You Jump I Jump, Jack

Ne les écoutez pas, ils sont fous. 25, Aus.

[allthingseurope]

Den Bosch, Netherlands

[gyrovagi]

(smugly) actually all narration is unreliable because language can only ever communicate through approximation

[a-similarghost]

this was too good to not post here

[ph-cutie]

Our inquiry for the pronouns of the most humble man alive was refused, "I haven't done anything that makes me worth talking about in third person"

[amyamychan]

One of my queer acquaintances came out with the world's best response to a pronoun inquiry from a person who clearly did not have good interest in their heart:

"You don't need my pronouns, you don't know me well enough to talk about me."

[victusinveritas]

[writing-prompt-s]

!!!

[ow-my-skin]

Glasses people love to make you try their glasses on to see how fucked up their eyes are. It's a sign of respect in their culture.

[fibbunny]

It’s fine because I’m actually using a secret technique called writing it in my head and nowhere else.

[bgm05]

Went outside and saw a bat flying around. Then i saw a toad in the yard. Straight up like a witch’s brew out there . Stay safe

[decembersoul]

Libraries with a sense of humour.

[cidthecoatrack-blog]

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

[siyurikspakvariisis]

an article on the subject for the curious:

Recoding Voyager 1—NASA’s interstellar explorer is finally making sense again

"We're pretty much seeing everything we had hoped for, and that's always good news.”

[rainbowfic]

But there was a period of friction, when “hello” was spreading beyond its summoning origins to become a general-purpose greeting, and not everyone was a fan. I was reminded of this when watching a scene in the BBC television series Call the Midwife, set in the late 1950s and early 1960s, where a younger midwife greets an older one with a cheerful “Hello!” “When I was in training,” sniffs the older character, “we were always taught to say ‘good morning,’ ‘good afternoon,’ or ‘good evening.’ ‘Hello’ would not have been permitted.” To the younger character, “hello” has firmly crossed the line into a phatic greeting. But to the older character, or perhaps more accurately to her instructors as a young nurse, “hello” still retains an impertinent whiff of summoning. Etiquette books as late as the 1940s were still advising against “hello,” but in the mouth of a character from the 1960s, being anti-hello is intended to make her look like a fussbudget, especially playing for an audience of the future who’s forgotten that anyone ever objected to “hello.”

Because Internet, Gretchen McCulloch

[loki-zen]

Posts that remind me to nerd out about the intricacies of historical fiction writing

[jackironsides]

This isn't historical fiction, but period fiction, but I remember having a jarring OH reaction when discovering something that's just a standard part of English now was less than a hundred years old by reading a book. the book was Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers, published in 1930, and in the first chapter a judge is speaking:

‘It is not necessary for him, or her, to prove innocence; it is, in the modern slang phrase, “up to” the Crown to prove guilt...’

[allthingslinguistic]

There are several particularly good examples of this in books by Frances Hodgson Burnett, who lived in both the UK and the US and several times depicts characters from those two places encountering each other. For example, The Shuttle was published in 1907 and has this delightful passage of two British characters encountering an American:

“Upon my word,” Mr. Penzance commented, and his amiable fervour quite glowed, “I like that queer young fellow—I like him. He does not wish to 'butt in too much.' Now, there is rudimentary delicacy in that. And what a humorous, forceful figure of speech! Some butting animal—a goat, I seem to see, preferably—forcing its way into a group or closed circle of persons.” His gleeful analysis of the phrase had such evident charm for him that Mount Dunstan broke into a shout of laughter, even as G. Selden had done at the adroit mention of Weber & Fields. “Shall we ride over together to see him this morning? An hour with G. Selden, surrounded by the atmosphere of Reuben S. Vanderpoel, would be a cheering thing,” he said. “It would,” Mr. Penzance answered. “Let us go by all means. We should not, I suppose,” with keen delight, “be 'butting in' upon Lady Anstruthers too early?” He was quite enraptured with his own aptness. “Like G. Selden, I should not like to 'butt in,'” he added.

And the more I see historical examples of people encountering novel expressions that are utterly unremarkable to us now, the more I think, you know what, I might as well approach language change with gleeful delight rather than a fussbudgety sniff.

[justcatposts]

Stray cat breaks into Lynx’s enclosure at zoo

(Source)

[cathartidae]

while the stray cat story may have circulated in 2020 and 2022, this story is actually from the Leningrad Zoo in 2014. (here's the original russian article as well.)

these two felines were introduced at 6 weeks old in order to give more enrichment for the lynx and for education purposes, however they got along fantastically from the start and were eventually moved to permanently live with one another.

a much less exciting story, but a much cuter one as well.

(source, source)

[pmd-stardust]

get in babe we're 30 year old women we're having formative experiences that our teenage years denied us

[theglitchywriterboi]

I hope every writer who sees this writes LOADS the next few months. Like freetime opens up, no writers block, the ability to focus, etc etc you're able to write loads & make lots of progress <3

[notbecauseofvictories]

A customer contacted our team with questions, and then finished their email with: "I am daunted by the complexities and unknowns." I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.

[cameoappearance]

Reblog if you are daunted by the complexities and unknowns

[dr-drea]

Be gay do crime but in Barvaria and we're putting these everywhere

[deutsche-bahn]

For those of you who don't know about the current discussions in German politics:

German is a heavily gendered language, with distinct female and male forms for a lot of words. While it's been pretty common to just use the 'generic male' term for, say, occupations (i.e. just using the male version of a word to refer to mixed groups of people), there's been a push in the last few years to use more gender-inclusive (or gender-sensitive, whatever you want to call it) versions of terms.

In written form, this usually means that you'll 'merge' the two terms with a * indicating that you're referring to a mixed group.

For example, if you're talking about teachers, instead of just using the generic male term Lehrer, or using both male and female (Lehrer und Lehrerinnen), you just write Lehrer*Innen (or LehrerInnen, or Lehrer_Innen, depending on preference).

The Bavarian state authorities, who are traditionally Christian maniacs, have now decided that this is unacceptable. They're arguing that this inclusive language goes against freedom of speech, that you need to be able to "have unrestricted discourse in a liberal society", and that an ideologically-influenced language like this would prohibit that. And so, in the name of freedom of speech, they are banning the use of the gender inclusive terms by schools, unis and state officials. It's as insane as it sounds.

[latenight-panic]

This shit has been going on for like three years in schools in Saxony. I once got an official warning by my headmaster because I referred to students as Schüler*innen in a mail to a parent. (The parent complained.)

As far as I know, this rule refers only to "schools and their project partners", meaning that as long as a company adresses parents/kids in a school context (for an internship for example) they are forbidden from using this kind of gendered language.

This includes also projects working with students on LGBT+ topics, which is so stupid I don't even have words for it.

[latenight-panic]

Actually, interesting addition: since students aren't really allowed to use it either, at my school some kids started using the female form as generic. I think it's funny as shit.

[canthaveshitingotham-crucified]

i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious. like in the airbnb i was at i guess it used to be a kids room cause you could see the imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white. like that's a poem already what's the point

[canthaveshitingotham-crucified]

you get it. you get the themes. i dont have time to do it justice. just look at it its on the ceiling

[brenna]

[teaboot]

[wheresmyphonemp3]

[inthefallofasparrow]

[weaselle]

these exchanges and this fiddling about for the collective to appreciate in passing is, to me, true artistic spirit. I don't know what the past was truly like to live, but in my heart i know that humans have always been... like this