katisconfused

[katisconfused]

fathers casually dropping the craziest lore of their lives in the middle of a conversation

[katisconfused]

This actually had me laughing really hard

[katisconfused]

generate a random power here

Don't forget to put the power you get in the tags!

(If you're reblogging from me, I got Mixed Martial Arts Mastery)

[katisconfused]

On Tumblr dot com when you say that you had sex before 20 they either act like you saw Bigfoot or start talking about societal decline

[katisconfused]

Well fucks? Get to it!

[katisconfused]

ive been meaning to draw bonnie to this post for forever so here u go

[katisconfused]

blocked because your interpretation of that character doesn’t match the way they act in my bedtime narrative i imagine when i’m falling asleep every night

[katisconfused]

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.

[katisconfused]

i was supposed to go to bed an hour ago dont tell my mom

[katisconfused]

remember when the poison status was intense as fuck and you had to rush your poisoned pokemon to a pokemon center and the game would make that awful fucking noise that made you feel bad for allowing such a thing to happen to your pokemon

[katisconfused]

i fear the battle is lost at this point but i still flinch every time i see "gay panic" used as a cute positive phrase. Like let's go on say wikipedia.org for a second and try typing that one in folks

edit: i caved and looked in the notes and my god you people are stupid. Stop talking about this like it's ancient history. The gay/trans panic defense is quite literally still legal in the majority of the US. Look at this map since you apparently don't have wikipedia or like any kind of search engine on your computers

[katisconfused]

I cannot stress enough to you that all American government agencies are falling apart at the seams right now and they will not be put back together for the foreseeable future. EPA DHS ED VA FDA NIH IRS CDC HHS NPS etc... Elon Musk is dismantling everything. Anyone who resigns or is laid off now, the word we (I am an agency employee) are receiving internally is that their position will be abolished, not backfilled.

Do you like eating clean, safe food?

Do you like having clean, safe air and water?

Do you want experts monitoring developing infectious diseases?

Do you like getting tax returns?

Do you want your children to have free, quality, public education?

If so, you need to write to your senators and representatives RIGHT NOW. Trump is not obeying the rule of law. He is illegally firing all the inspectors general of these agencies (they are literally being escorted by security out of their offices) so that there is no one left to stop him from doing quite literally anything he wants. He has bypassed the internal structure of all of the agencies by plugging in external email servers to push typo-filled emails and memos written by employees of the heritage foundation directly into the inbox of every federal agency employee in the country, threatening to terminate them.

The rule of law is dead. The only mechanism left to stop any of this is mass public outcry via convincing your state's congressmen & women to do something, because right now they are staying absolutely silent and none of us in these agencies can figure out why. A massacre is happening right now and every single American will feel the material, concrete consequences of this in their daily lives very soon if nothing is done.

Please help me boost this information.

[katisconfused]

This also is really dependent on the med and what is going on. Like it's true that one antidepressant doing this just means maybe avoid that drug class and try something else, but sometimes you do in fact run out of meds and find that the best you can do is some symptom relief for bad side effects and decide if it's worth it for you.

90s movies: Psychopharmacology is as good as a lobotomy. If you take pills to treat your mental illness it will literally murder your imaginary friends and you will become a boring, lotus-eating conformist drone.

Me after taking my meds: drives the scenic route home to see if there are any geese on the pond and does a little dance in line at the grocery store and comes home to throw everything​ in my fridge into a stew pot because I can finally taste food again while singing songs at my birds in which I replace all the instances of "she" with "Cheese" and doing a Dolly Parton impression on the phone to my sister

[katisconfused]

I think people need a reminder of what the original meme was, because i dont think people get the Vibe right

[katisconfused]

"Uhh AFAB transfem people could be intersex-"

Without looking it up, tell me what types of intersex people would be assigned female at birth and simultaneously need to transition to being female. I don't think you know, because most of you were just using intersex people as a rhetorical shield for your real audience - cis women who aestheticize and objectify trans women.