Tag: huh

jas0nwaterfalls:

earthshaker1217:

nowyoukno:

Source for more facts follow NowYouKno

  • A road has no special qualifiers. It connects point a to point b.
  • A street connects buildings together, usually in a city, usually east to west, opposite of avenue.
  • An avenue runs north south. Avenues and streets may be used interchangeably for directions, usually has median
  • A boulevard is a street with trees down the middle or on both sides
  • A lane is a narrow street usually lacking a median.

  • A drive is a private, winding road

  • A way is a small out of the way road

  • a court usually ends in a cul de sac or similar little loop

  • a plaza or square is usually a wide open space, but in modern definitons, one of the above probably fits better for a plaza as a road.

  • a terrace is a raised flat area around a building. When used for a road it probably better fits one of the above.

  • uk, a close is similar to a court, a short road serving a few houses, may have cul de sac

  • run is usually located near a stream or other small body of water

  • place is similar to a court, or close, usually a short skinny dead end road, with or without cul de sac, sometimes p shaped

  • bay is a small road where both ends link to the same connecting road

  • crescent is a windy s like shape, or just a crescent shape, for the record, above definition of bay was also given to me for crescent

  • a trail is usually in or near a wooded area

  • mews is an old british way of saying row of stables, more modernly seperate houses surrounding a courtyard

  • a highway is a major public road, usually connecting multiple cities

  • a motorway is similar to a highway, with the term more common in New Zealand, the UK, and Austrailia, no stopping, no pedestrian or animal traffic allowed

  • an interstate is a highway system connecting usually connecting multiple states, although some exist with no connections

  • a turnpike is part of a highway, and usully has a toll, often located close to a city or commercial are

  • a freeway is part of a highway with 2 or more lanes on each side, no tolls, sometimes termedexpressway, no intersections or cross streets.

  • a parkway is a major public road, usually decorated, sometimes part of a highway, has traffic lights.

  • a causeway combines roads and bridges, usually to cross a body of water

  • circuit and speedway are used interchangeably, usually refers to a racing course, practically probably something above.

  • as the name implies, garden is usually a well decorated small road, but probably better fits an above

  • a view is usually on a raised area of land, a hill or something similar.

  • byway is a minor road, usually a bit out of the way and not following main roads.

  • a cove is a narrow road, can be sheltered, usually near a larger body of water or mountains

  • a row is a street with a continuous line of close together houses on one or both sides, usually serving a specific function like a frat

  • a beltway is a highway surrounding an urban area

  • quay is a concrete platform running along water

  • crossing is where two roads meet

  • alley a narrow path or road between buildings, sometimes connects streets, not always driveable

  • point usually dead ends at a hill

  • pike usually a toll road

  • esplanade long open, level area, usually a walking path near the ocean

  • square open area where multiple streets meet, guess how its usually shaped.

  • landing usually near a dock or port, historically where boats drop goods.

  • walk historically a walking path or sidewalk, probably became a road later in its history

  • grove thickly sheltered by trees

  • copse a small grove

  • driveway almost always private, short, leading to a single residence or a few related ones

  • laneway uncommon, usually down a country road, itself a public road leading to multiple private driveways.

  • trace beaten path

  • circle usually circles around an area, but sometimes is like a “square”, an open place intersected by multiple roads.

  • channel usually near a water channel, the water itself connecting two larger bodies of water,

  • grange historically would have been a farmhouse or collection of houses on a farm, the road probably runs through what used to be a farm

  • park originally meaning an enclosed space, came to refer to an enclosed area of nature in a city, usually a well decorated road.

  • mill probably near an old flour mill or other mill.

  • spur similar to a byway, a smaller road branching off from a major road.

  • bypass passes around a populated area to divert traffic

  • roundabout or traffic circle circle around a traffic island with multiple connecting routes, a roundabout is usually smaller, with less room for crossing and passing, and safer

  • wynd a narrow lane between houses, similar to an alley, more common in UK

  • drive shortened form of driveway, not a driveway itself, usually in a neighborhood, connects several houses

  • parade wider than average road historically used as a parade ground.

  • terrace more common in uk, a row of houses.

  • chase on land historically used as private hunting grounds.

  • branch divides a road or area into multiple subdivisions.

The more you know!

this post felt so good to read.

dr-archeville:

blessedharlot:

darkersolstice:

captainsnoop:

one thing i think is interesting, as someone who basically grew up playing video games non-stop, is how some types of video game just don’t gel with people 

like, it’s easy to forget that, even though i’m pretty bad at most games, that my skill at handling video games is definitely “above average.” as much as i hate to put it like this, i’d say my experience level is at “expert” solely because I can pick up any game controller and understand how to use it with no additional training. 

a friend of mine on twitter

posted a video of him stuck on a part of samus returns. the tutorial area where it teaches you how to ledge-grab. the video is of him jumping against the wall, doing everything but grabbing the ledge, and him getting frustrated 

i’ve been playing games all my life, so i’d naturally intuit that i should jump towards the ledge to see what happens 

but he doesn’t do that.

it’s kinda making me realize that as games are becoming more complex and controllers are getting more buttons, games are being designed more and more for people who already know how to play them and not people with little to no base understanding of the types of games they’re playing 

so that’s got me thinking: should video games assume that you have zero base knowledge of video games and try to teach you from there? should Metroid: Samus Returns assume that you already know how to play a Metroid game and base its tutorial around that, or should it assume that you’ve never even played Mario before? 

it’s got me thinking about that Cuphead video again. you know the one. to anyone with a lot of experience with video games, especially 2D ones, we would naturally intuit that one part of the tutorial to require a jump and a dash at the same time.

but most people lack that experience and that learned intuition and might struggle with that, and that’s something a lot of people forget to consider. 

it reminds me a bit of the “land of Punt” that I read about in this Tumblr post. Egypt had this big trading partner back in the day called Punt and they wrote down everything about it except where it was, because who doesn’t know where Punt is? and now, we have no idea where it was, because everyone in Egypt assumed everyone else knew.

take that same line of thinking with games: “who doesn’t know how to play a 2D platform game?” nobody takes in to consideration the fact that somebody might not know how to play a 2D game on a base level, because that style of gameplay is thoroughly ingrained in to the minds of the majority of gamers. and then the Cuphead situation happens.

the point of this post isn’t to make fun of anybody, but to ask everyone to step back for a second and consider that things that they might not normally consider. as weird as it is to think about for people that grew up playing video games, anyone who can pick up a controller with thirty buttons on it and not get intimidated is actually operating at an expert level. if you pick up a playstation or an Xbox controller and your thumbs naturally land on the face buttons and the analog stick and your index fingers naturally land on the trigger buttons, that is because you are an expert at operating a complex piece of machinery. you have a lifetime of experience using this piece of equipment, and assuming that your skill level is the base line is a problem.

that assumption is rapidly becoming a problem as games become more complex. it’s something that should be considered when talking about games going forward. games should be accessible, but it’s reaching a point where even Nintendo games are assuming certain levels of skill without teaching the player the absolute basics. basics like “what is an analog stick” and “where should my fingers even be on this controller right now.” 

basically what i’m saying is that games are becoming too complex for new players to reasonably get in to and are starting to assume skill levels higher than what should be considered the base line. it’s becoming a legitimate problem that shouldn’t be laughed at and disregarded. it’s very easy to forget that thing things YOU know aren’t known by everyone and that idea should be taken in to consideration when talking about video games. 

All of this. Basic game literacy is remarkably complicated. I grew up on the earliest ones and had high fluency up to around the Super Mario 64 era. I fell out of regular gameplay at that point and even from that baseline, I experience a really bewildering disconnect from what’s required to approach most games today.

I wonder if this is partly a gatekeeping thing, keeping games for G A M E R S by assuming the player already has an ‘expert’ level of literacy re: the game’s mechanics and lore, which provides both a way to keep out Others (read: non-gamers) from their game space & a way for players to rank themselves by how well they do/how much they know, setting up a hierarchy they constantly struggle to rise up in so they can look down on those who can do/know less.

I.e., a manifestation of the Curator Fandom vs. Creative/Transformative Fandom split.

I came to learn that women have never had a history or culture of leisure. (Unless you were a nun, one researcher later told me.) That from the dawn of humanity, high status men, removed from the drudge work of life, have enjoyed long, uninterrupted hours of leisure. And in that time, they created art, philosophy, literature, they made scientific discoveries and sank into what psychologists call the peak human experience of flow. Women aren’t expected to flow. I read feminist leisure research (who knew such a thing existed?) and international studies that found women around the globe felt that they didn’t deserve leisure time. It felt too selfish. Instead, they felt they had to earn time to themselves by getting to the end of a very long To Do list. Which, let’s face it, never ends. I began to realise that time is power. That time is a feminist issue.

Brigid Schulte: Why time is a feminist issue (via librarianbyday)

My father, an activist and artist, told me I wouldn’t be able to be an artist when I had kids, because I would have to give all my time and energy to them.

This was said in 2005 when I was pregnant with my first child. 

And I have also been told on this very site that I had no right to have opinion, outside interests, or write because I should be taking care of my children. This was said, most recently, in November 2016, by a woman who claims to be interested in the rights of women. 

Let’s think about what that means.

(via toospoopyformyshirt)

TIME IS A FEMINIST ISSUE.

(via springsnotfail)

jumpingjacktrash:

kgaele:

jumpingjacktrash:

ariaste:

ariaste:

IDK if you guys are following the current trashfire over on twitter, but there’s this new group who are trying to “encourage” authors to stop focusing on “political messages” or “complaining about world events” and “steer the sci-fi/fantasy community of creators away from the bickering and fighting over non- sci-fi/fantasy issues and back to just creating wonderful new stories”. They’re explicitly aspiring to form a space where “all viewpoints are welcome and valued” (translation: “You know, I think we should hear out the Nazis, maybe they have some good arguments”).

Also they’re sympathetic to the Sad Puppies. Also they called my agent a cancer on SFF.
:DDDDDDDDD ENJOY THE THREAD.

Yo, fun facts –

So “dreamtime” was originally (1899) a mistranslation by a white ethnographer of an ATSI (Indigenous Australian) term “Alcheringa”. It was promptly criticized in the community of ethnographers for being a mistranslation/misunderstanding and usage in the academic community dropped out until the term was revived in the 1970s for a more broaaaaad definition, the mythological phenomenon described in the thread above.

What I was not aware of is that the mistranslation persisted in English-speaking communities to refer to those ATSl cultural belief sets! (When I was taking mythology classes in college, we used ATSI terms for ATSI concepts). Some very kind people on twitter gave me some sources and gently corrected me.

So let’s just all agree in the future to use the alternate term “strongtime” instead of “dreamtime” when we’re talking about the stuff that my thread concerned, y/y? It’s just less fraught with shitty colonialism and it costs zero dollars to not be an asshole, u get me?

SO NOW WE KNOW THAT

ok this is a REALLY GREAT THREAD but no, i’m not giving up ‘dreamtime’ as a term of art for narrative space. @ariaste you just underwent the process described in the thread – with regards to the word ‘dreamtime’. it was a lovely, evocative word, and then you found out it was politically tainted, and now you want to avoid it.

plus, it just makes more sense. if ‘strongtime’ is the correct term for australian mythology, then of course we should use it for that. but it doesn’t describe narrative space in general nearly as well as ‘dreamtime’.

aboriginal australians have reclaimed ‘dreamtime’ to mean that specific thing in their culture, in the town I lived in in central queensland there was a wonderful building that sadly closed before I could ever visit called the ‘dreamtime cultural center’ which had the history of the aboriginee peoples that live in the area. Reading about the dreamtime is really interesting and educational!

Using the same word to describe the narrative thing seems fine from what I know through my prior interactions with aborginee cultural practices. The thing that’s a Please Don’t from what I researched and asked about is using the actual dreamtime as a spice for fantasy/sci-fi stories and such if you aren’t yourself aboriginal australian, because it’s part of a living culture that holds stories and history as sacred.

also after rambling in the tags i just want to share a really lovely thing i learned at the retreat:

this is migaloo! migaloo is a white humpback whale that migrates past the island regularly and is sacred to the woppaburra people who live on what is now known as north keppel island, but the traditional name is konomie. His name means “white fella”. The woppaburra are part of a wider whale dreaming indigenous community around australia, and the spiritual salt water totem for them is mugga mugga, (the humpback whale).

i’ve blathered on a bit mainly because aboriginal mythology is really cool and there are so many distinct cultural groups and i just wanted to share what i know about the people who were kind enough to welcome me to their home and tell me their stories. I checked to be sure I wasn’t mangling anything c:
https://australianmuseum.net.au/woppaburra-people-of-the-keppel-islands (in case anyone wants to read more about the history! cw for some very sad stuff though)

thank you for adding this, knowing about this sacred whale friend added to my life’s happiness ❤

blacktailcat:

anaisnein:

ill formed thought:

we’re now working with (arbitrary but useful) separate categories for sexuality, gender, and gender expression.

what may be missing is sexual expression. and maybe kink and poly should be framed as falling under sexual expression. like, these are ways of being SNC, maybe.

of the current three, gender expression is kind of given short shrift in the discourse; there are comprehensible reasons for that and yet it’s not a particularly satisfactory state of affairs. bigtime competing access needs, alas. and presumably the same sorts of issues would arise around how to deal discursively with sexual expression. so my bringing this up may just be doubling/mirroring the can of worms we already have to contend with on that front, i.e., maybe I’m not helping.

but if nothing else it might help some ppl wrap their heads around what these things are even doing in the conversation, why they keep coming up, why there need to be ways to talk about them. like, even if you end up at the conclusion that expression stuff needs to be deprioritized in favor of identity stuff, maybe just in certain contexts, having the lexicon with which to articulate why and acknowledge tradeoffs and so on is going to be useful and might help dial down some of the unthinking contempt.

I’ve been personally categorizing ‘sexual expression’ as a 4th category for a while. It seems like the obvious extrapolation of the general consensus on how to talk about gender vs sexuality. If gender expression is a thing, sexual expression has to be a thing, too. They’re related but can be conceptually separated, and sometimes that’s useful. Especially when you start getting into kinks that are all about presenting as one gender, but being treated as a second one during a scene, crossdressing, stuff like that. And poly, too, of course – including desiring sex with multiple partners at a time, and so forth… that’s all specific expressions of a person’s sexuality, that isn’t necessarily easily expressed by just talking about who you are or who you’re attracted to – it’s also about what you’re attracted to and desire.

gayhani:

oborolover:

vaxildangilmore:

i love the fact that there are just some phrases that have transcended homestuck and are now just a part of ordinary internet slang.

like god tier? where did you think you got that from? your hubris will be your undoing

god tier has been a phrase since literally like the mid 90s in fighting game forums and shit can y’all please read something new

andrew hussie personally invented the english language

pitviperofdoom:

tomcats-and-tophats:

garliccloves:

classical-cacophony:

wardencommanderrodimiss:

this is too real

Note this doesn’t work for bi girls!! 

Mara Wilson is a bisexual woman

Boy bands are almost overwhelmingly cultivated around the easiest way to sell shit to young girls, which very heavily leans into societally dominant heterosexual love story narratives, which in themselves tend to focus on specific attitudes towards gender roles, presentation, and styles of attraction. 

Bi women are not straight so we do not conceptualize our gender and attraction the same way a straight woman would because we do not function under the same societal pressures and dynamics. Ergo, the marketing around and content within the songs by many boy bands can be incredibly alienating to a bi woman audience even if they still experience attraction to men because we often do not experience that attraction in a way palpable to or even considered by those cultivating the public image of these bands.

Accusing Mara Wilson, a bi woman, of bi erasure, for sharing an amusing anecdote on her own experience, is ridiculous. But it is also an incredible disservice to bi women like myself who are more than acutely aware that we are (and always have been) a far cry from this media’s target audience – and it is, in fact, a demonstration of the effects of bi erasure that people so stalwartly align us with heterosexuality that we’re accused of erasing ourselves when we talk about our alienation from mainstream m/f-focused media.

Keep ace ladies in mind too, because this applies to me like whoa.