Just some Stuff

Name: Ven, She/her.  GM

[dimension20official]

“You absolute…you absolute motherfucker.”

[prescription-cactus]

good morning God has let me live another day and I’m about to make it everybody’s problem

[nativenews]

[ms-demeanor]

I was granted a restraining order after a former friend who had been stalking me for months attacked me and my partner and tried to drive his car into us at the local hacker meetup because he was convinced that my partner had brainwashed me and “stolen” me from him.

I’d tried to report him to a different PD because he was coming into my workplace every day to stare at me and when my manager banned him he started staring from the sidewalk and the police were like “sorry, can’t do anything about it” and when we called the LAPD to report the assault at the hacker meetup they didn’t want to talk to me because I wasn’t involved since he’d only physically assaulted my partner.

After that dude drove his car into another friend’s house I went to my college campus police department to report the fact that this violent dude had been following me and had attacked me and they asked me why I’d been leading him on before pointing me at the campus “Women’s Violence Prevention” office, where a social worker helped me fill out the paperwork and drove me to a courthouse where I was granted a temporary restraining order. I knew what mental health facility he was 5150d in so I thought it would be a simple matter to have the Sheriff’s department serve it; this was pretty important because I knew that he was in possession of multiple firearms at his home.

The Sheriff’s department was like “okay we’ll take it over to him in like two months” and I was like “this is a temporary because the court date is set for two weeks” and they were like “not my problem, there’s a servitor’s office next door and it’s like $200 to have one of them take it over, maybe they’ll give you a discount because you know exactly where he is.”

So I had to ask a mutual acquaintance who knew us both through the hacker scene if he would serve the TRO. So basically this self-employed concrete worker and a Canadian social worker who retired two days after helping me with the paperwork did more to protect me and my friends than four different LEO groups and by the time the full restraining order was granted I was completely aware that it was useless.

In the three years that it was active I never called the cops about him but for those three years every time I got pulled over it took an extra twenty minutes to get away because they always asked “Why is your license returning a restraining order” and they always called back to dispatch to “check my story” before giving me my driver’s license back.

[ms-demeanor]

You know what ended up getting that guy to leave me (and my partner, and the other people in the scene he’d been harassing) alone? The dude whose house he drove into sued the living shit out of him for damages and his parents wanted to settle out of court so my buddy made part of the settlement be that he couldn’t go anywhere near anyone who’d gotten a restraining order against him.

The only thing the cops did in that whole fucking saga was ignore people who were concerned that this guy was dangerous and stand in the wreckage of his car on my friend’s lawn waiting for an ambulance to show up to take Honda Civic McStalkerson to the hospital.

(Also: my friend’s house is made of reinforced concrete, which is the only reason he wasn’t able to drive into my friend’s bedroom at 5am - he tried to ram it and couldn’t break through so he pulled around the corner, rammed the garage, pulled back, rammed it again, then tried to drive into the living room window. Cops showed up about 15 minutes later in spite of the police station being about half a block away from my buddy’s house)

You know why I’m bringing this up on a DV post? Because every cop who spoke to every AFAB person in this case both assumed that we’d dated this guy in the past and also refused to talk to us about his history of following us and leaving terrifying voicemails on our phones. It was completely surreal to be asked “so when did you date? If you didn’t date why did you lead him on? If you didn’t lead him on why is he doing this to you, that doesn’t make any sense; why did he think you were dating?” when reporting someone who was at the time claiming that we were sending coded messages to him through television commercials.

[alrightzuko]

[mysharona1987]

[ralfmaximus]

My dad was a straight-ticket Democrat, gave money to the ACLU, and left the Catholic church when his local parish prioritized a new, bigger church over hungry parishioners. He was VERY liberal. 

He voted for Al Gore in 2000.

In 2004 (when he was 75yo) an injury forced him to spend time at an assisted living facility for rehab. The TVs there were all tuned to Fox News.

All it took was six months.

Upon his release that’s all he watched. He obsessed over Fox. Became convinced liberals were out to destroy HIS America.

From 2004 onwards I watched my liberal dad – the guy who imbued me with my beliefs and values – decline into a ranting, angry, hateful person. 

He almost died alone because I told him I simply could NOT stand to hear any more about how Obama was ruining the country. He relented, and I said goodbye to him in 2011 at his hospice, only because we agreed not to discuss “politics”.

Fox News is pure 100% brainwashing. I’ve seen it up close, and it is evil.

[abubblingcandle]

Rewatching Escape from Bloodkeep Ep 1 and Sohkbarr’s introduction is I think one of the most dry comedic, D&D accurate things Dimension 20 has done. 

[ventusregina]

The faces of all the women in these pictures, compared to the faces of all the men in these pictures def says something

[shadow27]

Chewbacca… his arms open.

[mscottwrites]

This is some NEXT LEVEL nerd-ing and I nearly cried reading it.

[bass-borot]

I don’t get it

[bass-borot]

Please explain ;_;

[magicalgirlmindcrank]

There is a star trek TNG episode where Picard encounters a race that doesn’t speak in actual structured sentences but conveys ideas through story parralels. The ones referenced here are “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” - cooperation, “Shaka, when the walls fell” - failure and Temba, his arms wide/open" - signifying a gift.

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Tamarian_language

[wariowaretrans]

nice

[flavoracle]

OK, but here’s what’s awesome/hilarious about this.

The whole point about why communicating with the Tamarians was so frustrating was because all of their communication was contextual. The problem wasn’t that Picard couldn’t understand what words they were saying (the universal translator worked fine) the problem was that he didn’t understand what THOSE WORDS TOGETHER HAD TO DO WITH ANYTHING.

Why is this hilarious/fascinating to me? Because this is essentially what people are doing today with memes. They are posting pictures and writing sentences THAT MAKE NO SENSE WITHOUT PRIOR CONTEXT.

If Picard beamed down right now, and you told him that Data is a cinnamon roll… you are a Tamarian.

[emptymanuscript]

Reblogging because A) YES! and B) That commentary. It’s so true, it’s scary. 

I also just want more. ^_^

[technologistrevolution]

Actually, this isn’t something just present in memes but it seems to be a foundation of human language and partly why a universal translator could never work (or if it somehow did, it should be programmable to handle Tamarian). It’s just that most metaphors in language are so accepted or necessary to fluency that we don’t really notice them (or they seem to be a common human perspective… which aliens don’t necessarily have to share).

It is why when speaking German I have to remember it is, “How much Clock is it?” and not “What time is it?”. The metaphor in English seems to be that moments are separate entities/temporal locations that we visit through the day so we need to determine what one we are visiting now. Whereas in German, leaving aside the fact the “clock” can clearly be a stand-in metaphor for “time” the overall metaphor there seems to be that moments in time are accumulative entities that we collect through the day and we need to determine how much we’ve collected. 

And speaking of time, human languages tend towards two metaphors, either favouring one or the other or happily indulging in both… either time is a stationary path which the focus moves along (”… as we’re traveling into the month February…”) or time is a river the flows past a stationary focus (”his birthday is rapidly approaching”). Technically those are metaphors to handle an abstract concept, time could just as easily be metaphorically an object that “appears” rather than “approaches” or a location you “turn towards” instead of “move into”… and I don’t know if any human language allows you to metaphorically be a man in a boat traveling up a river (or what that would look like/imply) but it is a possibility (especially if you are considering an alien perspective on time).

Leaving behind time, some emotions are metaphorically a direction. Happy is up, sometimes way up ‘til you’re “on Cloud 9″ (and there’s no obvious reason for it to be the 9th cloud but you accept it) and on the opposite end of that spectrum sadness is down (in the dumps) when it isn’t busy being a colour (blue). And naturally you yourself are a container for your emotions, or more specifically your heart is (at least in English, in Indonesian it’s your liver) and the container can be put under pressure until it is “bursting with joy” or it “explodes in anger”.

And then there are true idioms which actually do reference historic events (which is what I assume is happening in Tamarian’s “Shaka, when the walls fell”) like “Read The Riot Act” or if you “heard it through the grapevine” your people had a mess of telegraph wires at some point and grapevines to compare them to. And “apple of one’s eye” is weird for being a double metaphor… the pupil was once believed to be a solid object metaphorically called an “apple” but then, after Shakespeare popularized the phrase in reference to a person in terms of affection, and science let us know the pupil is not apple-like at all, it came to exclusively mean “this person is very dear to me” and we all forgot why apples were involved in the first place.

Of course, I am far from a linguistic expert so you should take this all “with a grain of salt” ;)

[allthingslinguistic]

Yes, and there’s even an Official Academic name for this: intertextuality! Aka “texts referring to other texts” – whether those texts are song lyrics, proverbs, historical references, movie quotes, clichés, memes, metaphors, in-jokes, parody, fanfic, and so on. 

It doesn’t even have to be as explicit as an idiom or metaphor: even a turn of phrase will do. For example, saying something “is a truth universally acknowledged” invokes Pride and Prejudice, or “a thing of beauty and a joy forever” invokes Keats (although for me it invokes Mary Poppins, because obviously as a kid I watched that movie long before I’d ever heard of Keats), or “Strange women lying in rivers distributing words” invokes Monty Python. Intertexuality is one of the reasons people study literary works within the context of what other literary works were important at that place and time, so as to catch the intertextual references that the author may be making. 

[dvandom]

Obi-Wan and Skywalker at Mustafar.

[should-be-sleeping]

☹

[garrettauthor]

Yoda, his head bowed.

[kyraneko]

Imagine saying “keep your temper” in an emotionally-charged moment and the “universal” translator decides that the closest thing to it is “retain the color of your sword.” Actually, that would work AMAZINGLY for a Star Wars canon in which Dark Side users “bleed” their lightsabers, hurting them to change their color to red, but for everyone else … wait a sec, that STILL works perfectly because “keep it the color that it is” can mean “don’t turn it blood-colored.”

But honestly, imagine the shenanigans that could be had in a Star Trek remake if the universal translators are regularly tripping over abstractions, contexts, and metaphors.

[lyricwritesprose]

As someone who has written a story with a universal translator, I firmly maintain that the best way to write one is to google translate your phrase to Japanese, and translate that to Hebrew, and then translate the resulting hash back into English.

This does two things.  First, it makes the alien’s dialogue borderline incomprehensible, such that your characters have to really work at communication.  Second, you’ll find that your characters start to speak in a really stilted way, with fairly simple grammar and as few metaphors as they can get away with, to avoid giving the damn translator a case of the hiccups.  (Does it work?  No.  But they try.)

Honestly if universal translators were a thing, then interpreting the garbage they spat out would be a job in itself.

[tparadox]

My wife’s first language is Spanish, and while a significant reason we don’t use translation software as much as we did when we first met is because we’ve learned a lot of each other’s languages, especially her, she also understand my English better than anyone else’s because when I’m speaking to her, not only do I speak slowly and simply for her, I’ve also learned a lot of Spanish idiomatic constructions and I’ll use those even if I’m speaking English (ex: “making exercise” instead of “exercising”). And then when we do use translation, I’ve also learned a lot of the things the translator is weak on and speak clearly around them.

[girlbossfranziskavonkarma]

fondant will be like hey is anyone gonna ruin this cake and then not wait for an answer

[jvlianbashir]

just watched a man ice skate a whole routine to cotton eye joe while wearing denim overalls. ladies, i may be in love.

[jvlianbashir]

this shit is so cute!!! he looks like he’s having a great time!!

[lordjenjen]

Okay, but I love this because he very much is doing an skating routine that is beautiful and elegant, but also made it look like that was very much the middle of a good ol fashion barn hoedown!

[rinrinp42]

He did the cotton eye joe dance in that routine!

[retropopcult]

Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder, Blazing Saddles (1974)

[brosefvondudehomie-deactivated2]

That has to be the most genuine smile in cinema history

[coldpapernightmare]

thats because the morons line was an ad-lib so the smile really is genuine cause hes cracking 

[nocontextgoodplace]

[morganoperandi]

I’m a cis-gender man which basically means that, when I was born, the doctor went “It’s a boy!” and when I was old enough to understand I agreed with him.

The thing is, I don’t know why I feel like a man.  I was teased and bullied for it a lot when I was little.  I’ve never had stereotypically American male interests.  I never cared about sports or cars or guns.  I was more interested in music and cooking and the arts.  I’ve always been emotionally in tune and sensitive, even when I did my best to suppress my emotions to survive a childhood of abuse from other children.

It’s not physical either.  I don’t feel like a man because I have a penis or a beard.  If you put my brain in a robot body or any other body, my essence would still feel male (I assume).  I literally can’t imagine what being any other gender would feel like, since I feel so acutely male.

I think that’s why the concept of being transgender always made sense to me.  I’m a man.  I don’t have any bloody clue why I feel like a man, but I don’t feel that it’s tied to my body or my interests or the way that I’ve been treated.  I feel like a man because of something beyond that.  Something ephemeral.  So, why couldn’t others feel the same?  Why couldn’t a person who’s been misidentified as a girl feel like a boy for the exact same nebulous reasons that I do?

And, since gender really doesn’t make any sense to me anyway, why couldn’t there also be people who feel as if they don’t have one?  Or who flow across genders like a ship on a map?

Are there people out there whose sense of their own gender is inseparable from their physical form?  If you put those people into robot bodies or, simply, other physically different bodies, would their gender identity also swap?  If so, why?  Are they actually more lost in their gender identity than I am and they need to hone in on the physical in order to anchor themselves?

Why do people feel like they are the gender that they are?

[sir-renaissance]

This is very soul filling to read. Thank you

[5typesoftrash]

My grandfather, who had a difficult time coming to terms with it when I came out, has been working very hard to understand me and my experience. About 5 weeks ago, he asked me, almost offhand, “why are you so sure that you’re a man?”

And I replied, “well, I could ask you the same thing.” And I moved on, continued, tried to explain why I feel the way that I do, but I don’t think he heard any of those things that I said afterward. 

Because six days later, we talked about it again, and this is what he told me: 

“I couldn’t stop thinking about what you said last week. Because all my life I identified it as ‘these are the parts that I have, and so I am a man’. But you’re living proof that gender is not limited to what is attached to your body, so I asked myself, why am I a man? And all I can say is ‘because I have no idea what it feels like to be anything else’. I cannot imagine what it’s like to be a woman. Or neither, or both, or any other gender. I have always been a man.”

And I replied, “that’s exactly what it feels like for me.”

So, shoutout to my cisgender grandfather, for stumbling upon the essence of being trans accidentally, with very little help from me. I love you, grandpa.

[the-cimmerians]

watching cis folks suddenly and comprehensively grasp the inessential nature of gender is always a joy

[skygenders]

“A masterpiece was created in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone today” video by Kyle Kotajarvi

[skygenders]

[chatarmatha]

I've NEVER seen him go off this hard on the internet before ...... the king shit in this bus is astronomical

[suzie-costello]

[super-wolves-blog]

REMEMBER THAT EPISODE WHERE REESE THOUGHT MALCOLM WAS GAY AND MALCOLM THOUGHT REESE WAS GAY AND THEY TALKED ABOUT IT BUT LIKE THIS I’M CRYING

[cockroach-queer]

I know I’ve reblogged this and commented before- but my favorite part is that immediately after this, Malcolm is like “so anyway I got you these” and hands Reese some pamphlets about accepting yourself as queer that he got from the guidance counselor, and Reese is like “oh, I got you these” and hands him a grocery bag full of gay porn.

[luxwing]

Before lowering my corpse into the ground for eternity I'd like to thank John Roderick and the long winters for the use of their theme song it's a departure from the album putting the days to bed.