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put it in my hand

@grammarpedant / grammarpedant.tumblr.com

Grammar may be fake, but sweating the small stuff is forever. Verso, they/them. Diversity of race and gender, speculative fiction, tabletop rpg podcasts, sociology, anime, neurodivergence, revolution, video games, higher education, webcomics, philosophy, and all things related to writing. Current obsessions include Murderbot and Friends at the Table. Asian-American, college grad, technically a doctor. Check out my "Tags I Use" tab for specifics and request new tags anytime.
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Reblogged moonbittern
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ratfoundintrash asked:

Hii! Can you do birds that are the only members of their families? Thank you!

(Also, I genuinely love this blog so much. It’s helped me find so many birds and reptiles I would have never found before)

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herpsandbirds answered:

OH YES, I loive this kind of request!!!

Wallcreeper (Tichodroma muraria), family Tichodromidae, found across high mountain areas of Europe and Asia

  • This species is the only member of this genus and family.

photograph by Mathieu Bally - Wildlife Photography

Bearded Reedling aka Bearded Tit (Panurus biarmicus), family Panuridae, order Passeriformes

photograph by Carlo Galliani

Sunbittern (Eurypyga helias), family Eurypygidae, order Eurypygiformes, found in southern Central America and northern South America

  • The only member of this family

photograph by Supreet Sahoo

Kagu or Cagou (Rhynochetos jubatus), family Rhynochetidae, order Eurypygiformes, endemic to New Caldeonia

ENDANGERED.

  • This bird is the only member of its family.
  • It is most closely related to the Sunbittern.

photograph by the_zoologist_barista

Hamerkop (Scopus umbretta), family Scopidae, order Pelicaniformes, Ethiopia

  • The taxonomic affinities of this bird have been greatly debated over the years, and now is believed to be in the Pelecaniformes.
  • This is the only bird in this family.
  • Their closest relatives are the Shoebill.

photograph by Ian Davies

Shoebill (Balaeniceps rex), family Balaenicipitidae, Mabamba Swamp, Uganda

  • This bird is the only member of its family.
  • The taxonomic affinities of this bird have long been debated. It currently rests within the order Pelicaniformes It was, in the past, often places in the Ciconiiformes).
  • Its closest living relative is most likely the Hamerkop.

photograph by Jean-Christopher Damond

Malaysian Rail-Babbler (Eupetes macrocerus), male calling, family Eupetidae, order Passeriformes, Malaysia

  • The only member of this family

photograph by Janetli SF **Xiao Guo Tai**

Yellow-breasted Chat (Icteria virens), family Icteriidae, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA

  • This species was once considered to be a wood warbler, family Parulidae, but is now placed in its own family (of which it is the only member).

photograph by Loud Photography

Hoatzin (Opisthocomus hoazin) aka “Stink Turkey”, family Opisthocomidae, order Opisthocomiformes

  • The only living member of the bird order Opisthocomiformes.
  • This leaf-eating bird uses foregut fermentation, in its enlarged crop, to help break down its food. (The ferementation is where the smell comes from, which gives it the name “Pavo Apestoso”)
  • They live in vegetation at the edges of lakes, streams, and rivers.
  • The young have 2 small claws on the fronts of the wingsthat help them climb through vegetation.

photograph by Angus Pritchard & Brodie Hopkins Media

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#bird#!!!#queue
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Reblogged
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grammarpedant asked:

some questions on the OC ask game that caught my eye: what are pendikhia's favorite weapons/tools and/or her jewelry situation?? it made me think about how one would depict her character in iconography, or perhaps more relevantly/morbidly, in terms of burial goods!

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specialagentartemis answered:
For the OC Ask Game

I have not been ignoring these I have simply been. Thinking about them. A lot.

Tools she carries with her at all times: a flint knife. Basic part of a person's kit once you're old enough to handle sharp things, which is maybe five or six (you learn fast in Ice Age Land). String. A bit of kindling, kept dry. Probably a slingshot because it's good to have on you though she doesn't really like it because she doesn't have great aim. She much prefers hunting with an atlatl, there's a simple fluidity to it (and also you're aiming at a bigger target), but she doesn't carry those around with her unless she's specifically going out hunting for larger game, which she doesn't do super often - she has other duties.

She does carry red ochre around with her at all times. You never know when you'll be called on to anoint or sanctify something, or give an offering. She probably has a separate medicine bag of medicines, purgatives, talismans, and sacred plants... I haven't decided what plants are sacred. These are specifically significant in her role as shaman.

I feel like drums and/or bone whistles should be involved in shamanic activities somehow but I haven't given much thought to that yet... would definitely be something she would be buried with though.

For jewelry... I picture her wearing a carved wooden hair comb to put her hair up. Shekhie made it for her. She keeps the old one her mother made for her as a child that has since broken and worn down in a pouch; clearly I need to picture her with more pouches. The comb is no good for hair anymore, but it's sentimental. Her mother died years ago, and she's the only one of her siblings who made it to adulthood.

Her belt is decorated with shell beads as well as a few fossil shells. She also has some carved wooden pins to secure clothing, particularly light summer clothing.

I've been thinking that, for jewelry and adornment, wood, shell, seeds, and stones are considered feminine (earthy), and bone, teeth, claws, and antler are considered masculine (animal-y). Carved ivory is a symbol of status among everyone, though. Strings of seed beads worn in the hair are for mothers; Pendíkhia doesn't have those.

But also, jewelry is generally something you earn or are given. And while it would be seen as a bit gender non-conforming for a woman to dress in animal teeth or ivory, it's definitely done after successful hunts if she made a good kill. Deer, bison, and horse teeth are popular. Successful hunters have a lot of those. Fox teeth are rarer, but present; killing a fox is only done in certain conditions. If you wear teeth of a bear, cave lion, or wolf, you were fighting for your damn life and you really earned that. Pendíkhia doesn't have any of that because hunting trophies are not really part of her status marker as a shaman... but after the end of the first book she does have a difficult-to-overlook ivory medallion either worn as a necklace or sewn onto her coat that's a complete cross-section of a mammoth tusk! She Earned That.

(Inspiration: article / scientific paper about Gravettian adornment practices)

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#!!!#Ice Age Story#ask game
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Reblogged
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Hands down, best scene I've seen in a film for years. Fucking art of the highest caliber. This will NEVER get old to me.

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@grammarpedant I’m peer reviewing your tags for visibility because I agree, this scene is worth waiting to watch in the full context of the movie. It’s a banger song and and incredible video even without context, but my god. Do it for yourself, if you haven’t seen the whole movie yet, bookmark this and come back to it once you have, because the whole first half of the movie is leading to this exact moment in such an important way.

#!!!#<3#it's true tho!!!#described#sinners 2025#queue
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Reblogged
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The weird part was that some of our security recordings had been released. My vantage point, as I searched the Deltfall habitat and found the bodies. Views from Gurathin's and Pin-Lee's helmet cameras, when they found Mensah and what was left of me after the explosion.

(Artificial Condition)

#!!!#ough mensah sitting by MB's mangled body!!#my FAVORITE underrated scene hands down. thank you for this depiction!!#she looks so worried and is cradling her arm..#OUGH#murderbot#murderbot diaries#fanart
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Reblogged prokopetz
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CELESTIAL BODIES IS NOW OUT! GO GET IT!

Our (myself and @basilisika's) mecha game is FINALLY OUT! Go get it here!

(You may have read my post about The Grid™️ a little while ago. This is that!)

We're running an itchfund to raise a little so we can devote the time and energy to create our full vision of what this game can be. The stuff you're seeing here is only a fraction of this game's potential: please help us get the whole way. In exchange, you'll get the Terrestrial Edition right now (a playable version with the base concepts and a smattering of content to get you started). If you give us a little more we'll make more content for you too! Weapons, factions, and even new Frames entirely are on the table.

(We also have community copies available, and those higher tiers will unlock more too.)

What are you waiting for! Go get it!

#tabletop rpg#mecha fiction#!!!#queue
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Reblogged ehyde
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Welcome to The Journey to the West (西游记) Daily!

You are about to beging a reading journey to get the hidden Buddhist texts accompanied by the monk Tang Sanzang, Sun Wukong, Sha Wujing, Zhu Bajie and Bai Long Ma.

To beging this journey you must subscribe to the newsletter, which you will find at https://journeytothewestdaily.substack.com/. You wil receive your first email this week, welcoming you and sharing information about what's to come and what I will include in the emails.

However, beforehand I want to tell you already that you won't receive a daily email, despite the name of the newsletter. The chapters are dense and full of references to folklore or religion references that you might be unfamiliar with, so you will receive an email every 2 or 3 days maximum.

If this is the first time that you hear about this newsletter and you don't know what Journey to the West is...

The classical Chinese novel Journey to the West is an extended account of the legendary pilgrimage of the Tang dynasty Buddhist monk Xuanzang, who traveled to the "Western Regions" (Central Asia and India) to obtain Buddhist sūtras (sacred texts) and returned after many trials and much suffering. Gautama Buddha gives this task to the monk, whose name in the novel is Tang Sanzang, and provides him with three protectors who agree to help him as an atonement for their sins. These disciples are the Monkey King, Zhu Bajie, and Sha Wujing, together with a dragon prince who acts as the monk's steed, a white horse. The group of pilgrims journey towards enlightenment by the power and virtue of cooperation.

The novel is perfect for the epistolary format, since it's is divided in different and disconnected adventures, so you don't have to always remember what happened in the previous chapter to read the next!

We'll be reading Anthony C. Yu's translation since it is the first unabridged version that we have available in English. It is about 100 chapters long.

As I said, you will receive a first email as soon as you subscribe and an introductory email in a few days. Please, share this post so more people can read along. Use the hashtag #jttwdaily if you want to comment your impressions. I'll share the most important dates soon.

May the Buddha help you in your endeavours.

#!!!#journey to the west#jttw daily
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Reblogged
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The secret project I've been working on for.... several weeks now is revealed! A fan video for the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, set to Relax (Take It Easy) by MIKA. Click through to YouTube for a link to image descriptions.

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Spotlighting another of the animatics mentioned in this post- aside from being an artist and master of monochrome in their own right, Kes Beacon provided the voice of Gurathin on the Murderbot Fanimation Project.

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YEAAAH babye, catch me/my voice in this! I'm super psyched to see how it's turned out.

#murderbot reruns#!!!
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Reblogged
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I think it's fascinating that 87 TMNT, the version most explicitly aimed at little kids and designed to appeal to them, has being made small and cute and helpless and losing autonomy as a re-occuring threat to the turtles.

  • Being demutated (and the emphasis is always on being made helpless rather than possible loss of sapience).
  • Being deaged.
  • Being shrunk.
  • That time Michelangelo was turned into a gerbil.
  • The ray in the Ireland episode where it was ambiguous whether it would make them smaller and cuter or larger and fiercer and Michelangelo was delighted to find it was the latter.
  • The guy who wanted them in jail "or at least in a really big glass bowl", which doesn't actually change them but does suggest changing the rules to treat them as pets again.

Then in the red sky seasons the ultimate answer to Raphael's demand to know why they should help humans against Dregg when humans are choosing to trust him is that a lot of humans are still children. They have no say in this but will still be stuck with the future it causes.

It's a story in which growing up is hard, sometimes. The turtles have fun while deaged. Donatello wonders whether they were better off as pets than struggling to be accepted as people.

But it's a story in which being a kid is hard too and certainly not a state you would want other people to decide you didn't get to leave.

#!!!#teenage mutant ninja turtles#meta#queue
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Reblogged
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Here is a compiled list of art prompts for Aspec Murderbot Diaries! (Many thanks to @alex-van-gore for the lovely background edit and putting this image together.)

  • Murderbot!!! Has!!! Friends!!!
  • Murderbot and ART hanging out in the feed
  • Bot culture and bot relationships
  • Murderbot or others wearing the AAA battery shirt (aromantic, asexual, agender)
  • Characters with aspec pride flags or colors.
  • Corporation Rim advertising using Sex®, Love™, or Gender© to sell the product.
  • Bots/constructs helping each other with maintenance/upgrades
  • Aspec characters watching a show and heckling amatonormativity and bad romance plot lines.

If you are a visual artist, a doodler, or someone with a drawing implement, I hope these might inspire you to make something! :) If you post the art to tumblr, tag us and we'll reblog it.

#Murderbot diaries#Murderbot#fanart#aroace agenda#!!!#please artists
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Reblogged feralphoenix
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What I think is really interesting about the papyrus account of the workers building the tomb of Rameses III going on strike to demand better wages is really fascinating to me because if you look at the description given by the royal scribe you see that there was an attempt to satisfy the workers by bringing a large amount of food at once but that was rebuffed by the workers who declared that it wasn’t just that they were hungry at the moment but had serious charges to bring that “something bad had been done in this place of Pharoah” (is poor wages and mistreatment). They understood themselves as having long term economic interests as a -class- and organized together knowing that by doing so they could put forward their demands collectively. It so strongly flies in the face of narratives that are like “in this Time and Place people were happy to be serve because they believed in the God-King and maybe you get some intellectual outliers but certainly no common person questioned that”. If historical sources might paint that sorta picture of cultural homogeneity it is because those sources sought not to describe something true but invent a myth for the stability of a regime.

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Since this is getting notes here’s a link to a translation of the papyrus scroll and here’s an article that gets further into the economic situation surrounding the strike and giving an explanation of the events. The workers didnt just refuse to construct Rameses III’s future tomb, they actually occupied the Valley of the Kings and were preventing anyone from entering to perform rituals or funerals. Basically they set up the first ever recorded picket line

Again the workers went on strike, this time taking over and blocking all access to the Valley of the Kings. The significance of this act was that no priests or family members of the deceased were able to enter with food and drink offerings for the dead and this was considered a serious offense to the memory of those who had passed on to the afterlife. When officials appeared with armed guards and threatened to remove the men by force, a striker responded that he would damage the royal tombs before they could move against him and so the two sides were stalemated.

Eventually the tomb workers were able to win the day and acquire their demands and actually set a precedent for organized labor and strikes in Egyptian society that continued for a long time

The jubilee in 1156 BCE was a great success and, as at all festivals, the participants forgot about their daily troubles with dancing and drink. The problem did not go away, however, and the workers continued their strikes and their struggle for fair payment in the following months. At last some sort of resolution seems to have been reached whereby officials were able to make payments to the workers on time but the dynamic of the relationship between temple officials and workers had changed – as had the practical application of the concept of ma’at – and these would never really revert to their former understandings again. Ma’at was the responsibility of the pharaoh to oversee and maintain, not the workers; and yet the men of Deir el-Medina had taken it upon themselves to correct what they saw as a breach in the policies which helped to maintain essential harmony and balance. The common people had been forced to assume the responsibilities of the king.
[…]
The success of the tomb-worker/artisan strikes inspired others to do the same. Just as the official records of the battle with the Sea Peoples never recorded the Egyptian losses in the land battle, neither do they record any mention of the strikes. The record of the strike comes from a papyrus scroll discovered at Deir el-Medina and most probably written by the scribe Amennakht. The precedent of workers walking away from their jobs was set by these events and, although there are no extant official reports of other similar events, workers now understood they had more power than previously thought. Strikes are mentioned in the latter part of the New Kingdom and Late Period and there is no doubt the practice began with the workers at Deir el-Medina in the time of Ramesses III.
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There was also a strike at one point where construction workers refused to continue until they were given sufficient “cosmetics.”

This was thought a highly strange thing until somebody deciphered the recipe for the “cosmetics” the workers were demanding and recreated it.

It was sunscreen. Sunscreen. 

Making that the first recorded strike over occupational safety.

#worker solidarity#!!!#history#queue
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Reblogged feralphoenix
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There is a new Chrome extension that detects if a video you’re streaming has a strobe in it, will freeze the video and stick this warning up there until you approve it.

WHERE THE HELL HAS THIS BEEN ALL MY LIFE????

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[image description: a screencap of the chrome web store, showing an extension called “seizsafe - epilepsy alert for youtube” and an example image of the extension, showing a blocked video with the text “warning: the following content may potentially trigger seizures for people with photosensitive epilepsy.” there is a toggle with an option reading: “don’t warn me again during this video. click here or hit spacebar to continue watching 👆”. end image description.]

chrome webstore link:

Seizafe - Epilepsy Alert for YouTube™
Prevent Photosensitive-Epileptic seizures while watching YouTube™ videos. We'll warn you before you see any flashy videos.
chrome.google.com
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stillaliveiguess

reblog to help photosensitive folk feel safe!!

#epilepsy#psa#!!!#queue
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Reblogged
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There’s no protocol for this.

Okay it was very tempting to draw Arada and Overse again but I loved this color palette for Three so much, I had to try it! I have never drawn Three before and didn’t really have a mental image for what it looked like, so I did my best. And I couldn’t help putting in references to our Mx. Machine Manners fic and the “Three goes to university” headcanon from the discord, so it gets to wear a Pansystem University sweater while it attempts to give advice on those tough life questions.

Thanks for the ask @theaicollective!

#Three Three Three Three Three Thr-#TheThreeCollection#here's Three in all its 'i'm participating anyway' glory!#running an advice column and going to university GOSH im so proud of it#i love that the natural trajectory of its life quite easily leads from 'a lot is happening and im participating anyway' ->#'a lot is happening and im helping anyway'#!!!#murderbot diaries#fanart#queue
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Reblogged kurozu501
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If you’re in the US, you can now watch Paula Vogel’s Indecent on PBS for free. 

It’s the story of Sholem Asche’s play 1907 Yiddish play The God of Vengeance, which is itself about the love affair between a young Jewish woman and a prostitute. Vogel has crafted a beautiful mythology around the play, in which she effortlessly weaves her own gorgeous inventions with real events. One of her best inventions is the backstage established relationship between the two women playing the leads. 

Ultimately, it’s the story about how we use art to try to close the gap between the freedom we desire and know we deserve, and the limited freedom we have. It’s an astonishing piece of theater.

It streams for free on the PBS website until December 1st. 

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Okay I watched this tonight and REALLY GO AND WATCH IT BY THE 1ST. THIS IS GOOD THEATER.

#!!!#theatre#wlw#judaism#pride month every month

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