Dante’s Inferno: a guide to hell

(Source: corrino)

fiyerro:

i’ve been angry about this for my entire life

(Source: elderthomas)

Neverending list of books that everyone should read ∟Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman

“25 And the Lord spake unto the Angel that guarded the eastern gate, saying ‘Where is the flaming sword that was given unto thee?’
26 And the Angel said, ‘I had it here only a moment ago, I must have put it down some where, forget my own head next.’
27 And the Lord did not ask him again.” 

chirabella:

“Now consider the tortoise and the eagle.

The tortoise is a ground-living creature. It is impossible to live nearer the ground without being under it. Its horizons are a few inches away. It has about as good a turn of speed as you need to hunt down a lettuce. It has survived while the rest of evolution flowed past it by being, on the whole, no threat to anyone and too much trouble to eat.

And then there is the eagle. A creature of the air and high places, whose horizons go all the way to the edge of the world. Eyesight keen enough to spot the rustle of some small and squeaky creature half a mile away. All power, all control. Lightning death on wings. Talons and claws enough to make a meal of anything smaller than it is and at least a hurried snack out of anything bigger.

And yet the eagle will sit for hours on the crag and survey the kingdoms of the world until it spots a distant movement and then it will focus, focus, focus on the small shell wobbling among the bushes down there on the desert. And it will leap…

And a minute later the tortoise finds the world dropping away from it. And it sees the world for the first time, no longer one inch from the ground but five hundred feet above it, and it thinks: what a great friend I have in the eagle.

And then the eagle lets go.

And almost always the tortoise plunges to its death. Everyone knows why the tortoise does this. Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off. No one knows why the eagle does this. There’s good eating on a tortoise but, considering the effort involved, there’s much better eating on practically anything else. It’s simply the delight of eagles to torment tortoises.

But of course, what the eagle does not realize is that it is participating in a very crude form of natural selection.

One day a tortoise will learn how to fly.”

- Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

scribnerbooks:

An action shot goes a long way.

crowleyaziraphale:

edgebug:

turnabout-taisa:

my-singing-soul:

why is it that all the most popular posts on tumblr

are written like this

with no capitals

and no punctuation

i just really want there to be a popular and grammatically correct post on tumblr

I think the majority of Tumblr’s dialect (is there a word for a written dialect? Hardly anyone speaks Tumblr.) comes from influence within the tag system.

My theory is that the lack of capitalization is stylized, ironic laziness (same reason as the increasingly popular use of abbreviations such as idek and ikr, and particles like desu), whereas the punctuation stems from the tag system, where commas split up tags. So, “this is like, so totally cool” would be tagged “this is like” “so totally cool.”

With commas struck from the tumblr blogger’s arsenal, they rely on run-on sentences and other means to show emphasis. One such means, spacing, is another quirk influenced by the tags. If you repeat a tag, it will only show once, which is why you get “really r e a l l y weird things like this.”

Also common on Tumblr are people who show their enthusiasm through their text by pretending their haNDS ARE FRKEAKIGN OUT AN D THEY CANT TPYE OMFGGGG. This adaptation is actually pretty cool, I think, as it serves to communicate tone across a very toneless medium.

Did you hear that noise? That was the sound of my desk breaking. My linguistics boner just snapped it in half.

 #we’ve created our own language with its own set of rules and guidelines #based on the environment #that is cool #if you don’t think that’s cool you’re wrong

wordisdrawn:

dictionary.com word of the day: erinaceous \er-uh-NEY-shuhs, adjective: Of the hedgehog kind or family.

(Source: jessamint)

Words to keep inside your pocket:

• Quiescent - a quiet, soft-spoken soul.
• Chimerical - merely imaginary; fanciful. 
• Susurrus - a whispering or rustling sound. 
• Raconteur - one who excels in story-telling. 
• Clinquant - glittering; tinsel-like. 
• Aubade - a song greeting the dawn. 
• Ephemeral - lasting a very short time. 
• Sempiternal - everlasting; eternal. 
• Euphonious - pleasing; sweet in sound. 
• Billet-doux - a love letter. 
• Redamancy - act of loving in return.