Orangesandlemons3 - Orange The Ace

YALL. Holly Black has a list of resources she's used for writing her books on the fair folk. I'm OBSESSED. I love her work and world building. it's so true to the heart of faeries

note（ノート）

Must-know for Japanese fandom: the meaning of "proship" and the concept of "proshippers" in Western f｜オレンジア｜note

[TN: This is a translation of this note by Maromi. If you are able, I encourage you to read the original article for yourself as translation

I have never read a more excellent article

so i just saw this and i’m not sure how i feel about it

feel free to explain - if you can? i’m still a little 🤔 abt it personally - in the tags

This is my life. It would have been so cool for Sasori to be Gaara’s weird uncle and the head of Puppet Corps and be a mentor to Kankuro. So much wasted potential…

Star Wars prompt! So there are several Jedi with specific force-granted powers through the unifying or living force. Mace with shatterpoints, etc. But what about someone like Obi-Wan, whose connection was to the Unifying but was trained in the Living by his master? The manifestation of Force abilities as something that is related to both halves of the force, such as seeing auras, etc? (sorry for incoherency)

i did some googling and a lot of thinking; considered and disregarded several options and ended up with this weird little thing:

Keep reading

Cartoons messed people up on what rabies looks like. Ppl think of a rabid animal and assume it's always snarling and frothing at the mouth and ready to attack. Rabid animals can appear really friendly because they lose human fear and they might approach you supposedly looking for food. It might look like a deer stumbling in circles and limping and falling over as if it's injured and disoriented. Might looks like a fox repeatedly trying and failing to stumble to its feet and unable to pick its head up. Their brains are melting. They might seem angry but they might also seem confused or injured or in need. But if you try to help that injured crying fox you could end up getting bit by an animal that's basically already dead and then your brain will melt too

I’m not asexual, I’m ‘ehsexual’ as in “eh, I’d rather not”

People on this website will really mock anti-vaxxers and flat earthers for ignoring scientists and getting their alternative facts from facebook, and then turn around and insist they know more history than historians and more archaeology than archaeologists because they read an unsourced tumblr post once

thinking about this today

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.