The countries that got tea via China through the Silk Road (land) referred to it in various forms of the word “cha”. On the other hand, the countries that traded with China via sea - through the Min Tan port called it in different forms of “te”.

I liked this so much I became curious… and it checks out! The explanation lies, unsurprisingly, in who was interacting with whom in early modern long-distance trade.

@amuseoffyre immediately thought of you :)

I think I should start bragging about my adopted son’s achievements when people around me start bragging about their kids. Ooooh your child can count to 10 in mandarin? Well, my child found 110 landmines! And he’s only 6 years old!

does anyone else remember when michaels (art supply company) accidentally made omegle again

when they What

michaels added a feature for a while in sept. 2020 where shoppers could ask questions that would be answered live by other shoppers anonymously. which led to some good michaels interactions.

"The people of Iran are taking back their country. This is the greatest feminist movement of our time."

-@highlyjewish

For the past two weeks, millions of people have been marching in the streets trying to overthrow an oppressive theocracy. The IRGC could fall and it all started with women not wanting to cover their hair.

Crowds are being shot at, people are disappearing, an entire nation's phone lines and internet have been shut off.

An entire nation has gone dark.

Where are the celebrities? Where are the news agencies? Where are the petitions? Where are the influencers? Where are the late-night talk show hosts? Where are the flotillas? Where are the encampments? Where are the "All Eyes on Iran" memes?

If you'd like to be more informed on one of the most important geopolitical events of our generation, I highly recommend this podcast episode. If you get your news mostly from sources leaning left, you likely won't be told much about it at all. The BBC had to be pressured into covering it, and is still falling short.

Why do you think that is?

Antizionism doesn't just hurt Jews.

Watching millions of Iranians marching in the streets is like watching South African Apartheid end or the Berlin Wall come down. Imagine what the world would be like today if Eastern Europe was still under the boot of the Soviet Union.

The Iranians need our support.

"They are freeing themselves from the regime, Israel and Gaza from Hamas, Lebanon from Hezbollah, Yemen from the Houthis, and the West from nuclear threat."

-Elica Le Bon

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 am very glad this has been going around so folks learn the Lore, but also let’s encourage it because then we get to say “bang paths” more often.

A snake story, based on an experience I had while I was in Florida.

This comic always gives me feels ;-;

I do think it’s funny when headcanons are presented as objective character facts bc I get “He would not fucking say/do that” as much as the next guy but I must also humbly acknowledge its powerful cousin named “A skilled enough writer could make me believe he would”

So for some reason (either a glitch or an oversight) I have access to international internet now, and I don't know how long that will last so let me update you:

In the past week, at least 17000 people were murdered and shot in cold blood in the streets of Iran. These people were unarmed, most of them were teenagers. What was their crime? Protesting. Standing up against their oppressive dictator regime. Almost immediately from 8th of January they cut us off from internet. Complete blackout. We couldn't even text each other, we couldn't call each other. People couldn't call for an ambulance when they saw their friends and family getting shot. The IRG wouldn't let anyone help those that were dying. Now they've taken the bodies hostage, either demanding money before handing them back to their family or harassing the family to bury them at dawn so no one can gather. Thousands have lost their sight. Thousands are in custody and the regime does not need legal reasons for executing them.

The Islamic republic officials have made up different stories about this. First they said all those who protested were terrorists funded by America or Israel. Then they said thousands were killed by ISIS, not them. Now they blame every western power for everything that happened. Not one admits to what actually happened. They see themselves as God, whoever disagrees with them is not a human and must die. This is not an exaggeration.

It's been a week since the bloodbath. All the cities are in martial law. You're not allowed to go out at night, they will either shoot you, arrest you, or confiscate your phone.

Meanwhile the regime is trying it's fucking best to normalize everything. Don't let them.

I just remembered that this was a thing that was HILARIOUS in 2006 and apparently that was ten years ago now.

Old people: join with me in remembering how funny we found this on LiveJournal.

Young people: look at this lolrus, it’s so happy, it has a bucket.

And then they stealed away the bucket and we realised we had fucked up a perfectly good elephant seal and given it anxiety.

listen this vintage meme is high quality and i will hear nothing said against it

20 years. I am not happy about this.

I’m delighted at the bucket reappearing but dismayed at the passage of time

Discworld character named Corporal Tunnel who does too many fiber crafts on his days off

While making dinner tonight, I very very fleetingly, but very seriously and legitimately thought “I should watch Goncharov tonight”

And then I Remembered.

That it's no longer on poob?

This is incomprehensible outside of tumblr, i love a well maintained closed ecosystem

Reach WITH IN To your LOCAL dirt and you may find A Friend And Boy…

Reach WITH IN To your LOCAL dirt and you may find A Friend And Boy…