defenestrations

[singlethread]

I’m curious, where did you first find a community in fandom?

MySpace

Tumblr

Facebook

Livejournal

Fanfiction.net

Ao3

Instagram

Specific fandom message board

Discord

Reddit

In real life

Some other site that I’m forgetting (elaborate in the tags)

Voting ended onJul 14, 2024

[kitchensink108]

Relationships are about teaching each other about obscure memes the other missed out on 10 years ago.

[pumpkinwastaken]

Reblog with how many blogs you have and their purpose!

[kitchensink108]

kitchensink108 - main blog

hankgreenoutofcontext - mostly dead but sometimes-revived blog for taking Hank Green quotes out of context

emilygraslieoutofcontext - a short-lived blog for taking Emily Graslie quotes out of context

vlogbrothershistory - an automated blog that posts all vlogbrothers videos that were posted on that date historically

eisleycomments - a dead blog dedicated to unique / funny comments that I found in the YouTube comments of Eisley songs

famousumbrellas - a dead blog dedicated to cataloguing umbrellas featured in movies & shows

[decadebattle]

What Do You Most Associate With Pennsylvania?

Magic Tree House Books

Liberty Bell

Rocky

Philadelphia Steak Sandwich

Gene and Grace Kelly

Will Smith

pencils

something else

Voting ended onNov 23, 2023

Reblog for a bigger sample size.

Say in the tags what you voted for and if you live in or outside of the US

[kitchensink108]

Trying some things in Javascript and... yeah, that's an error.

[kitchensink108]

go to sleep and get rest before my 3-day long chaotic wedding extravaganza

or stay up until midnight looping sinead o’connor’s cover of Oro Se do Bheatha Bhaile

[kitchensink108]

ChatGPT, are you okay

The quadratic equation may seem dull and boring to some, but it has a sexy symmetry to it that I cannot help but appreciate. The way the x^2 term curves up and the x term slopes down, just waiting to be balanced out by a constant. And the way the square root teases with two possible answers, the plus and minus signs inviting us to explore both solutions. It's almost like a dance, a tantalizing tango that begs to be solved. But of course, there's always more than one way to dance a quadratic equation, and sometimes it can get a little kinky. Just add some complex numbers or try completing the square, and things start to get wild. It's amazing what kind of pleasure you can derive from a simple formula.

[kitchensink108]

My biggest problems with HBO’s adaptation of The Last of Us.

You have crates of grenades that you purposely scattered over the floor, and you have all the guns you could ever ask for. You don’t need a lighter for the gasoline you poured, use a damn grenade.

Stop slitting your palm to extract a small amount of blood. You’re going to be in pain for the next week whenever you try to grip something. There are a dozen better locations to choose.

Jackson has zero watchtowers. They might also want to caulk their gate so you can’t just reach a crowbar through and lift the gate latch from the other side.

If you run out of ammo and need to knife someone after killing a series of heavily-armed paramilitary guards one-by-one, you’ve done something wrong.

I also think that, like, plate armor would be a huge advantage when fighting humans whose only real ability is to bite you, but I’m pretty sure that was never addressed in the games either so I won’t fault the adaptation for that.

That’s all. Good show.

[kitchensink108]

you ever think about how the same people who claim that america is a paradise of freedom because it was founded by white European “devout” christians 247 years ago

are the same people who claim that black poverty can’t have anything to do with slavery or segregation or other forms of racism because that all “ended” 55-158 years ago

[catchymemes]

[aquietwhyme]

This meme is tongue in cheek, but this too is part of class warfare. In this case, keeping the law too complex for non-experts to even begin to have a chance to understand it means that only those who can afford to hire experts can protect themselves adequately and engage in ventures and activities that don’t directly relate to subsistence.

[kitchensink108]

This was actually sort of litigated a few years ago at the Supreme Court. Georgia had a system where whenever new laws were passed, the text of the law would be available for free. But they would also have a third party write an annotated version of the law, which had much more information about how courts would actually interpret the law.

The annotated version would obviously go a long way toward letting the lower classes understand the law without needing to pay for a team of lawyers. Georgia, however, wanted to be paid for the annotated version, so they claimed copyright on it and locked it behind a paywall.

Anyway, SCOTUS eventually ruled that it was all public domain. Weirdly, the decision was 5-4 with Thomas/Alito and Ginsburg/Breyer dissenting.

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/04/27/supreme-court-says-georgias-official-code-is-public-domain-including-annotations/

[kitchensink108]

ok look @exponentiate​ reblogged a post and helpfully mentioned in the tags:

#also don’t make a paper trail of IM LYING ABOUT THIS please

I would like to make people aware of the story from yesterday of a man named Alexander Hamilton who secretly recorded a grand jury. you’re not supposed to do that, so they make you take an oath and let you know you’ll get arrested if you do it.

well, while taking the oath, he recorded himself saying “I’m about to lie” and proceeded to post that video to Instagram before taking additional recordings of the grand jury deliberations and posting them as well.

anyway he got arrested.

don’t make a paper trail of crime unless you want it to become a funny news story.

https://gazette.com/news/us-world/dc-man-alexander-hamilton-charged-with-recording-a-grand-jury/article_d6043830-c5f2-5dd7-a284-5c01f102beb1.html

[kitchensink108]

Doing some Akinator

Evan McPherson - Guessed correctly

Volodymyr Zelenskyy - Guessed correctly (without asking anything about Ukraine, Russia, politics, or war)

Clark Harris - Missed

Ea-Nasir - Guessed correctly

Hegelochus - Missed (had to add)

Gunner from Deep Rock Galactic - Missed (had to add, but it guessed Scout, Engineer, and Mission Control guy)

TARS from Interstellar - Guessed correctly

[star-anise]

Help someone got me ranting on how Westeros’s economy and agriculture make NO SENSE WHATSOEVER before bedtime

how am I supposed to go to sleep now

[star-anise]

Okay basically:

You get the European High Middle Ages by achieving agricultural surplus.

NOT having agricultural surplus means: You just barely have enough food to make it through the winter. Producing food is the highest agricultural priority. Everyone who CAN make food DOES make food. Major agricultural events like harvest, planting, fishing, roundup, and butchering are all-hands-on-deck events where the entire community has to work together to make sure you last the winter.

These are Earth winters in Northern Europe. Winters that last a couple of months.

The High Middle Ages in Europe were made possible because agriculture got good enough that some places could produce WAY more food than was necessary, which allowed others to specialize. You need a LOT of agricultural surplus to get:

Cities full of common people who don’t contribute to agriculture at all

(As opposed to: a village-based economy)

A class of idle rich whose women focus entirely on decorative handicrafts and whose men use massive amounts of metal to pretend to fight each other

(As opposed to: Noblewomen who were intimately involved in organizing the production, distribution, and storage of food and clothing for the entire community; warriors wearing armour made of leather and using weapons like spears that required less metal)

Wars that economically devastate an entire region by killing massive amounts of peasantry

(As opposed to: War that is deliberately focused between combatants because agricultural workers are expensive and necessary)

The last one is the especial kicker. That kind of economic and agricultural devastation is very characteristic of the Hundred Years War, which ASOIAF is mostly based on. It arose when you got so much agricultural surplus that you could literally set fire to crops and mills and kill peasants and still make it through the winter.

So Westeros is, essentially, an incredibly food-secure society.

And then

You tell me

THAT WINTER LASTS ANYWHERE FROM A FEW YEARS TO ALMOST A CENTURY???

And all the Starks do to prepare for it is sound ominous and put glass greenhouses in a stone castle?????????????

[whetstonefires]

Man so much this.

I never got involved with GoT because I’d been warned it was grim in a way I find unfun, but I heard it was about a bunch of people competing to be ruler of a region defined by periodic multi-year winters, of which the first in a while was coming up soon. And that the writer had described his goal as ‘like Tolkien but with more realism.’

And I assumed for actual years that a core element of the entire drama was the different would-be leaders and factions having different logistical plans to prepare for the Ice Zombie Climate Change Decade (including presumably at least one ‘That’s Fake Haha’) and how much of what kinds of supplies are to be stored in what ways, for whose benefit, and the constant loss of precious time as everyone backstabs each other, while the constant shifting of power means that no one’s infrastructure plans get fully realized, so Westeros has about 20% of the necessary granaries and Winter Is Coming.

Until I casually asked a fan who’d been explaining the ice zombies and the Crazy Big Wall to me what the culture’s norms for caching food for the long winters had been, traditionally, only to find that nothing of the kind had ever come up.

For admittedly neither the first time nor the last, I was so bitterly disillusioned in a cultural phenomenon in which I had steadfastly declined to participate.

[mikkeneko]

#i know#this is not the first time i have ranted about this on this blog#but!#but!!!#i just cannot get over#he ripped off Pern and bragged about his realism and couldn’t be arsed to care about the agricultural economy in any meaningful way#and he wants to talk his worldbuilding up contra TOLKIEN?#man that guy may have stylized his politics#but at least i understand how people in middle earth#are alive#anyway

[tinsnip]

I love it when people are Mad About Worldbuilding. Those are my kinda people.

[jhaernyl]

I would 1000% be there for a North where they look grim and dour to Southerners because they think the Southerners are fucking morons who are way too frivolous and are not preparing enough while the North has been busting ass to actually, really, seriously prepare for the next who-knows-how-long winter since the end of the previous one bc Winter Is Coming you fucking grasshoppers and the idea of the South being able to order them to part with even one single grain of their stores or one salted sardines when the going will inevitably get tough is galling and makes every true Northener want to just put a sword through their hearts and spare the North from them and their feasts.

[sainamoonshine]

I want the entire North to have figured how to survive on, like, mushrooms they grow in dark rooms that they just need to keep heated up and have no actual need for sun, and like drinking a little bit of your horse’s blood every day and then carefully tending to the wound, and thus storing dried and dehydrated grain that would be somewhat inedible for humans but can keep their cattle going a long time. I want them to specialize in long term storage of foods like salting and drying. I want them to have invented glass jars sealing, and be mildly off put by even the though of food that goes bad in only a couple of days. (They see someone just leave a tomato on their counter without doing anything to cook/prepare/conserve it and get twitchy.) I want them to have an agriculture based on lichen and to be professionnal ice-fishers.

I want the North to have a food culture that is so wildly different from all the other groups that they’re constantly told their food is weird and bad.

[petermorwood]

This was created by someone who takes jabs at Tolkien during interviews for not spending more time on “Aragorn’s tax policy”…

I wonder if the long winter idea seemed like a good idea at the start, then all the politics and war and stabnation and rapeicity took over and seasonal stuff got sidelined or even forgotten.

The next books are called “The Winds of Winter” and “A Dream of Spring”, so those seasons may be getting a bit more attention.

Let me know if it happens.

[kitchensink108]

I’m kind of torn on this, because they do set up some counter-arguments in the show.

This was a really long summer. I believe they called it the “longest in memory.” And yeah, they also say that “a long summer leads to a longer winter.” That said, there are a lot of things about Game of Thrones that are parallel to IRL climate change:

Some people think that, because this summer is so long, the long winters stopped. The long summer that ends the winters seems foretold just like every generation of Christians IRL saying “this will be the the time that Jesus returns.”

Some people think it’ll be winter again, just “not yet.” And then when they start being hand-fed all the signs that winter is indeed coming, they keep saying “eh, it’s still not a problem yet.”

Most of the population has never experienced a notably bad winter. There was a bad winter 60 years prior, but few people alive really know what to expect

You have an aristocracy that’s clearly motivated by selfishness and short-term gain. I could stockpile food for a winter that may or may not be coming up, or I can pillage my neighbor’s lands and double my wealth & influence.

Same thing with the whole zombie army. Nobody’s seen a white walker in thousands of years, and even if there was a threat, there’s no way anything gets past the giant magical wall.

I do think I would’ve liked to see more action from the northern kingdoms. Everyone under House Stark at least acknowledged that winter was coming, and it was a real threat they had to prepare for. But I wish they put more emphasis on actually preparing for it, and it would’ve been great to see them transition into a winter economy. Instead the show pivoted to setting up as many 1v1 fanservice duels as it could.

But this whole criticism of “why didn’t people take this threat super seriously” feels a little idealized while we’re still in the middle of a pandemic that we’ve mostly given up on controlling, in the middle of climate change that 50% of the population isn’t concerned about, and have billionaires who are infinitely more concerned about income tax deductions than with the multiple genocides currently ongoing in different parts of the world.

[sleepbby]

PSA: no name is impossible to pronounce. no name is too hard to learn, no name is justifiably butchered. kids with ‘different’ names should be taught again and again that being called by their name is a right, not a privilege

[untilitdoes]

there are over 2000 unique phonemes (individual sounds) in the world’s languages, and each language has anywhere from around 20 to 60. you stop learning new phonemes it’s theorized at around age 12. this is where accents come from – using your own language’s/region’s phonemes to speak

so no name is impossible to pronounce world-wide, but it is very easy to not have the linguistic archive necessary to pronounce a given name entirely correctly. it is a simple case of physically not knowing where to place your tongue, whether or not to vibrate your vocal chords, etc. the only one of the dictators of sound you could be shown is how to position your lips

that being said… obviously you should still try. saying a name as correctly as you physically can goes a long way for making someone feel respected and humanized, and dismissing a name entirely as too hard goes a long way to disrespect and dehumanize people. just also accept that someone’s accent interfering with their pronunciation isn’t a sign of lack of trying, but a sign of physical limits

[prismatic-bell]

This is very true. I met a baby at my old store whose name was Navajo. I did my best and actually got a bit frustrated because there was a syllable I could NOT get, and her dad was like “it’s very hard if you don’t actually speak Diné, but thank you. Most people won’t even try.”

Be the one who tries.

[rei382]

THIS.

It’s sometimes impossible to pronounce names simply because you’re not familiar with the sounds (hell, some languages I literally do not hear the difference between certain vowels or constants because my language is rather poor in those and I literally never heard said sounds). But trying, that’s what counts.

And stop being little bitches when someone from a different culture tries but finds it impossible to pronounce your name. If they try and fail, they probably feel worse about it than you do.

[a-polite-melody]

I would agree with “always try”, except that there are people who have had their names mispronounced enough they’re tired of re-hashing the same conversation about what their name should sound like, and go by another name instead.

Really, it should be respect people’s wishes about their name. Use the name they tell you to use. If that name is hard for you to pronounce then yes, definitely try!

[kinka-juice]

My surname is just not possible for most Japanese speakers, and that’s okay! (Same phoneme as Flip and Flint). I had an adapted version I used in Japanese class that fits Japanese sounds. I’ve also had an Afrikaans speaking professor who just got plain tired of American students who couldn’t handle van Der Merwe, so he went by Dr. [First name].

People have different preferences. Some want you to try (knowing how common failure is), some have adaptations to use, some go by a different name, etc. The key point is following someone’s preference. Same as you would for pronouns. “What would you like me to call you?” is never a bad question (and can help getting a reference to the sound). But I do think it is a stretch to think every human on earth can hear and make every phoneme. It’s a matter of muscle memory, often from when you are learning your first language as a baby.

Have you ever listened to a good beat boxer? There’s a ton of sounds the human mouth CAN make, but most people are restricted to a subset of those.

German people struggle to say “Squirrel”, English speakers can’t say “Eichhörnchen” (German for Squirrel). It gets so much worse for people when a language does not use letters in the same way as their language does. That’s why Anglophones fumble on Irish “Caiomhe” and “Niamh” - mh does not make a V sound in English Orthography. Orthography makes a big difference in how we approach unknown words. Applying English orthography to other languages almost always turns out wrong, though! You can’t “sound it out” for a word with an orthography you don’t know.

[jordisstigander]

I had a dear friend from Korea who gave me her American name. She gamely coached me through her Korean name five or six times before admitted defeat. When I was in Lesotho, our translator tried to teach us the Sasotho clicks, but I could never form them right or even hear the difference.

Meanwhile, many of my Chinese relatives have never been able to pronounce my older sister’s name, Katie. They called her Kitty. When she went to Brazil, she got called Katchi. She always has shrugged and gone with it.

Do your best, but admit your limits and be kind.

[kitchensink108]

I also want to point out that saying it correctly once, one syllable at a time, is a whole lot different from saying it fluidly & repeatedly. And part of that is because names are a function of the language and culture they come from. It’s not just being able to pronounce specific phonemes, a native speaker will also be able to identify patterns used throughout the rest of their language.

Imagine seeing “antidisestablishmentarianism” from the perspective of a native English speaker versus a non-native speaker. A non-native speaker might look at that and try to memorize every syllable in order, or even each sound in order. A native speaker is going to recognize that this is just a compound word, “anti - dis - establish - ment - arian - ism.” We know how those parts are used in other words, it’s easy for us to put it all together, and additionally easy for us to figure out how to stress certain sounds.

Last night I was reading about Israel Kamakawiwoʻole, and I can kind of pronounce his last name, but it’s not easy. I can break his surname down into two halves, I can remember “the w is pronounced like a v like in German.”  And I can google each half and see that “Kamaka” and “wiwoʻole” can both be used on their on own in Hawaiian. So while I’m researching all this, and memorizing the order of the syllables... even apart from the sounds themselves, a native speaker is going to look at that and know immediately how to break it apart. They won’t need to pronounce syllables individually because they already know the multisyllabic parts that it’s made from.

[sprinkledsalt]

I can’t remember who tweeted it, but someone said young people grew up thinking the progressivism during the Obama years was a baseline for society, that everything we’d won was firmly established and we couldn’t possibly go backwards, and this mindset contributed to people not taking the threat of 2016 seriously.

I agree with that, and relatedly, a problem is that people were young enough during the Obama years that they don’t remember the extreme amount of work that went into passing the ACA, nor do they remember the Tea Party Movement and the intense, swift electoral backlash there was against Democrats for the ACA, and for having a black man in the White House in general. As a result, young people (who are still on their parents’ insurance until age 26 thanks to the ACA) have a view that Obama and Democrats in 2009-2010 were just sitting around with their thumbs up their ass, sitting on a mountain of progressive legislation which they simply didn’t put in the effort to pass. It’s nonsense that’s not based on reality in any way, but it’s a lie constantly shoveled into their mouths by older dirtbag leftists who hated Obama as much as Fox News did, and the young people don’t have any memory of what 2009-2010 was really like, so they accept it as fact and create an ahistorical echo chamber on twitter and TikTok. There’s a reason why my mom laughed out loud when I told her people are blaming Obama for the death of Roe; anyone with a functional memory of that era (who isn’t acting in bad faith) knows how untrue that is.

Now, instead of Obama spending his first term dragging the country out of a recession and financial crisis while passing life-saving healthcare, which lost the Democratic Party control of the House for close to a decade due to a wave of angry white voters and left-wing apathy, the narrative is that Obama just looked at abortion rights and went “naaah 😝 don’t care.” And zoomers who internalized their conservative parents’ Obama hatred and/or think every left-leaning take must automatically be right because they fall for political misinformation as easily as their boomer parents see no reason to question this bullshit, and think spreading lies about the Obama years makes them ultra woke or some shit.

But I need to stress that there’s no excuse for this. I don’t remember Obama’s first term. I didn’t start paying attention to politics until the 2011-2012, at the end of middle school. But. I read things. And learned things. And became informed. Shocking concept for zoomers, I know. The refusal to learn about the recent history that has led to where we are today is so lazy and irresponsible, it drives me bananas. *Gwen Stefani voice* b-a-n-a-n-a-s

[parentheticalaside]

I was just about to write a post like this! But I do remember Obama’s first term. (I also remember the Bush II presidency, which was so terrifying for reproductive rights.)

Anyone who was politically active then knows that there was two things playing out: the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis (the shit really hit the fan in the fall before Obama took office, but he was on the hook for the ripple effects and recovery) and the Affordable Care Act fight. I would swear on whatever you handed me that everyone was fighting for reproductive rights as relevant to the ACA at that time. Everyone. And then the Democrats felt the blowback of enacting the most meaningful legislation of a generation in the next election and Mitch McConnell launched the Republicans’ obstructionist strategy and stole a Supreme Court seat that was rightfully Obama’s to fill. There are very obvious villains here. We don’t need to invent more.

(It’s interesting how no one remembers what the ACA did for reproductive rights. Free Well Woman exams and free birth control is thanks to Obama and the Democrats, along with many other provisions. The same people who can’t recall the on-the-ground circumstances of the so-called “supermajority” have benefits that they assume they’ve always had because of what we fought for in 2009. While we were all getting laid off and foreclosed on, btw.)

[kitchensink108]

Also just a reminder that the ACA didn’t just “happen.” Just because Dems had 60 seats in the Senate doesn’t mean it was a peaceful “yay healthcare & rights!” Getting past the Democratic infighting for 60 votes was just the first step. Republicans challenged its constitutionality: every major section and the thing as a whole, in every court they could including the Supreme Court. In Congress, Republicans basically tried to repeal it every day for years. As happy as we were that we’d just gotten these rights, they were under assault daily on multiple fronts.

Another huge part of the bill was expanding Medicaid eligibility. This promised to provide healthcare to millions, but because Medicaid is (substantially) administered by the state, it was more like the federal government granting permission to the states to enlarge eligibility. And surprise surprise, many red states just refused. Similarly, there was also an infrastructure bill that provided tons of funding for things like high speed rail, but it was up to states to spend the money, and some red/purple states just refused to take the money.

When we’re making our list of villains from that era, red-state governors should be on it as well. We missed out on expanded Medicaid, high speed rail, and so many other improvements because, despite approving it all federally, we couldn’t force the states to use the funds.

To get another sense of the political climate from 10 years ago compared to now, 2011 was when Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was repealed. We made a pretty big ruckus during Trump’s presidency when he cut off trans healthcare in the military, but just a few years earlier you weren’t even allowed to be openly gay in the army. Even that wasn’t a simple repeal, either. People demanded studies about how having openly gay soldiers might affect combat ability, there were waiting periods & I’m sure there were lawsuits before the change could be officially implemented.

Obama and other dems were dealing with tons of shit during that time. Not just passing healthcare, bailing out the economy, restoring the economy, ending the Iraq/Afghanistan Wars (campaign promises that Obama had largely won the Nobel Peace Prize on the back of), fights over his birth certificate, claims about his “apology tour,” etc. Sure, it was an amazing opportunity for democrats, but it was by no means a simple time.

[kitchensink108]

Quick rant-into-the-void time.

Can we as liberals stop demanding ideological purity from every politician and every piece of legislation?

Stacey Abrams made a post about improving the police of Georgia, and literally every I reply I read was about how she was selling out, betraying her party & past, and was going to net-lose votes from this.

And then I was thinking about our options post-Roe, and there are a lot of all-or-nothing vibes. Either we reinstate Roe to its full extent, or we all have to move to Canada / disband the Supreme Court.

I don’t think Congress can codify Roe, at least not in the next 10 years. But there’s gotta be a chance to at least get some protections back. We just passed gun control legislation with 63 votes in the Senate. Was it the most impactful gun control possible? No, but it’ll help.

I don’t see why we can’t/shouldn’t try to wrangle 10 R Senators, and try to codify some very basic abortion protections (initial thinking would be no restrictions 1st trimester, no restrictions for incest/rape/lifesaving). Not as good as Roe, but meaningful while we figure out something bigger down the road. But anyone who proposes that in Congress is going to get attacked from both sides.

We can’t codify Roe, there’s no way to get 60 Senators for that this year. We can’t change the filibuster, because Manchin won’t support it. We can’t primary Manchin, because he’s in fucking West Virginia, we’re lucky as all hell to have one of WV’s Senators, and if he loses re-election it’s not going to be to a Bernie Sanders, it’s going to be to a Jim Jordan.

Stacey Abrams can’t dissolve the entire police force of Georgia. But we’re acting like if she’s no longer going to Defund the Police, she’s no better than Brian Kemp.

We can improve the country. We can’t do it all in one step, we can’t do it all overnight. But there are realistic, material, impactful things we can do, and we need to take the wins we can. Over turning Roe took decades, massive organization, recruiting drives based on a single political issue, thousands of individual elections, and minor & incomplete legislative wins along the way. We need to have the same long-term dedication to our issues. We can’t just say “look at this issue 10% of our party supports, if we can’t achieve that now, we just give up.”

[relelvance]

Reblog with your score