Synalpheus Regalis or Sponge-Dwelling Snapping Shrimp!

On land, we are all familiar with the eusocial behaviors of bees, but did you know that there is one genus of marine creatures that exhibit these same behaviors?

Sponge-dwelling snapping shrimp (aka pistol shrimp) are, according to Nat Geo, the bees of the sea! These tiny shrimp host the inside of sea sponges and live in colonies of about 300 members. The queen will reproduce while the eggs/babies are cared for by the colony. Guard shrimp also protect the queen and the colony from predators. This altruistic behavior exhibited by these shrimp is a strange and beautiful act that is continually being studied by scientists!

Game-Changing Sites for Writers

A recent search for a specific type of site to help me build new characters led me down a rabbit hole. Normally, that would make me much less productive, but I have found a treasure trove of websites for writers.

Bring Characters/Places to Life

There are a few different places you can use to create a picture of something entirely new. I love this site for making character pictures as references, instead of stock photos or whatever pops up on Google Images.

thispersondoesnotexist: every time you reload the page, this site generates a headshot of someone who doesn't exist. This is great if you're thinking about a character's personality or age and don't have specifics for their facial features yet.

Night Cafe: this is an AI art generator that takes your text prompt and generates an image for it. I tried it for various scenery, like "forest" or "cottage." It takes a minute for your requested photo to load, but no more than maybe five for the program to finish the picture.

Art Breeder: this website has endless images of people, places, and general things. Users can blend photos to create something new and curious visitors can browse/download those images without creating an account. (But if you do want to make an account to create your own, it's free!)

Find Random Places on Earth

You might prefer to set a story in a real-life environment so you can reference that place's weather, seasons, small-town vibe, or whatever you like. If that's the case, try:

MapCrunch: the homepage generates a new location each day and gives the location/GPS info in the top left of the screen. To see more images from previous days, hit "Gallery" in the top left.

Atlas Obscura: hover over or tap the "Places" tab, then hit "Random Place." A new page will load with a randomly generated location on the planet, provide a Google Maps link, and tell you a little bit about the place.

Random World Cities: this site makes randomly selected lists of global cities. Six appear for each search, although you'll have to look them up to find more information about each place. You can also use the site to have it select countries, US cities or US states too.

Vary Your Wording

Thesauruses are great, but these websites have some pretty cool perspectives on finding just the right words for stories.

Describing Words: tell this website which word you want to stop repeating and it will give you tons of alternative words that mean the same thing. It typically has way more options than other sites I use.

Reverse Dictionary: type what you need a word for in Reverse Dictionary's search box and it will give you tons of words that closely match what you want. It also lists the words in order of relevancy, starting with a word that most accurately describes what you typed. (There's also an option to get definitions for search results!)

Tip of My Tongue: this website is phenomenal. It lets you search for that word you can't quite place by a letter in it, the definition, what it sounds like, or even its scrambled letters. A long list of potential options will appear on the right side of the screen for every search.

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Hope this helps when you need a hand during your next writing session 💛

Boarding

Boarding is when the crew of a ship tries to capture another ship and not sink it by forcing their way on board. Captured ships and captured crew have been a valuable asset to retrieve throughout most of the naval history.

Ancient war galleys, such as those of the Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians and Persians, were armed with heavy ram spurs to pierce the sides of an enemy when the opportunity arose, but they also carried soldiers and archers. But since the opportunity rarely arose, they had to resort to fighting on the enemy deck.

Naval battle between the Romans and Carthaginians, 260 BC.

A ramp (corvus) with long spkies was lowered when the enemy was lying alongside and the men stormed the deck to defeat the enemy as in a land battle.

Fighting as on land and ramming was still very present in the Middle Ages, even if attempts were made to keep distance. As a result, the height of a ship became an important factor that gave the crew the advantage of being able to attack or shoot at the deck of an enemy. Warships began to resemble fortifications on land, with high sides and “castles” built at each end of the hull. The forecastle, which addresses the front part of the ship, dates from this period.

The explosion of the Spanish flagship during the Battle of Gibraltar, 25 April 1607, by Hendrick Vroom 1621

The temptation to build bigger and bigger ships and to load them with heavily armed soliders and archers on the upper deck and different types of cannons distributed all over the ship when they went into battle led to some notoriously unstable ships. This was the case, for example, with Henry VIII’s Mary Rose, which capsized in calm weather and sank in the Solent, as she sailed towards a French assault.

The arrival of heavy cannons on board warships in the early 17th century began to change the way naval warfare was conducted. By the end of the 17th century, naval gunnery had become the main means of fighting an enemy, and small-scale warfare between masses of ships trying to board gave way to fleets in long lines manoeuvring across the sea.

Even though boarding was now used less frequently, it remained a legitimate tactic. All warships trained for both boarding and defence against attackers. When they went into action, they often attached ship-spanning nets to provide a barrier to the enemy. They also carried a large arsenal of weapons for close combat, including muskets, pistols, blunderbusses, cutlasses, boarding axes and pikes. There were even some weapons designed specifically for this type of warfare, such as the strange four-barrel “duck-foot” pistol. All but the smallest warships had marines on board, who were specialists in this kind of warfare. And were often used as sniper in the tops. 

Capture of HMS Ambuscade by the French corvette Bayonnaise, 14 December 1798

Under certain circumstances boarding was a preferred tactic. Both privateers and pirates wanted to capture a prize, while causing as little damage to the ship or cargo as possible. It was also the only tactic available during a cutting attack, i.e. when a ship was captured by an enemy approaching in boats alongside.

Even in actions between warships, a protagonist who was in an unequal firefight with a larger enemy could turn the tables with a quick, surprising boarding. Nelson used this tactic to capture the Spanish 80-gun San Nicolás and the 112-gun San Josef with the crew of his much smaller 74-gun captain in the Battle of Cape St. Vincent. In 1798 the French corvette Bayonnaise used the boarding to surprise and defeat the Royal Navy’s larger frigate, Ambuscade. Cochrane did the same in 1801 when he conquered the Spanish 32 guns xebeque El Gamo  with his much smaller, 14-gun brig Speedy.

The Action and Capture of the Spanish Xebeque El Gamo, by  Clarkson Frederick Stanfield 1845 

Smooth bore cannon in the age of sail were only really effective at ranges below a thousand yards, and most battles took place at even closer distances than this, which kept boarding in play as a possible tactic. Even when the introduction of rifled guns in the 19th century pushed out the range at which sea battles took place, crews were still trained in boarding. It was used in situations in which firing at an enemy was not an option. The suppression of the Atlantic slave trade in the 19th century, for example, was largely carried out in this way, for fear of harming the slaves being liberated.

Even if the boarding has changed in its current form, it is still present and is still carried out.

2300 years old Scythian woman’s boot preserved in the frozen ground of the Altai Mountains[750x451]

So I was mobile when I reblogged this earlier, but re: the adornment on the soles. These shoes undoubtedly belonged to the Pazyryk Ice Maiden, given the date, culture, and location. (I love her, I care about her so much, and I will never not ramble about her given the chance.) The woman who wore these boots was 30 years old, at the oldest. She was probably a priestess, a storyteller. She was from a horseriding culture, and it’s unclear if stirrups had been invented at the time. She suffered from chronic pain, and she died from breast cancer and/or complications from a fall (probably from horseback). This is the first time I’ve seen her boots, but I’m entirely unsurprised by it. She may not have had to walk much, given her status and riding culture. She may not have been ABLE to walk much, given her apparent disabilities. She was valued in her community, despite these limitations, to the point that they created these beautiful, less-than-functional objects for her, that they buried her with ceremony befitting royalty, that she and her belongings are the best and most solid example of this culture we have. Disabled people have inherent worth in a society, and always have.

tips for choosing a Chinese name for your OC when you don’t know Chinese

This is a meta for gifset trade with @purple-fury! Maybe you would like to trade something with me? You can PM me if so!

Choosing a Chinese name, if you don’t know a Chinese language, is difficult, but here’s a secret for you: choosing a Chinese name, when you do know a Chinese language, is also difficult. So, my tip #1 is: Relax. Did you know that Actual Chinese People choose shitty names all the dang time? It’s true!!! Just as you, doubtless, have come across people in your daily life in your native language that you think “God, your parents must have been on SOME SHIT when they named you”, the same is true about Chinese people, now and throughout history. If you choose a shitty name, it’s not the end of the world! Your character’s parents now canonically suck at choosing a name. There, we fixed it!

However. Just because you should not drive yourself to the brink of the grave fretting over choosing a Chinese name for a character, neither does that mean you shouldn’t care at all. Especially, tip #2, Never just pick some syllables that vaguely sound Chinese and call it a day. That shit is awful and tbh it’s as inaccurate and racist as saying “ching chong” to mimic the Chinese language. Examples: Cho Chang from Harry Potter, Tenten from Naruto, and most notorious of all, Fu Manchu and his daughter Fah lo Suee (how the F/UCK did he come up with that one).

So where do you begin then? Well, first you need to pick your character’s surname. This is actually not too difficult, because Chinese actually doesn’t have that many surnames in common use. One hundred surnames cover over eighty percent of China’s population, and in local areas especially, certain surnames within that one hundred are absurdly common, like one out of every ten people you meet is surnamed Wang, for example. Also, if you’re making an OC for an established media franchise, you may already have the surname based on who you want your character related to. Finally, if you’re writing an ethnically Chinese character who was born and raised outside of China, you might only want their surname to be Chinese, and give them a given name from the language/culture of their native country; that’s very very common.

If you don’t have a surname in mind, check out the Wikipedia page for the list of common Chinese surnames, roughly the top one hundred. If you’re not going to pick one of the top one hundred surnames, you should have a good reason why. Now you need to choose a romanization system. You’ll note that the Wikipedia list contains variant spellings. If your character is a Chinese-American (or other non-Chinese country) whose ancestors emigrated before the 1950s (or whose ancestors did not come from mainland China), their name will not be spelled according to pinyin. It might be spelled according to Wade-Giles romanization, or according to the name’s pronunciation in other Chinese languages, or according to what the name sounds like in the language of the country they immigrated to. (The latter is where you get spellings like Lee, Young, Woo, and Law.)  A huge proportion of emigration especially came from southern China, where people spoke Cantonese, Min, Hakka, and other non-Mandarin languages.

So, for example, if you want to make a Chinese-Canadian character whose paternal source of their surname immigrated to Canada in the 20s, don’t give them the surname Xie, spelled that way, because #1 that spelling didn’t exist when their first generation ancestor left China and #2 their first generation ancestor was unlikely to have come from a part of China where Mandarin was spoken anyway (although still could have! that’s up to you). Instead, name them Tse, Tze, Sia, Chia, or Hsieh.

If you’re working with a character who lives in, or who left or is descended from people who left mainland China in the 1960s or later; or if you’re working with a historical or mythological setting, then you are going to want to use the pinyin romanization. The reason I say that you should use pinyin for historical or mythological settings is because pinyin is now the official or de facto romanization system for international standards in academia, the United Nations, etc. So if you’re writing a story with characters from ancient China, or medieval China, use pinyin, even though not only pinyin, but the Mandarin pronunciations themselves didn’t exist back then. Just… just accept this. This is one of those quirks of having a non-alphabetic language.

(Here’s an “exceptions” paragraph: there are various well known Chinese names that are typically, even now, transliterated in a non-standard way: Confucius, Mencius, the Yangtze River, Sun Yat-sen, etc. Go ahead and use these if you want. And if you really consciously want to make a Cantonese or Hakka or whatever setting, more power to you, but in that case you better be far beyond needing this tutorial and I don’t know why you’re here. Get. Scoot!)

One last point about names that use the ü with the umlaut over it. The umlaut ü is actually pretty critical for the meaning because wherever the ü appears, the consonant preceding it also can be used with u: lu/lü, nu/nü, etc. However, de facto, lots of individual people, media franchises, etc, simply drop the umlaut and write u instead when writing a name in English, such as “Lu Bu” in the Dynasty Warriors franchise in English (it should be written Lü Bu). And to be fair, since tones are also typically dropped in Latin script and are just as critical to the meaning and pronunciation of the original, dropping the umlaut probably doesn’t make much difference. This is kind of a choice you have to make for yourself. Maybe you even want to play with it! Maybe everybody thinks your character’s surname is pronounced “loo as in loo roll” but SURPRISE MOFO it’s actually lü! You could Do Something with that. Also, in contexts where people want to distinguish between u and ü when typing but don’t have easy access to a keyboard method of making the ü, the typical shorthand is the letter v. 

Alright! So you have your surname and you know how you want it spelled using the Latin alphabet. Great! What next?

Alright, so, now we get to the hard part: choosing the given name. No, don’t cry, I know baby I know. We can do this. I believe in you.

Here are some premises we’re going to be operating on, and I’m not entirely sure why I made this a numbered list:

You’re going to stick with the same romanization system (or lack thereof) as you’ve used for the surname. In the interests of time, I’m going to focus on pinyin only.

First let’s take a look at some real and actual Chinese names and talk about what they mean, why they might have been chosen, and also some fictional OC names that I’ve come up with that riff off of these actual Chinese names. And then we’ll go over some resources and also some pitfalls. Hopefully you can learn by example! Fun!!!

Let’s start with two great historical strategists: Zhuge Liang and Zhou Yu, and the names I picked for some (fictional) sons of theirs. Then I will be talking about Sun Shangxiang and Guan Yinping, two historical-legendary women of the same era, and what I named their fictional daughters. And finally I’ll be talking about historical Chinese pirate Gan Ning and what I named his fictional wife and fictional daughter. Uh, this could be considered spoilers for my novel Clouds and Rain and associated one-shots in that universe, so you probably want to go and read that work… and its prequels… and leave lots of comments and kudos first and then come back. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

(I’m just kidding you don’t need to know a thing about my work to find this useful.)

Keep reading

I had to remove the links from the main post in order for it to show up in tag search, so here are the links to dictionaries and resources as a reblog!

Antarctica  Sailing

© Bark Europa

Cuttlefish can change color to fade into the background. It can do it amazingly fast.

more importantly they’re walkin on little peets

This is a Flamboyant Cuttlefish, which does not need to blend in, because it’s poisonous! The colors advertise that. They also don’t swim often because they aren’t very buoyant, which they can get away with, because again, poisonous.

Also they’re tiny.

A thing I’m doing! I’m akiwitch on twitch

I sometimes still see people tagging #please don't reblog but the post is rebloggable so just making sure you know about this feature:

It's in the post settings under the little gear wheel in the corner and the options are Anyone or No One

THIS IS SO IMPORTANT!

There ARE trolls who search and reblog posts tagged "DNR" "do not reblog" etc etc. Before, our only option was to not tag things, or if necessary bury the no-reblog tag after five other tags so they wouldn't come up in search.

We don't have to do that anymore. If you don't want something shared, click the gear icon. Set the option to No One. Tag your post with anything you want, because unless someone goes to the trouble of posting a screenshot, no one can share your post now.

And well, if someone does screen shot your post to share it, you need to block them at minimum.

It's a great way to prevent a post from "escaping containment". It's also good if your original post has been edited with corrections but the version being reblogged isn't that version. It can prevent people from dogpiling someone. There's literally so many reasons to use this feature, give it a go!!

Bioluminescence Defense

fuckin fish has a goddamn anime attack

At what level did this fish learn ice beam?

Hey guys, you know about the Same Energy website right? has someone made a post about that? Cuz otherwise im gonna sing its praises to high heaven for its artistic references

Okay so I'm just gonna talk about it even if someone's already made a post, someone's gotta spread the word of this incredible website

So you go to the main page, and you like the vibes of one of these pictures

Lets click skull face lady.

It then gives you BUNCHES of images with similar vibes. Want to tweak it a little and narrow it down further? What if you like the vibe of thatt purple one more? Well u click that one and TADA

And you can just keep narrowing down from there, and if you make an account you can even save images you like :D

I know it sounds like i'm advertising for them but honestly i would GLADLY take money to advertise for these guys, their website is still only in beta mode but already I use this (or try to) for my art warmups because I get to try to do something a little different each time. (I would give money to support them but I am broke AF so that's why I'm just spreading the word instead ;A; )

And on the front page there's even an option to search with your own images I think! (Though, I tried to do that but I kept getting an Error, so I don't know if that's a Me With Bad Internet issue or a Website issue. Again, website is in beta, so if it is a problem on their end it will hopefully be fixed soon).

and i just love this website cuz its GREAT for collecting asthetics and vibes (i mean, hence the name "same energy")

It's like Pinterest on crack :0

So yeah :D Definitely go check out Same Energy, it is a GREAT resource for artists and those trying to collect specific vibes.

Sharing here bc helpful resource, but also to add on a few notes.

This is a search engine! Long pressing images on mobile will bring up where the engine found the image (not sure how to pull this up on desktop). It is no different from the images section of Google or Duck Duck Go or w/e else you use in this regard.

I specify this bc pintrest is a hellscape of stolen works :,) it's entire foundation is based on ppl finding aesthetic photos and art and uploading them to the site with no credit or permission. This isn't like that. It is a search engine.

Sometimes what it finds may be reuploads, which sucks, but it's not based in trying to do that. So if you like a photo you see, check out the source. If it seems ligit, consider helping the artist by leaving a tip or doing whatever pleases that site's algorithm.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again but it is absolutely an example of civilizational inadequacy that only deaf people know ASL

“oh we shouldn’t teach children this language, it will only come in handy if they [checks notes] ever have to talk in a situation where it’s noisy or they need to be quiet”

My mom learned it because she figured she’ll go deaf when she gets old

My family went holiday SCUBA diving once, and a couple of Deaf guys were in the group. I was really little and I spent most of the briefing overcome with the realization that while the rest of us were going to have regulators in our mouths and be underwater fairly soon, they were going to be able to do all the same stuff and keep talking.

The only reason some form of sign language is not a standard skill is ableism, as far as I can tell.

For anyone interested in learning, Bill Vicars has full lessons of ASL on youtube that were used in my college level classes. 

https://www.youtube.com/user/billvicars

and here’s the link to the website he puts in his videos:

https://www.lifeprint.com/

Update: you guys this is an amazing resource for learning asl. Bill Vicars is an incredible teacher. His videos are of him teaching a student in a classroom, using the learned vocabulary to have conversations.

Not only is the conversation format immersive and helpful for learning the grammar, but the students make common mistakes which he corrects, mistakes I wouldn’t have otherwise know I was making.

He also emphasizes learning ASL in the way it’s actually used by the Deaf community and not the rigid structure that some ASL teachers impose in their classrooms

His lesson plans include learning about the Deaf community, which is an important aspect of learning ASL. Knowing how to communicate in ASL without the knowledge of the culture behind it leaves out a lot of nuances and explanations for the way ASL is.

Lastly, his lessons are just a lot of fun to watch. He is patient, entertaining, and funny. This good natured enthusiasm is contagious and learning feels like a privilege and not a chore

And it’s all FREE. Seriously. If you’ve ever wanted to learn ASL

I love it!!

WAS ANYONE GOING TO TELL ME THAT FISH ARE VOCAL!?

@bunjywunjy WHAT THE FUCK, PLEASE EXPLAIN

LOTS of fish make noise of some sort, usually by using their swim bladders as a kind of drum! they use noise for the same reasons birds do: to stay in touch with each other, warn of predators in the area, attract a mate, or just to yell HEY GUYS ITS DAY NOW

fish noises aren’t nearly as pretty as birdsong though, it’s mostly grunts, clicks, pops, and squeaks. but it’s still REALLY FUCKIN COOL, plus can birds sing underwater? no. no they can’t. git gud, birds.