Bruh

benis

[occasionalvirgin]

Right wing manipulation tactics explained

[taraljc]

this is an epic exposure of how propaganda functions.

[supreme-leader-stoat]

[prokopetz]

I don't always agree with the decisions of Wikipedia's volunteer editors, but having learned that their decision on how to handle the James Somerton situation was to deem him non-notable and turn his article into a redirect to a brief writeup of Hbomberguy's plagiarism investigation – well, like I said, this may not be a good decision, but in context it's an extremely funny one.

[lokh1]

communication is key 💪

[astraltrickster]

Only now does it strike me that a lot of egg joke discourse is people having two entirely separate conversations, completely talking past each other.

On the one hand, we have people saying it's fine to make "have you considered you might not be cis" comments...about friends. Because sometimes someone is giving egg vibes, consciously or subconsciously, as a means of looking for support, looking for the people they know and trust to still be cool with it or tell them what they're thinking is a valid option, and it's good to turn toward those bids and offer support.

On the other hand, we have people saying not to make those kinds of comments or jokes....about strangers. Because you don't know them, they might be trans in a totally different direction than you think, and second-guessing someone you don't know about their own gender - often in a way that treats nonbinary identities as a fake thing, a phase, just a step in a pipeline for people with only one foot out of the closet - is not the compassionate trans-positive action that a small but frustrating number of people think it is.

And the thing is, both of these things are true. You can't treat strangers the way you treat your bestie! You will do more harm than good if you try!

I just wonder how many internet slapfights would not happen if people could recognize that these ideas don't contradict each other; they're different advice for different situations.

[astraltrickster]

Like I think we can all agree that it's different to look at a friend who says "oh come on, who DOESN'T wish they were a different gender sometimes?" and say "a lot of people...and you know you can just decide to be, right?" with the level of seriousness/joking/roasting that is appropriate for your relationship,

Than it is to make broad and generalized jokes about no one in particular, about the emo-kid-to-trans pipeline and along the lines of "shoutout to the high school alt couples who are still together but traded genders" or "if you were the weird wolf girl in school how's being trans treating you?" or "isn't it touching how 10 years ago we saw hundreds of nervous, nerdy boys lining up to see [MOVIE] and now 10 years later those same girls are having line parties for [SEQUEL]?"

Than it is to look at an individual total fucking stranger in a store buying something that doesn't seem to match their gender, let alone having a weird gender presentation on the internet, and "lightheartedly"-but-persistently INSIST they're OBVIOUSLY just 2 years out from a binary transition, come on, people NEVER do THAT unless they're a [MAN/WOMAN] deep down, DUH!

And I suddenly can't help but notice that a lot of people will criticize the latter...and then get misinterpreted as saying the former two are inherently evil and degrading (often because the people doing the misinterpreting haven't seen enough of the latter to even realize it's a thing a small but frustratingly substantial number of people do)-

And I can't help but notice that people will defend the former two...and get misinterpreted as demanding the divine right to do the latter, or saying no one can have individual boundaries within the former,

And so the two sides just continue talking past each other.

[doberbutts]

Oh good food.

I have an example of this happening in my friend group:

A few years ago while gaming with my usual crew, I made an offhand comment about not feeling well because I was on my period. After our session, one of the group sent me a message on the side asking to talk to me about something serious. Without going too much into detail about this person's life, I knew just enough to know that the serious thing could have been suicidal ideation, or domestic violence, or needing to discuss a stressful event, or something, and being a friend I agreed because of course I wanted to help in whatever way I could.

They hadn't realized I was trans. He thought I was a cis man, and my high voice (pre-T) they rationalized as me just being extremely gay (which I am.... which they knew). So it was a couple hour conversation about how did you figure out you're trans, what did you do about it, was it scary was it hard, etc etc.

They told me secretly they always wanted to be a girl. That they never felt comfortable being a man. It never felt right to them. They would look at cis women and feel sad that they could never be like them. They wanted to wear dresses and makeup and be beautiful and feminine and delicate and they couldn't, what would their family think, what if they get hatecrimed, what if they choose wrong and they're just making it up or faking. They asked me if something was wrong with them.

And sure, internally my response was: you're transgender, dummy. Congrats: you are a girl.

But my external response had to be more delicate than that. I told them most cis people don't actively desire to be a different gender than the one assigned at birth. That they didn't have to necessarily do anything about it or change any labels if they didn't want to. That they could start small with things, just experiment, they didn't need to go out and change everything overnight but could take their time figuring themselves out. It's not a race. And if they experiment with non-permenant stuff for a while and decide it's not for them, no judgement either way.

We let that lie for a while. Nothing changed for several months. Then we played the pronoun game in our gaming group for a while, slowly transitioning from he to they to where they've landed now. We didn't game for a long time, everyone's lives got very busy over this past summer and holiday season. I noticed one day their discord name had changed to something significantly more feminine, and I asked about it.

She's she/they now, trans demi girl, medically transitioning, and absolutely fucking radiant. She thanked me for that sit-down years ago, to get her started on this path. She's fixed a lot of her previous situation and is headed towards bigger and better things. I'm so fucking proud of her.

We've privately made the joke that I cracked her egg but like. This was a conversation between friends who'd known each other for years and spent around 800 hours in various co-operative situations together. Not me going up to some random amab person buying a dress and saying that it makes them trans, or putting that person online for everyone to see and discuss. And SHE brought it to ME, not me deciding for her that based on her behaviors and likes and interests obviously she had to be a woman.

[wizardarchetypes]

3 seconds into dungeon meshi and they’re already living my dream. i love eating things I ought not in unfamiliar ecosystems

[wizardarchetypes]

one time in undergrad we went to this big farm & greenhouse where they were cultivating rare & endangered plants and during the tour the botanist let us all taste a leaf off of a particular plant & I was like oh some of these are edible!

so we got to the next plant and when he took questions I asked if it was also edible and he said “I mean. It’s not poisonous, but I’m sure it won’t taste good.” I asked if I could try it anyway and it seemed like he was just perplexed enough to indulge me so he gave me one leaf. It was terrible.

At the next plant he offered me a leaf before I asked and he wanted to know what it tasted like

For the rest of the tour he gave me a leaf from each non-poisonous plant and I told him how they all tasted (mostly like nothing at all but some unspeakably terrible) and that’s how I ate several dozen rare & endangered leaves.

So anyway. I’m a fan of this blonde guy already. I think we’d be friends

[orkyydorky]

this too shall pass

[orkyydorky]

HURRY UP

[arsnof]

Don't force it; that's how you get hemorrhoids. Eat some chocolate, drink some coffee, and grab your favorite comics because it's going to be a long one

[flagellant]

is it needlessly pedantic of me to get annoyed at people who think any 5/7/5 structure is an actual haiku? yeah, because haiku is innately untranslatable and therefore following the actual structure is not just pointless but actively impossible. however, this does not change the fact that i am annoyed. motherfucker doesn't even incorporate a kigo.

[flagellant]

@disasterhimbo @tapirtrash

Haiku (as well as several other rigid forms based on them that I'm not gonna get into right now because no one is paying me money for it) are way more complex than just the 5/7/5 structure.

99% of all haiku written in English might at best be called a senryu. The problem is trifold:

First: The subtle but distinct difference between on and syllables. Haiku are made of 14 on, which are essentially the equivalent to Japanese syllabic structures, except the nature of how Japanese as a language is constructed versus English means that any given proper haiku could be translated in extremely and intensely different ways, each giving a subtle but distinctly different meaning. The best way I can explain what I mean is that in English a good poem can be defined as a shallow river, whereas a good haiku is a deeply-dug well.

Second: The presence of the kigu. There is a specific series of characters/words which are used to imply a season, and specifically a specific aspect of a season which the haiku revolves around. The creation of a haiku is often done as a meditative practice revolving around the kigu--you're essentially contemplating on this particular natural feature (nearly always the temporal aspect emphasizes either ephemerality or the opposite as well bc Buddhist ideas of enlightenment and beauty begin coming into play) and building an evocative and purposeful point that revolves around it like a hinge. It functions as both gro und and anchor.

Third: The presence of the kireji. As I said earlier, no one is paying me to explain haiku to y'all well, so I'm not even gonna bother trying to define kireji for y'all. Just know that it's a concept borderline absent from English because it's an intersection of linguistics and philosophy that doesn't really exist outside of the context of Japanese.

In summation: While all of these aspects together are objectively impossible to perfectly translate into English and thus no haiku written in English is to be considered as such, the 5/7/5 structure of English haiku are functionally distinct enough to be considered its own thing that does not necessarily need to follow the rules of Japanese haiku. However, that begins to get into discussions of appropriation, Orientalism, and the nature of translation as imperfect, and, once again, none of you are paying me to talk about English haiku as a form of Orientalist appropriation.

[threadpuppet]

unfortunately also not paying you, but what do you think about Kerouac's work in/thoughts on Western haiku?

to wit, from Scattered Poems:

The "haiku" was invented and developed over hundreds of years in Japan to be a complete poem in seventeen syllables and to pack in a whole vision of life in three short lines. A "Western Haiku" need not concern itself with the seventeen syllables since Western languages cannot adapt themselves to the fluid syllabic Japanese. I propose that the "Western Haiku" simply say a lot in three short lines in any Western language. Above all, a Haiku must be very simple and free of all poetic trickery and make a little picture and yet be as airy and graceful as a Vivaldi Pastorella.

Missing a kick at the icebox door It closed anyway.

Useless! useless! —heavy rain driving Into the sea

Straining at the padlock the garage doors At noon

[flagellant]

I don't want to agree with Jack Kerouac because I find him disenchanting.

[patternsinnoise]

I actually found myself in a position to explain kireji to a college classroom a few months back. I'm not an expert, but I can take a crack at it here.

Japanese, like a number of other languages, has particles -- helper words that are sort of like verbalized punctuation. The closest thing we have to this in English is stuff like "bro", "dude", or "girl" in English. In Japanese, the one I'm most familiar with is "ka", which marks an utterance as a question.

Kireji -- cutting words -- are a special set of particles that have taken on a traditional importance in Haiku. What makes them complicated is that a few of them have tenses. So, you may technically be able to translate one of them as "wow!", but how do you get across that it's specifically "wow! (Past perfect, i.e., referring to something that happened and is now over and done with".

The only one I can think of a translation for is "ya", and it would only work typographically, which would be to use an equal sign. As far as I can tell, it's much more emphatic and essentializing than "is", though I could be wrong.

It's a really fascinating topic, and I apologize for going on for so long, but untanslatability is interesting and often poorly understood.

Also, yeah, not really here for Kerouac.

[flagellant]

Thank you for your addition! I hope it helps everyone see why this stuff is so insanely difficult to translate, because also most of the time the kireji interacts with the kigu in a way which could honestly, itself, be a little mini poem!

[letsoptimistictyphoonbouquet]

The answer is: yes, it is needlessly pedantic.

[flagellant]

But you learned something, so that's cool :)

[verdantry]

Another day of being a sweetiepie. Just clocked in

[verdantry]

Sick of this shit it’s time to be a rotted cunt

[glumshoe]

Me: “You can’t ascribe human morality to non-human animals because they do not share our particular cognition and culture.”

Tumblr: “Why do you hate animism, huh? Why do you think humans are a separate species from other animals, you human supremacist?”

[glumshoe]

Me: “You wouldn’t marry a warthog because you know that its cognition is different from human cognition, it is a different species with different abilities and emotions, and it does not share your understanding of marriage and consent and culture. It’s different from you and you know this.”

Tumblr: “Well humans don’t all speak the same language, so…”

[glumshoe]

Of all the ridiculous arguments I’ve gotten into on Tumblr dot hell this one. This one might be. Might be the wildest.

[eternal-flame]

I’M LOSING MY MIND 

[funereal-disease]

“I’m trying to establish whether or not you think a sand hill crane is interchangeable with a human boyfriend”

[bovineblogger]

ophelia..

[bunjywunjy]

psst quick note to everyone calling this a Water Buffalo:

this is a cow 🐄🐮

[vireja]

Literally went from:

“Why would I ever trust the word of an Oathbreaker?”

“It’s unwise to trust a bloody Sharran”

To:

“Why hello, Lover, that sounded more debonaire in my head, I admit”

“I am yours, my Heart”

.

.

.

.

Aaaand I’m finally in Act 3 (fucking finally) with my Oathbreaker Paladin Durge run. I can only wish I’m talented enough of a writer to write a fic for these two I swear-

[crimson-rots]

being a fan of a friend's ocs is actually so humiliating....... like yes my favourite character rn is tragically doomed and a pillar of humanity who i think is relevant to the current world. you can find information about them on discord dot com and sometimes in late-night conversations with this guy i know. what the fuck

[crimson-rots]

up late at night thinking about a guy who exists to three people. such a desire to talk about him until my lungs give out and read every scrap of fanfiction on the internet and yet there is NOTHING!!!! and i have to pretend to be NORMAL about this. "oh yes your character is cool. have you considered writing more" meanwhile the wolves in my brain are tearing and biting

[gargantua01]

[hickeywiththegoodhair]

[nthfunct-deactivated20231201]

construction workers were a superstitious organization who thought orange objects could ward off vehicles, or even control people.

[pharmafelon]

Legend has it their most important ritual was destroying a section of a road then smoking cigarettes around it for hours on end. Experts say this was to bless the area

[sangoundercover]

I'd let her be a little mean to me

[dishesoap]

mr krabs. euthanize this slut