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I think about how that “alpha beta” shit is based on a flawed study of captive wolves and like how much of “human nature” is based on living under capitalism

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(via r/justneckbeardthings)

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the best political compass meme to this day is still the death grips lyrics one

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editing a story and i forgot to put the fucking adjective in there holy fkuc

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Petroleum, when you think about it, is definitely an escaped piece of worldbuilding from a twee gothic fantasy dystopia

“The elven civilization gets energy from poisonous, flammable rock juice mined deep underground, sometimes causing earthquakes in the process. It’s slowly roasting their planet, but they keep doing it anyway to light their disposable palaces and fuel nihilistic displays of opulent wealth. Its stabler aethers are used in cosmetics rubbed upon the skin.”

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https://alexruizart.deviantart.com/gallery/

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Yáterash, náterash, & sepíng: the Belter vocabulary of gravity

(NOTE: Words in lang belta (Belter) are pronounced with stress on the penultimate syllable. An accent on a vowel indicates that stress falls on that syllable in a particular word.)

Oye, kopeng!

One of the characteristic experiences of da livit da belta (Belter life) is birth and childhood in low- and zero-G. It affects Belter physiology, to the point that they can’t stand up or breathe properly at Earth’s gravity (1G). They require steroids and growth hormones to develop properly, even by Belter standards. It’s made clear that the more prejudiced among inner planet folk believe that “Belters aren’t even human anymore.” This is why one of the Belter slogans is Milowda na anyimal!, “We are not animals”. (Note: Belter does not add an -s to indicate plural; it’s implied by context, in this case milowda, “we, us”. Mi na anyimal is “I am not an animal”.)

Inner planet folk talk about “gravity” because it is a constant force all their lives. Most Earthers never get even as far as Luna, so zero-G is a purely theoretical concept for them. The culture’s largely unchanging experience of gravity is reflected in that there is one word for it.

In the Belt, gravity comes with an on/off switch as well as a volume knob. Shipboard experience of gravity varies from floating in zero-G to G forces strong enough to kill the crew, depending on how hard the drive is burning. Different space stations will have different gravities depending on how big they are and how fast they are spinning. None will be at a full G.

The multiple words Belters use to describe their cultural experience of gravity reflects this lived reality.

One way to mimic gravity is through rotation; on a rotating space station “down” is the direction of the centripetal force. The word for this kind of gravity is sepíng, “spin".

One artifact of spin gravity is the Coriolis effect. Close to the core, the station is spinning so quickly in such a tight arc that if you drop something, although it’s pulled in straight line towards the floor, by the time it hits the floor the floor (and the room above it) has moved; rather than fall straight down, it will look like it’s falling in a spiraling curve. The further away from the core, the longer the arc of travel, and the less Coriolis one experiences.

Watch Miller pour liquids. In the governor’s office, he pours water into a glass and it falls in a straight line. That means they’re pretty close to the outside skin of Ceres, because there is no visible distortion to the water stream. When Miller is going through Julie’s dating profile to find the data-broker, he pours a brown spirit off to the side of the cup, and it pours in an arced stream, implying that he’s someplace towards the core where the Coriolis is much stronger.

Similarly, when he’s interviewing Gia the prostitute after her client gets murdered, he shares a glass of something, probably with the excuse of helping her calm her nerves. We don’t see Gia drink, but when it cuts back to Miller, rather than “raise a glass” in a toast, he swings the cup in front of him in a flat circle before taking a sip. The Rosse Buurt district is coreward, and maybe that’s a Belter way of toasting the other person while close to the core without flinging the drink out of the glass.

Another example of sepíng is when Naomi is guiding everyone through the Eros service tunnels. At one point, she drops a pinch of dust in front of her and looks at how it corkscrews to the floor. That gives her an orientation and lets her know what direction she wants to go. (GIF via @CarlBrwn)

The other way Humanity mimics gravity in space is linear acceleration. The Epstein drive is hyper efficient, doesn’t require the ejection of reaction mass, and can accelerate a ship far faster than a human could ever tolerate, drugs or no. Epstein drive ships in The Expanse are built like a skyscraper, floors stacked on top of each others, with the engine in the basement. As long as the ship is actively accelerating nose first or decelerating engines first, the crew experience gravity.

A point-to-point trip would involve accelerating to half-way, cutting the drive, “flipping” the ship using “teakettle” thrusters (water-ejecting maneuvering thrusters). Once the ship is repositioned and flying engines-first, one fires up the drive again and decelerates towards the final destination.

The nouns for the on/off state of ship-based gravity in Belter experience are yáterash (“under thrust”) [literally “yes thrust”] and náterash (“thrusters are off”) [literally “no thrust”].

The belter word for “to jump” is du push. Because in zero-G, that’s essentially what a jump is. And if you think it through, belters probably think of jumping with their hands. Jump in terms of a leap is salta.

Kaka felota means “floating shit”. It’s what happens when the toilet backs up during náterash, and is also used where an Earther might say “bullshit”, and probably how they express general displeasure. We don’t know if Nick has given us the straight up verb “to float” (or if he has, we haven’t captured it in the tékidoc yet), but it’ll probably end up being similar to felota.

No doubt there are other gravity-related words regarding navigation. Owbit is the Belter word for “orbit”. We know “slingshot club” is an extreme sport among Belters, but we don’t have the Belter for it yet. So keep your eyes peeled for more physics vocab. As always, Nick Farmer is the final arbiter of all things lang belta. Follow his twitter if you haven’t already.

Du féri da Belte!

Pirata & Lexica

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insp. | quote.

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the only person who ever came back for Rey was Finn

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It’s weird how cats vary in sizes and colors but still look pretty similar and then there are dogs who can range from “this fuckin close to being a bear” all the way down to “small angry potato”

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I feel like with the new ~fandom drama~ or whatever going around, I should re-introduce my favorite theory of fandom, which I call the 1% Theory.

Basically, the 1% Theory dictates that in every fandom, on average, 1% of the fans will be a pure, unsalvageable tire fire. We’re talking the people who do physical harm over their fandom, who start riots, cannot be talked down. The sort of things public news stories are made of. We’re not talking necessarily bad fans here- we’re talking people who take this thing so seriously they are willing to start a goddamn fist fight over nothing. The worst of the worst.

The reason I bring this up is because the 1% Theory ties into an important visual of fandom knowledge- that bigger fandoms are always perceived as “worse”, and at a certain point, a fandom always gets big enough to “go bad”. Let me explain.

Say you have a small fandom, like 500 people- the 1% Theory says that out of those 500, only 5 of them will be absolute nutjobs. This is incredibly manageable- it’s five people. The fandom and world at large can easily shut them out, block them, ignore their ramblings. The fandom is a “nice place”.

Now say you have a medium sized fandom- say 100,000 people. Suddenly, the 1% Theory ups your level of calamity to a whopping 1000 people. That’s a lot. That’s a lot for anyone to manage. It is, by nature of fandom, impossible to “manage” because no one owns fan spaces. People start to get nervous. There’s still so much good, but oof, 1000 people.

Now say you have a truly massive fandom- I use Homestuck here because I know the figures. At it’s peak, Homestuck had approximately FIVE MILLION active fans around the globe.

By the 1% Theory, that’s 50,000 people. Fifty THOUSAND starting riots, blackmailing creators, contributing to the worst of the worst of things.

There’s a couple of important points to take away here, in my opinion.

1) The 1% will always be the loudest, because people are always looking for new drama to follow.

2) Ultimately, it is 1%. It is only 1%. I can’t promise the other 99% are perfect, loving angels, but the “terrible fandom” is still only 1% complete utter garbage.

3) No fandom should ever be judged by their 1%. Big fandoms always look worse, small fandoms always look better. It’s not a good metric.

So remember, if you’re ever feeling disheartened by your fandom’s activity- it’s just 1%, people. Do your part not to be a part of it.

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im so sorry 

original comic by @rhymewithrachel on twitter

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And that’s how we turned Rose Faeries into Potato Faeries

‘Okay, so, today at work I asked a question that made my boss recoil, but apparently, once asked, he has to tell me the full story or ‘bad things will happen’. Which, as it would, immediately piqued my interest. I did the mash up last night, so I know that I left potatoes in the bin. I was last one out, and first one in this morning, and the potatoes are gone from that bin. Bit of a ‘huh?’ moment. And my boss … he starts telling me about how they always used to put out roses outside the restaurant when they opened. “What? Isn’t that expensive?” “I mean, yeah, but it’s just what you do when you open a restaurant” What the fuck kind of answer …? Anyways, the roses always used to disappear, so they had to replace them everyday, (This skinflint spending that much cash?!). One outside the front door, in that little metal thing that I had forgotten exists.  It’s above to the right of the front door, a small circle made by 8 vertical bands of metal, each in an ) shape. So, like, the cross-section is a )(. Apparently that’s a flower holder. And then outside of the back door, apparently the old wooden post there never held up anything, it was just a post with a vase on it. That he drove into the asphalt there. In the alleyway. “What? Why would you do something so pointless?” “Anyways,”, he brushed me off, “like I was saying, we used to put out the roses every night [[emphasis mine]] and they would always be gone by morning. City kids, right?” “Why did you keep doing this?!” “We had really good luck opening, I didn’t want to screw it up” At this point I feel I should stress that my boss is a straight-laced no nonsense, no superstition, don’t-do-needless-things, pennypincher without an ounce of spirituality in him. But throughout all of this he’s defending putting out roses at nighttime, like it’s the most obvious thing n the world. Just when I think he’s playing the longest, weirdest joke on me, he brings out the iPad, and he starts showing me security footage. It’s indistinct, it’s too dark, he’s trying to point out that the rose never changes from the beginning of the night to the end, but when it gets bright again, the flower is just gone, while the stem remains. It’s about this point that I realize: This is a faerie sacrifice. This is how you sacrifice things to goblins and faeries. These are rose faeries. Now you might not know, even if you live here, but Newfoundland has a tradition of rose faeries. We basically took all the stuff british colonists knew about faeries and said, ‘yeah, well, it’s all about wild roses now’. Hike up to Signal Hill from behind the geo centre and you’ll pass a faerie ring of rose bushes that someone planted because of that. (It’s not obvious at first). Later in Newfoundland history, we star replacing all of the rose faerie tales with tales about Mother Mary, (As in, Christianity), whose flower is the rose. Ask around the old folk, they’ll tell you tales about people getting sick or getting well really suddenly, followed by a strong smell of rose. About people working on church roofs, falling down into rose bushes, and not getting hurt. About statues of Mother Mary crying rose oil, indicating that an infant will be left in front of the statue soon. Those are all stories that are actually about rose faeries, but they changed the topic. I guess they still pay respect to them, they just think they’re paying respect to god with rose petals and rosehip tea. “But what’s this got to do with potatoes?” Well, he said, he kept this up for about 5 or 6 months, and then the winter started. And back then, the florists in town didn’t stock as much in green houses, there wasn’t enough call for it. So he wasn’t able to get roses. The restaurant had really bad luck for a while, but then one day, all of the potatoes in the restaurant went missing. Of all the things, not the tenderloin steak, not the fresh salmon, not the halibut, not the cherries, not the fresh baked bread, the potatoes. And the luck came back. And he hasn’t questioned it since. “So, about how many potatoes go missing every week?” “About 25lbs in little bits” We turned rose faeries into gluttonous potato faeries.

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I reblog for Tier 7, long may it reign.

writing smut like

how many synonyms for “penis” do I actually know?

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