So I just spent twenty minutes standing out in the front yard of my In-Laws house being bitten by mosquitoes and getting my sandals soaked becuase THERE IS A FAMILY OF FOXES DENNING UNDER THE HOUSE AND THEY HAVE NO LESS THAN FIVE FAT ADORABLE LITTLE BABY KITS AND THEY WERE ALL ROLLING AROUND AND PLAYING ON THE LAWN AND I COULD WATCH THEM FROM THE PORCH EVEN THOUGH THE SPRINKLERS WERE ON AND IT’S THE MOST ADORABLE THING i’VE EVER SEEN GOODBYE EVERYONE I HAVE TRANSCENDED TO THE BEST PLANE.
you literally captured whats called “ball lightning” which is the rarest form of lighting
its so rare that we dont even know how it forms other than by heat, static electricity, and humidity
storm elemental it is
look guys this is how nature-based deities and spirits come about this is ridiculous
Are you aware that the first-ever video footage of ball lightning outside a laboratory was taken in 2014 and there are only like 3 or 4 videos like this in existence and this might be the most close-up one
me, standing behind some trees with a handful of LED lights, banging pots & pans together,
Housemate Xed works for the Secretary of State, in the bit that registers businesses and, for a few years and for somewhat convoluted political reasons, domestic partnerships.
Yesterday their office received the… complaints? Of a somewhat distraught pair of people (notice I do not say ‘couple’) who, at some point in the last few years, had decided to go into business together — a nail salon or something, I think — and been advised that they should form a Partnership. Pretty standard for a small business with two owners.
…except they didn’t understand and formed a Domestic Partnership instead.
Washington State legalized same-sex marriage in 2012, and as part of that, this June ALL non-senior domestic partnerships became marriages automatically.
These two business partners accidentally married each other.
And now they’re trying to figure out how to undo it.
…short of divorce.
THIS IS THE BEST *saves this plot for REPEATED FUTURE USE*
So you know what I don’t get? Why people repeat words. (x)
Grammar time: it’s called “contrastive reduplication,” and it’s a form of intensification that is relatively common. Finnish does a very similar thing, and others use near-reduplication (rhyme-based) to intensify, like Hungarian (pici ‘tiny’, ici-pici ‘very tiny’).
Even the typologically-distant group of Bantu languages utilize reduplication in a strikingly similar fashion with nouns: Kinande oku-gulu ‘leg’, oku-gulu-gulu ‘a REAL leg’ (Downing 2001, includes more with verbal reduplication as well).
I suppose the difficult aspect of English reduplication is not through this particular type, but the fact that it utilizes many other types of reduplication: baby talk (choo-choo, no-no), rhyming (teeny-weeny, super-duper), and the ever-famous “shm” reduplication: fancy-schmancy (a way of denying the claim that something is fancy).
screams my professor was trying to find an example of reduplication so the next class he came back and said “I FOUND REDUPLICATION IN ENGLISH” and then he said “Milk milk” and everyone was just “what?” and he said “you know when you go to a coffee shop and they ask if you want soy milk and you say ‘no i want milk milk’” and everyone just had this collective sigh of understanding.
Another name for this particular construction is contrastive focus reduplication, and there’s a famous linguistics paper about it which is commonly known as the Salad Salad Paper. You know, because if you want to make it clear that you’re not talking about pasta salad or potato salad, you might call it “salad salad”. The repetition indicates that you’re intending the most prototypical meaning of the word, like green salad or cow’s milk, even though other things can be considered types of salad or milk.
@deadcatwithaflamethrower because you’re the first language nerd i can think of to @ this at right now ;D
I can’t explain how much I want a 21st century Star Trek au where Kirk still lives in Iowa and it’s like “holy shit aliens just literally landed in my cornfield I can’t believe my life became a bad episode of x-files”
ok but. hear me out like…
kirk as just this genius 21yr old in Iowa building hi-tech shit in his basement; like radios and shit that manage to pick up sub-space frequencies that he helps code w/ the help of Uhura
kirk thinking it’d be a funny prank to make some crop circles in his family’s cornfield
kirk making intricate crop circles that read as some rudimentary script of Vulcan
spock responding to the images that seem to be an SOS from his father; beams down to earth only to find out some humans managed to accidentally learn the vulcan language
“oh so you’re an alien” “indeed” “And…you’re looking for your dad.” “affirmative” “well, you know what this means?” “….” “…roadtrip.”
spock learns the meaning of friendship as he roadtrips across america with a pack of humans that kirk picks up along the way in search of his father: mccoy, the doctor they met in georgia that let them sleep in his basement; scotty the auto repair guy they meet in some backwater town; sulu in new york that is much better at driving than kirk is; nobody really knows how chekov ended up with them, but it’s probably illegal
these are the voyages of the 1970 Volkswagen bus Enterprise
Minnesota, Interstate I-495: The Final Frontier
It’s not a 1970 Volkswagen, but…
driver picks the music!
Someone please write this. I don’t write in this verse. Please write it.
My friend got married yesterday and we missed the wedding because of work but we made it to the reception. Because its mid-September and the reception was in a nature center (awesome!) there was a little bit of a fall theme. Not overbearingly, but the tables all had these tiny pumpkins.
So they’re cleaning up at the end of it and we’re still hanging out because we haven’t seen these people in forever and we can talk until three in the morning when we get together. All of a sudden, the Maid of Honor hands us a tiny pumpkin.
“Take one.”
“Um… okay?”
“Take another.”
“….?”
“It is my duty as Maid of Honor to make sure that the guests leave with an uncomfortable number of tiny pumpkins.”
So it turns out that she’d gotten a bunch of them for a Halloween party last year and after the party was over her mom threw them into the compost heap thinking that would be the end of it. But what she didn’t seem to realize was that if you put pumpkins in a compost heap- it grows more pumpkins. It grows pumpkins exponentially. Serious mathematical anomaly pumpkins.
So this year she has even more tiny pumpkins and she figured it would be a good idea to have them as decor for the reception. BUT- she would still have to throw them out at the end of the day and no matter where you throw them you are doomed to have a ridiculous amount of tiny pumpkins growing SOMEWHERE at your fault.
So everyone left with at least two tiny pumpkins and that’s how we made friends with the Maid of Honor.
So I forgot about it and then the next morning I woke up and found these two tiny pumpkins in my purse and had a puzzling moment of ‘what?’
We were invited to the Maid of Honor’s house the other day so we could:
take some of the flowers off her hands
help with some post-wedding stuff
watch the presidential debate
play Clue for like three hours
drink a lot of booze.
And there are just… tiny pumpkins EVERYWHERE.
They were in the bathroom.
At the end of the night, I counted 26 tiny pumpkins, and that was just what I could see.
It happened again.
Three pumpkins ended up in my purse this time.
One of them has a face.
I need to stop drinking with this woman.
this is getting out of hand.
Okay so I finally had a day off and decided that the best way to handle the pumpkin situation was to eat them and muffins sounded fucking fantastic. But I found out really fast that most recipes call for a ‘can’ of pureed pumpkin and I don’t have a scale to go by. So I figured that I had six pumpkins, it would probably amount to something like one can, right?
Well… no.
It ended up being something like two and a half cans-ish. And that’s a really rough estimate. Turns out there’s a lot more meat on those things than you think there’d be. So I figured I could do something like double it and then make a half batch.
But then I ran out of sugar. I mis-measured the baking soda. I only had whole cloves, so I had to grind them down and had to estimate how much I needed. I couldn’t find the liquid measure.
I’m mixing up this giant bowl of pumpkin batter goo thinking shit shit shit this is going to be a mess. There’s no way anyone is going to be able to eat these things. And there’s no muffin cups. But I already made it this far and I’m stubborn as hell so in the oven they go.
I… kind of… forgot about them? Woops!
Place starts smelling like Yankee Candle and I’m like SHIT. Get over to the oven and…
they’re…
….somehow perfect?
Maybe a little dry, but they’re fucking delicious. Fucking magic pumpkins. Truly I am a witch.
So the moral of the story is that if life gives you tiny pumpkins, make them into muffins and give them right back.
Also roast the seeds because hell yeah.
Happy Halloween, everyone!
We’ve found her in real life guys
An actul fictional character in real life
she even baked with them
This is not the only evidence posed to me that I might, in fact, be a fictional character.
Steel Phoenix Studios 