Today's Seal Is: The Obstacle

the skrunkly🩷💜💙

coloured sketch thing of Nomi-nomi!!! i love them SO SO SO SO SO SO MUCH

Omg those eyes 🐈

アザラシの赤ちゃん

Is the “Welcome to Suns-“ poster in the back of the main menu an intended reference to Our Life of am I simply delusional? thank you in advance:3

Intentional! We reached out to GB for it lol same goes for the games we reference across our UI, BG, and story. All the devs were so nice about it 🥹

fascinating linguistics breakdown

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.

Twin Cities Miku

Miku's birthday is on August 31st!! Happy Birthday Miku!!

The first rule of Fight Club is that fights can neither be created nor destroyed

shiny….

GUYS

google.com

Rare black seal pups among births at Donna Nook in Lincolnshire

The grey seal pups at Donna Nook are normally born white and shed fur at about two to three weeks.

HOLY SHIT

I've been seeing everyone create really amazing Miku designs based off of their cultures or their countries but I'm a basic midwestern white guy so here are some lazy doodles of Minnesotan Miku (who is just like me frfr)!

Minnesotan Miku lore I just made up:

She goes to the state fair every year and pays like $200 bucks for food she could have gotten at Culver's instead

She hates shoveling but has to do it mid March every year while other states enjoy spring

She doesn't have an accent like in the movies (bc those aren't actually that common in MN) but she sure does say "ope" (that's a real thing we do here)

She loves when her rich friends invite her out to go boating on the lakes but normally spends her summers melting away from the humidity in the Minneapolis suburbs while working retail

Her dad passed down a collection of trucker hats to her despite the fact that he definitely isn't a trucker himself

She goes all out at Christmas time when decorating and loves to go to Menards to buy big inflatables for her yard

One of her hobbies is going to Target dollar sections and trying to get all of the good stuff before the mom vloggers do

She can grill a mean burger but it has to be made on a griddle