fipis pipis

Spin the wheel to find out your weakness!

Here's how that works:

say you get a text from your internet provider, let's say it's Comcast (whom i hate). So you have this text that says it's from Comcast about your bill with a contact number and a clickable link -- could be real, could be a scam.

Don't touch anything about this text. Open a web browser and look up the customer service number for Comcast. Or get the number from the bill they send you. However you do it, get the contact info for Comcast from a trusted source, like an official phone directory or the Comcast website itself.

Get in touch with them using that information.

So. Let's run the example both ways it could go.

If it IS a scam: you reach out to Comcast and tell them you were contacted about a problem with your bill, they look you up in their customer database, and they tell you there is no problem with your bill.

If it's NOT a scam, you do the same thing, they look you up, and they explain the problem. In this case, neither Comcast nor the employees involved give a single shit whether or not you clicked the link in the text vs. going through their official website.

This works the same for the your bank, the IRS, Amazon, political causes, charities, everything.

When Life Gives You Corpses is a brilliant YA about a cursed praying mantis who falls for a young witch. Yield Under Great Persuasion is a raunchy, but surprisingly sweet story about two men repairing their relationship. Fabulous Bodies is a horror story about a queer rockstar rising from the dead.

This is Where the Future Bleeds is a fantasy set in a vividly imagined land, where two women (who happen to kiss) are the key to healing the broken sky. You're No Better is a story about a teen struggling in the shadow of his murderous parent. Oil on Canvas is about a woman who finds disturbing paintings in the home of her dead mother.

(Some) Queer Presses:

Lurid Editions are "a publishing project committed to intentional and conscientious acts of archival repair". They are "attentive to how marginalised histories are forgotten and remembered, [and] hungry to rediscover overlooked queer books". They've just received funding from Arts Council England to engage queer readers in a project to contribute to the archive!

Cipher Press "We’re really keen on the idea that queer and minority stories are for everybody, and we want to make our books – and the stories they tell - accessible to all" (what an amazing mission statement!)

Anamot Press "Anamot [Անամոթ] means shameless in Armenian. ⁣⁣Anamot Press publishes poetry and prose on intersecting experiences of gender, sexuality, race, migration, class, belonging and loss - with no shame."

(Some) Queer Bookshops

Queer Lit Oh man, I remember when this was just a tiny little shop, and now they're the biggest LGBT+ bookshop in Europe! They do amazing work in donating books about being trans to schools and parliament! They have a pay-it-forward board that will make you sob with its notes of love and support. (You can tell I wish I still lived nearby)

Lighthouse For Scottish friends - "a queer-owned and woman led independent community bookshop. We are an unapologetically activist, intersectional, feminist, antiracist, lgbtq+ community space"

Gay's The Word The OG Queer bookshop in the UK. One day I will make my pilgrimage!!

The Keeper of Lonely Spirits is about an old man cursed with immortality, loss, grief, and the meaning of home

Carb starts your engine, protein keeps it going.

Cookie

Fruit (canned or fresh)

Chips

Piece of bread

Popcorn

Crackers

Easy protein add on:

Nuts

Spoonful of nut butter

Cheese

Roasted chickpea snacks

Glass of milk (dairy or non dairy)

“But it’s confusing!” If you take the time to educate yourself it’ll no longer be confusing. Otherwise you’re just gonna have to learn to be ok with being confused.

“But it’s weird!” You probably do weird things all the time. Everyone does weird things sometimes. Life goes on.

“But it scares me!” Is it hurting you? No? You’ll be fine. Being scared and being harmed are not always the same thing. Learn to tell the difference and then act accordingly.

"But it makes me uncomfortable!" The world is an uncomfortable place and complete strangers are not required to fix that for you. Learning to endure harmless discomfort is a life skill for existing in public.

"But I don't like it!" There's plenty of things in the world and not all of them are fun or enjoyable or For You. This applies to everyone and we all have to deal with that in a mature fashion.

but the thing is: only *most* got filled to some extent

not all

because there used to be dragons

and now their niche is just *empty*

it's like i can feel the gap they left, in everything from open grassland ecosystems to isolated islands; the world we know is shaped by the absence of a truly big flying predator

no bird could ever fill their niche, because of plain and simple anatomical constraints

because they cannot use their wings to jump

birds could never be azdarchids

they could never be dragons

there are no more dragons

but there used to be

Find out your companion here *jazz hands*

Do you love them? Do you hate them?

So the official term for this, when a kanji is read one way in some contexts and a different way in others, is usually a case of onyomi vs kunyomi. -yomi, "reading" (from yomu "to read") basically categorizes words into whether you read them with the chinese pronunciation or the japanese pronunciation.

There are a lot of complicated factors that go into this but the easiest way for english speakers to wrap their heads around it is that the Japanese language ended up with multiple sets of vocabulary in the same way that the English language did with the Germanic language/Romance language split; you have one set of vocabulary for common, everyday use that derives from germanic vocab, and then another set of vocabulary for fancy, formal use that derives from Latinate vocab. The classic example is using swine to describe the animal, which the Germanic-speaking Anglo-Saxon farmers and handlers would tend to, and porc to describe the meat, which the French-speaking Normans would eat. But pretty much every word in the English language has some degree of casual-formal duplication of this kind.

Much like European scholars did with Latin, a bunch of vocabulary got imported by the literati of Japan starting around about the 5th century in order to have a different and more formal register to talk about certain topics. This was imported alongside the Chinese writing system at the same time, which then over the next few centuries was shifted into a simpler, non-logographic, syllabic script that became hiragana (the wavy one.)

But that means that a bunch of imported Chinese vocabulary was conventionally written in their original-or-close-to-it hanzi form, and spoken with their original-or-close-to-it Chinese pronunciation. Words of this type have a much higher incidence of long vowels, left over from the Chinese where each character would represent a single complex syllable varied by vowel intonation, compared to native Japanese words which are polysyllabic and hit more consonants.

So, the system has evolved in various directions over time, and now there are a lot of ways that a single character can be read depending on positioning and context, but the broad strokes are: if the kanji is mostly on its own, surrounded by hiragana, it will take the Japanese reading (kunyomi) and if it's part of a compound word, paired with other kanji, it will take the Chinese reading (onyomi.) The more formal the text -- especially notable with medical, scientific, or governmental texts -- the more dense and compacted it will get, with a much higher ratio of kanji compounds to hiragana, and a correspondingly higher dose of onyomi readings.

To leave off with one example: the video above highlights (手), which is 'hand.' When it appears by itself surrounded by simple words like participles, it takes the kunyomi te, like in the sentence 'take my hand' (手を握って, te o nigitte.) But if you are using it as part of a more abstraction concept, like in 手動 -- done by hand, or manual, see how the english term underwent the exact same shift into latinate when it gains a level of abstraction? -- then it becomes part of a compound word with another kanji. Now it takes the onyomi shu, to become part of the compound word shudou. Catch that long vowel! If it weren't part of a compound word, that 動 by itself would take the kunyomi hataraki, for motion or action.

'Troupe', 'troop', and 'thorp'. Loaned from French twice, as well as the homegrown term for a small village/group of houses.

'Pack', and 'bailey'. Native word and French loan.

"Sir', 'sire', 'seigneur' and 'Monsieur'. All from French at slightly different times and in different contexts.

Same with 'dame', 'dam', 'madam', and 'ma'am'.

'Mister', 'master', 'magister' and 'maître d'. All from Latin and French.

To 'spout' and 'spit'. First is from Dutch, second is native English.

To 'wake', 'watch' and 'wait'. First two are native English, third is from French.

To 'ward' versus 'guard'. Same word, but the second one was borrowed into Latin and then back into English from French.