that’s mr. wordmaster presidentboy to you

nick, 25, they/them

[aimervee]

So anyways the Pokecology book is really good you guys

[louisealzzz]

awababwbabwbabwa

[wizardarchetypes]

like logically ofc i know my sleep disorder is indeed a disorder but it's still crazy to me that i have been taking my sleep meds every single night without fail for 3 months now, and as a result i have been sleeping by midnight and THROUGH the night every single night without fail for three months. but tonight i forgot to take it on time and now it's almost 3 am and i'm awake. it doesn't matter how long i stick to a rhythm, i will no magically become a healthy sleeper. these meds are genuinely life saving.

absolutely bonkers and actually MADDENING thinking about spending nearly three DECCAAAAADESSSS of my life believing i could just "fix" my schedule and get my sleep "on track." LMAO. i was up at 4 am when i was 6 years old sneaking downstairs to watch TV in misery bc i couldn't sleep and then i was still 32 YEARSSSS old like "no everyone listen THIS week i'm gonna avoid naps and go to bed on time and then i'll sleep normal from now on. for real this time." AJVBJAS SHUT UP!!!! NO YOU WEREN'T BABY!!!!!!!!! YOU WERE NEVER GONNA BE ABLE TO DO THAT!!!!!!

[wizardarchetypes]

i went to my doctor in march and i was like "man you gotta help me. i haven't slept in 75 hours. and i know sometimes people say that but they really mean they've only slept 2 or 3 hours a night for several nights, which is awful of course, but i mean quite literally i haven't slept in 75 hours. and i keep waiting to finally 'crash' but i don't."

and he was like, "has this ever happened to you before?"

and i said, "oh yeah loads of times, since i was a toddler."

and he said, "why are you just now getting help?"

and i said, "well recently when i hit the 60 hour mark i've started hallucinating birds. and that's new."

and he said, "what do you mean, birds?"

and i said, "i don't know, i think they're house sparrows"

and he said, "i didn't mean what kind of birds"

(true that's not what he said but it was hard to parse the nuances of the conversation because there were a bunch of house sparrows in the room)

[amethystsoda]

ninajiraichi // Sabakaru Online

[memeclassheroes]

[thydungeongal]

Also shout-out to the Swedes for just borrowing the French "adieu" into their vocabulary and just spelling it "adjö"

[legov7]

German has borrowed the italian "Ciau", spelling it "Tschau" and only using it as a goodby instead of also a greeting.

[thydungeongal]

I had completely forgotten about this, this is fantastic.

[erlann]

If you enjoyed "ciao" becoming "tschau", you'll definitely want to hear where "tschüss" (German, also meaning "goodbye") comes from!

[thydungeongal]

Borrowed from German Low German tschüß from earlier adjüs, from Dutch adjuus, back-formation from adjuusjes, from French adieu.

We can't let the French keep getting away with this

[ospreyonthemoon]

I mean the french very much aren't getting away with it. Everyone else is taking their language and running off with it cackling with glee. We're all getting away with fucking up french words on purpose

[saxifraga-x-urbium]

#English loves french so much it steals the same fucking word a few centuries apart so it gets two words that have the same meaning#But different spellings -#Like guarantee/warranty#(aside: There was a w/g shift so you can see if the word showed up with the normans or got nicked later#Which is why for e.g. the english call it wales and the french call it pays de galls)#Catch/chase#Gender/genre

[thydungeongal]

I'm so glad someone reblogged these additions while I was away from my puter, I absolutely love doublets (or twinlings as they are apparently called as well!! That's so cute!!)!

[chipthekeeper]

I have a lot of pet peeves but I think the biggest one is when people say things like “oh it’s such a small town, only 35,000 people” like bitch my town has 200 people, you need to pick a new adjective 

[thegoldengals]

According to Wikipedia, a small town is 1,000-20,000 people. So although you are correct in stating that 35,000 people is not a small town (it is a large town), you are incorrect in thinking that you live in a town. You live in a village. You are a villager.

[chipthekeeper]

I…… don’t know what to do with that information……a villager…

[memecucker]

sometimes i think about that one Los Angeles fire captain that turned out to be an incredibly prolific serial arsonist with one of the things that ended up giving him away being that he wrote a novel about a firefighter that becomes an arsonist and used the pen-name “Aaron Stiles” which turns out to be an anagram for “I set LA arson” 

[yeahiwasintheshit]

[flagellant]

hey yeah no this guy is actually a Big Deal in California at least in my town he set fires across central and southern california for over a DECADE before being caught. The FBI estimates he set over two thousand fires before being caught. After his arrest, wildfires in the surrounding area dropped ninety percent

[shotfromguns]

John Leonard Orr (born April 26, 1949) is an American who was the former fire captain and arson investigator for the Glendale Fire Department in Southern California and novelist. He was indicted and later convicted of serial arson and four counts of murder. Orr had originally wanted to be a police officer, but had failed the entrance exam; instead he became a fire investigator and career fire officer. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Los Angeles was plagued by a series of fires that cost millions of dollars in damages and claimed four lives. Orr was found to be the cause of most of those fires.

the only thing worse than a cop is a wanna-be cop who couldn’t get in

[rook-brightsilver]

watching a scene with a fav character can be so humiliating sometimes. like yes i'm watching this scene with this character because i want to see the character. yes i've paused it multiple times because i got too excited. before the character fully entered the screen even. guhhhh

[demilypyro]

thinking about how Mew Mew Kissy Cutie in Undertale/Deltarune's universe is a copyrighted anime property. we've never met the "real" Mew Mew because there isn't one. she's a branded fictional character from an in-universe anime. both Mad Mew Mew from Undertale and Pink from Deltarune are NOT Mew Mew, they are at best abstractions or imitations of Mew Mew as interpreted by Maddie/Pink. even the darkner that spawns from Pink's body is not *actually* Mew Mew, it's just the flower shop dark world's interpretation of how a Mew Mew doll would act once given consciousness. I feel like it connects to Deltarune's deeper themes of narratives deriving from other narratives. Deltarune the game IS the legend IS Lord of the Hammer IS Dragon Blazers, and meanwhile they're all very different. A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. Pink both IS and IS NOT Mew Mew. Mew Mew doesn't technically exist within Deltarune's world, we only vaguely know about the "real" Mew Mew as an in-universe character because these derivatives of her exist. we never watch Mew Mew Kissy Cutie, we just hear Alphys talk about it. a story told about a story we never get to see. every retelling slightly different. play with me in this space.

[demilypyro]

fuuuuck that's a great point why didn't I think of that

[digupreaganandkillhimagain]

im going crazy you have GOT to decouple romance/amatonormativity and marriage in your mind. you have GOT to understand that marriage is a legal document that protects you from exploitation especially if you are a woman or a stay-at-home anything. it is not some evil unique to heterosexual people. it is a legal document that says 'this is who i want in my hospital room when i die, this is who i want to have my stuff when i die, THIS PERSON OWES ME RECOMPENSE IF THEY KICK ME OUT OF THE HOUSE I LIVE IN"

You are not immune to being taken advantage of by your partner if you are queer. do not wind up homeless because your garbage live-ins name is on the lease and they decided to drop you like hot coals.

[elexuscal]

Adding to this:

This is why it is not assimilationist for gay/queer people to want to enshrine marriage rights in their country/region

Similarly, this is why polyamorous people are fighting for the right to have their relationships recognised by their states through marriage and/or similar agreements

Oh, and because on top of those aforementioned financial and medical protections, these laws also help you maintain connection to any kids you have and/or raise together!

I would go further and say, this is why we really should be looking to expand some of these rights so that marriage is NOT the only way they should be enshrined. (e.g. Why could I get married tonight to a guy I met this morning, and get him on my health insurance, but I cannot do the same for a sibling?)

[leaky-port-nacelle]

Remember the fight for same sex marriage was never “we feel left out”, it was “we’re sick and not allowed to see each other. We’re dying and not allowed at the funeral. Someone who kicked me out at 14 just showed up for the first time 24 years later to tell the doctor to pull the plug, and they did.”

Marriage is a legal documentation of rights. Fully agree with prev that those rights should be divested from the concept of monogamy entirely, but for now we have to at least understand what they are

[unforth]

I need the tumblr kiddos to understand that when my wife and I got married in 2013 we had to plan our vacations to ensure we only visited states where our marriage was legal, because otherwise if my wife got sick (not unlikely, she has multiple chronic conditions) I might not even be allowed to visit her in the hospital.

Every older queer you know who is in a longterm relationship will have similar stories of how we planned our whole lives to protect what would have been granted nigh automatically if we were heterosexual.

Marriage is a legal status that confers certain protections and rights, and until societies introduce other ways to get those protections and rights, we need it even if we hate it as an institution.

[energyprison]

Having a job is an awesome way to stay hydrated because you get so bored you start drinking water just for a little excitement

[slightly-sigilant]

I have a new standard for the level of haterdom to aspire to, and it's Reddit User KismaiAesthetics, who hates doing laundry so much that he got really good at it, so that he can (I quote) do it right the first time, every time, and get back to watching cat videos on the Internet.

and by "really good at it," I mean that he does a bunch of reading on the chemistry of laundry, subscribes to academic journals about laundry, and buys a bunch of different laundry products (including from outside the US) to scrutinize their ingredients and test them for himself. he writes a bunch of incredibly detailed longposts about his findings on /r/laundry and his website, which is also about laundry. he even got interviewed about his laundryposts, in which he revealed he's writing a book about laundry. this man is like ahab and the white whale, if ahab had a reddit account and moby dick was a pile of clothes with cheeseburger stains on them

[slightly-sigilant]

anyway the reason I encountered this guy was because recently, the household washer has been leaving these gross little oily brown flakes on anything washed in it. this is kind of a big problem for me, given that I not only have (literal, diagnosed, medicated) OCD which includes a contagion phobia, I also sew a bunch of stuff with the intent of gifting or selling it, and sometimes that involves prewashing fabric. only, you know, washing is supposed to make things cleaner, not dirtier.

and my research brought me to (gross photos warning!) Kismai's post on the very topic. apparently this stuff is called "scrud," and it's basically a residue that forms over time inside the nooks and crannies of a washing machine - leftover detergent reacting with mineral traces in tapwater to form a buildup that also traps dyes, grease, and other dirt, which bacteria then feeds on, because it wasn't already gross enough. it forms faster if you have hard water, use too much detergent (which most people do), use fabric softener, wash only on cold and the list goes on and on - point is, scrud is the reason that you have to actually clean your washing machine, or be super fastidious about how you do laundry.

(I'll take "things I wish school/my parents actually taught me" for 800)

so now I am engaged in a lengthy battle against scrud, armed with a tub of oxiclean and a sack of citric acid crystals. (we're renters, so disassembling the machine is out of the question.) pour in a scoop of oxiclean, run a machine clean cycle, pour in a scoop of citric acid, run another machine clean cycle, all while wiping piles and piles of scrud out of the drum at the end of each cycle. I'm on the eighth cycle now. there's still so much scrud. the reddit record for "how many cleaning cycles were needed to get a machine entirely free of scrud" is 22 cycles. help

[slightly-sigilant]

hey so like

it turns out that laundry sucks significantly less when your clothes and sheets and etc actually come out of the machine looking, feeling, and smelling clean, rather than looking, feeling, and smelling like despair dipped in slime

like, I have this pillowsheet I call my Depression Era Pillowsheet, because during a Real Bad Time of my life when 90% of all I could do was lie in bed and cry, that was the pillowsheet I laid and cried on. this went on for weeks, and it was never changed out because, again, 90% of my waking hours were Lie In Bed And Cry Hours. it did eventually get changed out, but no matter how many washes I put it through, it remained stained and slimy. like I'd throw it in every time I washed my clothes and it would still come out feeling like someone had applied a fresh layer of Weeping Slime Laminate to it. someone with more sense probably would have thrown it out but idk, I just never did for some reason

anyway! taking some pointers from the freaks over at /r/laundry, I grabbed an enzyme-based detergent, a booster (thing of More Enzymes and oxygen bleach that you add alongside detergent to make it clean gooder), and washed everything on hot (in a machine without a scrud problem), including the Depression Era Pillowsheet. it finally came out looking and feeling like fresh clean cotton?? what?? I hadn't even done the whole "soak it for 24 hours in various unsettling substances" thing??? wack

[zombvibes]

which could mean nothing.

[cipheramnesia]

Working with different business cultures all over the globe, my biggest surprise is that while the USA is bad, it's not actually the very absolute worst I've ever worked with.

[cipheramnesia]

I can imagine all the guesses, but if you haven't talked with a crap ton of people from dozens of countries, it's not obvious.

[cipheramnesia]

The key is business culture is like its own weird separate culture with rules and structures, but most places have a fairly comprehensible set of expectations. So most of the time, it's just remembering perceived differences in expectations. Some places it's polite to be what feels really overly friendly to me. Some places it's polite to be what feels obsequious and formal to me. It's like, whatever. A secondary form of language kinda. It's not even social cues, it's just mechanics of language really. Places with that stuff, those are all fine and wonderful to deal with because there's a framework to communicate and all that.

Part of why the USA shits the bed trying to talk with is because every business person here has like zero framework, it's all lies and bullshit, and everyone wants to be the smartest bestest boy. It's not business culture as much as daycare for toddlers who have millions of dollars and hate human rights. Not the worst though, not by far.

[cipheramnesia]

What's key to understand is this is all separate from things like the real people in different places. Business brain people don't have any relevance to real human behavior, it's this whole other structure of make believe which controls everyone's well being. It's important to know because I know how to email a business guy in South Korea using language that will feel appropriate enough after translation, but that's completely irrelevant to the real people living there. It's easy to talk to business guys in China or India or whatever. Germany, Nigeria, Mexico.

UK business guys are pretty bad too. Still not the worst but you have to put a lot of extra work in because business culture in the UK still thinks the Brittish empire exists. The majority of business dudes in the UK see no difference between selling something that has their company name on it, and making it themselves. It's like how all the stuff that says "made in the USA" is 99% made somewhere else, and then one staple is put into it and it's made in the USA, but if you talk to business guys here, they never confuse where things are made, just like... more basic realities like linear time and physics. UK guys go the opposite way, and always say they own everything. But that's all relatively navigable. It's like, okay, you all live in an imaginary world, but I can still get everyone to understand time and logistics and stuff enough to get everyone understanding the same information. I can translate imagination land to reality and back, they get it.

[cipheramnesia]

Apparently tumble ate my explanation, but the worst business guys are Australians.

[cipheramnesia]

I cannot stress how much effort I put into explaining things in ways that work for people who aren't native English speakers, because I understand how weird translation can get, and I am not good at other languages. I have so many special little quirks and tricks to make what I say become something moderately clear and apropriate in translation. I can rotate through a dozen approaches to a topic to make it click for someone unfamiliar with what I'm explaining. I know it works because it's been time tested.

Australian executives simply take any information they receive, and do not. Did you say something is going to take a month - after signing a contract and collect a fee? The Australian business executive simply accepts that you have said you have begun work and it will be finished in 48 hours. If I told an Australian executive that the earth revolves around the sun, I would expect him to let me know that I had told him a hamster named Ben carries a really bright lamp around space to make the seasons. I have to painstakingly document every single detail of any interaction with Australian business persons, because they simply imagine things that have happened and information they have been told, and ignore whatever has transpired in actuality.

I have actually warned all my friends off buying anything from Australia - not because I think there's anything specifically wrong with the general quality of Australian goods, but because after every conversation with Australian executives going exactly the same (I say one thing, they declare I have said something completely different), I am hard pressed to believe anyone at a corporate level in Australian businesses actually understands laws, regulations, logistics, safety, or just... words. Every interaction I have with an Australian business guy inevitably stuns me into a loss for words through some completely unanticipated recap of an interaction we had or email I sent which is fully disconnected from the text or actual event. I cannot understand how the people of Australia, not particularly better or worse than people anywhere else, become the worst humans I have had the misfortune to encounter the second they enter the world of business. I wouldn't trust a single Australian executive to pour water out of a boot with instructions printed on the heel.

[wheatforme]

this is utterly fascinating and i’m so sorry you have to deal with it but also

you work in business????

[cipheramnesia]

I work with businesses, but I'm not working in business. Which is nice because at least a few times a year I get to tell an extremely confident corporate executive, "Sorry, but you simply cannot." Everything else is pretty horrible though.

[sycamorality]

whitebaby you can literally just say ass. whitebaby just say "this" instead of butchering aave. whitebaby. whitebaby stop

[ffishkit]

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