alyssa @alyssa@cat.family

there was a dude in 17th century spain that argued that the Garden of Eden was in America. and that the forbidden fruit was the banana.

reading about this briefly led me to wonder how i had never realized that the banana is of American origin. (the answer is that i never realized this because it isn't. turns out people have been anachronistically back-projecting plants on the wrong sides of the "Columbian exchange" for a long time)

this prompted by reading the introduction to *Las venas abiertas de América Latina", which talks a lot about eugenicist policies in "development"/"foreign aid" stuff and trying to look up more about it

unsurprisingly the wikipedia is not a very useful source for researching imperialism

i suspect that despite the fact that during this phase of the game i need to evolve a dragonite for this challenge run. i'm still going to end up basically afking for days or weeks to get phone calls for evolutionary stones

one of my favorite things about argentine spanish is that… you know how in US english you call the thin flaky fried potato-based snacks “chips” and in UK english you call the tube-ish-shaped fried potato-based side dish “chips”? (“crisps” and “fries” in the alternate dialects)

both of those are just “papas fritas” here (“fried potatoes”). there is not an established more specific term for either of them to disambiguate. i love it.

side note: that npc’s name? hank the hill giant.

very satisfying when i get suspicious about an npc and then the other npcs we brought to work for him and who were eating his food fall over unconscious and he looks at sofi’s character and mine like “didn’t y’all eat your food?” (we did but we can eat anything without harm) before tearing out of his false skin and attacking us.

it’s nice to notice things and develop suspicions and i’m right.

«derivational morphology (as in derive: derivation: derivational)»

what a nerd (affectionate)

it’s nice to see trans representation in british quiz shows.

i assume that more actually black hair exists and that it is sometimes possible to distinguish it from dark brown hair.

the distinction between dark brown and black hair is not very real to me
like sometimes if an individual strand of my wife's hair really catches the light i can tell it's not just black. but honestly most of the time it just seems black.

in this SS playthru i think i've already got more than enough sun stones from pickup to evolve every pokémon ever released which uses it to evolve

i expect to get many more

today sofi and i are exploring the contrasting meanings of use of english liquids as verbs. to water something is to add water, while to bleed or to milk or to juice something is to remove blood/milk/juice (except in certain metaphorical usages of juice).
to wine and dine someone is to give them wine (and dinner) but to wine is not really a verb in itself.