after the fall of the Roman empire. It's believed it was the language of the ruling class.
Latin: however, the islands' population probably continued speaking Vulgar Latin.
Al-Andalus: Arabic and Amazigh
Arabic: Semitic language from the Arabic peninsula. Introduced with the Islamic conquest in 902. It was the language of the political power.
Amazigh: Afroasiatic language from the North of Africa. Brought by the repopulators, it was the language of the countryside.
Kingdom of Mallorca: Catalan
Occitano-Romance language. Brought with the Catalan conquest of 1229. It was the official language of the Crown of Aragon and, thus, of the Kingdom of Mallorca. Besides in the official organizations, it was spoken both in the city (Palma) and the countryside (the rest of the island), since it was the language of the repopulators.
Province Balearics: Spanish and Catalan
Spanish: Ibero-Romance language. The Nueva Planta decrees of 1715, the incorporation of the Balearic islands to Spain, and Franco's dictatorship introduced and established the use of Spanish.
Catalan: still, Catalan continued being the language of the Mallorcan people.
[From the Instagram account parlars.mallorquins.]
Combined Axe and Flintlock Pistol, 1570, Art Institute of Chicago: Arms, Armor, Medieval, and Renaissance
George F. Harding Collection Size: L. 48.9 cm (19 ¼ in.) Wt. 8 lb. 8 oz. Caliber .495 Medium: Steel, wood, bone, and staghorn
Summer Destinations 7
Split, Croatia (by David Curry)
Tortoise beetles come in all different shapes and sizes and colours and every single one is a joy to behold. In this way, you are no different
synchronisation/dubbing is so interesting to me. the art of translation is just……wow. it can be done so beautifully but then it can go so wrong. like when teresa lisbon says “come on” very softly in patrick jane’s direction & it feels so intimate and then you hear the German synchronisation, which is “Kommen Sie” & they use the formal ‘you’ and suddenly it’s just two friendly colleagues and not two people slowly falling in love, like,,,,,, the implications! but then the other way round i will hear the German version of the song from Tangled (2009) & start bawling my eyes out because it just hits different and the English version could never! idk, i just think about languages & translations & how we never really know what another person truly means a lot
the spanish dubber of spn wrote this
