Esperanto estas mojosa lingvo!

aspiring polyglot, he/them, li/gi, western white queer - Native language: English - Conversational: Esperanto, French - Learning: Danish - used to be primarily a langblr, now a mix of languages, activism, politics, history, and culture. plus some fun facts

[kviralingvisto]

Some updates on my language studies bc I haven't been on tumblr much in a while:

The last few years I've been bouncing around languages and doing enough to keep my streak on Duolingo, but not really focusing on any one language. Unfortunately, I've been busy with other things in life.

A while ago I was using Duo to practice my French that I haven't used since high school, but I decided to switch over to learning Arabic. I'm still pretty new, and the Duolingo course is taking a long time (which isn't helped by the energy update 🙄), but I'm getting used to the writing system and translating some simple sentences.

Then more recently, I managed to convince my bf to start learning Esperanto, so I picked up learning it again. I'm making my way through the Duo course on days I don't want to do Arabic since I remember a lot of what I learned before. And in the last few weeks I've been feeling confident enough to start pushing my learning further than what I achieved a few years ago. I started reading "The Last American" translated into Esperanto on Project Gutenberg, it's a bit difficult but I generally understand most of the words and I've got an English copy open so I can check the original.

And that's all I've been up to lately! Thanks for reading, happy learning!

[aorish-deactivated20251222]

[kedamono-dreams]

the name of the piece is "Replica of a Chip", and it was woven by Marilou Schultz. here is a good blog post about the piece, the weaver's current work, and a history of the Navajo nation's involvement in the semiconductor industry:

The Pentium as a Navajo weaving

Hurrying through the National Gallery of Art five minutes before closing, I passed a Navajo weaving with a complex abstract pattern. Suddenl

[deep-down-in-drowsy-town]

language ideology is a fascinating thing. i was with my mom and brother and we were comparing different actors who've played jean Valjean in Les Mis, listening to different versions of Bring Him Home. you know, normal family activities.

so i say oh i gotta show you this one version- and i pull up Þór Breiðfjörð's INCREDIBLE performance from the 2012 Reykjavik production of Les Mis. i didn't tell them what it was, i wanted them to experience it fresh.

as soon as it became clear that it was in a different language, my mom starts- i kid you not- LAUGHING. then she asks me "what is this"? like what do you mean? it's Bring Him Home from Les Mis, it just happens to be in Icelandic! but my mom immediately loses interest, and i turn it off.

it's just another example of what anglocentirc culture does to our brains. anything that's in a different language- especially a non-global language or minority language- is treated as a joke, not serious, or "lesser than" content in english. it doesn't matter how mind-blowingly gorgeous Þór Breiðfjörð's voice is (i honestly think he rivals Colm Wilkinson), he can't be that good because he's not singing in english. this is why we NEED more visible multilingualism, and a total re-evaluation of our anglocentric language ideologies.

[remnantglow]

also speaking of jakub różalski this painting of his is my FAVOURITE like yes girl snitch on the knight!!! get his ass!!!

the one of a girl looking longingly at a naked witch flying by and the one of a babushka yelling at a devil also rule tho

[helendamnationx]

Just want to make sure people are aware that the artist is on ArtStation and many of these, including the longing stare at witch one, are in fact for sale as prints for highly reasonable prices - the cheapest option being an 8 by 12 art poster for 18 US dollars (plus shipping).

[the-heart-of-leo]

HERE’S HIS WEBSITE

Not only will you get to see the hilarious names of these works but usually a short story and a detailed look at his work progress!

He also does a lot of werewolf art which I adore!

[ludmithjacques]

There’s even a sequel to old woman yelling at the devil *and* naked witch longing. It’s called Over My Dead Body!

[targetedknowledge]

[blackbearmagic]

Good morning,

museums should repatriate artifacts belonging to living cultures and display reproductions instead

[blackbearmagic]

Good afternoon,

no one is entitled to the sacred art, tools, or costumes of another culture (save members of the culture itself) and nonsacred reproductions will serve just as well for the purposes of education and appreciation

[blackbearmagic]

Good evening,

having museums full of reproductions would be even cooler than having museums full of sacred artifacts because when modern craftspeople are able to replicate those artifacts, it’s usually because they still make the same items the same way today

this means that you could have description tags emphasizing that such-and-such item has been made by these people in almost the same way for hundreds of years

having museums full of beautiful reproductions takes the emphasis off of Things and places it on the People who make them, which is really as it should be

[royalgrimoiresalamander]

Ancient Chinese poetry is 100% ragebait because wym some guy named literal Sushi dreamt of his dead wife a thousand years ago and wrote

"Ten years, the dead and living, lost and bound apart. I don't think of you, for I never forgot."

From: Su Shi's "Melody of a River Town", about AD1075

It's eerily lyrical because, generally, when we think of something (or someone), the thought wasn't there before, it appears in our minds out of nothing.

He's not thinking of her, because she never left his mind.

[captain-price-returns]

A real page on the White House website

[bogleech]

In case people missed it, another real page on the white house website pretends to "reveal the truth about ALIENS" and once again means immigrants, which it calls "its."

4chan took over the country.

[headspace-hotel]

This is actually fucking insanely horrifying what the fuck

[electronicgallery]

Museum Asks People To Recreate Paintings At Home, Gets 30 New Impressive Photos

It appears that boredom lies behind the most creative ideas. That's why quarantine has produced some of the most entertaining activities. One of them is the Getty Museum challenge, that so many of you have already seen in our previous article here.

[delphinidin4]

Narcissus taking a selfie is the ACTUAL best.

[simplyclockwork]

These are REALLY cool

[notallfay]

These are art in themselves, in a some of them point out what lockdown was like for us, they’re expressed themselves in a really cool way. But I think these are going to be talked about in the future.

[junmyk-deactivated20200225]

[beifongkendo]

‘Scrolls of Frolicking Animals’ (Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga) from the Kōzan-ji temple in Kyoto, 12th/13th century.

Animated by Studio Ghibli in 2016 ✏️

[catchymemes]

blue sunset on Mars is a real phenomenon caused by the way Martian dust scatters sunlight.

Unlike Earth, where sunsets are red and orange due to the scattering of shorter blue wavelengths by our atmosphere, Mars has an extremely fine dust that scatters blue light more efficiently near the Sun.

So during sunset on Mars, the sky turns reddish-brown while the area around the Sun glows a soft blue. It’s the opposite of what we experience on Earth.

NASA’s rovers have captured this eerie sight

[homunculus-argument]

Imagine if you met someone who can't eat watermelon. Not that they're allergic or unable somehow, but they just haven't figured out how to do that. So you're like "what the hell do you mean? it works just like eating anything else, you open your mouth, sink your teeth in, take a bite and chew. If you can bite, chew and swallow, you should be able to eat a watermelon."

And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

"It's red on the inside?"

Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.

"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

If someone can't do something after being repeatedly told to "just do it", there might be some key component missing that one side has no idea about, and the other side assumed was so obvious it goes without mention.

[therainstheyaredropping]

Yep.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. [...]

I think my revised belief is that if you are stuck at how to get better at something, spend a little while assuming there’s just some trick to it you’ve missed. You can try to generate the trick yourself, but it’s probably easier to learn it by observing someone else being good at the thing, asking them some questions, and seeing if you have any lightbulb moment.

[hergan416]

My fiance played the clarinet when he was in school. When he was first learning to play, he rented an instrument from the school to learn on. He was the last chair clarinet, had been for years, because he could not make notes that required the register key. For years, they kept making him do embrature exercises and he started to get a few notes, with lots of effort. Eventually he had to get private lessons to stay in band.

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.

Sometimes you don't need to brute force a problem. Sometimes your clarinet is just broken.

[nowordsandnotune]

Not quite sure why the clarinet addition got me crying, but here you go people: just in case, let's get you some new pads.

[kitsnicket]

I don’t like this actually

[kitsnicket]

This is depressing does anyone else find this depressing

[mikkeneko]

I would actually make the argument that the heart of the problem here is not either about fans, as the article claims, or production companies being exploitative cowards, as some of the comments are claiming. The heart of the problem is the increasingly eroding privacy we are seeing in the modern age.

There's some people in the comments saying "fandoms have always been like this" and others saying "No, it's worse than it was." And both are to some extent right. Fans (or at least a small percentage of fans, and the larger a fanbase gets the larger a group this will describe) have always been Like That; but they did not always have the level of access to creators and actors that they have now.

The notion that a performer needs to be constantly available to public scrutiny, that their personal information should by default be available to any rando with google, is pretty new. It used to be that actors would only be expected to engage with the public on limited, specific, and controlled occasions, usually with security provided. Now they're being asked to rawdog exposure to the mob 24/7 on their own.

(Also, production companies have always always always been exploitative cowards, just to get that straight; reading the biographies of literally any actress from golden Hollywood years makes that clear. It's just, again, more public now.)

There has also been a negative feedback loop as fandoms come to realize that the constant access they have to creatives increases their leverage and power. It did not use to be the case that this was so; fandoms pre-internet largely worked under the assumption that they didn't really have any meaningful way to contact or influence the publication houses. Even if they sent a letter or a campaign of letters, they wouldn't even know whether the letters were being received or read unless the publishing house chose to respond. So, without that expectation of access, the drama usually stayed internal. Nowadays, with constant immediate feedback from creators and publishers, fans are ever more incentivized to act out to try to push an agenda, get attention, or just vent whatever is going on in their lives onto a face contractually obliged to be friendly to them.

[thecryptkeeper]

i know the way people talk about their pets now is probably how we’ve been doing it for all of history. a cat owner in ancient rome saw their cat lounging on the dining pillows and commented “he thinks himself to be the senator claudius 🤣”

[library-seraph]

The first attested cat in Japan was given to a young 9th century emperor and his diary about it includes such gems as 'I affixed a bow about its neck, but it did not remain for long.", "The color of the fur is peerless. None could find the words to describe it, although one said it was reminiscent of the deepest ink.", "When it lies down, it curls in a circle like a coin. You cannot see its feet. It’s as if it were circular Bi disk." and "I am convinced it is superior to all other cats.” Basically posting about how his void is the best little void and so good at getting really round

[not-quitenormal]

Rage. In my heart. All-consuming. FUCK AI.

[neveragainfools]

For those who don't know, this piece is titled 'Unfinished Painting', by Keith Haring. He painted it about a year before his death of AIDs. I believe he actually finished other pieces between this one and his death. He left the majority of the canvas blank to represent his life and art career cut short due to HIV/AIDs. This was a deliberate choice and commentary about all that we lose (both personally and culturally) by ignoring the AIDs crisis at the time (1989). He was devastated he didn't have time to make more art. 'Finishing' Unfinished Painting is straight up spitting on Haring's grave and shows no understanding to the meaning behind the art. The AI interpretation doesn't even follow his extremely recognizable shape language and symbols. This is why people are angry about AI art. All commerce images and no meaning or humanity

[mmhhch]

human mind is truly needed for a true art, as

this is a masterful ragebait post

also many human minds needed to fall for it

[vaspider]

Satire which is indistinguishable from that which it intends to satirize is shitty satire.

If the "ragebait" post is indeed intentional ragebait and not just another instance of AI dipshittery, it's not "masterful," it's just... shitty. In order to be understood as satirizing completionist slop, it has to be able to be distinguished from it.

This is just... bad. Hope that helps! :)

[darthwoodrack]

The original ‘We’ve invented the Torment Nexus from the famous novel Don’t Invent the Torment Nexus’ joke wasn’t punctuated by the poster actually inventing the Torment Nexus, the joke ended on the obviously satirical punchline.

In this case, it doesn’t matter if the original poster did or didn’t understand how outrageously fucking disrespectful it would be to ‘finish’ Unfinished Painting with AI, because regardless of their knowledge, and to all appearances, they have literally done so.

You can’t claim to be satirizing cannabalism while munching on somebody’s severed calf. If they wanted to make the joke, it should have stopped at ‘With the power of AI, we can even complete works such as Unfinished Painting by Keith Harring!’

Even that would likely be an irresponsible joke to make towards general audience due to the fact that most AI bros, upon reading it, wouldn’t take a second to do some research and figure out why trying to complete the work with AI is worthy of mockery, they’d just respond with ‘@Grok generate a completed version of Unfinished Painting by Keith Harring’ or some shit.

Also, I’m damn near sure that the post with the ‘finished’ painting is AI anyways, so any interpretation as satire falls dramatically flat regardless.

[theconcealedweapon]

You wish to a genie for a money tree and he grants your wish. The money tree gives you $1 every second.

In just 3-5 days, you can buy a house with cash. That's just a few days to buy something the average person spends decades paying for, and something many people will never be able to afford in this lifetime.

I make $40 per hour working typical full time hours as a programmer. I'm considered one of the well off ones. My salary for an entire year is still less than what your money tree gives you in a day.

Clearly, the money produced from your money tree is astronomically large.

But in order for your money tree to make you as rich as Elon Musk, it would take 30,000 years.

It's nowhere near possible for someone to earn that much money.

[thestuffedalligator]

I’m going to level with you. I have listened to The Devil Went Down to Georgia for most of my life. We were a country music household, this was a staple of my childhood along with Johnny Cash, Garth Brooks, and that one Chipmunks country album.

I have no idea what “Fire on the mountain run boys run/The Devil's in the house of the rising sun/Chicken in the bread pan picking out dough/Granny does your dog bite no child no” means and at this point I’m too scared to ask.

[dementian]

For once I can be of assistance.

Each of the lyrics comes from an old-time hickory song for fiddles, and is a lyric from that corresponding song.

"Fire on the Mountain" --> "Fire on the Mountain, run boys run"

Fire On The Mountain - Fiddle Player POV

"The House of the Rising Sun" --> "The Devil's in the house of the rising sun"

House of the Rising Sun

"Ida Red" --> "Chicken in the bread pan peckin' out dough"

Ida Red - Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys

"Granny Will Your Dog Bite" --> "Granny does your dog bite? 'No child, no'."

FTC #149 Granny Will Your Dog Bite

And for your furthered education, The Mountain Whipporwill.

Mountain Whippoorwill (aka How Hillbilly Jim Won the Great Fiddler's Prize)

[impossiblepackage]

this is the key part of the song, that a lot of people miss. people have this misconception that the contest between Johnny and The Devil is about who is the better fiddle player. but it isn't. its about who is the better fiddler.

in a time before things like radios and record players, every time you heard music was because there was somebody in the room with you playing an instrument. and many, many, many social events involved dancing, which requires music. so, if you're planning any kind of gathering in the american south or appalachia, you need to find a fiddler. and the fiddler's job is to play music that everybody knows and likes and can dance to.

the mistake The Devil makes in his bet with Johnny is that he misinterprets the contest as being about technical ability, so he has this big flashy song. he plays fast and impressively with a band of demons playing unfamiliar instruments in unfamiliar rhythms. he's definitely more skilled at playing than Johnny, and thinks he has it in the bag.

but Johnny wins because the contest is about being the best fiddler. the song uses these lines mentioned above as a shorthand for saying that Johnny is playing these songs. Johnny launches into a set of the most popular songs, played well, and that's what gives him his big win. A good fiddler knows all the hits, and can read the room to know what to play next. The Devil loses because he completely fails to read the room, and doesn't know the right songs.