Hey there! I’ve been following your blog for awhile (it’s a nice blog!) but I was wondering, do you have any encouragement for a beginner learning Korean? I get a hard time for it because I’m a white American and people say that you can’t just learn a language for fun if you’re a white American. I have a serious passion for this language and I want to learn but people saying this is really getting me down. Do you have any tips or encouragement? Thank you so much!

lenyberry:

languagesandshootingstars:

Hi! You are allowed to learn any language you want, regardless of your skin colour or nationality. Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant and wrong. Don’t listen to them. They may tell you learning a language is “cultural appropriation”, but as long as you’re not accessorizing it or claiming it as yours, it’s not. So go ahead and learn the language, and learn about the Korean culture and people and their country. There’s nothing wrong with that. Good luck and have fun!

Learning a language so that you can more easily communicate with more people is not cultural appropriation. 

Learning a language because you like the way it sounds is not cultural appropriation. 

In fact I can’t think of any way in which learning a language could be rendered appropriative. You’d have to be such a huge asshole about it that I can’t even imagine what that would be like.

Australian scientists went looking for deep sea creatures and pulled up your nightmares instead

rjzimmerman:

Excerpt:

Recently, an international team of scientists sponsored by Museums Victoria and a government research organization spent a month trawling the ocean floor off the Aussie Coast trying to figure out what lives down there — and how they’ve adapted to survive.

For scientists, the finds are beginning to shed light on the dramatic evolution of creatures in extreme environments. They’ve possibly identified a new fish and found animals living at lower depths than recorded.

For the rest of us, the photos of the findings offer something different: seawater-scented nightmare fuel.

The scientists pulled up more than a thousand sea creatures, which will be studied and catalogued in the months to come, then gaped at by Australian schoolchildren.

They also raised the alarm about the most disturbing thing they uncovered: pounds and pounds of trash. Humans have rarely made it to these depths, the scientists said, but our garbage has .“We have found highly concerning levels of rubbish on the sea floor,” Chief Scientist Tim O’Hara said in a news release. “We’re 100 kilometres off Australia’s coast, and have found PVC pipes, cans of paints, bottles, beer cans, wood chips, and other debris from the days when steamships plied our waters. The seafloor has 200 years of rubbish on it.”

Australian scientists went looking for deep sea creatures and pulled up your nightmares instead

typhlonectes:

Northern River Terrapin 

Endangered
Species Series: Harvested for their meat and traded as exotic pets,
Northern River Terrapins are a species on the brink of extinction

by Shailendra Singh


A brackish water species, the Northern River Terrapin (Batagur baska) is one of the largest turtles to be found in Southeast Asia.
It is one of the world’s most endangered turtles – classified as
Critically Endangered by the IUCN Red List.

Up until the 1960s, they
were very common – in fact, they were possibly one of the most common
turtle species, according to the literature available from the British
era in the Zoological Survey of India. Earlier, B baska used to
be found in the river mouths of Odisha and the Sunderbans. Today, it is
considered extinct in much of its former range. Fewer than 50 adults
remain, in four captive locations around the world…

(read more: Nature in Focus)

photograph by
Shailendra Singh

brown-nena:

How Amazon reviews go:

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
“This is the best thing I’ve ever purchased in my entire life. Customer service rep was like family. Delivery time was 16 minutes, condition is perfect, and it has lasted me 20 years.”

⭐️
“Ordered a bed frame and got a pack of plastic knives instead. Customer service told me to fuck off. Delivery lasted 7 years. Caused a divorce. Lost my house. I am now going to jail.”