gelertrook

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the canine urge to be self destructive, short fused, and loyal to a fault

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Splendid glossy starling.

🐦 betopolezel on IG

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What I mean when I do not control the hyperfixation.

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by Dmitry Alekseev

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It’s a balmy 60-something degrees outside today, but it’s still wintertime and there’s snow in the forecast for Tuesday so it’s appropriate to post a snow-clad reindeer, right? Some of you must be getting wintery weather somewhere out there…

(this was a custom request from last year’s Kickstarter – a Svalbard reindeer!)

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Errol Le Cain - illustration of ‘Thorn Rose’, a version of Sleeping Beauty.

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No reason why the next Overwatch character can’t be a Greek Orthodox priest

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Be gay, trans and alive

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Once you become a certain age, it is your responsibility to unlearn behaviors that hinder your growth as a person.

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having a freeze response to stress is so funny in the context of normal adult stressors. millions of years of evolution are trying to tell me that the email will not find me if i stay very still and do nothing

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Have you seen this post?

You probably have. It currently has over 120,000 notes, largely because of this addition.

Of course it's going to get reblogged, this kind of unsourced factoid does numbers on here. But something about it wasn't quite right.

A bit of searching turned up the origin of the "fact".

Alright, so it's someone who posted this on reddit 4 years ago and somehow ended up in the search hits. And the post confuses the electric eel (from South America) with the electric catfish (from the Nile, which the Egyptians would have known about).

Reminder: this is an electric eel (Electrophorus electricus). It is from South America. (image from Wikipedia)

And this is an electric catfish (Malapterurus electricus). It is from the Nile and would have been familiar to the ancient Egyptians. (image from Wikipedia)

And then of course people were speculating in the notes to that post about trade routes between South America and Egypt. Excellent scholarship everyone.

At this point I was ready to call it another made-up internet fact that gets reified by people repeating it. But something was still bothering me.

An ancient Egyptian slab from 3100 BC. What could that be...

Oh.

The Narmer palette. It's the goddamn Narmer palette. (image, once again, from Wikipedia)

So where is this "angry catfish"?

It's not the Egyptian name for the electric catfish.

It's... Narmer. It's Narmer himself.

Narmer's name is written as above (detail of top middle of the palette), using the catfish (n`r) and the chisel (mr), giving N'r-mr. The chisel is associated with pain, so this reads as "painful catfish", "striking catfish", or, yes, "angry catfish" or other similar variants, although some authors have suggested that it means "Beloved of [the catfish god] Nar".

So.

Where does this leave us?

It would appear that this redditor not only confused electric eels with electric catfish, but also confused a Pharaoh's name with the name of a fish. And then it got pushed to the top search hits by a crappy search engine and shared uncritically on tumblr.

In short, "the electric eel is called angry catfish" factoid actually literacy error. Angry Catfish, who ruled upper Egypt and smote his enemies, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

Also the Arabic name for the electric catfish is raad (thunder) or raada (thunderer).

References

Afsaruddin, A., & Zahniser, A. H. M. (1997). Humanism, culture, and language in the Near East: studies in honor of Georg Krotkoff. Eisenbrauns.

Clayton, P. A. (2001). Chronicle of the Pharaohs. Thames & Hudson.

Godron, G. (1949). A propos du nom royal. Annales du Service des antiquités de l'Egypte, 49, 217-221.

Sperveslage, G., & Heagy, T. C. (2023). A tail's tale: Narmer, the catfish, and bovine symbolism. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 109(1), 3-319.

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"X-men is becoming woke!" I'm sorry, have we been seeing the same series?

The main teacher is a disabled man who uses a wheelchair. The team has a powerful African lady who is literally called a god. In some universes, she is in an interracial relationship with Wolverine. The three most powerful members of the team are Jean, Storm, and Rogue, who are ALL women. Bishop is a smart and powerful black man. Forge is Native American and is super smart and builds cool futuristic tech stuff. One of the protagonists is a chinese-american girl whose love interest is a dark-skinned Latino dude. Mystique is literally gender fluid and married to a woman. Mystique also got the woman pregnant by giving herself a penis, which is how Kurt was born. Kitty Pryde is confirmed to be bisexual. Magick is confirmed to be bisexual. Iceman came out as a gay man. Wolverine dated the literal actually HERCULES in one comic. Deadpool has been confirmed by multiple writers (AND THE MOVIE) to be pansexual, and even has a (VIATNAMESE) nonbinary love interest in one comic. The entire series is about minorities living in a society that despises them.

But yeah, sure. Complain about Morph, a SEXLESS SHAPESHIFTER WHO WAS BARELY EVEN IN THE ORIGINAL SHOW, being nonbinary and having a crush on Wolverine.

Xmen has ALWAYS been woke. It's a metaphor for oppression and how anyone who differs from the societal norm is treated terribly. OF COURSE they're going to have queer characters in there 💀

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I love insults like landlubber and cityslicker, look at this idiot not used to areas and situations

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not normie enough to fit in but not fringe enough to lean into being a freak, worst of both worlds, pure liminality, just the weird coworker, and unrelatable classmate. and your mutual

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I'm working on a *fiddlestan + stan adopted soos* animatic right now, and I'm SUPER close to being done. I'll probably post it within a few days. But I was looking at fiddlestan on here and I felt it in my bones that I needed to contribute to the tag. So here's a frame of these geezers being cute.