Fun fact! Lepidopterans (butterflies and moths) and most other insects fly by flexing/deforming their thorax causing the wings to move. There aren’t actually any muscles attached to the wings themselves.
Damselflies and dragonflies do have muscles attached directly to the base of the wings which is why they can fly Like That.
I have asked this myself in the past and never gotten an answer.
Maybe today will be the day we are both finally enlightened.
woodsgotweird said: man i just jumped on the bandwagon because i am a sheep. i have no idea where it came from and i ask myself this question all the time
Maybe someone made a typo and it just got out of hand?
I kinda feel like panic!at the disco started the whole exclamation point thing and then it caught on around the internet, but maybe they got it from somewhere else, IDK.
The world may never know…
Maybe it’s something mathematical?
I’ve been in fandom since *about* when Panic! formed and the adjective!character thing was already going strong, pretty sure it predates them.
It’s a way of referring to particular variations of (usually) a character — dark!Will, junkie!Sherlock, et cetera. I have suspected for a while that it originated from some archive system that didn’t accommodate spaces in its tags, so to make common interpretations/versions of the characters searchable, people started jamming the words together with an infix.
(Lately I’ve seen people use the ! notation when the suffix isn’t the full name, but is actually the second part of a common fandom portmanteau. This bothers me a lot but it happens, so it’s worth being aware of.)
“Bang paths” (! is called a “bang"when not used for emphasis) were the first addressing scheme for email, before modern automatic routing was set up. If you wanted to write a mail to the Steve here in Engineering, you just wrote “Steve” in the to: field and the computer sent it to the local account named Steve. But if it was Steve over in the physics department you wrote it to phys!Steve; the computer sent it to the “phys” computer, which sent it in turn to the Steve account. To get Steve in the Art department over at NYU, you wrote NYU!art!Steve- your computer sends it to the NYU gateway computer sends it to the “art” computer sends it to the Steve account. Etc. (“Bang"s were just chosen because they were on the keyboard, not too visually noisy, and not used for a huge lot already).
It became pretty standard jargon, as I understand, to disambiguate when writing to other humans. First phys!Steve vs the Steve right next to you, just like you were taking to the machine, then getting looser (as jargon does) to reference, say, bearded!Steve vs bald!Steve.
So I’m guessing alternate character version tags probably came from that.
100% born of bang paths. fandom has be floating around on the internet for six seconds longer than there has been an internet so early users just used the jargon associated with the medium and since it’s a handy shorthand, we keep it.
Absolutely from the bang paths–saw people using them in early online fandom back in 1993 for referring to things.
I had been doing it for a very, very long time but never actually knew the actual name for it. This is exciting! I like learning things.
“The patient: this 3-day-old little boy was born with torn upper and lower wings. Let’s see how we can help!”
Today the Department of Awesomely Good Deeds salutes costume designer and master embroiderer Romy McCloskey who used her fine skills with delicate materials to help a monarch butterfly she’d raised and who’d emerged from his cocoon with damaged right wings.
“The operating room and supplies: towel, wire hanger, contact cement, toothpick, cotton swab, scissors, tweezers, talc powder, extra butterfly wing”
“Securing the butterfly and cutting the damaged parts away. Don’t worry it doesn’t hurt them. It’s like cutting hair or trimming fingernails”
“Ta-da! With a little patience and a steady hand, I fit the new wings to my little guy”
“The black lines do not match completely and it is missing the black dot (male marking) on the lower right wing, but with luck, he will fly”
“FLIGHT DAY! After a day of rest and filling his belly with homemade nectar, it is time to see if he will fly”
“With a quick lap around the yard and a little rest on a bush, he was off! A successful surgery and outcome! Bye, little buddy! Good luck”
IF THIS POST CREATES 1 NEW PUSHING DAISIES FAN MY LIFE = MADE.
Alright let me help out then:
1) Most of the cast is female. In fact only two main characters are male.
2) Both male characters take typically non-masculine hobbies. Emerson Cod knits almost non-stop and makes pop-up books. Ned is literally called “The Pie-Maker” because he bakes homestyle pies from his mother’s method. Both are shown to be very nurturing and even maternal characters. Conversely, the women? A pair of professional travelling show performers that have gritty sexual scandals the way men usually get (see the entire “Chuck’s father” storylines), a beekeeper who is the single most positive and optimistic character imaginable, and a former professional jockey- Three of four pro athletes.
3) You could very easily make the claim Ned is asexual.
4) Yes, the storyline is about romance. But it’s also about the positive side of a love story, and their only drama lies in overcoming their inability to actually share contact.
5) A very good friend of mine recommended this show to me as “Disney for adults.” I told her it was already on my list to watch because “It’s by Bryan Fuller, from Wonderfalls and Dead Like Me.” Bryan Fuller is now most known for “Hannibal.” The same camera methods and bright colours and lighting techniques Hannibal is known for? Perfected in this show, just using a different tone- The same colour methods in reverse, upping the vivid greens and yellows instead of reds and blues, which sells emotion both ways.
7) Probably one of the best examples of a modern day fairy tale possible.
8) Narrated by Jim Dale- The narrator for the HP audio books.
I don’t know if anyone’s already added links to this, but all of these here work and if you hover over the links, an episode description shows :)
This is a curious one: an antique miniature all-bisque “frozen Charlotte” doll in a little metal coffin, embossed with the letters “Don’t Talk So Much.” What does it mean?
