Latest Posts by swampycreatures - Page 2

Happy dagger day, friends

Opening Tumblr on March 15th

Mini Knife Plushie Preorders (+bonus "dumbass corner" sticker) are NOW live!!!⭐from February 17 - March 10

10% of all sales will be donated to the Trans Youth Equality Foundation to help trans youth and their families pay for medical expenses and escape anti-trans states🏳️‍⚧️

housegoblin.bigcartel.com

The neurodivergent urge to do this

another put prev somewhere

would you enter my terrible haunted mangrove?

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.

Current status while playing the Slime Rancher 2 update

did i tell u guys i got into an argument on twitter bc i said foxes are dogs and someone tried to bring up their actual fuckin. classification or whatever and i just said “foxes are dogs cause they are fluffye” and they kept arguing with me. the entire time i was like “you will not survive the immigration to tumblr you are lucky we are not there right now”

hush little baby dont you cry. mamas gonna buy you a big horse fly. and if that big horse fly dont fly. mamas gonna buy you another horse fly

fuck you

"galinda is gay for elphaba" i say into the mic. the munchkins boo. i begin to walk off in shame as a voice speaks and commands silence from the room. "she's right" they say. i look for the owner of the voice. there she stands. its ariana grande.

ok last thing. but what people fundamentally need to get through their heads is the significance of gaza fundraisers not being the same as like mutual aid when you're helping someone get groceries, because it is a genocide. there is insane deliberate scarcity and prices are unmanageable, because there is nowhere nearly enough for everyone, so only people who can pay can eat. and what positioning individual fundraisers as the only course of action does is quite simply give a tiny percentage of random people whose fundraisers take off the ability to pay those prices while thousands of others can't. and every one of those thousands of people without a fundraiser is suffering through the same inconceivably horrific reality. it is giving a few completely desperate people out of hundreds of thousands a slightly more favorable position in a horrific war economy of imposed scarcity. and what grassroots community kitchens do is try to mitigate in some small way that inconceivable hierarchy of who can pay and who can't, by stretching ingredients as far as they can last to cook meals at large scale and give them out at no cost. and obviously people are still going to send money to their friends and families because this is hell what else are we supposed to do but please just think about that before promoting endless individual fundraisers as somehow the most ethical way to help

i call this one “nobody likes you when youre 23”

This is the best idea in the history of film.

Petition to bring back the boop function next year for the ides of March where instead of a paw on the screen it’s a little knife that Caesar gets stabbed with

Please, spread this for those who might need it right now

U.S. suicide hotline: call or text 988 (available 24 hours)

U.S. trans lifeline: (877) 565-8860 (when you call, you’ll speak to a trans/nonbinary peer operator. full anonymity and confidentiality)

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline: 1-800-662-HELP (4357) – provides 24/7 confidential support and referrals for individuals and families facing mental health and substance use disorders, including panic attacks and anxiety.

LGBT National Help Center: (888) 843-4564

Trevor Project: Call (866) 488-7386, text START to 678-678, or chat online.

Take care of yourself and each other. Please stay safe ♡

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1994) dir. Henry Selick

war never changes

We’ll have to do dinner Thursday night instead.

Hi ♡ I'm opening more slots and a new type of commission to help cover some unexpected vet bills 🐾

I now have a Character Sheet commission option ✨ It includes a half body fully rendered illustration, two mini items/illustrations of your choice and some text/description of your character. I'm open to discussion for anything you'd like to add/change, and you can find more details as well as my other commissions prices and samples on my Ko-fi ♡

Please contact me at ✉ saradiiation@gmail.com or directly fill my commission request form *before* booking a commission on kofi so that we can discuss your project first.

Thank you for the support! 🙏❤️