PETA: They’d rather spend their money on publicity campaigns than on the animals in their care. PETA killed 73.8% of the animals in their care in 2015 (x)
FCKH8: Is a for-profit company that exploits oppressed groups for money. They’re also wildly uninformed, and spread misogyny, cissexism and bi/panphobia, as well as stealing their posts/designs (x)
Autism Speaks: They spend most of their money on researching a way to eliminate autism, heighten the stigma against autism and don’t have a single autistic person on their board (x)
Please support other, better charities, and feel free to add any others you can think of to this.
Susan G. Komen for the Cure: CEO makes insane amounts of money, they deny a lot of requests for wigs/help with treatment/etc., and have attempted to sue other charities that use the color pink as part of their anti-breast cancer campaign. ( xxx )
The Salvation Army: They promote the hatred of LGBT+ people, work with fundamentalist Christian groups to support conservative politics and rip off and exploit workers. ( xxx )
Wounded Warrior: They take money that should be spent on veterans and blow it on huge opulent parties for the company bigwigs. 26 million in 2014 alone wasted! ( xxx )
^ Important reminder to NOT waste any money donating to these groups
Reblogging because of the added info about Wounded Warrior.
A good way to know if a nonprofit you’re donating to is allocating their money in the right way is to check out their Charity Navigator rating: http://www.charitynavigator.org
Signal boosting, the bell ringers are out in force, and this info is too important.
Charity season is coming up in not even two months, so I feel like this is important to share now before it’s too late.
Also of note – “glass” in this case refers to eight ounces. Eight ounces is nothing. Eight ounces is like the tiny glass they bring you to drink orange juice from at Denny’s. Those glasses in that image are almost certainly 16 ounces if not more. A personal bottle of soda is 16-20 ounces. Most coffee mugs are 10-14 ounces minimum.
After my last surgery I was told that in order to stay hydrated I needed to drink just, shit tons of water, ten to twelve glasses at least every twelve hours. And I tried, oh my god did I try. But I finally resigned myself to the fact that I just could not get more than seven or eight down me in a day.
Turns out I was drinking from a 14 ounce mug. I was drinking a little under 16 “glasses” of water a day.
MORAL OF THE STORY: KNOW HOW MANY GLASSES ARE IN YOUR GLASS.
Tumblr is apparently doing some crazy nonsense again, so it seems like a good time to remind everyone that Pillowfort.io is a new social media platform that aims to give users control of their content and how it’s seen and shared, as well as provide better communication tools to promote conversation and creativity. If this sounds good to you, you can donate $5 to our PayPal and you will receive a registration link the Friday after your donation. And if you decide the site isn’t for you, you can request a refund for up to three weeks after you sign up. (All money we receive through this process is going towards paying our hosting expenses and compensating our programmers.)
Reblogging this in light of the recent news, since we’ve been getting a lot of questions from people looking to join. If you’ve sent us a payment since the 16th of November you will receive your invitation email shortly after the site returns, which will likely be tomorrow! If you want to purchase more than one registration link ($5 per link, so $15 for example would get you 3 registration links) you can give them to anyone you want– the ones you purchase are not tied to your account in any way.
Now, Pillowfort will not always require a payment to sign up; we are doing this because we are still in the process of implementing our subscription plan, which will be our source of long-term revenue, and these payments through PayPal give us funding to make sure we can pay all our server expenses, employee compensation, etc. while we are still working on implementing our business plan. Once we exit beta you will be able to join the site and use all of its essential features
for free, with the option to pay for some extra goodies similar to what LiveJournal and DreamWidth offer in their subscription plans.
A directory of social media handles so people can find you on other sites. Once you fill out the form (none of the questions are required so in theory you can just hit “submit” without answering anything, but you can also just View Here) you will be able to access, but not edit, a spreadsheet of everyone’s handles across their social media.
As the disclaimer banner says, EVERYTHING you enter into this form is made public so you know, be careful. If you don’t want two of your handles linked…don’t put ‘em both in there.
I can’t think of a genuine reason this would be a bad idea but it’s a lot of data about people and their personal names that’s easily scrapeable so you know, if you can argue that this is a really bad idea for X reason, I’m willing to listen and delete as necessary.
As someone who does ceramics, that twisted, broken up fork would make an excellent tool for slipping and scoring, or maybe even just texturing. It would make a super cute bug print, or make easy, perfectly spaced lines at a farther difference than a typical fork. It can be used for creating, rather than just feeding some giant machine. Just because it wouldn’t be particularly good at being used as it is expected to be used, which is not to say that a creative person couldn’t find a way to make it work, does not make it useless. In the right hands, even the most seemingly “useless” object can be functional, or even groundbreaking in the right hands.
Also, people aren’t objects, and you dont need to be able to “use” them in order for them to exist.
Surreal Sunday is the perfect day to redecorate with one of these awesome stone rugs made by Vienna-based designer Martina Schuhmann. All those smooth stones are actually soft felted wool, which means that they look like real stone, but are actually soft and comfy to walk on.
xanike made me ascend out of the physical realm and into an astral plane
Honka and Xanike are on opposite sides of the spelling spectrum
the answer to “how do you spell Hanukkah” is “with a different alphabet”
Gather round, my children, and let me tell you how to spell this pesky word.
I’ll start by what everybody agrees on in the spelling: the vowels. Everybody agrees that they go -a-u-a- (I’m using the dashes to denote possibly missing consonants for now).
You may have noticed the 2 different spellings of The Word in Hebrew above:
חֲנֻכָּה: the original word, in which the /u/ portrayed in
נֻ (/nu/) is a short one. BiblicalHebrew distinguished between long vowels, short vowels, and half-sized vowels. Due to Biblical Hebrew syllable-structure shenanigans, the /u/ is short.
חנוכה: the modern way of writing the word. The נו (/nu/) would have denoted a long vowel in Biblical Hebrew … but Modern Hebrew does not distinguish vowels by length.
The first /a/ (in
חֲ) used to denote a half-length vowel. Since vowel-length doesn’t mean anything anymore in Hebrew, both /a/ are equal.
Therefore, in Modern Hebrew,
חנוכה =
חֲנֻכָּה.
That covers the vowels. Next, the bits where everybody who knows even a bit of transliteration would agree on:
There’s only 1 /n/. That means it’s -anu-a-.
There are 2 /k/ after the /u/. That’s because the Hebrew is
כָּ. You see the little dot in the middle? That used to mean that the sound used to be geminated. We don’t really observe gemination in Modern Hebrew anymore, except that in some letters (v, f, ch) the little dot (dagesh) denotes something very important.
In case you don’t want to double the K, because the language that you’re using, AKA English, that doubling means absolutely nothing, you can skip it.
This leaves us with -anuk(k)a- as a definite spelling so far.
This is where things get murky. Because you see … this is when the transliteration rules start falling apart by way of a long tradition of transliteration as well phonology rules across several languages in the duration of about 2000 years.
The beginning
ח: is it h, kh, or ch? Frankly, it could be any of these.
KH: This is the transliteration of a sound in Hebrew that no European language has or has had. Standard Modern Hebrew doesn’t have it anymore, but it’s still considered an acceptable, very common variance of the consonant ח. In linguistics, it’s written as [
ħ
], and in Semitic studies, it’s written as
ḥ (an h with a little dot below it). You can listen to it [here on Wikipedia]. This is the classical, old-fashioned, origins-faithful spelling … which looks very very wrong: Khanukka-. Weird, right? Still correct.
If you listened to the recording, you might think it sounds between an /h/ and an /x/ (as in ‘ch’ in the Scottish Gaelic word for lake ‘loch’), depending on which sound you preferred.
H is how the Greeks transliterated the letter ח in the Bible (such as in the second h in the word ‘Bethlehem’)
CH is how Standard Modern Hebrew pronounces via the Ashkenazi pronunciation of Yiddish.
So if you spell it with a KH, you’re an out-of-date traditionalist; if you spell it with an H, you’re faithful to the name of the holiday in your own language, and if you spell it with a CH you’re faithful to the Standard Modern Hebrew pronunciation (and probably have family who speaks either Hebrew or Yiddish).
Possible, correct options so far:
Khanuk(k)a-
Hanuk(k)a-
Chanuk(k)a-
Which leads us to the very last dash! Is there an H at the end? Should there be an H at the end?
This is where it gets the most complicated, because it requires some background in Hebrew noun-noun constructs.
The word ‘
חנוכה
‘ is an actual word in Hebrew that means ‘inauguration, dedication, consecration‘ according to morfix.co.il (the Hebrew-English-Hebrew web translator). Since Hebrew is a gendered language, The Word is a feminine noun. A lot of feminine nouns in Hebrew end with what can be directly transliterated as ‘-ah’, or, in Hebrew, a word-final ‘
ה
‘ (the name of this letter is either He or Hey, depending on how much official Hebrew education the person had).
This Hey is silent. It hanging around does not mean there’s an /h/ sound in the word. All it does is tell the user of the language that they should pay attention to this word, because in noun-noun constructs, the Hey becomes a Tav (or Taf). This was ‘inauguration of [noun]’ is חנוכת-בית (khanukkat-bayit in pefect translit; ‘bayit’ is ‘house’ or ‘home’).
So, it’s really up to you whether to add that last H or not.
What you should be careful of, probably, is mix-and-matching. Khanuka is just outright weird, because you’re mixing a bunch of translit styles – going from extreme translit mode (KH) to mild mode (one K, no H). Chanuka also looks strange, because the CH is also somewhat strict-ish translit.
This all means that these are all the correct spellings in English, from a Hebrew standpoint, from most-strict transliteration to the most permissive:
Khanukkah
Chanukkah
Hanukkah
Chanukka (h is silent, double-k still serves a phonetic purpose that I didn’t bother going much into)
Hanukah
Hanukka
Hanuka (as much as it makes me twitch)
You’re welcome, and may you all confuzzle everybody you come across!
Frankenuff’s Castle 