Valerie Halla

To me this is like football. This would be like when they throw the football through the football hoop

All I want for Christmas is for velvet worms to be extant members of the lobopod taxon. I just want that for them. Haven't they earned it???

They did so much research about lobopods while I wasn't looking!!!

a planet like earth, but significantly hotter, sunnier, and wetter, i think, would maybe be the scariest place in the universe. a planet where creatures the size of a guy could afford to have the metabolism of a fly would be my personal nightmare

one of the biggest factors in determining how scary an animal is is its energy budget. cave creatures and deep sea freakfish may look scary, but they're all bark and no bite. the amazon rainforest is one writhing mass of biting stinging animals that move faster than you can think

in some cases, like above, a clause beginning with "to which" ends (or would end) with a completely different preposition; sometimes the "to" is just superfluous: "[he looked] closely at convergence in evolution, to which he would call the robust replicability thesis"

it seems like it's maybe a hypercorrection against ending a sentence with a preposition (which is COMPLETELY NORMAL, BY THE WAY!!) where, failing to account for which preposition you would otherwise end the sentence with, you just stick "to" in there and forget about it

a random example i heard recently: "he would even go on to write a book about his discoveries and hypotheses around them, to which he goes into greater detail on." like, WHOA, right??? like, WHOA???

this one actually fascinates me because i've heard it from at least a half dozen different narrators on as many completely unrelated channels. it explodes in my ears as ungrammatical, but clearly it doesn't in everyone's, because it's spreading fast

i haven't heard someone say "irregardless" in the past, like, decade. it's time for us to move on to a *real* problem: why does like every youtube video essayist in 2022 think "to which" is an all-purpose conjunction and determiner???

any ever build a town house out of red bricks with big white bricks on the corners only ? especially if the white bricks alternate directions and form a lil bouncy pattern. just an idea i had

Five minute craft ideas for civilizations: making pottery? Try taking a length of rope or braided cord and pressing it into the wet clay. You can make all kinds of fun patterns!

or like how the word "alphabet" refers one specific set of symbols (or used to, a long time ago), and is named after the first two symbols in that set (alpha, beta)! to say the whole set is redundant: alpha, beta, you know the rest. she, her, you know the rest!

so in other words, "he/him" isn't really MEANT to be an exhaustive description of a set of pronouns -- it's kind of just a descriptive term which *refers* to a set of pronouns, the way, like, "hearts suit" refers to a set of cards

you could simply say "i use he pronouns" (as some do!), or you could exhaustively say "i use they/them/their/theirs/themself" (as some also do!). but the former reads kind of awkwardly, and the latter is often redundant bc it's deducible from context (even for many neopronouns)

as a professional trans who is also a hobbyist linguist, i find it interesting that we all settled on "[nominative case of pronoun]/[oblique case of pronoun]" as our shorthand for specifying our pronouns (e.g. "my pronouns are she/her"). there's more cases than that!

here's the thing about blue whales. they aren't even blue! they're just whale colored. "the blue whale is so named because underwater it can appear grayish blue" LIKE LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE UNDERWATER??? NOT NOTABLE, GUYS!!!!!!!!

i have a somewhat heavy touch when drawing, but that's just because i like to take advantage of the full range of pressure sensitivity. if the nibs are gonna scratch shit up at pressures the pen is explicitly designed to handle, that's a problem!!!

the issue is that i just got a brand new screen protector, and these plastic nibs are already leaving rainbow scratches in it!! (this was also a problem with the protector it came with -- it got so scratched in just a few months that it was blurry to the point of unusability)