urpriest

[urpriest]

New Zealand is known as the “Saudi Arabia of milk” because it controls 35 per cent of global exports.

Tooze are you shitting me who says that, the Cow Kingdom

[urpriest]

Boba tea is usually based on a milk tea, right? Taiwan's biggest culinary invention!

New Zealand is known as the “Saudi Arabia of milk” because it controls 35 per cent of global exports.

Tooze are you shitting me who says that, the Cow Kingdom

[urpriest]

“Philosophy should be about resolving linguistic technicalities” vs. “Philosophy should be about how to live well” is a debate which is very easily overcome by resolving linguistic technicalities

[urpriest]

[urpriest]

I think we should rewrite math course descriptions as clickbait headlines, I feel like that would actually be more honest somehow

[urpriest]

Magic the Gathering tip: don’t gather too much magic or u will explode!!!

[urpriest]

dont tag bible stuff as mythology God isnt mythology

hi hello how are you. most if not all story-based religions are in fact considered mythology by definition including the abrahamic religions. god is in fact abrahamic mythos whether you think he’s real or not. im sorry if that upsets you but im assuming this is regarding the post i just reblogged and i have to say im surprised the part you’re upset about is me tagging biblicalia as mythology and not the entire discussion on who tops in jesus/judas ship discourse

[urpriest]

Supreme Court Justice and bribe magnet Samuel Alito asked in court today if Pornhub is similar to “the old Playboy” in carrying articles written by public intellectuals. They don’t but they should

[urpriest]

Manifesting a 4D Chess Trump that is threatening to trade war Denmark for Greenland so that Europe responds by getting its act together and adopting a muscular defense policy and foreign affairs agenda, and then he arranges a false flag death-by-freedom-fighter so he can go out like Lelouch from Code Geass and leave a stronger, more united America & Europe to carry the future.

[urpriest]

FINAL UPDATE FOR THE SPIDER WEB SWEATER:

I FINISHED IT YALL!! wore it for the first time ever and it felt absolutely amazing. I didn't think I would love it that much but it is now my child. Thank you for coming along on this mini journey, I want to start a new top soon so stay tuned for that <3

pattern is made by @/aperpetualmess on youtube!!

[urpriest]

So… I got a notification from the State Department at like 8 PM Pacific that my passport was approved, and I was quietly thankful and stunned bc my legal gender in Oregon is listed as X, or undeclared, and that's what's on my passport. I'm pretty sure someone(s) worked late to get the X passports done today.

I was already really grateful to whoever in the Seattle Passport Office worked late to get these things processed on the last Friday before That Man gets back into office... and then I got a notification that my passport shipped at fucking midnight Pacific and whoever got that shit out the door so it couldn't be picked up on Monday and like, denied and shredded?

They're my fucking hero.

[urpriest]

I got to hold a 500,000 year old hand axe at the museum today.

It's right-handed

I am right-handed

There are grooves for the thumb and knuckle to grip that fit my hand perfectly

I have calluses there from holding my stylus and pencils and the gardening tools.

There are sharper and blunter parts of the edge, for different types of cutting, as well as a point for piercing.

I know exactly how to use this to butcher a carcass.

A homo erectus made it

Some ancestor of mine, three species ago, made a tool that fits my hand perfectly, and that I still know how to use.

Who were you

A man? A woman? Did you even use those words?

Did you craft alone or were you with friends? Did you sing while you worked?

Did you find this stone yourself, or did you trade for it? Was it a gift?

Did you make it for yourself, or someone else, or does the distinction of personal property not really apply here?

Who were you?

What would you think today, seeing your descendant hold your tool and sob because it fits her hands as well?

What about your other descendant, the docent and caretaker of your tool, holding her hands under it the way you hold your hands under your baby's head when a stranger holds them.

Is it bizarre to you, that your most utilitarian object is now revered as holy?

Or has it always been divine?

Or is the divine in how I am watching videos on how to knap stone made by your other descendants, learning by example the way you did?

Tomorrow morning I am going to the local riverbed in search of the appropriate stones, and I will follow your example.

The first blood spilled on it will almost certainly be my own, as I learn the textures and rhythm of how it's done.

Did you have cuss words back then? Gods to blaspheme when the rock slips and you almost take your thumbnail off instead? Or did you just scream?

I'm not religious.

But if spilling my own blood to connect with a stranger who shared it isn't partaking in the divine

I don't know what is.

[urpriest]

Paleontologists Claim to Have Discovered Terrifying New Dinosaur Species in Pre-WWII Photographs

love the phrasing of this headline

[urpriest]

I woke up out of a dead sleep to make this and then immediately passed back out

[urpriest]

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.

[urpriest]

Interestingly, this is *kind of* true in MtG, because of how decks work. There have definitely been competitive decks that would have a hard time against a "kitchen table" deck because they're designed to beat the meta, the decks other competitive people actually play, and those tend to have shared traits that "kitchen table" decks don't, so sometimes you have a deck that exploits those shared traits so hard that it can't beat a more amateur deck.

most bizarre misconception i keep seeing about chess online is "you can beat a really good player like a grandmaster just by playing random moves and confusing them so they don't know what to play next". bestie that is not how it works at all. if your moves don't do anything they will just do their own thing and set up their pieces to trap you

[urpriest]

to this day possibly one of my best ideas. someone get me a pitch meeting with the hallmark channel