A place to be my peripheral brain, to do some random writing, discuss life, and talk about books. There will be some politics. There will be some fandom stuff. There will ranting. There will also be stuff on baking, cooking, knitting, and whatever else distracts me. Stick around if you want.
every genius who thinks mandatory two-factor authentication is a good idea should be forced to do tech support for a public library that serves a lot of elderly poor people
way too many people are interpreting this as 'old people are too ignorant to understand technology' instead of 'poor people, especially elderly poor people, often do not have reliable access to a cell phone'.
i know 2fa is more secure. everyone knows that 2fa is more secure. the problem is, when you make your very secure 2fa reliant on a cell phone, people who do not have cell phones can no longer use your service. when the service in question includes every major email provider, and you are required to have an email to access many basic kinds of assistance, people without cell phones are cut off from accessing those things.
So I’ve never actually watched The Princess Bride with closed captioning. All the copies I own/have owned didn’t come with that option. Well, it’s on Disney+ now, and it DOES have captions. I decided to watch it tonight because apparently half of my coworkers haven’t seen it and that made me sad.
AND WHEN I TELL YOU I WAS APPARENTLY MISSING THINGS-
I now know ALL of Fezzik’s rhymes from the boat.
I know exactly what fighting moves Westly and Inigo were saying in that EPIC fight.
I can understand what Fezzik is saying when they break into the castle (I love Andre the Giant, but his accent is so hard for me to decipher)
AND
Apparently I have missed something in the twenty years I’ve been watching this movie. When Inigo is drunk in the Thieves’ Forest, a member of the Brute Squad comes around the corner of the building after Inigo proclaims this is where [he’ll] stay, that he will not be moved.
“Ho, there!” he says.
Now. I always assumed Inigo just repeated the man’s phrase.
Oh no. The closed captions read as follows:
“I do not budge. Keep your Joder.”
Because he’s a Spaniard, in the movie it is pronounced exactly like “Ho, there.”
THAT. IS. NOT. WHAT. THAT. MEANS.
Joder means fuck in Spanish.
So when the guy comes around the corner, I can only assume Inigo’s sloshed brain just heard him shout “fuck” at him, and THAT is how he responded.
NO ONE I KNOW realized this for nearly FORTY YEARS!!!!!
Closed captioning, y’all. It’s not just because you can’t make out what they’re saying. It’s also for recognizing jokes people were slipping into movies and past censors from before you were born.
genuinely, i think watching live theatre can improve your media literacy so much
like people who look at doctor who and are like 'lol the effects are so rubbish'
maybe watch a stage play where there's no backdrops and half the characters are played by the same three guys in different hats and maybe you will calm down
I do think the problem is that so much modern media has trained us to believe that the only way to properly judge effects is whether or not it looks real. Which is honestly a very limiting criteria. Focusing purely on whether or not it looks real ignores the fact that lots of things that happen in scifi fantasy are never going to look real because they're impossible and trying to make it look real inevitably means choosing the safest, most boring design so that people aren't put off by it.
Instead, I ask, does it look interesting? Does it convey the feeling that it wants to convey? Does it contribute to the overall aesthetic goals of the show? Does it look cute or uncanny or evocative or iconic? Can I draw it on my notebook? Does it inspire wonder?
All of these are much more interesting questions than does it look real?
it gets worse: funi had an option to buy anime outright. but, it was bought digitally, and now CR has said that they're not going to honor that, so if you bought anything from funi digitally, CR are taking that away from you
A professional exorcist, but with the attitude of a professional pet handler. A demon whisperer, if you will. Just showing up to places that have a ghost problem, figuring out what the creature's problem is, and then just... give them chew toys, usually. The girl whose soul is trapped in your cellar is scared and bored in there, of course she'll rush at you and shriek every time you try to go in there. Ease her into human interaction, leave the door open sometimes and talk to her until she gets used to you.
Yeah the thing clawing on your walls is a bear spirit. Yeah a bear was slaughtered on the spot of this house incorrectly in the 1800s or something. Yeah performing the proper rites now won't make it go away, it's already used to your trash - bears are creatures of habit. Just do these little rituals to appease it every once in a while. In the good news, the ghost bear will keep the living bears off your trash. Yeah bears have a lot of reverence to their dead.
Oh, "poltergeist" is an outdated term, we don't use it anymore. It was used as a kind of a blanket explanation for a whole bunch of different phenomena that couldn't be explained otherwise. What you have here is an undiagnosed autistic child who's also on psychic spectrum. Yeah no there's actually significant overlap between the two. Here's where to find resources on how to better accomodate your kid, the furniture should stop exploding on its own once you've figured out a better way to communicate so they don't get overstimulated.
This house right here is just build on a demon area. No yeah the mysterious scripts you found carved in the stone that your house's foundation was built on literally just say "DEMON AREA DO NOT BUILD". They don't live here, it's just like an ant road. Except the ants are the size of a truck and immaterial. No you can't redirect the demon highway, you gotta move. You built a house on top of a stone that literally says "DO NOT BUILD". I get that you didn't know it at the time, but you do know now, so if you choose to stay, that's a you problem.
my take on Fast Car by Tracy Chapman is that if a man covers it, then for those five minutes, that man is a lesbian. and if he isn't? then he isn't allowed to cover the song
A Guide to Historically Accurate Regency-Era Names
I recently received a message from a historical romance writer asking if I knew any good resources for finding historically accurate Regency-era names for their characters.
Not knowing any off the top of my head, I dug around online a bit and found there really isn’t much out there. The vast majority of search results were Buzzfeed-style listicles which range from accurate-adjacent to really, really, really bad.
I did find a few blog posts with fairly decent name lists, but noticed that even these have very little indication as to each name’s relative popularity as those statistical breakdowns really don't exist.
I began writing up a response with this information, but then I (being a research addict who was currently snowed in after a blizzard) thought hey - if there aren’t any good resources out there why not make one myself?
As I lacked any compiled data to work from, I had to do my own data wrangling on this project. Due to this fact, I limited the scope to what I thought would be the most useful for writers who focus on this era, namely - people of a marriageable age living in the wealthiest areas of London.
So with this in mind - I went through period records and compiled the names of 25,000 couples who were married in the City of Westminster (which includes Mayfair, St. James and Hyde Park) between 1804 to 1821.
So let’s see what all that data tells us…
To begin - I think it’s hard for us in the modern world with our wide and varied abundance of first names to conceive of just how POPULAR popular names of the past were.
If you were to take a modern sample of 25-year-old (born in 1998) American women, the most common name would be Emily with 1.35% of the total population. If you were to add the next four most popular names (Hannah, Samantha, Sarah and Ashley) these top five names would bring you to 5.5% of the total population. (source: Social Security Administration)
If you were to do the same survey in Regency London - the most common name would be Mary with 19.2% of the population. Add the next four most popular names (Elizabeth, Ann, Sarah and Jane) and with just 5 names you would have covered 62% of all women.
To hit 62% of the population in the modern survey it would take the top 400 names.
The top five Regency men’s names (John, William, Thomas, James and George) have nearly identical statistics as the women’s names.
I struggled for the better part of a week with how to present my findings, as a big list in alphabetical order really fails to get across the popularity factor and also isn’t the most tumblr-compatible format. And then my YouTube homepage recommended a random video of someone ranking all the books they’d read last year - and so I present…
The Regency Name Popularity Tier List
The Tiers
S+ - 10% of the population or greater. There is no modern equivalent to this level of popularity. 52% of the population had one of these 7 names.
S - 2-10%. There is still no modern equivalent to this level of popularity. Names in this percentage range in the past have included Mary and William in the 1880s and Jennifer in the late 1970s (topped out at 4%).
A - 1-2%. The top five modern names usually fall in this range. Kids with these names would probably include their last initial in class to avoid confusion. (1998 examples: Emily, Sarah, Ashley, Michael, Christopher, Brandon.)
B - .3-1%. Very common names. Would fall in the top 50 modern names. You would most likely know at least 1 person with these names. (1998 examples: Jessica, Megan, Allison, Justin, Ryan, Eric)
C - .17-.3%. Common names. Would fall in the modern top 100. You would probably know someone with these names, or at least know of them. (1998 examples: Chloe, Grace, Vanessa, Sean, Spencer, Seth)
D - .06-.17%. Less common names. In the modern top 250. You may not personally know someone with these names, but you’re aware of them. (1998 examples: Faith, Cassidy, Summer, Griffin, Dustin, Colby)
E - .02-.06%. Uncommon names. You’re aware these are names, but they are not common. Unusual enough they may be remarked upon. (1998 examples: Calista, Skye, Precious, Fabian, Justice, Lorenzo)
F - .01-.02%. Rare names. You may have heard of these names, but you probably don’t know anyone with one. Extremely unusual, and would likely be remarked upon. (1998 examples: Emerald, Lourdes, Serenity, Dario, Tavian, Adonis)
G - Very rare names. There are only a handful of people with these names in the entire country. You’ve never met anyone with this name.
H - Virtually non-existent. Names that theoretically could have existed in the Regency period (their original source pre-dates the early 19th century) but I found fewer than five (and often no) period examples of them being used in Regency England. (Example names taken from romance novels and online Regency name lists.)
Just to once again reinforce how POPULAR popular names were before we get to the tier lists - statistically, in a ballroom of 100 people in Regency London: 80 would have names from tiers S+/S. An additional 15 people would have names from tiers A/B and C. 4 of the remaining 5 would have names from D/E. Only one would have a name from below tier E.
Women's Names
S+ Mary, Elizabeth, Ann, Sarah
S - Jane, Mary Ann+, Hannah, Susannah, Margaret, Catherine, Martha, Charlotte, Maria
A - Frances, Harriet, Sophia, Eleanor, Rebecca
B - Alice, Amelia, Bridget~, Caroline, Eliza, Esther, Isabella, Louisa, Lucy, Lydia, Phoebe, Rachel, Susan
C - Ellen, Fanny*, Grace, Henrietta, Hester, Jemima, Matilda, Priscilla
& Men were sometimes given a family surname (most often their mother's or grandmother's maiden name) as their first name - the most famous example of this being Fitzwilliam Darcy. If you were to combine all surname-based first names as a single 'name' this is where the practice would rank.
*Rank as a given name, not a nickname
+If you count Mary Ann as a separate name from Mary - Mary would remain in S+ even without the Mary Anns included
~Primarily used by people of Irish descent
^Primarily used by people of Scottish descent
>Primarily used by people of Welsh descent
I was going to continue on and write about why Regency-era first names were so uniform, discuss historically accurate surnames, nicknames, and include a little guide to finding 'unique' names that are still historically accurate - but this post is already very, very long, so that will have to wait for a later date.
If anyone has any questions/comments/clarifications in the meantime feel free to message me.
Methodology notes: All data is from marriage records covering six parishes in the City of Westminster between 1804 and 1821. The total sample size was 50,950 individuals.
I chose marriage records rather than births/baptisms as I wanted to focus on individuals who were adults during the Regency era rather than newborns. I think many people make the mistake when researching historical names by using baby name data for the year their story takes place rather than 20 to 30 years prior, and I wanted to avoid that. If you are writing a story that takes place in 1930 you don’t want to research the top names for 1930, you need to be looking at 1910 or earlier if you are naming adult characters.
I combined (for my own sanity) names that are pronounced identically but have minor spelling differences: i.e. the data for Catherine also includes Catharines and Katherines, Susannah includes Susannas, Phoebe includes Phebes, etc.
The compound 'Mother's/Grandmother's maiden name used as first name' designation is an educated guesstimate based on what I recognized as known surnames, as I do not hate myself enough to go through 25,000+ individuals and confirm their mother's maiden names. So if the tally includes any individuals who just happened to be named Fitzroy/Hastings/Townsend/etc. because their parents liked the sound of it and not due to any familial relations - my bad.
I did a small comparative survey of 5,000 individuals in several rural communities in Rutland and Staffordshire (chosen because they had the cleanest data I could find and I was lazy) to see if there were any significant differences between urban and rural naming practices and found the results to be very similar. The most noticeable difference I observed was that the S+ tier names were even MORE popular in rural areas than in London. In Rutland between 1810 and 1820 Elizabeths comprised 21.4% of all brides vs. 15.3% in the London survey. All other S+ names also saw increases of between 1% and 6%. I also observed that the rural communities I surveyed saw a small, but noticeable and fairly consistent, increase in the use of names with Biblical origins.
Sources of the records I used for my survey:
Ancestry.com. England & Wales Marriages, 1538-1988 [database on-line].
Ancestry.com. Westminster, London, England, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1935 [database on-line].
Personally I think the Justice League not knowing Batman had kids would be more bad at social things Batman rather than paranoid Batman and they found out like this:
Justice league, minus Batman: *walks into the meeting room*
Superman: *freezes*
Green Lantern: what’s wrong?
Superman: …Batman. Why do you have three heart beats and why is one of them a cats?
Batman: *throws cape over his shoulders revealing Damian sleeping on his lap and a cat sitting on his lap* this is Robins cat Mr Whiskers
Flash: you have a side kick?!
Batman, confused because he thought they knew: no? I have a team?
Wonder Woman: a team?
Batman: Nightwing, Red Hood, Red Robin, Robin, Batgirl, Signal- I thought you guys knew this *pulls out his wallet and pulls 50+ family photos out of that* how did you not? Have none of you pick pocketed me? *the Robins always steal his stuff and he assumes that both his teams do the same things*
Superman: I’m sorry, what?
Batman: how did you not know?
Green Arrow: well you don’t exactly talk about your life
Batman: yeah but you should’ve figured it out, I give figuring out your guys secret identities out as things to do when the Robins are bored. Who did you think looked after Gotham when I couldn’t?
Flash: I thought your power was being two places at once?
Batman: ??? I don’t have powers?
Everyone: WHAT
Batman: I never have?
Superman: how are you such a good fighter then?
Batman: I trained for two decades?
Flash: what.
Green Arrow: wait, why did you call them ‘the Robins’ I thought there were only two Robins?
Batman: well they were all Robin at some point, most of them anyways. Dick was the first Robin, then he became Nightwing. A while after that I found Jason and he became the second Robin, he died and then got resurrected and became a crime boss for a while and changed his name to Red Hood. And while Jason was dead Tim showed up and became Robin, Tim became Red Robin. And Damian is the current Robin.
J’onn: why do you call them by their real names, I know you know everyone’s secret identities but isn’t that rude?
Batman: what do you mean? They’re my kids? I’ve adopted all of them?
Everyone: WHAT
Superman: Wait, circle back. One of your kids got resurrected and is a crime boss
Batman: he isn’t bad, he just isn’t offically part of the team anymore but we still work togther all the time-
Flash: offically? What is there a list on the Gotham police website.
Batman: yes, it can be wrong sometimes though, they thought Batgirl was my sidekick way before I actually started training her. It took me a while to realise I couldn’t convince her to stop crime fighhting.
Green Lantern: you don’t make them when you adopt them?
Btman: NO! She was like 12! I don’t make kids fight! She wouldn’t stop and it would be mroe dangerous to leave her without proper gear or any way to call for help, and I didn’t want Nightwing to fight when I adopted him he chose to himself and when I said no he went out after Zacoo anyways, and I found Jason stealing my tires so he already knew I was Batman-
I just saw a Tik Tok that said writers on AO3 are not looking for constructive criticism in their reviews. I have no audience on this platform so I have to know if this is true? I've always left my pros and cons when reading a fic and now I'm concerned that the authors didn't like that.
Yeah writers are Not looking for criticism, constructive or otherwise. Unless they specifically ask for it, it’s considered rude and honestly a bit hurtful. In the least bitchy way possible, don’t do that. It’s unwanted.
Yeah, please don’t do that. Unless the cons are like “gaaaaahhhhh I know you said this is slow burn and I did this to myself but I WANNA SEE THEM KISS and it’s not happening yet,” which, valid, it’s just mean.
Way that people don't answer phones because they are so full of scams is one of the prime demonstrating examples for the "American government can't even govern as the managing committee of Capital in general anymore," Capital would like people to answer phones but the small group of hyper-rich cranks who run our system don't care.
This post feels ahistorical, or at least ignorant of developments in the last year.
The volume of robocalls and scam texts I have received on my cellphone has dropped massively over the Biden presidency. I used to get daily text messages for Medicare scams related to a third party's HIPAA leak, daily phone calls for house offers, weekly text messages for car-wrap schemes, and intermittent broadcast phishes and student-loan scams. In the last month, I received four scam calls, three of which were We Buy Houses franchisees, and no scam texts.
But that's just anecdotal evidence; we need true data. Call-filtering software provider Robokiller says that robocalls were down 21% from H2 2022 to H1 2023, though spam texts were up. I haven't yet found a comprehensive database.
Are those changes the result of actions taken by the Feds under the Biden administration? I think so.
Congress passed the TRACED Act in 2019, laying the groundwork for what follows...
FCC issued rules in 2020 mandating STIR/SHAKEN adoption, which makes Caller ID reliable and, and required NANP telcos to block telcos that don't implement STIR/SHAKEN.
Those blocking requirements went into effect in 2021, but they had loopholes.
FCC effectively killed car warranty phone calls by 2022.
FCC issued its first rules requiring telecoms to block scam texts in March 2023.
FCC in June 2023 won convictions of two robocallers, whose calls targeted Black voters with vaccine scaremongering in an effort to convince them to not vote. In a separate docket, the scammers are being charged with elections-related crimes.
FCC issued rules limiting spammy VoIP providers' access to NANP phone numbers in September 2023.
Biden got a third Democrat commissioner appointed to the FCC in October 2023. The new commissioner wasn't Gigi Sohn, but a 3-2 partisan tilt means that the FCC can actually pass the regulations that Republicans opposed on partisan grounds.
FCC petitioned Congress in October 2023 for the authority to actually collect the fines it issues to violators.
FTC (not the FCC) began prosecuting robocallers in July 2023.
FCC issued a rule blocking the "lead generation" loophole in December 2023, whereby a company would collect consent to send automated messages to you on behalf of a third party, then sell that consent to additional third parties. The FCC is also proposing to make email-to-text services opt-in instead of opt-out, which will close a common spam technique, and to apply a mechanism like STIR/SHAKEN to text messages, which will make it harder to send spam texts without getting caught.
The biggest item on the shopping list would be banning automated phone calls to landlines, making landlines have parity with cellphones, but that'll require an act of Congress, which will require Dems to win the House in 2024 and hold the Senate and Presidency.
I'm late to the aro positivity party but thought I could shout out a manga I read this year, I Want to be a Wall!
It's about an aroace woman (who is really into BL) and a gay man being arranged into a marriage and how they navigate that, growing closer and kind of becoming a QPR.
The stuff that really got to me was the discussion of the woman's experience with her asexuality (and aromanticism though that isn't explicitly labeled), how it connects to her media tastes and the way people have hurt her in the past. It was all absolutely heartbreaking.
A fun detail I also like is how the pair act out romantic tropes (Gift of Magi style misunderstanding, paranoia about "cheating,"), but they are all done through a platonic context.
(Ex. Even though they're not in romantic love, he still feels upset at the idea of losing their bond, or her getting hurt by someone he doesn't know.)
There's not too many chapters of it out, unfortunately (only like two volumes), but the ones I read are very enjoyable and I'd love to put this on other people's radar!
(btw, I got this manga rec from this video, and there's more in it!)
Asexual Manga and their Powerful Visibility
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=urXrwYmMdgA
Cleverness Escapes Me @drbibliophile - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
