something we agreed we like about uncle vernon is that despite like, personally suffering at the hands of wizards pretty significantly (dudley’s tail, marge), vernon is like, always ready to mess with wizards? like he is SO SCARED of them but he’s always ready to fight? please take this moment to imagine uncle vernon meeting voldemort
*scoffs* ‘“Dark Lord” huh??? that just sounds to me like another way of saying you don’t have a REAL JOB.’
I am bribing Hot Friend (with food) to be a guest commenter on our podcast! Help me decide what exactly to bribe him with?
We’ll be recording around dinnertime so I’m thinking I’ll make dinner + dessert. For dinner I’m leaning toward either some sort of savory pie (probably a quiche because I have more eggs than I know what to do with right now), lasagna, or my old standby, beef stroganoff (it’s got to be something that stands up to reheating so he can take some home to his girlfriend). For dessert…well, it’s almost Christmas so I’m thinking eggnog, but I’m open to suggestions!
i will never be over the fact that during first contact a human offered their hand to a vulcan and the vulcan was just like “wow humans are fucking wild” and took it
Humanity’s first contact with Vulcans was some guy going “I’m down to fuck.”
Vulcans’ first contact with Humans was an emphatic “Sure.”
“sir…these…these humans…they greet each other by…” *glances around before furtively whispering* “by clasping hands…”
*prolonged silence* “oh my…”
“sir…sir how will we make first contact with them? surely we…we cannot refuse this handclasping ritual, they will take it as an insult, but what vulcan would agree to such a distasteful and uncomfortable ritual??”
*several pensive moments later* “contact the vulcan high command and tell them to send us kuvak. i once saw that crazy son of a bitch arm wrestle a klingon, he’ll put his hands on anything”
Elsewhere, w/ kuvak: “….my day has come.”
The vulcan who made first contact with humans is named Solkar guys. Y’all just be makin’ up names for characters that already have names.
Bonus: here’s a screencap of Solkar doing the “my body is ready” pose right before he shakes Zefram Cochrane’s hand:
I swear Vulcans only come in two types and they are “distant xenophobes” or “horny on main for humanity”. Also apparently this guy is Spock’s great-grandfather and frankly that explains everything.
Hey so I looked into this at one point and that handshake literally created a lifelong telepathic bond between the two of them, and basically all of Solkar’s descendants were later obsessed with humans, including freaking SPOCK, so I’m not saying that handshake was so gay and good that it created an intergenerational telepathic bond between Solkar’s descendants and humans, but I’m also not….not….saying that.
The slow deliberation with which Solkar takes Cockrane’s–I’m sorry, Cochrane’s–hand… The sheer sensuality witch which Solkar infuses an otherwise borderline impersonal social ritual… It clearly shows a very conscious knowledge, on Solkar’s part, of what the significance of the handshake is in Vulcan terms and of how affected he is by it.
That’s why he’s so slow in doing it, and so sensual. A part of Solkar can’t believe this is happening, despite it being a perfectly logical thing to expect from a human, and the rest of him can’t believe how good it is.
I bet that if the camera zoomed in any further we would see the dilation of Solkar’s pupils and a quickly-repressed shiver of delight. Cochrane’s firm, businesslike clasp is probably (in sexual terms) being perceived as a deliciously carnal display of dominance.
No wonder Solkar is all like, “TAKE ME, YOU WILD-MANNERED BARBARIAN WITH ENTICINGLY ROUGH CALLUSES.”
And so we find out that yes, there is such a thing as bottoming in Pon-farr.
Every time this post comes round my dash, it just gets better.
For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.
The underlying kinds of stuff are the firststuffs, which link together in sundry ways to give rise to the rest. Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest. Now we have made more, such as aegirstuff and helstuff.
The firststuffs have their being as motes called unclefts. These are mighty small: one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts. Most unclefts link together to make what are called bulkbits. Thus, the waterstuff bulkbit bestands of two waterstuff unclefts, the sourstuff bulkbit of two sourstuff unclefts, and so on. (Some kinds, such as sunstuff, keep alone; others, such as iron, cling together in chills when in the fast standing; and there are yet more yokeways.) When unlike unclefts link in a bulkbit, they make bindings. Thus, water is a binding of two waterstuff unclefts with one sourstuff uncleft, while a bulkbit of one of the forestuffs making up flesh may have a thousand or more unclefts of these two firststuffs together with coalstuff and chokestuff.
At first it was thought that the uncleft was a hard thing that could be split no further; hence the name. Now we know it is made up of lesser motes. There is a heavy kernel with a forward bernstonish lading, and around it one or more light motes with backward ladings. The least uncleft is that of everyday waterstuff. Its kernel is a lone forwardladen mote called a firstbit. Outside it is a backwardladen mote called a bernstonebit. The firstbit has a heaviness about 1840-fold that of the bernstonebit. Early worldken folk thought bernstonebits swing around the kernel like the Earth around the Sun, but now we understand they are more like waves or clouds.
It’s not just Latin derivations that have been taken out and replaced by Germanic-English roots; it’s Greek and French too. The source is “Uncleftish Beholding”, by Poul Anderson (full text here, Wikipedia article here).
What English might sound like if we didn’t beat up other languages in back alleys, then? 😉
Seriously tho I love this.
Eh, be fair, French and Latin were forced upon the English.
And so was Greek, mostly by the people who brought in the French and Latin.
But yeah, what English might sound like if its speakers had always been language purists but the language had somehow survived anyway.
Ok, why is oxygen sourstuff?
Literal translation: oxygen means ‘thing that creates acid,’ aka sourness. (Hydrogen and oxygen really should have their names switched, but it is centuries too late for that now.) You can find a real-world equivalent to Anderson’s terminology in German, wherein the name for oxygen is Sauerstoff and the name for hydrogen is Wasserstoff. 🙂
missionlameturtle 