[guerrillatech]

[left-reminders]

To be clear: this is an intentional tactic from these sniveling shitbags. Of course they're gonna try to throw the left under the bus even when this was transparently an example of fascist sedition.

Here's the video from that first tweet.

[mentally-homeless]

It's also not a new tactic, Nazis burned down the Reichstag and blamed it on the Communists. It is happening here.

[averagefairy]

old people really need to learn how to text accurately to the mood they’re trying to represent like my boss texted me wondering when my semester is over so she can start scheduling me more hours and i was like my finals are done the 15th! And she texts back “Yay for you….” how the fuck am i supposed to interpret that besides passive aggressive

[runawaymarbles]

Someone needs to do a linguistic study on people over 50 and how they use the ellipsis. It’s FASCINATING. I never know the mood they’re trying to convey.

[feynites]

I actually thought for a long time that texting just made my mother cranky. But then I watched my sister send her a funny text, and my mother was laughing her ass off. But her actual texted response?

“Ha… right.”

Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.

Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.

So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:

“Yay! That sounds great - where are we meeting?”

My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:

‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”

And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.

On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master. 

So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like we’re scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like she’s expecting her Eighth grade English teacher to come and mark them in red pen. She has learned that proper punctuation and mistakes are more acceptable, but when she considers putting effort into how she’s writing, it’s always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and not along the lines of ‘how would this sound if you said it out loud?’

[adora-korra]

the linguistics of written languages in quick conversational format will never not be interesting to me like it’s fascinating how we’ve all just silently learned what an ellipsis or exclamation mark implies and it’s totally different in different communities or generations or whatever

[whitepeopletwitter]

[everythingfox]

Destroyer of tornadoes, village hero, ultimate good boi

[honeyvoicedfem]

the idea of being vague & mysterious is appealing to me, but i overshare every day

[starjasmines]

girls with adhd will be like "im making a list" yeah of course you are 🙄

[tearlessrain]

somehow knowing that tumblr is being kept around mostly as a testing ground for advertisers and corporations doesn’t even make me feel that exploited, because every social media site is exploitive. but being basically lab rats to test shit on before it’s refined for use in polite society is by far the funniest possible way to be exploited.

[spartanlocke]

#yeah maybe i’m a marketing lab rat but at least my dash is in fucking chronological order

[raesoldblogg-deactivated2022032]

this ad appeared right after i read this post.

so yeah, they’re testing something, but in true lab rat fashion we have no fucking clue what

[aconstantstateofbladerunner]

[notmusa]

i expect ill be able to solve a lot of my problems once my baby brain falls out & my adult brain grows in

[emilianadarling]

holy fuck you guys 

after years of being vaguely confused when I came across the measurement “a stick of butter” in recipes, today I learned that in the United States they sell butter in these skinny stick things:

it is literally a stick of butter. A STICK OF BUTTER. 

i have literally never seen butter sold this way. each stick one only amounts to ½ a cup of butter AMERICANS PLEASE UNDERSTAND THAT MY WHOLE LIFE WHEN I SAW THE PHRASE “A STICK OF BUTTER” IN RECIPES I WAS IMAGINING THIS:

THIS IS THE ONLY “STICK” I’D EVER SEEN BUTTER SOLD IN. I THOUGHT Y’ALL WERE THROWING FUCKIN’ POUNDS UPON POUNDS OF BUTTER INTO THINGS HOLY JESUS THE WORLD MAKES SO MUCH MORE SENSE NOW FUCKIN CHRIST. 

[oddballwaterfall]

I love little foreign confusion things like this

[bepeu-deactivated20171202]

you can literally lay in bed and eat a block of cheese like an apple and it’s not illegal

[nurseyiiisms]

even if my titties aren’t physically out, they’re spiritually out, and that’s what matters

[kaddie]

[superunfriendlyreminder]

[guidetodreaming]

One of the most important things I learned in my Language and the Law class is that law enforcement will intentionally misinterpret every type of statement asking for a lawyer as not asking for a lawyer. Even directly saying it like this “I will not speak to you without a lawyer” can be taken as a simple statement of fact rather than a request for a lawyer. You literally have to state “I am now invoking my right to a lawyer” and every time they try to proceed with an interrogation you have to answer every question with “I am invoking my right to have a lawyer present”. You can’t just tell them you won’t talk without a lawyer or that you want a lawyer. You have to state that you are invoking your rights. Otherwise they could just say “well they just said they wouldn’t speak without a lawyer present. That’s not invoking their rights to a lawyer. It’s just stating a fact.” even just stating your right to a lawyer doesn’t count!

[penrosesun]

PLEASE share this addition. I am a lawyer who works in criminal defense, and this is one of the most avoidable things that people consistently get wrong about the Miranda rights.

Here are some more “ambiguous” phrases which courts have found DO NOT invoke your right to a lawyer:

“Maybe I should speak to my lawyer first.”

“I might like a lawyer.”

“I think I should have a lawyer present for this.”

“Could I speak to my lawyer first?”

“How long until my lawyer gets here?”

And perhaps most egregiously – “Get me a lawyer, dawg – ‘cause this is not what’s up.”

Here are the magic phrases which you need to know if you want to invoke your Miranda rights:

1) “Am I free to leave?”

It’s worth asking this even if the answer is obvious. Even if the officer does not let you leave, by forcing them to admit that you are not free to leave, you are creating a record which your attorney can use to prove that you were in custody. Miranda rights only apply if the interrogation is custodial, meaning that police officers will frequently claim that their suspects were “not in custody” to get around their Miranda rights.

2) “I am invoking my right to remain silent.”

Simply staying silent will not invoke your right to remain silent. As absurd as this is, you must explicitly say that you are invoking your right to remain silent in order to invoke that right.

3) “I am invoking my right to an attorney.”

As stated above, you must be not only clear and unambiguous, but clear and legally unambiguous. Don’t get cute. Don’t get sassy. And on the flip side, don’t get intimidated and use verbal ticks to minimize your request. Say the line with those words exactly – say it clearly, and say it once, and then say nothing else.

Because even after you’ve done all this, the police can still try to get you to talk. They’re not supposed to interrogate you, but they’re allowed to make casual conversation, and if that conversation just happens to circle back around to the thing they wanted to question you about, well, that’s really your fault for talking after you said you wouldn’t, isn’t it? Can’t possibly fault the poor officers when you initiated – if you really wanted to have your rights respected, you wouldn’t have talked to them in the first place.

The police know this, and they will mercilessly exploit this loophole. So, once you’ve successfully invoked your Miranda rights, any and all conversation you have with police officers will put those rights back into jeopardy. 

Putting it all together:

Ask: “Am I free to leave?”

If they say no, say: “I am invoking my right to remain silent and I am invoking my right to an attorney.”

And then shut up and do not say a single thing to them for any reason whatsoever until you have actually spoken to an attorney. Yes, even if it takes hours. Yes, even if they start talking to you about something else.

Finally, a very important disclaimer:

I may be a lawyer, but I’m not your lawyer, and I cannot guarantee that what I’ve just laid out here will always work for every situation. We didn’t get to this bizarre and absurd place overnight – we built this ridiculous system piecemeal, by deciding on a case-by-case basis that certain phrases were “too ambiguous” or certain types of questioning weren’t actually questioning at all. The law is still in flux, and is still fundamentally out to get you, and willing to bend plain meaning beyond all recognition to do it. Even if you invoke your rights perfectly, exactly as I have specified above, there’s a chance that your invocation of rights will be disqualified on some new technicality that no one’s even thought of yet – and that’s precisely the problem.

[lemonsharks]

Watch this video: “Don’t Talk To The Police”

[catscenter]

[communistbussy]

same energy

[strangeparker]

[ampervadasz]

[ofkindnessandchaos-deactivated2]

OMFG.

[all-aboard-the-bane-train]

Very curious doggo

[castle-engineer-deactivated2019]

Reminder that puffins are extremely social and like to fit in with their friends, so they will adopt mannerisms and interests of the group. So there is a good chance this little guy is trying to be friends with the photographer by showing his interest in the camera.

[willow-wanderings]

TIL photographers are a lot like puffins, cuz we also make friends by showing interest in your camera XD

[dykelliewilliams]

Reminds me of the time researchers were trying to get puffins to land in a specific area so the put decoys up to draw them in but the decoys only had 1 leg and

[legally-a-bastard]

this is so fucking cute