You'll never guess what I did once No Man's Sky added custom shipbuilding.

when i was curating the marine science museum i was up in the archives looking for something and when i walked out i had to go through the main museum hall and i heard some kids speculating something about a whale skeleton so i walked up and started talking to them about it. they started asking me follow up questions and then another and another and another and then their parents came over and immediately zeroed in on my "curator" nametag and told their kids i was probably very busy and i said no not at all keep asking me questions. soon their parents asked some questions too (after a few more apologies, because somewhere along the line they learned shame that i want to undo) and in the end i talked to them for like 30 minutes as a few more people joined.

a few months later one of the parents wrote me a letter that i still keep with me and in the letter they asked the kids what they learned at the museum and one of the kids said, "i learned i'm special."

choked up just typing that now LMAO. they didn't mention the whales or the squids or the seals or the tides or the seaweed i told them all about. they learned that their questions matter so much that even the person in charge should stop and answer them. they learned they don't need to apologize for not knowing and for asking questions. they learned that they're special!!!!!!!! what could possibly matter more???

Did they task the vampires with hanging up the flags 😭

@zsmithzdlgs2

I can't readily identify the yellow one with the heraldic-looking border between Peru and Antarctica but it could well be the Royal Banner of Scotland or some variant of the Walloon flag from Belgium. Either answer raises merely more questions

it is, in fact, the scottish lion rampant. incredible.

You know, I still have the illustrated movie companion for Twilight and while it did not have flag information, it did have a note that a large amount of the school graphics, banners, and yearbooks were donated by the principal of Forks High School. So there's a good chance that the principal just had a bunch of expired flags and sent them over.

the phrase "expired flags" is a delight to me. "don't use that flag it's expired!" "no it's still safe they just become less effective"

The hottest girl you know has a truly unwatchable thing to recommend you

Bronze & Crystal Sword,

Warring States Period and Wudi Period of Han Dynasty (c. 4th-2nd century BC),

Chinese bronze sword with turquoise studded, gold inlaid rock crystal hilt.

Length 22.83 in / Width 3.15 in /

Collection & Credit: Cardale Auctioneers

SEASON 1 EPISODE 5 | JOURNEY INTO MYSTERY

it's healthy for academics to have professional feuds. enrichment activity

Holy shit. "The demese ef the Ne'enderthels: Wes lengege a fecter?" published in the Science magazine

short but sweet

My toxic trait is that no matter what I need three hours to myself at the end of the day to do absolutely nothing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_social_platforms

the metric for "top" is active users btw

keep being like “damn i’m posting too much yugioh all my non-yugioh followers are gonna be annoyed and unfollow me” and i’m now realizing not only has my follower count not gone down, but also i have no idea what 90% of the fandom content on my dash is about and i haven’t unfollowed anyone either

Are they like..... Yknow.... [Goes to do a hand gesture but forgets I'm a wizard and I accidentally cast Lv50 lightning bolt]

...do you ever get really invested in some extremely miniscule quirk or thing The Character does or a way of speaking etc. and you have thoughts on it and thoughts on the acting choice behind it because it's so good and perfect and brilliant.

And then you see an actual interview or sth and it's just something the actor does. Anyway I think we should stop talking to actors i think we don't need to see them out of character at all.

once again needing to remind some people that mispronouncing foreign words isn't just about not knowing how to say it; if your language doesn't have that sound, in many cases you can't hear it properly. You won't be able to hear yourself say it wrong because you probably can't distinguish between the sounds a native speaker can. It will sound right to you and you will be wrong.

Most languages use relatively similar sound inventories overall, but make distinctions others don't. And the way the our language centers work is they group these sounds together, allowing us to recognize that things within a given range constitute a recognizable phoneme. If your languages groups together sounds another language makes a distinction between, your brain cannot tell.

So everyone on those posts congratulating themselves for looking up pronunciation and saying "It's Not That Hard?" Surprise, you might have still got it wrong and can't even tell. You can look up the IPA chart and still flub it completely because what sounds right to your brain and what a native speaker will understand are totally different things!

"I might have butchered that, please let me know" is sometimes an excuse for lack of research, but it is, unfortunately, also a much more accurate self-assessment than confidently fucking it up after mouthing along to a wav file a few times.

This is one of the reasons that, historically, many people would take on or be granted new names if they stayed any length of time in another culture; it's very common for the names from one language to simply not map to the sounds of another!