Reached out to a biologist to request some info about an extinct species of freshwater shrimp and the email she sent in response was not only lovely and helpful but also kind of poetry to me? People who study invertebrates are actually the most hopeful and compassionate scientists that we have.

Fun fact about Tobi: I have a blistering personal hatred for Alex Jones. Mostly because he was my mentally ill, brain damaged mother's (I'm not being cruel she literally has a hole in her brain from cancer) introduction to the world of conspiracy theories and alt right bullshit.

So for years, every now and then, I put a curse on him. Curses are fun because they let you feel like you're hurting someone without ever actually doing anything illegal that could conceivably harm them. My curse was in the form of a drawing- Anubis, the Egyptian god of death and judgment, as a jackal, eating the heart out of Jones' chest.

Today I wake up to the news that Jones' stupid fucking Infowars channel was bought by the Onion, who intends to gut it out and use its corpse as a puppet to mock the ignorance the channel once espoused as truth.

I'm not saying there is or is not a god. But I have a sneaking suspicion there might be an Anubis.

Drew another one to celebrate why not. Suffer and die you stupid motherfucker.

I actually really like the thing when you're starting to get the hang of a new language, enough to understand and say simple sentences but you gotta get creative to get more complex thoughts across, like a puzzle. I remember a time in the restortation school when a classmate who wasn't natively finnish and did her best anyway dropped something and sighed, telling me "every day is monday this week. I have had four mondays this week." And I understood.

I don't think I speak much of spanish anymore, but in the nursing school training period I did there, I did manage to get by with making weird Tarzan sentences. I got a nosebleed at some point and startled another nurse. Not knowing the words "humidity" or "stress", I managed to string together: "This is ok. It is hot, it is cold, I have a bad day, I am sad, I have blood. This is normal for me." And she understood.

And sometimes you just say things weird, but it's better than not saying it. One time, I was stuck in a narrow hallway behind someone walking really slowly with a walker, and he apologised for being in the way. I was not in any hurry, but didn't know the spanish word for "hurry", but I did know enough words to try to circumvent it by borrowing the english "I have all the time in the world."

The man burst into one of those cackling old man laughters that they do when something in this world still manages to surprise them. He had to be somewhere between 70 and a 100 years old, and I guess if there was one thing he wasn't expecting to hear today, it would be a random blond vaguely baltic-looking fuck casually announce that he is the sole owner and keeper of the very concept of time.

I’ve mostly learned Chinese in school, so I know a lot of academic vocabulary while having the language skills of a toddler in some basic areas. Once, I forgot the word for sad, which is a really dumb thing to forget. A bunch of the ways to say sad in Chinese are literally just “not happy”, but I also momentarily forgot how to say happy. So instead I said “there is an economic downturn inside my brain”.

When my wife and I were in Japan we went to an izakaya on our first full night in the country, and when it was time to pay we weren't sure where to do it, at the table or at the counter up front? Our waitress didn't speak much English, so I threw myself on that conversational grenade with, "Okane ga koko desu ka? Okane ga asoko desu ka?" Literally translated that's, "Money is/goes/should be here? Money is/goes/should be over there?"

She very gratefully confirmed that "Money goes over there," and we paid and left.

This is exactly what I was taught to do when I took Spanish (and I took a decades' worth, and my main teacher was amazing). He always tried to get us to tell him what we wanted or needed or was trying to say in the best way we knew how, because that is how people actually use language. Rather than have it be a barrier, he taught us above all to keep communicating. He never really told us why, or how valuable a skill it would be, he would just pretend he couldn't understand us anyway when we asked for a word we didn't know, and basically forced us to do exactly that. So it became completely normal to just...do that when we didn't know something.

Later, when I was in college and/or in the real world and I didn't know a word or couldn't remember or didn't have the words for a concept, I would I automatically do what I always did, what had become normalised: I would talk around it, which is what my teacher always called it. I even had one of my professors compliment me on getting what I needed that way, and she said that she'd never had another student do that and how helpful it was for her to be able to help me. I know that when I encountered others in my job with whom I had to speak in Spanish, and I couldn't communicate with them in the "proper" way, I could still get what I needed, or they needed, and there was always a sense of delight that even though my grammar was far from perfect, and I didn't always use the right words, that we all accomplished what we were there for. Most people don't care if you get it "right." They just want to be able to communicate effectively. (Can't speak for the French, though. 😉)

I also highly recommend doing this in your native language if you forget a word or blank on something. When I have conversations with people and they tell me they're blanking or can't think of something, I always, always ask them to describe it. Most people don't because they think it's weird and so either they don't get their point across or the conversation simply stops. But if they were more willing to keep communicating, we might get there. So I'm subtly trying to train everyone around me to do the same thing.

it's so much less frustrating and more funny when you can forget the word for windows and just say 'the doors for light to come in the wall' and if you forget the word for noodles you say 'you know the bread worms? from soup?' and if you forget the word for tiger you say 'those big assholes in the jungle, with stripes, they're orange.'

genuinely people love it when you do this. it makes the rest of the conversation so much more fun.

official linguistics post

the second eel at the end in its little cuck shelter 💜

eel deets from @whitefangthefightingwolf

pro-abortion. pro-divorce. i believe we have the god-given right to give up

when people go after no-fault divorce or abortion what they're really doing is trying to enshrine the sunk cost fallacy into law

it sounds like a joke but this is a genuine political belief of mine. you should be able to leave a situation you don't like. the government has no business trapping you in a relationship.

quitters rights!

genuinely irritated about the prevalence of brother-sister character designs where the brother has a huge nose and the sister has a tiny nose. 1) why are you a coward who hates the joy and beauty of women with big noses 2) have you looked at any real human siblings lately 3) why do you appear to think the nose is a secondary sex characteristic

wishing all women with big noses a beautiful day i hope you get everything you want forever and i'm sorry about the rank cowardice of general society you deserve better

good shirt from the market today

i gotta remember this

Fibre crafts are 50% soothing repetitive action and 50% "God Fucking Damnit"

Me, doing my silly little crafts, trying not to fall into a hopeless abyss:

just remember, one day you're going to open tumblr and the crabs will be raving like they never have before

My summer, 2021

Inspired by this tweet

the world is running out of glassblowers and yet you want to become a fucking doctor

new reason to stay alive: outlive the trump presidency, live to see the day he's guaranteed to never be in office ever again and make sure he knows that he'll never have enough power to kill you

stay strong, friends, this isn't your fault

We'll live to crab rave when he dies. It won't be long.