A Door on Other Time

Title is from Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories". Handle means "storyteller" in Nahuatl. This'll mostly be about pop culture, linguistics, philosophy, history, and other things that interest me, but also about writing.

[tlaquetzqui]

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

I heard someone say the other day that most people's brains don't separate information into "true" and "false" but rather "us" and "them": will the people of my tribe approve of this? Then it's true. Will the people of my tribe disapprove and cast me out for expressing it? Then it's false.

[simon-newman]

I watched a detailed documentary on this a couple of years ago but it talked more about sect mentality and religious dogmas.

This is why I say that politics replaced religion for a lot of people.

[feminismisstillahatemovement]

Marxism is a secular religion.

[generallemarc]

And sometimes people will see it and oppose actual efforts to alleviate poverty because they "sound Marxist", the main problem being that Marxism is fucking lying about everything it claims to want. But people who can't get that end up going down the Ayn Rand pipeline, at the end of which lies her entire ideology based around why altruism as a concept is a bad thing because Marxism says we should help other people and if they say it it can't be true.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

I see a lot more far-leftists claiming right wingers do that than actual right-wingers doing that. Of course, that's ironic when so many also want to take the "credit" for any government program that helps people.

[tlaquetzqui]

That just means you don’t know any Objectivists, because they absolutely do believe that.

[promptcalender]

Wedding Ring Alternatives

For characters who may not want to wear rings, or a fantasy culture with different customs!

ankle bracelets or cuffs

blood oaths

charm bracelets, which you add onto with each relationship milestone (10/20/… years, kids, grandparents, …)

combining their families’s crests into a new symbol, which is engraved on all important possessions

custom weapons

exchanging each other’s favored weapon

head bands

lighting an eternal fire which shall not die until their love does

magical bonds / oaths

matching tattoos, either somewhere visible to show off, or hidden because of the intimate nature

necklaces without a clasp, that would have to be cut off to be taken off

pieces of armor

planting a tree / flowers in the garden of their new home

sacrificial and ritualistic scarring / branding

temporary ink marks which will fade if the work to upkeep them is not consistently put in

[Prompt Calender: February 3rd, National Wedding Ring Day]

[tlaquetzqui]

From real cultures you have covering your face or hair (common throughout the Mediterranean and North Africa) and putting your hair up or down (common among Native Americans). For that last one, there’s a Hopi legend where a girl’s father yanks her hair out of its “squash blossoms”—giant Princess Leia rolls that unmarried women wore—when he finds out she’s pregnant. (Since, in Hopi society, women traditionally own the property, the Western equivalent would be a man’s mother getting mad at him when she finds out his girlfriend is pregnant.)

[coldboreshooter]

[tlaquetzqui]

Except that WW2 era British submachine gun that would empty itself out on full-auto if you dropped it.

[yourtoradorasextendedwarranty]

...........Are you on Crack?

Also the Americans didn't "Capture" anyone to turn into slaves. YOUR people did though Abdul. And they STILL DO.

[tlaquetzqui]

Muslims don’t even get to talk like this about Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan.

[icara-mack]

I bitched to my family for like an hour about Nolan’s odyssey and I wanted to put a point out here that I’ve seen a lot of people sort of skipping. I’ve studied (Kline’s translation) the odyssey for a good 2 years and a lot of the themes boil down to the effects of hospitality and Xenia. (as well as the journey Odysseus undergoes himself and the divine involvement… which is a whole other thing)

when I saw the film, I was immensely frustrated with the portrayal and poor explanation of “Zeus’ law” (essentially westernised Xenia) despite it being seemingly very narratively important to Nolan’s version, and the exclusion of so many of the most important scenes or events in the odyssey where Xenia was key throughout the film. Odysseus’ flaws and misinterpretation of Xenia was completely ignored & the movie as a whole failed to get the point across to me (an angry classicist)

Idk man if you’re going to completely recharacterise odysseus and remove his agency and shorten and his journey as well as cut one of the (2) main themes, it kinda feels like you should make sure the one thing you keep from the text is accurate and effectively portrayed. Cutting the exchange of guest gifts and the Phaeacian hospitality and the sparing of maron and (specific) servants (and ignoring aeolia but keeping Circe?). I feel like so much was missed out and I was just disappointed the whole movie. There’s so much more I could speak about (an hour’s worth, apparently) but I am not typing up a novel today . Lmao

[retiredtsgt]

[tlaquetzqui]

…Because you can’t forcibly convert Muslims to Islam?

[retiredtsgt]

[mist-the-wannabe-linguist]

Levels of understanding other slavic languages

oh we also have X and it means the same!

that looks like X but misspelled

that's just the archaic variant of X

this sounds a lot like Y from another slavic language I know which means X in mine so this almost 100% also means X

this word is completely different but I can kinda tell the meaning from the morphology

what

okay right now I'm gonna have to dissect the entirety of this language's history to figure out how the FUCK did y'all get to the point of calling X that and not something more normal

I wanted to ask for X and accidentally called someone a whore

[mist-the-wannabe-linguist]

I don't even have to look at the blog and I just know this is from a Pole about Czechs

suffering

[byrons]

KAKAOVY CHLEBICEK???!!!???

[mist-the-wannabe-linguist]

hissing growling scratching you etc etc

[mist-the-wannabe-linguist]

for example

(Polish: are you looking for a squirrel?, Slovak: excuse me, he is doing what to the squirrel?)

(also "hladna pića" means "cold drinks" in Croatian. means "hungry cunt" in Slovak and Czech)

("you're weird" in Czech is the same as "you're amazing" in Croatian, while "you're amazing" in Czech is the same as "you're terrible" in Croatian)

[poetka]

My favourite recent-ish example of #8:

[visloka]

[czto-nebud-blog]

Don't forget this:

And of course pomoć (help) vs pomoč (ordering you to piss on something)

[czto-nebud-blog]

Also remembered this shop from my trip to Croatia (piko means meth in czech and slovak)

[kaazdalena]

przepraszam w CZYM ta restauracja????

[axolotl-anemonoides]

This reminds me of that time my (Czech) family went to Poland for my uncle's wedding (because my aunt - his wife - is Polish and they decided to get married in Poland).

The wedding afterparty was in full swing, everyone was drinking and partying.... and an elderly Polish lady approached my two aunts (who were also drinking a lot and partying hard) and commented something along the lines of "jesteście odporne". Which in Polish means "you're resilient" (as in they're handling the alcohol well) but in Czech it means "you're disgusting".

It took my aunts a bit to remember that it means something different in Polish. 😅

[mist-the-wannabe-linguist]

another beautiful case of n.8 from @someidioticurl

Czech vision: ah yes an emergency button to press in case of emergency

Polish vision:

[ta-bajna-cerna-okybaca]

Oh, I have a few!

'pozor' in Czech means 'watch out!', but means 'shame' in Russian

droga in czech means drug, in polish it means road

záchod in czech means toilet, zachód in polish means 'west'

odchod 'to depart' in Czech means very specifically 'to depart by foot', while in Slovak it has a bit wider meaning, and buses and trains also combine with 'odchod'. To a Czech speaker this gives the funny implication that departing trains grow legs and walk out of the train station

Croatian 'mrdati' = to wiggle, means 'to have sex' in Czech

'Čerstvý, voňavý chléb' is Czech for 'fresh, nicely smelling bread'. In means the opposite in some slavic languages 'stale, stinky bread'. This kind of 'good meaning in one but bad meaning in other' duality happens surprisingly often actually, see also úžas and odporný above

otrok in Czech means 'slave' but in Slovenian and perhaps other South slavic languages it means 'child'. Very funny when combined with bazaar, turns a perfectly fine baby bazar into a slave bazaar

My friend has a fun sentence from Slovenian - "Hitri otroci kuhali jed na Dunaji". Literally none of the words here mean what a Czech thinks they mean. No not even Dunaj. Czechs read it as 'smart slaves were disemboweling poison by the Donau river', original Slovenian meaning is 'fast children were cooking food in Vienna'

Edit: wait one more. "srpanj" in Croatian means July, "srpen" in Czech means August. Listopad in Croatian means 'October', in Czech means 'November'. rujan in Croatian means 'September', říjen in Czech means 'October'. kwiecień in Polish means 'April', kviteń in Ukrainian also means 'April', květen in Czech means 'May'. Months are fucked up.

[tlaquetzqui]

The calendar ones are because they derive from the seasons and what you do in them, and, like, one of the major Serbo-Croatian cities is known by an Italian name in many other languages, while Czechs were in the same country as Austria and much of Germany, for a reason.

[hustlerose]

idk much about jojos bizarre adventure but what i DO know is that there’s a character named r.e.o. speedwagon like the fucking 70s rock band and everyone just thinks that’s fine 

[ndiecity-deactivated20241101]

reading this is like seeing someone discover pokemon for the first time but they’re like “there’s a lizard that breathes fire? what the hell”

[carlosmarcosapproved]

[generallemarc]

No, I was told it was bad by the numerous historical accounts of mass murder and totalitarian autocracy. It failed, it lost the Cold War, and now Europe is free. Democracy and the will of the people triumphed over one-party dictatorships from Prague to Warsaw. Get over it.

[generallemarc]

#democratic socialism is more what we should adopt

There's no such thing. Socialism by its nature is autocratic, either you do what you're told or you're brutally reminded why you should've complied. "Democratic socialism" only ever refers to the impossibility of squaring the circle of what socialism says it wants vs what always happens, political movements that are genuinely socialistic but lie about what they want and claim to support democracy, or political movements that are genuinely democratic but are confused as to what words mean and claim to support socialism. The latter are social democrats who're just further to the left than normal 99% of the time, Bernie Sanders is a pretty good example.

[siryouarebeingmocked]

I wonder how many anti-communist people were also anti-slavery or even pro-black civil rights activists?

Google says Fredrick Douglass was strongly opposed to early socialism. And "(pro-civil rights) Politicians like Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner, were free-market capitalists".

Also, the early NAACP rejected communists (PDF).

Red-Baiting - SNCC Digital Gateway

By the time SNCC came into existence, “Red-baiting," shorthand for this extremely vicious form of anti-Communism, had devastated many Black

And MLK Jr. himself opposed it.

[tlaquetzqui]

As a mere historic fact, the party of segregation and the party of opposition to anticommunism are the same party. The Democrats who ended segregation—the Kennedys—were only in the Democrats in the first place because the New England GOP was WASPs only. John and Robert both clerked for Joe McCarthy (who was a Republican because the Wisconsin GOP didn’t have that issue), for a reason.

[jardinssteve]

[stupittmoran]

So was his dad.

[rockyp77mk3]

The false assumption of intellectual superiority on the part of the left is always amusing.

[tlaquetzqui]

Ironically Paul Sr.’s fanboys used to be rightly mocked for their insistence on saying “Dr. Ron Paul” as if an MD isn’t a layman on all other subjects. (Ron Paul’s purely reactive national defense policy was refuted by the three words “zerg rush kekeke”, and “would know why that doesn’t work if he had just played Starcraft” is no way to live.)

[baygeethefirst]

[colonelk2]

Does this not violate seperation of church and state?

[baygeethefirst]

Yes but it's totally cool when Muslims do it

[tlaquetzqui]

Mosque and to a lesser extent synagogue have been treated as something completely different for generations.

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

Have you seen Dances with Wolves (1990)?

Yes

No

Haven’t even heard of this movie

Remaining time: 2 days 14 hours

[Note: This poll is a re-do of an older poll, as the original poll for it received less than 1,500 votes.]

[tlaquetzqui]

The language consultant they used was a woman, and apparently they asked her how she would say things rather than how the characters would. Siouan languages have men and women speak in two different registers (think watashi desu vs. ore da ze in Japanese), so basically to Lakota speakers all these badass warriors are talking falsetto.

[mossadspypigeon]

[tlaquetzqui]

One of the things the Israelis did in fact do is settle places that the Arabs couldn’t make livable. So no they are settlers.

And if a Jewish person believes “settler” has an inherently negative connotation, they have no right to complain that their history is being lied about, since they apparently endorse lying about other people’s history.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]