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oh to have foxes play where I've laid to rest

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my ancient mama

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look at this tiny tiny ancient depiction of a goose sheltering babies beneath her wings. 🥺

it's not very detailed but look at the postures of the animals. And the way the goslings are not very young but recognisable as gangly and halfway grown.

Greek, Late Archaic Period, about first half of 5th century B.C.

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atoms are made of positive parts, negative parts, and neutral parts. the positive parts are attracted to the negative parts and repelled by each other, like magnets. but there's a second force that attracts positive and neutral parts to each other. to have an atom, you need the two forces that govern the parts of the atom to attain celestial harmony, which means you need enough neutral parts to make the positive parts stick together in the middle.

sometimes an atom is permissible but celestially disharmonious, usually because it's too big. there's also an occult diagram that determines which forms of atom are harmonious, but it's usually because it's too big. when this happens, the angels take offense and break it apart. this makes atoms that aren't celestially harmonious into smaller atoms that are, and is where balloon gas comes from: the form of balloon gas is particularly favored by God.

that's all well and good, as such things go. there are rocks that make balloon gas because God thinks their atoms are too big. that's fine. we can use it for balloons. but there's another type of celestial disharmony, caused by a secret third force that does this, where a neutral part of an atom can break into a positive part, a negative part, and a secret third thing called an "anti neutrino", and the atom gets bigger. you can't use this to make explosions, that's a third thing, but you can use it to light exit signs. you probably can't use it to turn base metals into gold either; that's a fourth thing, which is maybe the opposite of the third.

it's really hard to make gold because there's only one kind that isn't so celestially disharmonious that it curses you to death with beams. we wouldn't like gold if it cursed us to death with beams. it does curse us to death, of course, but the harmonious kind doesn't do it with beams.

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Because Catholicism and by extension Christianity are so big and normal I don't think a lot of people consider how strange the Vatican is just conceptually. Like yeah in the capital of a long-dead empire there's an opulent temple district that acts as it's own sovereign nation, still speaking the dead language of that empire for their rituals, ruled by a prophet-king chosen by a secret conclave of the high priesthood. Yeah his followers eat a lot of fish in the spring.

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I haven’t been on tumblr for quite as long as a lot of people but over several years I’ve noticed this interesting gradual sorta,, shift in the general culture? that it went from this mostly depressed, nihilistic outlook where people would regularly joke about hating themselves and being hopeless and depressed, to a wave of vehemence of “STOP hating everything actually the world is Good and you deserve love!!!” type posts, to now, where those aggressive ‘PSAs’ have faded away and instead I regularly see people romanticizing simple things like stars and hot tea and rainy mornings, and waxing poetic about their friends, and just trying to put love out there. and I don’t know exactly what that means (someone who knows more than me could probably say something smart about generational expression and trauma or popular perception of mental health and whatnot), but I do know that it makes my heart very full to see people learn to love the world and themselves by extension, and a whole userbase adopting healthier coping mechanisms, and therefore teaching the younger users to do so as well. I might just be following different people, but I really do think we’ve grown. everyone has grown. five years ago it wasn’t unusual for the next post on my dash to be a scathing commentary on why nothing matters or an anon ripping into someone they barely knew or someone complaining about how pathetic their interests are. now I have mutuals who get excited and spam reblog art of cows and friends I see tagging each other in pictures of frogs and strangers writing paragraphs about how much I matter. it makes me happy. idk. just an observation I wanted to make. I think people are good and everyone’s just trying their best at the end of the day

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idk if elon will kill his new chatbot grok when he finds out its woke, but he'll definitely kill it once he discovers it's funnier than him

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your only job on this earth is to be so intrinsically yourself that the right people gravitate toward you and the wrong people move out of your way

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remember when you could make a living on the website making silly mousegirl puns? these days you have to be knowledgeable about cursed eyes, princess/knight/maid dynamics, 8th century occult texts, dolls, demon blades, et cetera to even break 1000 notes

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i kiss you on the mouth and end my turn

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Crows are able to look at a handful of four-sided shapes and correctly distinguish those that exhibit geometric regularity from those that don't, according to a provocative new study. It's the first time a species other than humans has been shown to have this kind of geometric intuition, says Andreas Nieder, a cognitive neurobiologist at the University of Tübingen in Germany. "Claiming that it is specific to us humans, that only humans can detect geometric regularity, is now falsified," says Nieder. "Because we have at least the crow."

Continue Reading.

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Desdemona (1875) by Gustave Moreau

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the king picked the guy with skull shoulderpads for the court magician job, which is exciting

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Xiao’erjing is, at its core, a phonetic writing system which represents the phonemes of Chinese using adapted Arabic letters. In its phonetic aspect, Xiao’erjing is thus akin to pinyin, the system commonly used to write Mandarin Chinese in Latin letters, though differing notably in that tones are not explicitly marked. This lack of tone markings may be cause for confusion, given the vast repertoire of homophones in Chinese. In a given semantic context, however, native users of this writing system rarely encounter ambiguity, just as an experienced reader of Arabic or Persian has little difficulty inferring the short vowels of a given word despite the absence of diacritics from most texts.

Sharing this article that I thought might interest both Arab and Chinese speakers following me

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My favorite jokes are about mispronouncing philosophers' names but I'm afraid it's a nietzsche subgenre