My favorite thing is that Europe is spooky because it’s old and America is spooky because it’s big
“The difference between America and England is that Americans think 100 years is a long time, while the English think 100 miles is a long way.” –Earle Hitchner
A fave of mine was always the american tales where people freaked out because ‘someone died in this house’ and all the europeans would go ‘…Yes? That would be pretty much every house over 40 years old.’
‘…My school is older than your entire town.’
‘Sorry, you think *how far* is okay to travel for a shopping trip?’
*American looks up at the beams in a country pub* ‘Uh, this place has woodworm, isn’t that a bit unsafe?’ ‘Eh, the woodworm’s 400 years old, it’s holding those beams together.’
A few years ago when I was in college I did a summer program at Cambridge aimed specifically at Americans and Canadians, and my year it was all Americans and one Australian. We ended the program with a week in Wessex, and on the last day as we all piled onto the bus in Salisbury (or Bath? I can’t remember), the professors went to the front to warn us that we wouldn’t be making any stops unless absolutely necessary. We’re headed to Heathrow to drop off anyone flying off the same day, then back to Cambridge.
“All right, it’s going to be a long bus ride, so make sure you’re prepared for that.”
We all brace ourselves. A long bus ride? How long? We’re Americans; a long bus ride for us is a minimum of six hours with the double digits perfectly plausible. We can handle a twelve hour bus ride as long as we get a bathroom break.
The answer. “Two hours.”
Oh.
They had a comfort stop on my 2.5 bus ride across Ireland and I was like “didn’t we just get on this bus??”
@gallusrostromegalus I tried searching for the chincoteague horses and vernal ponds, but was unable to find anything useful. Will you enlighten me, please?
So Chincoteauge National Wildlife Refuge contains Assateague Island, which is basically a glorified sandbar of an island off the coast of Virginia, and a really nice park* to visit if you’re not deathly afraid of ticks. The thing the area’s really famous for (besides the Moneypit) is The Chincoteague Ponies, which are these very strange feral horses that are just cute as all get-out:
To keep the population stable and healthy, all couple hundred ponies are rounded up once a year and vaccinated/some of the animals are sold off to private persons/farms (they’re insanely popular as pets and work animals becuase they’re tough lil shits). It’s a whole party. Most of the animals are names and some have celebrity status.
The WEIRD thing about these horses is that they’re pretty much turning into kelpies, minus the hand-eating thing.
There aren’t any permanent sources of fresh water on Assateague island, only Vernal Pools that exist for maybe a couple months a year. The horses live there year-round, minus the three days in roundup. They drink oceanic water, eat super-salty plants grown in said water, consume salty dirt for minerals, and regularly swim around the island to get from graze to graze. Their kidneys and internal systems have undergone some really strange rearrangements to cope with the added salt, and even though most horses can swim, the ponies are extremely comfortable in the water, to the point where if startled, their FIRST inclination is to run into deep water to avoid pursuit.
The park ranger that explained all this to me says they also seem to supplement their diets with shellfish and crabs, which given that pasture horses already snack on bugs and the occasional lizard doesn’t’ really surprise me. There are other places with feral horses on similarly small islands but those have access to fresh water and haven’t developed the Chincoteague Pony’s affinity for ocean life.
Here’s another cute fucking pony:
*The park was actually established to protect THE BIGGEST, FATTEST FUCKING SQUIRRELS I’VE EVER SEEN. They’re called Delmarva Fox Squirrels. Fatass on the left, regular fox squirrel on the right.
A mouth-watering fuck-ton of hand angle references.
By Shadowcross on DA.
BLESS YOU, YOU WONDERFUL PERSON
Last month I went somewhere that reminded me of someone I used to be. There is still magic there, though I don’t know if it’s meant for me now. I have travelled so far and faith is tenuous.
I lit a candle, but I can’t be sure who it was for. The boy I was, the men I became, the shadow that I am now. For love lost and found, and faith I can neither hold onto nor let go of. For god, or gods.
3. Hit Ctrl+Shift+J to open the chrome javascript console
4. Now paste in everything you copied before, but don’t hit enter
5. Now copy the whole list of blogs you want to block (make sure they are separated by spaces ex: ‘blog1 blog2 blog3)
6. Now go back to your blog settings and hit enter in the console, and paste the list in to the popup box and hit ok
7. Now wait a moment, and then refresh the page, now you should have all of those blogs blocked
Y’all, this is a super good thing, and a really good reference for those who have lists of TERFs, aphobic blogs, and/or antisemitic people they’re blocking or meant to block but ugh it’s so much work.
3. Hit F12 (unless you have Firebug installed – then use Ctrl+Shift+Q, and navigate to Console tab) to open the Firefox ‘Inspect Element’ window and the Console
Note: F12 works on Chrome as well
4. Click on the Console tab, and paste in everything you copied before and hit enter (do not put list in this code)
5. A pop-up window appears, titled “Blogs to block”, with a space to enter text and an ‘OK’ and ‘Cancel’ button below (pictured below)
6. Paste the list of blogs you wish to block into this space, remembering to ensure blog names are separated by spaces
7. Now hit ok, wait about 5 seconds, and refresh your page. These blogs are now blocked!
Sorry to tag you all again but I just went through and figured out the process for Firefox and as vaspider said above, you are all well-suited for signal boosting
Happy to work this out for other browsers too, just thought Mozilla was best to do quickly! 🙂
Where the fuck was this last night when I had to manually block like 200 people from a sideblog
unfortunately the links on this post are broken, which is why i’ve been digging around for alternatives. having said that i sympathize, that woulda been a huge pain in the ass. when i made this blog i think the first thing i did was re-block a lot of people. it took many hours, stretched across multiple days
now that i have the /concept/ of a script being a thing, though, im never doing that again. if i find another thing that works, i’ll be sure to post it.
I can confirm that tumblr batch block works, but it took an hour for the script to block about 500 blogs, so keep in mind that one is slow going, though still better than a manual run.
sorry, i know this is somewhat unrelated but i assume anyone with the need to mass block people might also be interested in knowing that apparently even if you change your tumblr url, anyone who’s liked posts made by your old url will see your posts they’ve liked with your new url attached. (maybe this is common knowledge, but it definitely wasn’t to me until recently and i want to be sure people know about it)
So I was going through our bookshelf yesterday, because we’re fast approaching the point where we need a clear-out, and I came across one of my all-time favourite creations ever, probably even beating shit like the wheel and penicillin. Years back, before leaving The Man to pursue his dreams of being a sort of professional clown-thing, my husband used to be a translator for Neath Port Talbot Council; as is often the way with Welsh councils, though, owing to a lack of money and also everywhere is really close to each other (this country is 150 miles wide at its widest point, and about 47 miles at the thin bit. Ver ver small), NPT Council’s translating department was shared by Swansea Council. Thus it was that, in the halcyon days of circa 2009, the two decided to team up and produce a new Welsh language book for learners between them, and thus it got sent through to Steffan to proof read it.
A Thing You May Not Know: Welsh is one of ten indigenous languages to Britain, arguably the oldest, and has been viciously oppressed over the last millennium and a half as part of England’s big If You Destroy Their Culture They’ll Be Glad To Be Ruled By You policy. These days, it’s nonetheless still spoken by approximately a fifth of the Welsh population; a hell of a feat, considering, but the suppression of it continues to this day (just in cleverer, sneakier ways now than whipping people’s children if they’re heard.) But it is classified as Endangered. Thanks to Welsh-language schools now being a thing (though supply is much lower than demand), transmission rates to the younger generation are pretty good; but, Welsh is peculiarly dependent on adult learners.
This means that learner books might have to appeal to both children and adults while using very simple language, which I explain in case it in some way justifies the bewildering weirdness of what I’m about to show you; because at first glance, this book is simply for children. But it’s… Well.
Well.
I present to you, with translations in bold and commentary by me, Y Babi Sinsir.
Literally, “the Ginger Baby”, but they mean ‘ginger’ as in ‘gingerbread’. Literal ginger. Not the colour.
This is Mr Jones. This is Mrs Jones.
What’s wrong, Mrs Jones? I want a baby.
Note: there will be some confusion in this book about whether the narrator is speaking, or anyone else. It might seem cut and dried here, but there are no speech marks around “Dw i eisiau babi”, whereas later speech marks are used, and also in two pages’ time the narrator will actively pass a value judgement using first person, so… Well.
But, so far so good.
Mrs Jones is making a Babi Sinsir.
… okay, so I like this page because of the capitalisation of Babi Sinsir and the lack of definite article. She’s just making a Babi Sinsir. You know, a Babi Sinsir? Magical baby made of gingerbread that you make if you can’t conceive but can’t afford IVF? Yeah. A Babi Sinsir. That’s right.
Let it be known that this is Not A Thing in Welsh folklore or mythology. What the fuck. How does this work. Where does the magic come from? Do you need a faerie ingredient? Will the next page tell us?
This is the Babi Sinsir. I like the Babi Sinsir.
Nope.
But it is apparently shit-capable and needs a nappy. It’s good that the narrator likes it anyway.
The Babi Sinsir is bad. He’s running.
Uh oh.
“Come back, Babi Sinsir.”
Look how Worried the Joneses are. Funny how they don’t seem to be calling that enthusiastically, though. I’d have expected an exclamation mark at least. Did Mrs Jones always have a massive left arm? I can’t remember.
“Run, run, catch me. I’m the Babi Sinsir.”
Yeah, okay, so that’s the Welsh for “Run! Run! As fast as you can! You can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man!”, but once again, I’m going to have to draw attention to the lack of expressive punctuation here. It really feels like this naughty Babi Sinsir’s heart is just not in this.
“Come and help, Mr Horse.”
“Run, run, catch me. I’m the Babi Sinsir.”
Cool, look, a floating horse has come to help.
The pen there, incidentally, was an attempt by the translators to work out who was talking. I can’t imagine why. This dialogue is on fire, everyone can tell.
“Come and help, Mrs Cow.”
“Run, run, catch me. I’m the Babi Sinsir.”
Now they have been joined in their high-speed zombie shuffle by a married floating cow who is, if I’m not much mistaken, high as shit.
“Come and help, Mr Goat.”
“Run, run, catch me. I’m the Babi Sinsir.”
I’m starting to suspect the artist only knew how to draw the legs on animals in one way.
“Come and help, Mr Dog.”
“Run, run, Catch me. I’m the Babi Sinsir.”
Yes, that dog is definitely here to ‘help’. Also… the Babi Sinsir is literally within reach of Mrs Jones’ massive left arm now. Why is she not just picking him up?
“Come and help, Miss Cat.”
“Run, run, Catch me. I’m the Babi Sinsir.”
You may be wondering at this point if this is just… the whole book. An ever-increasing flock of floating zombie creatures shuffling after a naughty gingerbread baby in a nappy who is committing the cardinal sin of running. I mean… where can they go from here, amirite? A sheep? A squirrel? A chicken? We can hit a hundred pages this way, easy. The concern is the artist, whom I think was stretched a bit beyond their means on this project anyway.
BUT WORRY NOT! Shit’s about to go down, guys.
Oh no! Here comes Mr Wolf. Mr Wolf runs and catches the Babi Sinsir.
THAT IS A FOX
THAT IS A GODDAMN FOX YOU HEATHEN FUCK
WHAT THE FUCK
AND WHY THE FUCK IS IT WEARING CLOTHES WHEN NONE OF THE OTHER ANIMALS WERE
WHY IS IT DRESSED IN DUNGAREES LIKE A LAZY FARMHAND ON AN AMERICAN RANCH IN THE 1800S
This doesn’t bode well for the –
Half of the Babi Sinsir is left.
WHAT THE
Quarter of the Babi Sinsir is left.
WHY DOES IT STILL LOOK SAD AND HORRIFIED WHY IS IT STILL ALIVE OH MY GOD
The Babi Sinsir has gone! There’s tasty.
What the
I
Wha
It
I realise this is not the main point to make here, but two pages ago it had eaten half of that nappy, and now it’s whole again and delicately discarded to one side, I just want
I mean
It’s okay, right? This happens in fairytales? Little Red Riding Hood? Someone will eviscerate the fox and out will come the Babi Sinsir…’s pieces, and they can be baked back together…?
No one cares!
Mrs Jones is making another Babi Sinsir.
The new Babi Sinsir loves Mrs Jones.
…
…
…
…okay, so there’s a lot for us all to take in right now, and we’re all going to get through it at different speeds. But I’m just going to draw attention to the fact that Mr Jones is now merely depicted as a picture on the wall, and the new Babi Sinsir apparently only loves Mrs Jones, and…
Okay so they just lost their beloved baby gingerbread son because he got eaten alive by a fox in dungarees calling itself a wolf, right? Mrs Jones apparently couldn’t give less of a fuck if she tried, as long as she has some flour and ginger left over to make another. This one she made to love her.
Mr Jones, I presume, had a total mental breakdown and drank himself to death. At the very least, he’s left her, look. All she has left is the photo.
But does dim ots! Mae’r Babi Sinsir newydd yn caru Mrs Jones.
And that is the story of Y Babi Sinsir, aka the greatest work of literature ever written.
valerian house archive 