themorelinesthebetter

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Just learned this absolutely delightful bit of etymology:

During the 15th century, the English had an endearing practice of granting common human names to the birds that lived among them. Virtually every bird in that era had a name, and most of them, like Will Wagtail and Philip Sparrow have been long forgotten. Polly Parrot has stuck around, and Tom Tit and Jenny Wren, personable companions of the English countryside, are names still sometimes found in children’s rhymes. Other human names, however, have been incorporated so durably into the common names that still grace birds as to almost entirely obscure their origin. The Magpie, a loquacious black and white bird with a penchant for snatching shiny objects, once bore the simple name “pie,” probably coming from its Roman name, “pica.” The English named these birds Margaret, which was then abbreviated to Maggie, and finally left at Mag Pie. The vocal, crow-like bird called Jackdaw was also once just a “daw” named “Jack.”  The English also gave their ubiquitous and beloved orange-bellied, orb-shaped, wren-sized bird a human name. The first recorded Anglo-Saxon name for the Eurasian Robin was ruddoc, meaning “little red one.” By the medieval period, its name evolved to redbreast (the more accurate term orange only entered the English language when the fruit of the same name reached Great Britain in the 16th century). The English chose the satisfyingly alliterative name Robert for the redbreast, which they then changed to the popular Tudor nickname Robin. Soon enough, the name Robin Redbreast became so identified with the bird that Redbreast was dropped because it seemed so redundant. 

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Personality hire

Working Cats

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Effetto ottico impressionante 😲😉😁

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if you wiped every ICE agent off the face of the earth, a hundred million people would become safer overnight. if you wiped every furry off the face of the earth, the entire internet would collapse for good in a matter of hours. i know where my allegiances lie.

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KPOP DEMON HUNTERS (2025) dir. by Maggie Kang, Chris Appelhans

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1v1

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Growing up, my brother and I deeply dreaded going shoe shopping. It took hours, especially if it was for winter boots. My dad would examine the stitching, the brand reliability, the temperature recommendations, every piece of information he could get his hands on, and then when he'd finally found the right brand, it was on to making absolutely dead sure they fit properly - he had a particular way of poking the toe of the boot to ensure our foot was where it was supposed to be that always drove me nuts. This was always on a weekend, and it was about the worst punishment we could imagine.

Years later, I found out that he'd spent his entire childhood on the Canadian prairies with cold feet. My grandmother just bought whatever boots looked like the best value, regardless of whether they'd keep anyone warm. They'd kept him from frostbite, probably, but never, ever comfortable.

The reason my grandmother never had a thought about this was because she was buying her kids real boots. There was a sort of magical quality about real, purpose-made boots that meant that of course they'd work, because when she was growing up on the Canadian prairies, they had the kind of no money that meant you just stuffed some newspaper into your shoes and soldiered on.

The last pair of winter boots my dad bought for me was 15 years ago, in preparation for a three-month stint living in northern Quebec in midwinter. They cost $200 then, or something like it. I've worn them every year since, driving out to the remotest locations on the Canadian prairies and never once thinking about my feet.

When I read the Vimes Boots Theory for the first time, it rang a bell that reverberated back three generations.

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Some compared Alaska to the Munich appeasement:

Former P.M. Boris Johnson of Britain, once considered the Trump of London, called the Alaska summit meeting “just about the most vomit-inducing episode in all the tawdry history of international diplomacy.” - Trip Gabriel

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Calling it, this is the fucking Information Age Collapse. Bronze Age Collapse 2.0. We have three or so generations of this shit while everything slowly breaks and then in 1k years archaeologists will be unearthing hard drives and cursing us for putting all our information in such shitty, easily degraded media instead of etching it into metal and stone like a sensible civilisation.

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