this post is about LONG DEAD POLAR EXPLORERS !!!! everyone in the notes talking about actors or f1 or whatever but lets not lose focus: Robert Falcon Scott (6 June 1868 - c 29 March 1912) !!!!!!!!!!
surprise! The meaning of words changes as society advances. Five hundred years ago, a “factory” was a warehouse where traders would store their goods in a foreign country. Two thousand years ago, a “factorium” was an oil press.
“Technology” was once a created product. Now, it’s something specifically technical, running on electricity with wires and screens and making beeps and boops. That’s the way of the world, the way language functions and has always functioned.
I don’t think I have, actually. I went and read the whole thing, and her main idea is people “misusing the word technology”. That’s literally what she says two paragraphs before the above excerpt -
“But [the word technology] is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources. This is not an acceptable use of the word.”
That is precisely the sentiment I was responding to - the idea that our modern use of the word “technology” is somehow wrong or misinformed. But it’s not. It has simply progressed as our society has progressed.
She goes on to write that “Its technology is how a society copes with physical reality…” and no, it isn’t. Perhaps it was, centuries ago. But within the modern societal consciousness, that is not what technology means. The meaning has changed. It’s just like how you wouldn’t describe, say, a fantasy magic system as “weird” because “weird” doesn’t have any relation to magic in the modern parlance. But it did - in Shakespeare’s day, that was the word’s primary meaning - magic, power, the occult, fate, witchcraft - though he would have spelled it “weyard”.
The most ridiculous thing is that this is all written in response a review of one of her books, in which the reviewer is very clearly using “technology” in the modern sense. But she still pedantically insists that, actually, his review is incorrect because… she’s working with a completely different definition of the word than everyone else on the planet.
And on a side note, fuck this whole… essay? I hate it. ‘Not an acceptable use of the word’ my ass. That’s the kind of linguistic arch-conservativism that creates institutions like the Académie Française.
I think, that even if you want to argue that the meaning of the word technology has changed and it now only means something running on electricity, that just isn’t correct?
Like the definition in the dictionary (here specifically taken from Collins dictionary, but it is a variation of the same in the other dictionaries) is this:
“Technology refers to methods, systems, and devices which are the result of scientific knowledge being used for practical purposes.”
I can’t help but think that you have interpreted your own bias of what technology is, to mean that the word has changed definition over time. But in many ways it hasn’t. And it is just as correct to call a computer or iphone technology as it is to call a loom or a wagon technology. Not in any of the definitions I have looked up does it say that electricity or wires or anything else has to be involved for something to be considered technology.
She specifically mentions that to only use the word to include the complex technology of the last few decades isn’t an acceptable use of the word, not that the word hasn’t adapted to also include those.
Just because something isn’t a new technology doesn’t mean it stops being technology.
I know it for a fact because the vaccine for the sleeping sickness came out when I was ten, and she cried. When she was a kid, parents would have Sleep Overs whenever someone caught it, in the hopes of spread it around - children were statistically more likely to be woken up by "True Love's Kiss" from a parent or family member, after all, whereas if you caught it when you were older, things got more complicated and if you were old, you might be the last one in your family left.
(There’s more to it than that, I know, I've tried reading the papers, but I barely passed biocurse with a C+, and don't even get me started on organic curses. Those two classes were enough to kill any hope I had of becoming a fairy godperson.)
So, when the vaccine against the sleeping sickness came out, my stepmother cried, and my father got me on the list right away; I wasn't high priority, after all; I was young, there wasn't an active outbreak in my school district, and I was otherwise healthy. But they put me on the backup list anyway, so if there was one, just one available, I could get it.
When the fairy godperson's office called, my dad was at work, but my stepmother bundled me up and drove there so fast I thought we were going to be pulled over. (Later, I found out that she'd gotten an automated ticket from one of the red light cameras, a fact that she hid from both me and my dad.) They called my dad, of course, and he left work, but he also gave the okay for my stepmother to be my medical proxy in case he was delayed.
Vaccines don't last forever, and it was decided that I would be given it without him there. At 100 minutes, my stepmother would try kissing my forehead, and if it didn't work, the office would set me up for the 100 hours it would take before my dad could try.
Magic can't be ignored, but it can be tricked.
It didn't matter. At 100 minutes post-vaccine, my stepmother kissed my forehead and I woke up.
So. I know she loves me.
My mom would have been there, if she could, but she died when I was five. She'd gotten Rapunzelean cancer in high school, but she'd beaten it! She was one of the successes!
...Until it came back.
I don't remember much about her, but I remember that she loved me. Even as the golden tumors grew from her bare scalp and sucked the life out of her, she would sing to me, and she wrote me a series of letters for me as I grew up, just in case.
My stepmother took me to her grave sometimes. My dad does too, but it's nice that my stepmother is willing, you know? I had a breakdown one year when I couldn't find my mom's favorite flowers to take to her burial site, and my stepmom drove me all over town until we found one store that had them in the right color. (My dad was at the fairy godperson's office to get some pre-wards before we went to the cemetery. I found out later that his father had caught a curse shortly after my grandmother passed away, specifically geriatric onset donkeyskin, and my father was paranoid of following in his footsteps.)
My dad and my stepmom shuffled their shifts, so that one of them was with me in the morning before school, and one of them was there after, and then both were home for dinner. When I told them I wanted to study to be a fairy godperson, they took me seriously, even though I had wanted to be a pilot and a vet, and and a lawyer and and and - they always supported me, and soon I was being gifted books on the history of magicomedicine and cursebreaking. Some of them gave me nightmares - siren's disease freaked me out for a long time; something about the tongue swelling so much you would suffocate, and the agonizing images of ancient "cures" where the victim had to get their tongue cut out so they could breathe. I don't even know why! There were much worse ones! But something about that was so visceral to me. For the next month, any time my feet hurt even a little was convinced I was coming down with siren's disease.
I worried my parent's so much that they took me to Fairy Elena, my PCFP, and asked if she would be willing to go over how siren's is treated now. She gave me a quick rundown on intubation, pain medication, and told me about Prince's Blood Donations.
It was the first time I learned that magic can be tricked; according to legend, siren's disease could be cured by killing someone's true love and smearing their blood over the patient's legs. At least, that was one line of thought; another line of thought argued that it had to be the blood of royalty. Some fairy godpersons and magicoresearchers got together in the '80s and decided to research it methodically, going through every known case of siren's disease & what worked and what didn't. It turned out royalty was the key, but then it became a question of ethics. I didn't care too much at the time, that was all boring, grown-up stuff, but finally one researcher decided to just make a blood bank company, call it Prince's and see if that worked.
And it did.
Magic can be tricked, and my mind was blown.
I also asked my dad if we could put that book away for a little, because it was too scary. He agreed, and we put it on the top shelf, where all the scary books went. I reread it recently, and honestly? I don't remember what I was so afraid of.
Things started changing when I turned 16.
For one, my hair, which had always been brown, started darkening to black. For another, I stopped being able to tan. It was like a light switch went off; magic was determined to turn me into something, and I hated it. My PCFP really went to bat for me, getting insurance to cover the cost of cosmetic glamours and professional tanning sprays. She wanted me to tell my parents, but I didn't want to, not yet, and she was bound by her oath to protect my privacy.
She was right. But... I wanted to ignore it. I wanted to pretend everything was fine.
I didn't want to lose another mom.
And it worked for a while; managed to get to my senior year of high school before the world broke.
Stepmothers don't have the best reputation.
It fucking sucks, and it's not fair, but enough stories have been told about them that magic took an interest, and began manifesting curses that warp stepmothers until they follow the story.
We thought we were safe. My stepmother didn't bring any children into the marriage, so she was safe from the ash-girl curse variant, and I was a tanned brunette, so we were safe from the snow-daughter variant.
And she loved me.
She hid it too, I think. Not intentionally, but some of the symptoms are paranoia and anxiety.
I've done a lot of research. I don't think I'll ever be able to be a fairy godperson, but that doesn't mean I had to stop caring. I swapped my focus to researching curses from the history and literature side of things. I still work with researchers, we just come from different angles now.
Anyway, no one realized anything was wrong until she was french braiding my hair and the next thing I knew, she had locked herself in the bathroom sobbing while EMTs took me to the hospital for overnight observation. I don't actually know what happened. She turned herself over to the cops as soon I was loaded onto the ambulance, and she was taken to a hospital herself. She was sedated at first, as she was so wound up that she was hurting herself, and the hospital couldn't scan her for curses. Once she came out of sedation, she immediately called my dad and offered a divorce, he could take everything, she would leave immediately.
But we'd gotten the results of the scans, and I was fine. As best that the fairy godperson's could tell, the magic was frustrated that we didn't want to go down the snow-daughter route, and had lashed out in an attempt to force it. That was apparently what knocked me unconscious; magic poisoned the comb my stepmother was using in my hair.
That didn't mean she didn't feel guilty - but so did I. If I had told them earlier, would things have changed? If I hadn't tried to hide the signs that magic was fucking with us?
They don't blame me, and I don't blame her.
She loves me. I know she does. We still talk, as best as we can. She can only hear my voice for ten minutes before the curse starts taking over. We can email, though, as long as the orderlies can prescreen the email for any curse triggers. She also can't hear about me directly, but my dad will go and visit her, and tell me how she's doing. He refused to divorce her. His insurance still covers her hospital stay. He says he's married, and wears his ring.
When I applied to college, I wrote about all three of my parents, and how much they had all taught me.
How much they all loved me.
Someday, my stepmother will get her curse lifted, I have to believe that. I've joined a multidisciplinary group of researchers based in the EU. Some of us are looking at ways to trick magic, some of us are looking at ways to rewrite the stories of the wicked stepmothers, and create a new path for the magic to follow. One group of researchers is looking into ways of simulating the punishments that stepmothers receive at the end of tales to see if "punishing" stepmothers would break the curse. Actually going through the punishments would cause any ethical review board to remove someone's license, and there's no way I would want my stepmom to dance in red hot metal shoes.
But lately she's been getting hot stone foot massages before I call her; that's how we got to ten minutes before the curse took hold, and next week we're going to see if holding her feet in a hot bath lets us video call. Maybe someday we'll be able to see each other in person again. Maybe I'll be able to take her home where dad and I can cook dinner for her, and we can be a family again. My family has an apple pie recipe, and we never made it - I understand why, now, but maybe someday we can laugh at this and all make it together. To make your own apple pie, you'll need...
Having your main anxiety response be Avoidance is crazy cause you'll think you're chillin and then one day you're like waitttt I've been paralyzed with fear this whole time. Damn
Was anybody else playing dead the whole time they were teenagers or is that just a me problem. Like I'm 20 now and I'm like Oh shit I didn't do anything. Because I'm scared
hey dude, idk how much you remember from the party last night but- yeah, everyone saw your want. yeah no it was pretty late and winding down so it was quiet enough that every single person there saw it throbbing and twitching in your chest and so wet with hunger it was glistening under the kitchen light. they said it looked like it was reaching for something
Ladies and Gentlemen i present to you John Carpenter’s The Thing, as performed by the claymated, Antarctic cast of the hit children’s animation Pingu. Directed by Lee Hardcastle, in under 3 minutes. Noot, Noot.
Genuinely curious because i was counting mississippi today and was like “do other countries have their own way of doing this?”
Outside of the US do you have a filler word to count seconds like “1 mississippi”?
Yes and the answer is tagged
No
No and i dont understand what this is
Im outside the US but i use mississippi anyway??
Im in the US
Voting ended onMay 30, 2024
TAG WHERE YOU’RE FROM AND WHAT YOU USE IF ANYTHING!! Reblog so more people see this :)
For context: counting mississippi is going “1 mississippi 2 mississippi” and its supposed to be a filler word that pads time to your counting to make it more equal to a second. So the idea is saying “1 mississippi” would take approx 1 second to say, making it easier to count seconds / time things mentally/vocally. Idk if i explained that well enough but its the best i could do
Often when I'm reading the Wikipedia article about some zoological group, there'll be a sentence near the start that says something like "[group] varies in size from [smallest species in group] to [largest species in group]". I always immediately click on the largest species. I love to see a huge version of a thing, it's usually some crazy monster that looks sick as hell, it's always worth seeing and I have a great time.
And then I say to myself, come on now, you don't want to be someone who's just interested in the big ones, see what the smallest one looks like. So with a sense of grim duty, I click. It's not even that small usually, most small things aren't like that little frog wrapped around someone's pinkie, they maybe look a bit like the juvenile version of a more median-sized species perhaps. But I nod appreciatively and I say out loud, "Gee yeah, that is a small one of those", and then go back to the main article I started at.
Now both links are purple. No one can accuse me of being narrow-minded or unjust, and I can read my article in peace.
The crew of a massive container ship that crashed into the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore early Tuesday warned of power issues before the collision, which caused the bridge to collapse into the frigid Patapsco River, officials said.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said the warning from the ship’s crew likely saved lives.
“We’re thankful that between the mayday and the collapse, that we had officials who were able to begin to stop the flow of traffic so more cars were not on the bridge,” Moore said. He called those officials heroes.
Moore noted that the bridge was up to code at the time of the collapse. He said the collapse was a “shocking and heartbreaking” event for the people of Maryland who have used the bridge for 47 years.
Good to have confirmation from someone with more knowledge on this sort of thing that no bridge would hold up to that. I had concerns if this was an engineering fail at work as well.
It actually is somewhat true that it is the fault of the bridge. Yes no bridge would be able to hold up to a cargo ship colliding with it head on, but it should also not be possible for the ship to collide with the bridge support if they had been properly secured. Many experts after the accident have been confused as to why the bridge supports have not been secured by making false islands around them under the water, so that the ship would hit the ground before it hit the bridge.
andulkaphoto
yousharknotpass
2087
prguitarman
