Misery Loves Company

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are blogging.

[discoursedrome]

Canada's culture ministry only wishes our cultural and media products could achieve as much fame and influence in the US as our wildfire smoke. Apparently Trump is threatening us about it, now? I'm hoping this flips online Democrats into being pro-wildfire smoke.

[northshorewave]

French on loanwords: "If you say 'Youtuber' instead of créateur de courtes vidéos destinées à être visionnées en ligne, Napoleon Bonaparte will come back to life and kill you."

Japanese on loanwords: "Just say yūtuuba or some shit. It don't matter. None of this matters."

[eightyonekilograms]

Imagining a furious forum debate in the Japanese ATHF fandom regarding whether the official subtitling of “It don’t matter. None of this matters.” to しょうがない is sufficient, or fails to adequately capture the depths of Carl’s untranslatable New Jersey detachment and despair.

[discoursedrome]

funnily the OQLF's stated reason for discouraging "Youtubeur/Youtubeuse" is actually just that it's based on a trademark. (They recommend vidéaste instead, which is funny to me because technically it's a barbarism.)

[senalishia]

IN WHAT UNIVERSE WOULD I BE ON THE PHONE IF I COULD GET WHAT I WANTED OUT OF YOUR WEBSITE OR YOUR FUCKING APP

[discoursedrome]

medicine and law are both full of arbitrary and unnecessary latin terminology, but medical latin tends to be somewhat intuitive in what it means, whereas with legal latin, knowing what the latin means barely helps at all because the term is usually a kind of meme or injoke referring to a specific rule defined informally via 400 years of custom and case law.

[youzicha]

After the first trial ended in a hung jury, and awaiting the upcoming retrial, Oscar Wilde

earnestly asked the writer Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, who had called at Oakley Street, whether "truly and honestly he had never liked young men, never wished to fondle and caress them," and he "seemed almost to doubt Tex's sincerity when he emphatically repudiated the very conception of such a thing."

I guess the forced secrecy prevented common knowledge of both gayness and straightness.

[collapsedsquid]

Listened to someone relitigate the "vibecession", specifically the point that "Americans say that the economy is doing well for them but bad in general", that ordinarily is brought up as a "false consciousness" argument but I think that's what you say when your paycheck is alright but all the small businesses around you are closing. Americans love their treats

[discoursedrome]

I'm not sure what surveys they're looking at, but I'm a little skeptical that "Americans think the economy is doing well for them but bad in general" was ever the prevailing sentiment. Certainly it isn't the main point that people tend to discuss!

That said, to the extent that sentiment exists it seems sort of odd to view it as improper. Like, it isn't exactly the same thing here, but I've actually been coasting along fine despite the economy becoming much harsher in many ways I'm currently insulated from. I'm worried about that not just because the economy is all one piece, but also because I might stop being insulated from those problems at any time.

[discoursedrome]

having cats really was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made in my life, huh. it's ironic that social isolation makes it unviable to have pets

[youzicha]

as an English teacher, I can attest that it is a heck of a thing to come across ["unalived"] in a student’s essay and explain, “This isn’t social media⁠—you can use the word ‘killed’”, only for the student to express discomfort with that (!), having internalized from the censorship algorithms that writing “killed” crosses a line.  I’ve also seen late Zoomers be shocked to find the word “regarded” in a reading assignment, because apparently that has become a euphemism on social media for a Word That Must Not Be Written (which itself started out as a euphemism)

Hm. Meanwhile, my kid (currently in first grade) has somehow been taught in school that "stupid" is a bad word at the same level as "fuck"—the "F-word" and the "S-word". He acts scandalized if I say it.

[discoursedrome]

a lot of these feel highly contextual, but euphemisms for killed are sort of universal, aren't they? The real issue is that saying "unalived" makes you sound like a TikTok influencer, so the teacher should set aside a class to go over the grand history of killing euphemisms and what they connote

[iero]

T-shirt that says "I'M SORRY FOR THE PERSON I BECOME WHEN I'M OVERHEATED"

[3000s]

classic example of a pig egg

[77bears]

[contextfreepatentart]

[discoursedrome]

this is more of a preliminary filter than a comprehensive test, but I feel like if you are tempted to reach for the word "fascism" to describe something, you should first ask yourself if it would feel anachronistic in the 18th century, and if the answer is "not really" then you should probably reach for a different word

[fontseeker]

Ooh this just popped into my head and thought it might be a fun ask if you have a random moment to kill! What's a font/typography fact that you found recently that made you go "oh that's dope/cool how they did that/super pretty/wild history"? Just one of those little things you weren't aware of before but made you happy to learn, as general or esoterically niche as you want. I figure you've probably stumbled across some interesting things in your studies and my dragon hoard is collecting people's fun little tidbits from the things they study for fun!

Futura (1927) [Daylight Fonts · Fonts In Use · Identifont] is one of my favorites out of the well-established sans serifs, but one thing that annoys me about it is how C and c have vertical terminals, while G and e have angled terminals.

Besides being internally inconsistent, I find the vertical terminals ugly. (I dislike Antique Olive (1962) [Daylight Fonts · Fonts In Use · Identifont] for the same reason, but at least it uses its vertical terminals consistently.)

I recently learned the reason for this (from the book Paul Renner: The Art of Typography): Futura was designed first and foremost for writing German. In German the letter c only occurs before h and k, and in traditional German blackletter typography, ch and ck are obligatory, inseparable ligatures.

Futura doesn't have joined ch/ck ligatures, but ch and ck were still cast on a single piece of metal, with a smaller gap between the c and h/k than between other letters. The vertical terminal on the c was necessary to allow these letters to be placed so close together.

If Futura had been designed in a non-German-speaking country, the C would probably look different. Yet the German design was used and continues to be used all over the world (though usually with a normal-sized gap between the c and the h/k).

[jetix]

Jianqing Huaigu Trail, 2025/09

[fashion-runways]

ROBERT WUN Couture Fall/Winter 2027 pls help me get out of debt donating to: ko-fi.com/fashionrunways or dinahlance-shop.fourthwall.com

[youzicha]

I've been wondering why there's such great support for social media youth bans, but I'm sitting in a Dunkin Donuts right now and the radio is playing an ad along the lines of "is your teenager spending a lot of time on social media? There is evidence that social media companies deliberately made them addictive for children. Research links excessive social media use in children to Body Dysmorphia, Eating Disorder, Depression, Self-Harm, and Suicide. You may be entitled to compensation. Go to socialmedia66.com". I'm guessing this is not helping!

[discoursedrome]

People keep justifying these policies in terms of how incredibly dangerous and destructive social media use is and then jumping immediately to "that's why you need to be at least 16 to use them!" and I just kinda feel like there are some missing pieces to this argument

[japaneseaesthetics]

A Bronze Koro [Incense Burner]  Muromachi-Momoyama period (16th century) , Japan Cast in two sections and hinged, as a long eared hare looking upward with a bell around its neck 17cm. high .  Christie’s