liang-nova

[liang-nova]

Who can you trust in this shattering dream?

[liang-nova]

backlog part 3…

sorrrrrrta fell off the hsr bandwagon but here are some guys i drew anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

and that concludes the hoyo backlog excursion

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origami 🌃

I care him,,,🫶🏼

[liang-nova]

to be desired, to be sought, to be cut, to be sold — that is the fate of a gem.

[liang-nova]

We all know Aventurine is the favourite child…

Meanwhile Topaz 💀💀💀

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casual aventurine and ratio !!🗿🦚

[liang-nova]

Cowboy Comin’ Through! 💥

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the colors of the sunrise

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Why are streaming services these days all named shit like Fubi and Hehu and lala

[liang-nova]

You would think that Disco Elysium is a sequel to Rhythm Heaven. But it's not that

[liang-nova]

Sorry your boyfriend died and came back and died and came back and died and came back and died and came back again. He was trying to find you.

[liang-nova]

i would cannibalize god's rotting corpse. if the opportunity arose

[liang-nova]

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.

[liang-nova]

From Junk Drawers to Phone Books, Artist Bernie Kaminski Captures the Nostalgia of Banal Items Through Papier-Mâché

[liang-nova]

now more than ever, it is imperative that you spend time with people you love and doing things that you love. be prepared but please please please don't dwell on things that have yet to happen. you have to have hope for a better future in order to build one. it's gonna be okay. we're gonna make it. i love you.

[liang-nova]

@stvksn on ig

[liang-nova]

gaining followers pretty fast and that should not be happening i think. tumblr have some restraint. youre embarassing us