#updated to include title!

[ask-asks]

These Are Sure Some Asks

What do you really need right now?

What are some of the things that have made you who you are?

What are some of your pet peeves?

Share a dark thought? (Go on, vent a little)

Something that makes you ridiculously happy?

What are you craving?

Song stuck in your head?

Last thing you watched?

Shows on your watch list?

Books on your reading list?

Something on your wish list?

Something you want to monologue about?

If you were a note, what note would you be?

Tactician, fighter, generalist, or supportive role?

Talk about a stuffie.

They say you can tell a lot about a person from the state of their desk... Do you have a desk? Can you describe it?

Space, enchanted forest, magical kingdom, or underwater city?

What are some of the meanings of your name? (Or url if you don't want to say.)

What fictional doctor do you wish was your doctor?

Are you a gamer? What was the last game you played?

How do you take your pizza?

Strangest thing that has happened to you this week?

Share a bit of philosophy?

Do you follow the news?

What's on your mind?

What is your dream mode of transportation?

What fascinates you about humanity?

What about life makes you smile?

A dream you wish to make true?

What is your favourite way to create?

Insert your own question here!

[killjoy-prince]

House M.D. but it's when a character says the name of the episode

[brawltogethernow]

Increasingly difficult to be on an affectionately disrespectful first name basis with Magneto the more names he accrues. Stop dodging I AM going to refer to you exclusively in the least formal mode possible.

[giftoflife]

there is now a proper webcomic site for gift of life, including the ability to comment, and some commentary i didn't include here. check it out!

[clewis]

Chapter 1 — Cleo

Title: The Ocean's Call Relationship: Cleo/Lewis Chapters: 1/? Summary: It’s never been easy for Cleo to find balance between being a mermaid and a normal girl; still, when she ran away into the ocean, she wasn’t planning on disappearing forever. But as the burden of everything that was going wrong in her life weighed on her, she finally decided to answer the ocean’s call, leaving everything behind: her problems, her family, her friends, the boy she was still painfully in love with… her whole life. But could there be something more behind her decision? And how will the people she left behind deal with the pain and guilt they will inevitably have to face? Friendships will be put to the test as Lewis, Emma, and Rikki's lives shatter before their eyes. They will do anything to find Cleo and bring her back, but will they be able to find a lost mermaid in the vastness of the ocean?

Here's the first chapter of my canon-divergence fic taking place during the events of 2x25 "Sea Change"! Hope you enjoy 💙

[greenycrimson]

I've been reading a book called The Unfolding of Language, that talks about language's evolution and changes over time - how decay creates things like variations to pronunciation, how meanings naturally diminish as they're used for intensifiers - lots of really interesting stuff if you're this way inclined - and how similar features appear in very different languages.

For example: the use of 'going to' as an auxiliary (so how you probably say 'gonna' in the places you would use 'will' to indicate a future event) and how it started as a verb (doing word) and how this 'misuse' has made language purists angry, how it's happened in English-- but also in French, Basque, Tamil, and Zulu, so in fact it seems to be a natural feature of human thinking, this transposition of motion in space to a motion in time.

Anyway, good book, do recommend - but I was reading a bit in one of the appendices and it struck me as kind of relevant to a bunch of people's behaviours. It's kind of long, so I'll pop it behind a read more.

The emphasis in bold is mine.

...what I really wanted to know was not so much the change from 'content' to 'grammar', but the actual transformation between syntactic categories. Surely, the switch from verb to auxiliary or from noun to preposition can't just be a matter of gradual changes in meaning. After all, it's not as if a word can be a noun and a preposition at the same time, is it? So there must have been something that actually transformed 'back' from a noun to a preposition, and there must also have been something that changed 'go' from a verb to an auxiliary. And what I would really like to know is when exactly these metamorphoses from one category to another took place, and what exactly sparked them. ... I had always assumed that a word must be one thing or the other, either a verb or an auxiliary, either a noun or a preposition. And now you are telling me that 'gonna' can be both, or perhaps neither. But if words don't always fit neatly into one syntactic category or the other, then why bother with these syntactic categories in the first place? ...

As the linguist Edward Sapir once put it, 'all grammars leak'. The main syntactic categories can be very helpful in capturing broad similarities between words. What's more, a label like 'verb' must also reflect some psychological reality: the perception in people's minds that words like 'kick', 'bite', and a great many others, behave in a very similar way and in similar appear slots. So syntactic categories can be very helpful, especially when you take a bird's-eye view of language. But when you focus on the details, you often find that words don't always fall conveniently under one of the main labels. A word can start acquiring the distribution of another category only gradually, and sometimes it can even remain stuck between categories. When one tries to describe a language, this should not pose serious problems, as long as one remembers that syntactic categories are only meant to be descriptive labels - they are supposed to serve us, not rule us. So when you ask a question such as 'when did should remember a word move from category A to category B?', that the word never had to perform any complicated acrobatics. What you are really asking is: 'when do I decide to stop using the label A for a word, and start using the label B?' So if you discover that a word like gonna' won't oblige, and won't fit neatly under either of your labels, then you should remember that what's problematic is not the word itself, but your labels. This doesn't make your labels completely useless, it just means that they are not perfect in catching every aspect of language.

[aimsey-updates]

Aimsey is live!

They are getting every minecraft mob! (AUSMP)

[into-the-faewood]

The Faerie Prince's Dominion An original m/m romance about knights and faeries

Chapter 25 - Manifest. Dair’s body is still caught, helplessly, stupidly, on the fact that he wants him at all.

Read on AO3

[clumsyclifford]

x

[akkivee]

a hell quiz ffr

[mythgirlimagines]

Y'all are getting CONTENT these next two months :3

[abimee]

i cpul;d go on forever about amaurot. the specific people. thinking about the descriptionds for the philos and aidos minion and having a moment ill brb

[caninecowboy]

crying screaming throwing up etc etc etc

[spookymooks]

oye a bunch of shit on my previous theme broke so i switched it to the default mobile one until i stop being too lazy to implement a new one so never

also updated my about! you can read it here

[profeminist]

"School districts that don’t respect transgender and nonbinary students’ pronouns or force them to use restrooms that don’t align with their gender identity could be committing federal civil rights violations beginning this fall.

Today, the U.S. Department of Education announced the issuance of a final rule under Title IX to protect people in public schools from sex-based discrimination and harassment. The announcement marks a significant update in federal efforts to combat sex discrimination in federally funded educational institutions. During a call with reporters, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona emphasized the administration’s dedication to ensuring that Title IX effectively serves all students by providing safe, welcoming, and rights-respecting educational environments."

Read the full piece here

[zvaigzdelasas]

New York University led by troubling example when the school shared an updated code of student conduct last week. Ostensibly aimed at curtailing bigotry, the new language instead shuts down dissent by threatening to silence criticism of Zionism on campus. Students who speak out against Zionism — an ethno-nationalist political ideology founded in the late 19th century — will now risk violating the school’s nondiscrimination policies.[...]

Tucked into a document purportedly offering clarification on school policy, the new NYU guidelines introduce an unprecedented expansion of protected classes to include “Zionists” and “Zionism.” Referring to the university’s nondiscrimination and anti-harassment policy, known as NDAH, the updated conduct guide says, “Speech and conduct that would violate the NDAH if targeting Jewish or Israeli people can also violate the NDAH if directed toward Zionists.”[...]

“Using code words, like ‘Zionist,’” the guide says, “does not eliminate the possibility that your speech violates the NDAH policy.”[...]

The entire premise of the guidance — that “Zionist” must be functioning as a “code word — is a flaw egregious enough to reject the entire document outright.

The language here is of utmost importance. The text does not say that “Zionist” can and has been used by antisemites as a code word, which is no doubt true. Instead, it takes it as a given that, when used critically, “Zionist” simply is a code word.[...]

According to NYU’s guidance, then, Zionist and Zionism are either antisemitic dog whistles when invoked critically or a protected category akin to a race, ethnicity, or religious identity. Ethically committed and politically informed anti-Zionism — including the beliefs of many anti-Zionist Jews like myself who reject the conflation of our identity and heritage with an ethnostate project — is foreclosed, and the long history of Jewish anti-Zionism, which has existed as long as Zionism itself, is all but erased.[...]

“For many Jewish people, Zionism is a part of their Jewish identity,” the NYU guidance says. And this is of course true. That does not, however, make Zionism an essential part of Jewish identity.

There are conservative Christians for whom the damnation of homosexuality is a key part of their Christian faith too, but Republican lawfare to see homophobic positions enshrined as protected religious expression have been rightly and consistently condemned by the liberal mainstream.

“The new guidance sets a dangerous precedent by extending Title VI protections to anyone who adheres to Zionism, a nationalist political ideology, and troublingly equates criticism of Zionism with discrimination against Jewish people,” NYU’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine said in a statement in response to the updated conduct guide.[...]

“Furthermore, the new guidance implies that any nationalist political ideology (Hindu nationalism, Christian nationalism, etc.) that is integrated into some members of that group’s understanding of their own racial or ethnic identity should be entitled to civil rights protections.”

27 Aug 24