LANTERN RAT

Others just hang up Hanfu skirts as curtains, inspired by the Tang Dynasty tradition of lawn picnic gatherings. Back then, when people went out for picnics, they’d drape their long skirts around the lawn to make makeshift canopies. （cr cunkouyeren，悦风雅 Joy with Grace，林夕kiki，梦还草，卷卷小羊毛，曾寶珠，是张可爱，王星星）

Learning about flyovers and pyrotechnics at American games being a thing

Non-americans discovering the size of American football stadiums....for high schools in texas. Also the size of our stadiums in general.

Going to baseball games as a side treat! Lmao.

Non-americans losing their minds over "like, 100 petrol pumps," at buc-ees.

Related: Americans often forget how huge target and Walmart is.

People discovering American BBQ

Non-americans being obsessed with mid American restaurant chains like Golden Corral and Taco Bell

A lot of them really did feel god in this chile's apparently

The rightful obsession with waffle house

New understanding of American Big Drink With Ice supremacy as summer creeps in

Begrudging acceptance of mandatory water breaks during games

Americans realizing we have a Team USA and we are not, in fact, just "hosting our friends" from around the world — mostly because we won our first match and our team is decent??? Not amazing but not the worst.

Side rant: us women's football team is legendary good and we should care about that more like. Hello???

Admitting Americans are right about air conditioning

Related: the english team did warm ups in Florida RIP, and also the there's a video of the French team just being like fuck the heat, fuck the sun, this is so hot...

Americans who do not normally care about international football but fucking love a sport and cheering so we're just hyping whatever team is nearby, like we see a party and just show up and learn the chant. Like sorry many of us don't know shit about soccer but if we see a bunch of people in viking helmets or kilts or holding a bunch of flags and cheering we're game.

TAILGATING!!!!

I already said this but American yellow school bus is an international celebrity

The Scottish drank Boston dry of beer apparently, like they quadrupled what Boston normally sells for fourth of July weekend. SAM ADAMS HAD TO GET AN EMERGENCY BEER DELIVERY.

Also the English team fans got kicked out of The Londoner pub in Dallas after drinking 5,000 beers and going over max capacity lmao

Free refill drinks, tortilla chips & salsa.

So many non-americans are going to be here for the 4th of July for our 250th anniversary which is going to be great and hilarious

Non-americans discovering ranch as a beloved condiment

Non-americans understanding American obsession with hamburger now

Japan's homebase is in Texas and the cultural differences are frankly great and also the Japanese fans are SO NICE and helped clean up the stadium after a match???

finally searched for a solution and there IS in fact a giant hand-curated list of sites containing this content. it can be imported to ublock origin on desktop or mobile, and even can be used on iOS via the ublacklist extension in the safari app. it's updated regularly, and importing via the link as described should allow those updates to go into effect automatically.

i've only tested it a little bit, but after importing the list and repeating my duckduckgo search for backpack recommendations, my top results now lead to websites that appear to be linked to actual organizations in some form, with an "about us" page and the name of a founder and everything. the text is still often a bit wordy and SEO-optimized, but it now has actual recommendations that are relevant to the query. BIG IF TRUE???

Over fifty years of data show a peak in PFAS (also known as "forever chemicals") content in seabird eggs in the 90s, followed by a decrease as regulations went into effect. The most recent findings show a 70% decrease of most common PFAS.

We are making genuine progress! Producers are dramatically altering how much they use PFAS and how much gets released in effluent, but also there's a lot better understanding of how to remove PFAS from the environment!

I’m Australian. Sure, we do have those doors, but the vast majority of places in Sydney are automatic sliding doors or old-fashioned manual push/pulls because we don’t need to block out the cold and wind the same way here.

So every day I experienced a culture clash with something as basic as what doors were normal for me.

-> Phonics For Adults <-

a rare closeup of a black swift, found throughout north america and small parts of south america. swifts are rarely seen up close; they spend more of their life in air than any other species of bird - they eat, drink, mate and sleep while in flight. they are incapable of perching like other birds; they must cling to vertical surfaces.

but yeah, apparently completely true.  these birds stay aloft for as much as 10 months nonstop, feed on insects, spend more energy at night (when there aren’t warm thermals to ride) and at dawn and dusk climb to 10,000 ft altitude where the 30 min slow descent is probably when they catch their sleep.

they’re unusually long-lived for such active critters (20 yrs) and they may be limiting energy expenditure by being extremely aerodynamic and narrow bodied.  Also a single bird travels the distance of about 7 roundtrip journeys to the moon in its lifetime (>3 million miles).

Azune Nayar is someone whose childhood and youth were marked by adults who, faced with bad choices, made the less-worse one because they cared about him.

His parents starved themselves to give him and his sister the chance of being recruited as child soldiers by a mercenary group, because that was the only way to protect him from starvation.

Thjazi Fang saw a child abandoned by the roadside, desperately, determinedly, and implausibly claiming he could fight. Thazi Fang was in the middle of waging a rebellion against the powers of Araman. That rebellion wasn’t the best place for a child of twelve. But it was a better place than abandoned by the roadside or picked up by another mercenary group, and Thjazi cared, so Thjazi took him in and assigned him to noncombat work away from the front lines.

By 15 Azune was fighting on the front lines. (In an earlier war, the same was true of Thazi at that age.)

Thjazi’s rebellion failed. He asked his brother Hal to look out for the teenage Azune. Hal did so, treating Azune as part of his family. Hal did the same for other people who needed it. Being like family wasn’t the same as being Hal’s kid.

The tragedy of Azune isn’t that he was failed or abandoned or uncared for or used. The tragedy of Azune is that the best that people who cared about him could give him still wasn’t the same as what he needed, because being an adult doesn’t make you all-powerful. Azune’s problems weren’t created by those who loved him. They were created by the world he lives in.

Azune lived his adult life for the Torn Banner because it was the life he knew; or out of loyalty; or because they were the ones trying to change that world into something different.

He offers understanding and empathy to enemies (Julien) and strangers (Vaelus). He learned that somewhere.

Psyanky (pysanka in the singular) are very much what one imagines if they think of an elaborate geometric Easter egg, though the tradition of creating geometric shapes on eggs pre-dates Christian contact in the area. Psyanky etymologically comes from the word for the verb to write, so often the process of decorating is called "writing a pysanka" in the English translations. They're traditionally dyed with a wax-resist method of dip dying, colours typically added from lightest to darkest, with wax applied with a stylus referred to as a kistka to prevent unwanted dyes from bonding to the egg in unintended places. This method allows for incredibly intricate designs. Grabbed this off wikipedia which says that they're recreations of older designs but psyanky are all so beautiful I could just stare at them all day.

There are four points of the myths regarding Pysanky that I want to point out re the gnomish history and Chanters Eggs. The first of which is one of the origin myths of the reason psyanky are written.

There are myths of what I refer to as a world eater serpent, for the fact that this serpent has similar purpose to Jörmungandr but no name easily found in English sources, that is chained either to a cliff or beneath the world, and with each pysanka written, the chains are either tightened preventing the world eater serpent from being freed, or it adds another pysanks for the serpent's minions to find preventing its servants from freeing it, thereby preventing the destruction of the world, but this requires them to be remade frequently as the serpent fights eternally for its freedom. In this sense, the pysanky are classically expiring symbols of magical protection, as the Chanters Eggs are presented to be.

Secondly, and simply, it's very much considered bad luck to crush a psyanka, especially beneath your feet. It's actually common superstition that if you break one under your feet, you'll be punished with illness. This makes me think of the yellow "sick egg" that when smashed at your feet makes you and everyone around you sick.

Thirdly, pysanky are associated with spring, rebirth, the sun, and fertility. They were subsumed into Easter practices because of the connection to spring and the return of the sun after a long winter being close enough to being symbolic of the resurrection of Christ. There's also some sources that say the egg is unlucky if unfertilized and its potential to hatch after being incubated is specifically symbolic of the earth being heated by the sun and suddenly bursting to life in the spring. This made me think of the Bloody King prophecy from Ferryd, which I think would be a great origin for a similar practice among the gnomes.

Now fourthly and lastly, historically these were traditionally made by women and their symbolisms and techniques passed from mother to daughter, but Ulbid being a hermit without any women living with him anymore, and also fictional, would be without any of his cultural protective magics if he didn't create any, and the one with more colours and symbols is of greater magic but also Ulbid doesn't understand what it will do, just that it is meant to help change circumstances drastically.

I want to highlight this specifically also because I love Ulbid's relationship with Kattigan and Canada is one of the countries with the most Ukranian diaspora in the world, I believe it comes after only Russia in terms of Ukrainians not living in Ukraine, and because Ukrainian immigrants historically have had really great relationships with indigenous peoples of Canada. There's a traditional gift called a Kookum or Kokum scarf that is traditionally exchanged between indigenous people and Ukrainian immigrants that's sort of a blend of certain very similar practices regarding embroidered scarves and shawls. Kokum means grandmother in cree, so these are sometimes referred to as granny scarves. Below is a black kokum scarf. The florals tend to lean more Ukranian in design, but definitely look into it!