Just realized that my music profs in college all pronounced leitmotiv like "leet moteef" but in fact it is more like "light moteef." A lot of them were probably familiar with general German pronunciation from e.g. singing German lyrics, but I guess English habits die hard.

I could be trusted with omnipotence. There are just a few little things I want to change, honest. I definitely wouldn't keep escalating, altering more and more whenever the slightest discomfort or obstacle arises, finally culminating in a state of horrifying, cosmic tyranny.

This 1952 memo from the Pentagon UFO files is superb There is no point preparing for aliens ‘because no one of consequence is going to take this rubbish seriously unless it happens. At that point, our policy will be determined in the traditional manner of grand panic.’ 🤣 www.war.gov/medialink/uf...

Loved non-fiction trope: when, in between the descriptions of the achievements of some past intellectual, the author offhandedly throws in some unhinged, unrelated biographical detail.

I'll take "News Headlines That Appear In the First Fifteen Minutes of a Horror Movie" for $200, Alex.

Before using god names, Greek planet names were Phainon "shining one" (Saturn); Phaethon "brilliant one" (Jupiter); Pyroeis "fiery one" (Mars); Phosphoros "light bearer" (Venus); Stilbon "gleaming one" (Mercury). Think they found enough names saying "hey this thing's bright!"?

How I'm tryna be

Anyone else ever feel like all your concepts have been "poisoned" and you need to just, like, exchange them all for an entirely new set?

We will continue to make two-dimensional maps. Because your mind can't handle the truth.

It's kind of interesting that of course gets abbreviated to 'course, because the apostrophe kind of suggests that it's supposed to be one word

The best thing ive ever found in a garadge sale, a snail that is also a mesuring tape

Maybe the real Meaning was the search for meaning we were engaged in all along.

Late 19th century to early 20th century authors really liked the adjective "lurid" when applied to colors and light.

Sloth asked "What IS a monorail anyway" so I told him that mono means one and rail means rail

I'm not crazy, right? A lot of people pronounce "onomatopoeia" with an actual [n] for the /t/, like [ɑ.nə.mɑ.nə.pi.ə] or something. Either that or I just consistently mishear their flap [ɾ] as an [n].

Scientists can't explain why putting ice in a mocha is totally acceptable yet putting ice in chocolate milk is horrific and unpardonable.

Sometimes I wish there was a footnote/endnote convention to distinguish between footnotes that are just reference info and footnotes that add more interesting detail. I don't always wanna flip all the way to the end of the book just to find out which one it is.

You need only utter something that flatters indolence and conceit, to be sure of plenty of adherents among commonplace people. -- Goethe, quoted in Eckermann's Conversations of Goethe, March 22, 1831 entry

It's Achilles and the Tortoises all the way down.

If you quote something that already has italics within it, but you yourself want to emphasize a particular word as well, how would you convey that to the reader? Something like, "[italics in original, except ____]"?

Has anyone tried releasing a streamer-friendly game with the name of one of Twitch's non-game streaming categories, like "Just Chatting," "Special Events," or "IRL" just to make things confusing?

It's outrageous that "malleable" literally just means "hammerable" (from verbified forms of the Latin noun malleus, "hammer"). We sit around using it like it's a poetic word to express capacity to change form, and it just means "you can whack this with a heavy stick."

im built different (atop a vast cyclopean network of catacombs)

Life is a continual, awkward balance between attempting to find satisfaction with one's current state while simultaneously seeking to improve it.

If the Highest Good is so great, how come more people aren't pursuing it, huh?

Found this delightful illustration on the Wikipedia article about cats' falling reflex. (By Eyytee - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?... )

Why do we say “windowsill”? Are we concerned about confusing it with some other type of sill?

He just like me fr

RIP Otto Rank, you would have loved analyzing vore fetishes. (From The Trauma of Birth, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1929, p. 35)

Prince of Persia was an experiment in rotoscoping. It put lifelike animation on '80s home computers. Designer Jordan Mechner converted VHS tapes and movie footage into pixels -- and went way beyond the tech of his time. We explore: animationobsessive.substack.com/p/how-the-li...

*yeets a golden apple engraved with "To The Least Problematic" into your group chat*

sounds exactly like what a therapist would say to distract me from incoming threats

Every now and then I see a post and think ‘oh no, you don’t do your thinking with those concepts do you? Those are posting concepts, not thinking concepts’ and I think this tracks a meaningful distinction.

tumblr still has it, despite everything. social media platforms are really almost impossible to kill.

I can't believe "arrowy" is a real word. That's it, I'm never feeling guilty about inventing new adjectives by sticking "y" on the end of them again.

The existence of live snake traps in ancient tombs implies the existence of snake-supporting ecosystems within such traps that can endure, self-sustaining, for centuries.

Instead of leaving it unmarked, we could just decide to start pluralizing "species" as "specieses." We have that power, we could make it happen.

Just heard a streamer refer to heffalumps as the SCPs of the Winnie the Pooh world.

Who up pondering the immortality of the crab?

If a person says something happened "in the tenth year of my life," does that mean at age 9 or age 10? Your first year is age 0-1 (not inclusive of the 1), right? So presumably it should be mean age 9.

*Me to me, examining the contents of my own mind*: Damn, bitch, you live like this??

This is one of my favorite optical illusions, because even when you know specifically HOW IT WORKS, it's still hard to make your brain believe it. The image below is real-world video, but you're being tricked into believing it's an elaborate miniature by the DIORAMA EFFECT. Let's talk about it.

Comedy is legal again

New sci-hub just dropped.

Take me down to the Parallax city where the far moves slow and the near moves quickly

Epiphenomenalists dni