#paris rambles

[roseribboned]

Just confirmed that I am indeed seeing dnp in January I CANNOT CONTAIN MYSELF!!!!

found footage of me in the early hours of the morning:

my inner child is going berserk

[hopelessly-ever-after]

WHY GIVE ZEE A SHIRT TO WEAR IF HE IS ONLY GOING TO BUTTON TWO BUTTONS? WHY? WHYYY?

[parakaryote]

Fact 1: The field of linguistics has seen many attempts to link different language families with... often dubious reasoning.

Fact 2: Both Japanese and some Slavic languages have the word "on(n)a" relating to femininity ("woman" and "she" respectively), and the negating "nai" sounds kind of like "no" / "nein" / “n’est” / etc.

The conclusion: Someone out there has probably tried to pitch Japano-Indo-European based on the above.

Funnily enough, the Tambora word for "woman" was "óna-yit", so... is anyone up to argue for Tambora-Japano-Indo-European?

[parakaryote]

A few weeks ago, a local grocery store started stocking cereal with very obviously AI-generated box images. Full on pseudo-Pixar style, birds with scales instead of feathers and teeth melting into gums and shit.

Looked up the brand. Literally couldn’t find any pictures of the AI boxes online, only (I’m guessing) earlier versions with human-made drawings.

Are they ashamed to put it on their site 🤔

[parakaryote]

There are no easy fixes in this world...

So like. Many kids have abusive / bigoted parents. If they were to oversee their kids' Internet activity, they could easily prevent them from seeking resources on abuse, or sexuality, or gender, or disability, or... you get the idea. So saying “parents should just supervise their kids online” is not a universal solution.

But age verification laws are MUCH worse ideas on a grand scale, and the people pushing these laws also deem the aforementioned topics “not kid-friendly”. Without those laws, the kid could look up abuse or topics relating to marginalized identities at school / the library / a friend or other relative’s place, even if their parents wouldn’t allow it. With those laws, they can’t do it anywhere.

Plus, right-wing governments considering those topics “adult” / “obscene” complicates trying to make dedicated child-friendly spaces in the current world, because if you make one which allows discussion of abuse / queerness / etc. you’ll probably get attacked.

Basically the whole system needs to go.

[parakaryote]

Sometimes I think about the “lines” of what is considered “a disability” as opposed to just “a difference”.

Prime example: Synesthesia generally isn’t considered a disability. There’s some evidence suggesting that most (all?) people have it to some extent, with stuff like the Bouba-Kiki effect. Even the “more involved” projective type usually doesn’t cause any real issues, neither internally nor socially. So I agree that it doesn’t make a ton of sense to consider it a disability…

Except I’ve heard it CAN be disabling in certain cases. I can’t find it now, but years and years ago I read a magazine article talking about a girl who needed accommodations for her synesthesia at school because certain colours / patterns triggered physical pain for her. From what I remember, the point of the article was “there should be more awareness of synesthesia, and a lot of kids (article was child-centric) could potentially benefit from accommodations for it”.

So there’s a trait, a neurological condition, that can sometimes be a disability and sometimes not.

It’s interesting to think about.

[parakaryote]

I’m a little upset that the -punk suffix has, in a lot of cases, basically been redefined as “the setting of this genre has a specific technological level / aesthetic” instead of the original meaning from cyberpunk. That is, “this takes place in a dystopia enabled by the ruling class’ use of this technology, but the protagonists find ways to subvert that”.

Actually punk steampunk and such definitely exists, but if the story is just set in a world with that tech / aesthetic without any real punk themes, I feel there should be another term for that.

I had the thought that -technic could be used for tech-centric “-punk” aesthetics instead (ex. “clocktechnic”). I’m not sure what the equivalent would be for terms like desertpunk and oceanpunk, though.

(I’ve heard of “cyberprep” being used for “cyberpunk aesthetic but in a utopia / not a dystopia”, but… the -prep suffix just sounds silly, I’m sorry.)

[parakaryote]

Something I’ve noticed about conspiracy theorist types is that they hear an out-of-context snippet of something that seems to validate their beliefs and latch on to it, completely ignoring the full context because something something PROPAGANDA… even though that “propaganda” context is where they plucked their “evidence” from in the first place.

Example:

Anti-vaxxers: This study says polysorbate 80 can help substances cross the blood-brain barrier, polysorbate 80 is in a lot of vaccines, therefore vaccines are poisoning your brain! Scientifically proven!

What the study actually says: If polysorbate 80 is used to coat the surface of an intravenously-injected nanoparticle, it helps the nanoparticle and its contents get across the blood-brain barrier.

How this is relevant to vaccines: It isn’t. Almost all vaccines containing polysorbate 80 use it as an emulsifier for the liquid, except for one that uses tiny pure particles of polysorbate as a base on which to arrange viral proteins — the opposite of the nanoparticle-coating process described above.

On top of that, vaccines aren’t intravenous in the first place. If one is accidentally injected into a vein, the immune system quickly destroys it.

Anti-vaxxers if you try to explain any of this to them: Propaganda! Big words! I’m not reading all of that 😆🤣😜

What do you even call this phenomenon? It goes beyond “confirmation bias” and into “the things I personally (think that I) understand are the fullest possible extent of the truth, there is nothing in this world that I cannot understand”.