Feeling Pretty Sad Today, Grief Is A Very Hard Thing To Cope With.

Video captions: And stop trying to show your ex what they missed out on! Stop trying to teach your family a lesson for not believing in you! Stop trying to shit on your haters! Do it for you! Do it because you deserve it! Do it for YOU! Water your dreams with love! Don’t put no hate and resentment, and try to — “oh Imma fucking show them, Imma show” — FUCK THEM! Fuck them, do it for you! They don’t matter! They NEVER mattered.

he's very excited about his first night as a jack o lantern

YOU hates terfs

Have you seen this post?

You probably have. It currently has over 120,000 notes, largely because of this addition.

Of course it's going to get reblogged, this kind of unsourced factoid does numbers on here. But something about it wasn't quite right.

A bit of searching turned up the origin of the "fact".

Alright, so it's someone who posted this on reddit 4 years ago and somehow ended up in the search hits. And the post confuses the electric eel (from South America) with the electric catfish (from the Nile, which the Egyptians would have known about).

Reminder: this is an electric eel (Electrophorus electricus). It is from South America. (image from Wikipedia)

And this is an electric catfish (Malapterurus electricus). It is from the Nile and would have been familiar to the ancient Egyptians. (image from Wikipedia)

And then of course people were speculating in the notes to that post about trade routes between South America and Egypt. Excellent scholarship everyone.

At this point I was ready to call it another made-up internet fact that gets reified by people repeating it. But something was still bothering me.

An ancient Egyptian slab from 3100 BC. What could that be...

Oh.

The Narmer palette. It's the goddamn Narmer palette. (image, once again, from Wikipedia)

So where is this "angry catfish"?

It's not the Egyptian name for the electric catfish.

It's... Narmer. It's Narmer himself.

Narmer's name is written as above (detail of top middle of the palette), using the catfish (n`r) and the chisel (mr), giving N'r-mr. The chisel is associated with pain, so this reads as "painful catfish", "striking catfish", or, yes, "angry catfish" or other similar variants, although some authors have suggested that it means "Beloved of [the catfish god] Nar".

So.

Where does this leave us?

It would appear that this redditor not only confused electric eels with electric catfish, but also confused a Pharaoh's name with the name of a fish. And then it got pushed to the top search hits by a crappy search engine and shared uncritically on tumblr.

In short, "the electric eel is called angry catfish" factoid actually literacy error. Angry Catfish, who ruled upper Egypt and smote his enemies, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

Also the Arabic name for the electric catfish is raad (thunder) or raada (thunderer).

References

Afsaruddin, A., & Zahniser, A. H. M. (1997). Humanism, culture, and language in the Near East: studies in honor of Georg Krotkoff. Eisenbrauns.

Clayton, P. A. (2001). Chronicle of the Pharaohs. Thames & Hudson.

Godron, G. (1949). A propos du nom royal. Annales du Service des antiquités de l'Egypte, 49, 217-221.

Sperveslage, G., & Heagy, T. C. (2023). A tail's tale: Narmer, the catfish, and bovine symbolism. The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 109(1), 3-319.

I’m so proud of my baby Maximus 🥹❤️

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housegoblin.bigcartel.com

ok last thing. but what people fundamentally need to get through their heads is the significance of gaza fundraisers not being the same as like mutual aid when you're helping someone get groceries, because it is a genocide. there is insane deliberate scarcity and prices are unmanageable, because there is nowhere nearly enough for everyone, so only people who can pay can eat. and what positioning individual fundraisers as the only course of action does is quite simply give a tiny percentage of random people whose fundraisers take off the ability to pay those prices while thousands of others can't. and every one of those thousands of people without a fundraiser is suffering through the same inconceivably horrific reality. it is giving a few completely desperate people out of hundreds of thousands a slightly more favorable position in a horrific war economy of imposed scarcity. and what grassroots community kitchens do is try to mitigate in some small way that inconceivable hierarchy of who can pay and who can't, by stretching ingredients as far as they can last to cook meals at large scale and give them out at no cost. and obviously people are still going to send money to their friends and families because this is hell what else are we supposed to do but please just think about that before promoting endless individual fundraisers as somehow the most ethical way to help