wintermoth:

s-n-arly:

greater-than-the-sword:

Underlined PSA

Figment, the recently closed writing website, has just launched (after a long delay) their long-awaited successor to figment known as Underlined, where users can post their work and receive feedback, supposedly.

DO NOT USE UNDERLINED. DO NOT POST YOUR WORK ON UNDERLINED.

Underlined’s terms and conditions contains a clause stating that the rights to all your work that you post on their website belongs to them!!!!

Underlined belongs to Penguin Random House. This is an extremely dirty trick for them to play on writers, especially young writers and children, who come to the internet to get feedback and will lose the rights to their work. Please boost!!!

For my writing friends looking for an online writing community, DO NOT USE Underlined. 

I went to confirm @greater-than-the-sword‘s post, because seriously publishers are still pulling this garbage?  And yes, they are.  If you want to check out the full terms and conditions, have at it.  They are full of writers’ nightmares, a few of which I’ll highlight under the cut.

Keep reading

What the actual FUCK

fireheartedkaratepup:

thebeeblogger:

foxthebeekeeper:

jumpingjacktrash:

libertarirynn:

bollytolly:

l0veyu:

viva-la-bees:

fat-gold-fish:

how do u actually save bees?

• Plant bee-friendly flowers
• Support your local beekeepers
• Set up bee hotels for solitary bees
• If you see a lethargic bee feed it sugar water
• Spread awareness of the importance off bees

+Don’t eat honey✌🏻

NO.

That will not help save the bees at all. They need the excess honey removed from their hives. That’s the beekeepers entire livelihood.

Seriously refusing to eat honey is one of those well-meaning but ultimately terrible ideas. The bees make way too much honey and need it out in order to thrive (not being funny but that was literally a side effect in Bee Movie). Plus that’s the only way for the beekeepers to make the money they need to keep the bees healthy. Do not stop eating honey because somebody on Tumblr told you too.

excess honey, if not removed, can ferment and poison the bees. even if it doesn’t, it attracts animals and other insects which can hurt the bees or even damage the hive. why vegans think letting bees stew in their own drippings is ‘cruelty-free’ is beyond me. >:[

the fact that we find honey yummy and nutritious is part of why we keep bees, true, but the truth is we mostly keep them to pollinate our crops. the vegetable crops you seem to imagine would still magically sustain us if we stopped cultivating bees.

and when you get right down to it… domestic bees aren’t confined in any way. if they wanted to fly away, they could, and would. they come back to the wood frame hives humans build because those are nice places to nest.

so pretending domestic bees have it worse than wild bees is just the most childish kind of anthropomorphizing.

If anything, man-made hives are MORE suitable for bees to live in because we have mathematically determined their optimal living space and conditions, and can control them better in our hives. We also can treat them for diseases and pests much easier than we could if they were living in, say, a tree.

Tl;dr for all of this: eating honey saves the bees from themselves, and keeping them in man-made hives is good for them.

✌️✌️✌️

Plus, buying honey supports bee owners, which helps them maintain the hives, and if they get more money they can buy more hives, which means more bees!

benito-cereno:

Okay, so:

Latin has this word, sic. Or, if we want to be more diacritically accurate, sīc. That shows that the i is long, so it’s pronounced like “seek” and not like “sick.”

You might recognize this word from Latin sayings like “sic semper tyrannis” or “sic transit gloria mundi.” You might recognize it as what you put in parentheses when you want to be pass-agg about someone’s mistakes when you’re quoting them: “Then he texted me, ‘I want to touch you’re (sic) butt.’”

It means, “thus,” which sounds pretty hoity-toity in this modren era, so maybe think of it as meaning “in this way,” or “just like that.” As in, “just like that, to all tyrants, forever,” an allegedly cool thing to say after shooting a President and leaping off a balcony and shattering your leg. “Everyone should do it this way.”

Anyway, Classical Latin somewhat lacked an affirmative particle, though you might see the word ita, a synonym of sic, used in that way. By Medieval Times, however, sic was holding down this role. Which is to say, it came to mean yes.

Ego: Num edisti totam pitam?

Tu, pudendus: Sic.

Me: Did you eat all the pizza?

You, shameful: That’s the way it is./Yes.

This was pretty well established by the time Latin evolved into its various bastard children, the Romance languages, and you can see this by the words for yes in these languages.

In Spanish, Italian, Asturian, Catalan, Corsican, Galician, Friulian, and others, you say si for yes. In Portugese, you say sim. In French, you say si to mean yes when you’re contradicting a negative assertion (”You don’t like donkey sausage like all of us, the inhabitants of France, eat all the time?” “Yes, I do!”). In Romanian, you say da, but that’s because they’re on some Slavic shit. P.S. there are possibly more Romance languages than you’re aware of.

But:

There was still influence in some areas by the conquered Gaulish tribes on the language of their conquerors. We don’t really have anything of Gaulish language left, but we can reverse engineer some things from their descendants. You see, the Celts that we think of now as the people of the British Isles were Gaulish, originally (in the sense that anyone’s originally from anywhere, I guess) from central and western Europe. So we can look at, for example, Old Irish, where they said tó to mean yes, or Welsh, where they say do to mean yes or indeed, and we can see that they derive from the Proto-Indo-European (the big mother language at whose teat very many languages both modern and ancient did suckle) word *tod, meaning “this” or “that.” (The asterisk indicates that this is a reconstructed word and we don’t know exactly what it would have been but we have a pretty damn good idea.)

So if you were fucking Ambiorix or whoever and Quintus Titurius Sabinus was like, “Yo, did you eat all the pizza?” you would do that Drake smile and point thing under your big beefy Gaulish mustache and say, “This.” Then you would have him surrounded and killed.

Apparently Latin(ish) speakers in the area thought this was a very dope way of expressing themselves. “Why should I say ‘in that way’ like those idiots in Italy and Spain when I could say ‘this’ like all these cool mustache boys in Gaul?” So they started copying the expression, but in their own language. (That’s called a calque, by the way. When you borrow an expression from another language but translate it into your own. If you care about that kind of shit.)

The Latin word for “this” is “hoc,” so a bunch of people started saying “hoc” to mean yes. In the southern parts of what was once Gaul, “hoc” makes the relatively minor adjustment to òc, while in the more northerly areas they think, “Hmm, just saying ‘this’ isn’t cool enough. What if we said ‘this that’ to mean ‘yes.’” (This is not exactly what happened but it is basically what happened, please just fucking roll with it, this shit is long enough already.)

So they combined hoc with ille, which means “that” (but also comes to just mean “he”: compare Spanish el, Italian il, French le, and so on) to make o-il, which becomes oïl. This difference between the north and south (i.e. saying oc or oil) comes to be so emblematic of the differences between the two languages/dialects that the languages from the north are called langues d’oil and the ones from the south are called langues d’oc. In fact, the latter language is now officially called “Occitan,” which is a made-up word (to a slightly greater degree than that to which all words are made-up words) that basically means “Oc-ish.” They speak Occitan in southern France and Catalonia and Monaco and some other places.

The oil languages include a pretty beefy number of languages and dialects with some pretty amazing names like Walloon, and also one with a much more basic name: French. Perhaps you’ve heard of it, n’est-ce pas?

Yeah, eventually Francophones drop the -l from oil and start saying it as oui. If you’ve ever wondered why French yes is different from other Romance yeses, well, now you know.

I guess what I’m getting at is that when you reblog a post you like and tag it with “this,” or affirm a thing a friend said by nodding and saying “Yeah, that”: you’re not new

lupus-cordis:

-you arrive for the early shift every morning at 7:30. you turn on the lights. the shadows recede. on thursday, you turn on the lights, but for exactly one second, the shadows remain present. you try to ignore the feeling of terror that rockets through you. 

-the circulation computer has been giving staff problems for years; the screen freezes, the mouse sticks, and the monitor constantly flashes “time of death: 3:18. cause: electrocution.” a patron jokes, “must be possessed.” you try to laugh, but you eye the clock: 3:15. 

-the library has a metal roof; when it rains, the sound echoes through the whole library, huge raindrops pummeling the building. you have been enjoying the sound of the rain for about 3 hours when two patrons walk in wearing shorts and dry t shirts, commenting on how nice the sunshine feels. 

-a newcomer in the town has just signed up for a library card. you are explaining what happens when materials are overdue. books are 25 cents a day when overdue; if they are lost, the patron is hung by their toes on the front lawn. the patron laughs at your joke. you do not. you were not joking. 

-one of the clerks, Dawn, phones to say she will be a little late for her 3 o’clock shift. Dawn walks in at 3:15, logs in to her computer. the phone rings. it is Dawn. she will be in at 3:30. 

-a patron stops by the reference desk and asks for a certain book. you tell them the book will be in the 300s section. “and where can I find the 300s?” they ask. you don’t know how to reply. no one has seen the 300s section in years.

-you put a book in the stacking area to be reshelved. It is one of perhaps a hundred. You come back moments later – the stacking area is empty, and the ghostly stacks team continue about their ineffable business.

-you clean the shelves. you find half a pizza, several nerf darts, a sock, and your childhood teddy bear that mysteriously disappeared

-the books on necromancy sometimes hiss and sing. you’re not sure why there are books on necromancy. this is a college library.