If, Like Me, You Struggle With Long Zoo Days Because There’s Nowhere To Sit - Especially Not Near Where

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when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing

this might be a hard pill to swallow for college students but getting drunk all the time isnt a personality trait it’s alcoholism

Pointless LOTR headcanon of the day: Frodo & Merry both take after their mothers, meaning Frodo looks more like a Brandybuck than a Baggins and Merry looks more like a Took. This is a constant source of petty contention.

Te Wiki o te Reo Māori/Māori Language Week Day 2 – Rātū te tekau mā whā o Mahuru/Tuesday 14th of September

Pronunciation

Unlike English, te Reo Māori has very logical and consistent pronunciation rules, once you learn them, pronouncing new words is relatively simple!

Tohutō – one of the most important parts of the language is the length of the vowels. A tohutō is the macron/line above a vowel which indicates that you hold that vowel for slightly longer. If you can’t type the tohutō, just write the vowel twice to indicate the same thing. (eg. Maaori instead of Māori) the length of the vowel often changes the meaning of a word so its very important to include it.

Vowels – one of the key things is getting the pronunciation of vowels right, especially in combination with other letters and vowels. It might be aimed at children, but I recommend using this song. It’s the one we always used in primary school, and we used it in the first te reo class at uni too.

Difficult letters – the two bits that might take a bit more practice (depending on what other languages you know) is rolling your R, and the Ng sound. Ng usually comes at the beginning of the word and is often mispronounced by just removing the g. Try words like ring, just take the last part and add it to the front of the word (eg. Ngāi, Ngāti). Its all about the tongue placement, the middle of your tongue should roll against the roof of your mouth. In comparison, when you use the letter R in te reo, the tip of your tongue should roll against the roof of your mouth, it sounds almost closer to an English L. The Wh sound can also be difficult, simply put its just pronounced as an F sound (eg. Whakatāne, whakapapa).

Another important point is that te reo Māori does not use the S at the end of a word to make it a plural. When using a plural form of a te reo word, just leave it as it is! Just like how sheep and fish are already plurals in English, and it would sound wrong to say sheeps and fish, Māori is already a plural, and its completely wrong to say Māoris. Same goes for te reo animal names, its kiwi not kiwis, kākāpō not kākāpōs

bats photographed by josé gabriel martinez

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Fourth in a series I of comics about protesting safety tips I made with @this.is.ysabel . This one is about the dangers of police surveillance and how to avoid it if possible. Keep being safe when you go out. Don’t get snatched!

Actual things that happen in the 1897 Dracula novel, without context:

A character has ominous nightmares and attributes them to eating too much paprika

Dracula first appears wearing a fake beard

The person he was trying to fool with the fake beard immediately realizes Dracula and Beard Guy are the same man, due to both having really firm handshakes

We are told parrots are immortal unless fatally wounded

A Texan cowboy opens fire on a bat flitting around a window, and lodges a bullet in the wall of an occupied room

A woman is called a polyandrist for receiving blood transfusions from multiple men

An incorrectly addressed telegram leads to two deaths, multiple druggings, and several children being assaulted

Dracula, while trying to maintain a low profile, takes a lovely trip to the zoo and freaks out the animals so badly that he gets mentioned in a newspaper article

The one character who knows anything about vampires spends a good two-thirds of the book refusing to talk about vampires

Dracula went to Satan's Witchcraft Academy and somehow this is only brought up in two throwaway lines

A character gets stuck inside a circle of communion wafer crumbs

A major plot point of the book is Dracula (who was said to be a brilliant scholar and has the strength of twenty mortal men) realizing he can move boxes without human help

Someone is referred to as "manifestly a prig of the first water"

Two characters have a hobby of reading train schedules

A hospital lets a mental patient escape to see what will happen

A character starts vomiting up feathers from eating whole birds

A doctor refuses to give a medical diagnosis and instead makes a speech about growing corn

Dracula impersonates another character just by wearing the same clothes, despite being taller and visibly much older. This deception is successful.

A character "cleans" a room by eating all the insects in it

Suddenly: rats. Thousands of them.

The heroes progress in their efforts through "the wonderful power of money," i.e., bribery

Dracula has three other vampires in his castle. Their relation to him is never explained, nor are any of them named.

A character insists his salvation depends on having a pet cat

Dracula is thwarted by flowers on more than one occasion

A group of vampires stand in the hall outside a man's bedroom, talking loudly about their plans to eat him. When he comes to the door to confront them, they run away laughing

Dracula wears an unfashionable hat and gets roasted for it

A group of Romanians encounter a disheveled, shouting man and, "seeing from his violent demeanour that he was English, they [give] him a ticket for the furthest station on the way thither that the train reached."

A boat crashes due to Dracula having the munchies

A wolf is thrown through a window and immediately runs off, confused and covered in glass

Dracula makes a bed

you know what fuck it, I love you historical spelling. I love you weird fossilised preservations of obsolete alphabets, grasping for something that exists now like mist, like liquid, its true pronunciation lost to time but not quite forgotten, not yet. a ghost remains, a friendly one, comfortable in this old house. I love you repurposed letters for phonemes that neither the old language nor the variety they were borrowed into has any need for anymore. I love you sensible vowel pairings that have grown - improbably - centuries later, into unwieldy diphthongs, quietly thriving in an ever-shifting environment like weeds nestled cosily beneath the shade of grander plants that have long since turned to mulch. I love the word 'diphthong' (the little thicket of consonants in the middle of it, sprouting up from nowhere to trouble tongue and penmanship alike). I love how Phoenician fingerprints remain in a Norman revision of an Anglo-Saxon reworking of a Roman borrowing of a Greek repurposing, all these shapes and signs moulded again and again like clay, like mud, spun like flax to carry all those lovely glides and nasals and obstruents which come and go and come and go over time as the sounds mutate and grow apart, and the people grow and age and die, leaving behind nothing except (sometimes) a page. a poem. a piece of themselves, their voice, rendered in imperfect beautiful scratchings whose contours match the ceaseless flow of time, heavy with all that history and somehow also light with the sheer urgency of being written. look at it, isn't it wonderful? this moment in time that holds within it yet other moments? other echoes calling down through the centuries? this is how we spoke, this is what we sounded like, once. this is how we thought our ancestors would have said it. I love the inconvenience. English is so hard to learn. the spelling is so illogical. so cumbersome. it's frustrating. it makes no sense. it's inconvenient. yes and yes and yes, and yet you too are inconvenient, you too are inchoate and too much and you fail to resolve into a neat and comprehensible order. but look at you. how lovely you are. I treasure you. why should the words you speak be any less lovely.