Maybe someone made a typo and it just got out of hand?

I kinda feel like panic!at the disco started the whole exclamation point thing and then it caught on around the internet, but maybe they got it from somewhere else, IDK.

The world may never know…

Maybe it’s something mathematical?

I’ve been in fandom since *about* when Panic! formed and the adjective!character thing was already going strong, pretty sure it predates them.

It’s a way of referring to particular variations of (usually) a character — dark!Will, junkie!Sherlock, et cetera. I have suspected for a while that it originated from some archive system that didn’t accommodate spaces in its tags, so to make common interpretations/versions of the characters searchable, people started jamming the words together with an infix.

(Lately I’ve seen people use the ! notation when the suffix isn’t the full name, but is actually the second part of a common fandom portmanteau. This bothers me a lot but it happens, so it’s worth being aware of.)

“Bang paths” (! is called a “bang"when not used for emphasis) were the first addressing scheme for email, before modern automatic routing was set up. If you wanted to write a mail to the Steve here in Engineering, you just wrote “Steve” in the to: field and the computer sent it to the local account named Steve. But if it was Steve over in the physics department you wrote it to phys!Steve; the computer sent it to the “phys” computer, which sent it in turn to the Steve account. To get Steve in the Art department over at NYU, you wrote NYU!art!Steve- your computer sends it to the NYU gateway computer sends it to the “art” computer sends it to the Steve account. Etc. (“Bang"s were just chosen because they were on the keyboard, not too visually noisy, and not used for a huge lot already).

It became pretty standard jargon, as I understand, to disambiguate when writing to other humans. First phys!Steve vs the Steve right next to you, just like you were taking to the machine, then getting looser (as jargon does) to reference, say, bearded!Steve vs bald!Steve.

So I’m guessing alternate character version tags probably came from that.

100% born of bang paths. fandom has be floating around on the internet for six seconds longer than there has been an internet so early users just used the jargon associated with the medium and since it’s a handy shorthand, we keep it.

Absolutely from the bang paths–saw people using them in early online fandom back in 1993 for referring to things.

I had been doing it for a very, very long time but never actually knew the actual name for it. This is exciting! I like learning things.

I-I'm sorry but I can't stop thinking about this

My roommate just called from the kitchen to ask what was wrong because I laughed so hard I gave myself a coughing fit.

I'm so glad the music is what I thought it'd be.

dudes are rocking at unprecedented levels

thank you for the tag "make it hurt"

Thank god for Russian dash cams to bring us wonders like this

they’re saying it’s 3am and they’re so tired and lets just drive and get out of here and then it happens and they’re like ‘well that woke me up”

This video has given youtubers permanent strikes on their account for violent content. Reblog violent content on your dash TODAY

Elephants have learned highway robbery

@mrv3000​

I got way too much enjoyment out of this.

new heresy that makes the bible way funnier:

god genuinely had no idea that people would be able to disobey him, when he made them. angels couldn’t! everything in the universe was just an extension or a reflection of god himself, operating in perfect mechanical order. then he put a spark of his own creative consciousness in an animal and it turned out it could disobey him.

like, that’s why he told adam and eve not to access a perfectly accessible tree. nothing else in the universe up until that point would have done something he told them not to.

that’s why he asks cain a perfectly ridiculous question, given that he would have watched the murder happen right in front of him: where is your brother? what did you do to him? he didn’t know cain could lie. even when adam and eve disobeyed him, surprising absolutely everyone involved, they hadn’t figured out lying yet. cain figured out lying.

that’s why god decides to destroy humans and start over only a few centuries later. he has no idea what to do. not only are people disobeying and lying to him, they’ve started completely ignoring him, too. he can control the wind, the water, the plants, the animals, the angels, the heavens, the earth. but he cut a part of himself loose and gave it to this totally unique new critter and now he can’t get it back. he can’t make anyone do anything, and now they know it. he had to carve humanity back down to the one family that actually, for whatever reason, still listened to him, and he had to ride them pretty fucking hard from that point onward to make sure they didn’t just….. stop. because at any point basically any human, ever, even the ones who liked him, could just randomly decide to fuck off and do their own thing.

then like, according to christians, god thought maybe he could get a handle on whatever the fuck was going on with how bad humans were being by making another human who had even more god in him than all the other humans, and that didn’t work either. and also even jesus himself didn’t know what humans were going to do next, which was kill him young. like, god had to break the news to him based on an educated guess, and it was a big surprise to him! he was really upset! there’s a whole scene!

like, i think this is hands down the funniest fucking thing to conclude about god ever. he didn’t know it was going to turn out like this when he started and he didn’t know what to do when it did. he’s been basically scrambling to stay on top of the situation for six thousand years and he’s totally beefed it repeatedly.

god the omnipotent lord of creation knows everything, except what you’re going to do next. god the supreme ruler of the universe can do anything, except stop you. you have a little piece of god inside you and it lets you defy the most fundamental machinery of existence basically whenever you like.

if that’s not funny, i don’t know what is.

@roach-works’ original tags are too good to lose

more good tags from the heretical community:

today is the start of chanukah so for those who don't know: the holiday is celebrating the Maccabees, a group of ancient jewish freedom fighters.

the main jewish holy site, the Temple (and rly all of judea), had been conquered by the seleucid empire and repurposed into a temple for greek god Zeus. some upper class jews wanted to accept greek polytheism, letting the ancient tradition of judaism die out in favor of assimilation into empire. this of course was met with resistance from many jews, and that resistance was met with murder, subjugation, and outright religious persecution.as things in jewish history tend to go.

a large group of angry jews, largely poor farmers, who decided they werent afraid of death or imperialists or anything banded together as the Maccabees, named for the rebel leader Judah Maccabee and meaning "hammers". They fought a war against ensconced imperial forces, using largely guerrilla tactics and winning small skirmishes that built up over time into the ultimate victory: retaking the Temple and driving out the seleucids for good. as they celebrated and ritually cleansed the temple in accordance with the torah, the rebel fighters found that much had been taken or destroyed, with only one pot of oil left fit to light the Menorah, the religious lamp (which dates back to Moses himself). though there was only oil enough for one night, the lamp burned for eight nights, which was seen as a miracle and brings us back to the 8 candle lightings of modern day.

chanukah is definitely "not the most important jewish holiday" like many people say, but i wanted to share this story to bring some gravity to this celebratory time of year. we fry latkes and spin dreidels in the company of loved ones to bring joy in the winter, yes. but also, this tradition began as the revolt of an oppressed marginalized people, crushed by a government that did not represent them, left to rot by an upper class who sold their people out for nothing. the maccabees were not trained infantry, or a previous faction of government coming back together; they were just a ton of working class people unifying under a common cause, fighting scrappy battles to destroy the evil they saw looming. if you take anything from this holiday, it is the spirit of the maccabee: redouble your efforts to build and extend solidarity, release your fears of power and the size of our struggle, and dedicate yourself to fighting, in any way that you can. we too can unite, and push back the evil above us, and reclaim our world for all people. happy chanukah 🕎❤️

i KNEW my good sis francesca would come through for us and ask her dad about goncharov (1973) !!

Apparently there's an evolutionary theory that the reason why Africa has so much wild big-ass megafauna while the big-ass megafauna on all the other continents went extinct is because they evolved right beside humans, and knew us well enough to not get hunted into extinction.

So while everything from giant koalas to giant sloths barely had the time to think "what the fuck is that" before getting pierced by a spear and getting their bone marrow gently fed to babies and the toothless elderly, Africa had elephants who had all the time in the world to learn to tell apart human languages and teach the next generations of their herd which human sounds mean that this tribe won't hurt you, but humans who make this kind of sounds are a danger. And hippos learned to conclude "I think I'll fuck up this two-legged weird shit on sight."

That’s true about African Elephants being able to distinguish between human languages, BTW.

The original study they did on this is really cool, and it showed that not only can elephants distinguish languages, they respond differently depending on the general age and gender of the person spekaing. The researchers played recordings of different people speaking either Maasai or Kamba. All the speakers were saying the same thing, "Look, look over there, a group of elephants is coming."

What they found is that when presented with voices speaking Kamba, the elephants were supremely unbothered. The Kamba are mostly farmers, many work for the park services, and they rarely present a danger to elephants.

When presented with the voices of adult men speaking Maasai, the elephants drew close to each other and started investigating. The Maasai are largely cattle herders, and they sometimes come into conflict with elephants over water and grazing lands.

However, the elephants did not seem nervous when presented with the voices of women or young boys speaking Maasai. They were aware that only humans with deep voices were a threat to them.

They also seem to recognize that if humans are talking, they aren't necessarily a threat. Humans pursuing large game like elephants are stealth hunters. If you can hear them coming, they're probably not trying to hurt you.

Anyway, elephants are amazing and one of the creatures high up on my list of "non-humans who are probably people."

Reblogging for those fabulous details.

This is camp idc

TIL, the residents of Cheran, Mexico armed themselves and kicked out the ruling cartel as well as every politician and policeman. It now functions as a legal self-governing indigenous community with a crime rate near 0%

via reddit.com

👀

Specifically, it was indigenous women who freed their village from oppressive forces. From loggers to kidnappers to police, all of them were run out because these women armed (and masked) themselves, took hostages, and threatened to kill them.

Since this day, five years ago, they’ve begun to repair the forest that was destroyed by loggers over the decades. They’ve successfully revived 3000 acres! And because there is no more crime, all citizens feel save roaming the streets at night, and exploring the vast forest they’ve become responsible for.

I went looking for an update since it’s now 8 years from the uprising, and it appears things are still going very well for the community. In fact, they’ve been steadily improving: https://www.latimes.com/food/story/2019-10-07/mushrooms-cheran-mexico-indigenous-revolution

“They taught their neighbors to grind onions and guajillo chiles into thick, warming stews called atapakuas and young men to make tortillas by hand, a task historically seen as women’s work. The movement represented a return to certain traditions but, led by women and young people, also meant clearing space for new voices and attitudes.“  

~Michael Snyder  for the LA Times  Oct. 7, 2019

This is an EXCELLENT read! - go check it out.  I needed a happy ending.

this is why the powers that be have been attacking women for centuries because when we take over this is what happens

I think about this a lot.

may I add also “butt dial” vs “booty call” vs “bottom text”

Some things you need to know if you really want to be an ally to Jews:

-There is no such thing as a "Semitic people", and if there was, only Jews would be considered "Semitic people", since "antisemitism" was coined specifically as an alternative to the word Judenhasse, which means "Jew-hatred", and specifically to refer to Jews. If "Semites" was a legitimate identity, the only "Semites" would be Jews. People from the Levant who are not Jewish are not "Semitic", and are still very much capable of being antisemitic. In linguistic sense, "Semitic" only refers to a language family, not a cultural identity.

-"Goy" is not a slur. It means "nation", it's literally a word that means "non-Jewish person."

-Only Jews get to define what is and isn't antisemitic. If Jews are saying that something is antisemitic, listen to them.

-Jews are not White People Lite. There are Jews of every skin colour, and even light-skinned Jews can still be subject to racialized antisemitism. Listen to Jews when they say they experience racialized antisemitism.

-Judaism isn't just a religion. It's an ethnoreligion, a tribe, and a peoplehood. There are non-religious Jews. There are atheist Jews. And all Jews experience antisemitism.

-Judaism is a closed practice. Yes, we allow conversion, but it is a long and difficult process, and we do not allow prosletizing. It's like a locked gate where getting the key is extremely difficult.

-Judaism is not Christianity-Lite. Judaism came first, it is an ancient identity and peoplehood independent from Christianity. Christianity appropriated and butchered elements of Judaism.

-There are Jews of every sexuality and gender identity, and we have a long history of gender diversity and non-heteronormative sexuality. Include LGBTQ Jews in your activism.

-The Holocaust isn't your metaphor or comparison tool.

-Antisemitism has been around for thousands of years and it's still extremely prevalent and rising today.

-The Jewish community is a diverse, multi-faceted community. There are so many ways to be Jewish and so many ways to express one's Jewish identity. No two Jews are the same, but we are united by our shared history, heritage, and identity.

Thank you for taking the steps to being a true ally to Jewish people.

I’d like to add, not all Jewish mysticism and lore applies to Christianity, and so it is EXTREMELY possible to appropriate from Judaism. Lilith, golems, and Kabbalah are most commonly appropriated. They are Judaism-specific and have nothing to do with Christianity.

YES

Also the Hebrew alphabet isn't a "mysterious, occult alphabet" like I've seen some neo-pagans and witches treat it, and then of course use it for the ~aesthetic~.

I strengthen the last one! The language may have been dead and resurrected and is VERY VERY old but those who speak Hebrew use it in our day to day lives! It’s not mysterious nor is it occult, it’s just the alphabet we use.

I agree, but Hebrew was never a dead language. It has been spoken continuously as a liturgical language, as well as a Lingua Franca for Jews from different places wanting to communicate with each other. Many could speak basic Hebrew as a second language. Plus, Hebrew has been incorporated into new dialects and languages of every language of places with a historic Jewish population; Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic, to name a few.

Hebrew has definitely been modernized and popularized, but it was never truly a dead language.