“Beatrice Is Coming For You, 1913” & “Loveley Beatrice, 1913”

I love how ominous and cryptically poetic the ravens part sounds

I was really hesitant when my mom said she wanted to go to this wolf dog sanctuary several hours south of us. I didn’t want to be a tourist for a shady off brand zoo. But I looked the place up before agreeing. They’re completely aboveboard, all animals are spayed/neutered when entering the haven and they’re all given the space and respect they deserve.

The sanctuary serves as education and warning. Don’t get wolf dogs is practically emblazoned on every sign.

All the animals were high content, 95% wolf were most common. Their lowest was about 75% and his silly curled tail marked him as doggier than any of the others, yet he still had a sad story of being dumped in a shipping crate for days because he was too much for a house pet. Probably because he’s largely a wolf.

At the end the owner invited their two friendly ambassador animals to see if they’d like to say hello. They both did. I was politely sniffed and had my chin gently licked by the older male. The younger female demanded aggressive belly rubs and then set about biting the owner in a rough game that only she enjoyed.

Overhead ravens swooped in the treetops and made eerie eldritch calls to each other, like an echoing plink of water at the bottom of a well. It was honestly such a day.

Lumi, my favorite wolf of the day as tax he was huge and gangly and paced the fence staring at me, perhaps remembering the eighteen year old girl who had kept him in an apartment to be bred before he came to the sanctuary.

Art by David Lynch

Dancing with granite

(c) gif by riverwindphotography

Oliver Hazard Perry

Photo - © Charles Cormier Photography

Ears are ready for take off

Fall of the Candlekeep

i got a new shelf for my desk !! i decorated it cutely, i think it could be nicer but for now this is ok >_<

i have an emdr session today, my first one, so im anxious but looking at cute things like this definitely helps |(￣3￣)| r u guys doing anything today? ♡

Due to the name "GIMP" being considered quite offensive in some dialects of english, which has been a renewed topic of debate among the wider FOSS community, we are proud to announce that across the next month or so the project will be rebranding!

From now on, GIMP will be known as FAG!

The name stands for "FOSS Art & Graphics"! As our project had no longer been associated with GNU at all for a long while now, we felt it was finally time to sign the divorce papers and get rid of their name tainting ours. However we still wanted to convey that FAG is and always will be Free and Open Source software. After a long session of brainstorming, spending days upon days looking for a name that conveys our values and project well, we finally ended at FAG. We're quite happy with it! What do you guys think? Let us know through comments and reblogs!

The preservation of transgender history is essential to ensuring that the stories and experiences of trans people are not forgotten. The Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) has taken on the vital task of gathering and protecting this history, bringing together documents, images, and materials that reflect the rich and diverse experiences of transgender people across time and place.

By making these resources accessible, the DTA facilitates explorations of the often-hidden or erased narratives of trans communities. From personal stories to institutional records, these materials provide a window into the challenges and triumphs faced by trans individuals, while also celebrating the resilience and diversity of these communities.

Preserving this history is also about ensuring that future generations can learn, understand, and be inspired by the stories of those who came before them.

Explore more about how these efforts are safeguarding trans history, and why it matters, on JSTOR Daily.

Image: A man in drag and a man in male clothes looking into each other’s eyes, via Digital Transgender Archive.

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.