Vulpine Amethyst @vulpineamethyst - Tumblr Blog

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please stop sending me asks regarding financial assistance; I will delete them. it's not that I don't care, it's that I don't have the spoons/energy or time to verify that they are legitimate. I'm sorry.

sentimentalslut

trying to explain to tumblr that the Middle Class in not their enemy

sentimentalslut

saw someone say that someone complaining about only having 7k in savings makes them contemplate “doing something bad”

you know that 7k covers like. one hospital visit WITH insurance, right?

sentimentalslut

“people who make six figures shouldn’t be allowed to complain —“ most people who make six figures are, these days, solidly middle class. where i live, a combined household income of $110k is *lower middle class*.

“people who can afford homes —“ are typically 400-600k in debt for them. also if “can own your own home” is your threshold for the rich you are contemplating eating, i think you are genuinely stupid

“boohoo your investments dropped, stop complaining rich boy” idk how to tell you this but. most of us have a retirement account. you should probably open one

dirt-mann

vulpineamethyst

when my dad and stepmother died in 2019, they owned their home—they'd bought the house for $90k in the late 90s, and were still paying it off 20 years later.

she was 73 and had nearly $250k in her IRA.

he was 62 and had only a couple hundred in his savings account.

I got $5,000 from his estate, because the coroner couldn't conclusively prove she'd predeceased him and that $5k was selling the house for $110k 'as is' and splitting the proceeds between their estates and then between me and my siblings. (I'm leaving aside the part where neither of them had a will, despite my stepmother not wanting her kids to have anything of hers.)

most houses in the United States will not net you millions of dollars when sold. I know there's a lot of spilt digital ink about houses being an investment vehicle, but the idea was not that homeownership would make you rich, but rather that it would provide a nice nest egg when you retired so that you didn't have to work until your dying day.

and these days you need to have saved up $2 million or more, somehow, to live comfortably for 20-30 years without a job, even with Social Security, even with a pension (assuming you even have one).

wealth is not having to worry about how you're going to pay for anything. it's people earning seven figures a year. it's being able to deal with emergencies without your life imploding. it's being able to start a dozen businesses that fail before the thirteenth pays for all.

hypokeimena

Fair and understandable, but consider: perhaps Rocky increased by 6 rather than rounded to the nearest round base 6 number because his people are extremely good at math, and perhaps therefore culturally don't round as much because adding more numbers than necessary is trivial ☝️

i mean sure except for how the book explicitly states that eridians (or at least rocky) preferentially round off in base six specifically for rough estimates. which is the specific thing that pissed me off. like i'm not mad because he did that out of nowhere i'm mad because andy weir made a statement about how rocky conceptualizes numbers around guesstimating and then just didn't really commit to the thing he'd already established, in a way that makes it feel like he did not actually consider what it would mean to think in very different units and try to compensate, an experience Many Many Many Humans On This Earth Have Had, and which also explicitly troubles ryan gosling (cf. his constantly mentioning that being an american and thinking in inches causes problems).

like the thing that pissed me off was in regard to what percentage of nitrogen the taumoeba could tolerate. 8.0% is what's required. i could see him rounding from 8% to a number that's nicer in base six (what my post suggests) or like.

honestly i'd assume that for stuff like taumoeba resistance specifically a species that could do math as quickly as these calculations are possible for rocky would be a percentage leeway, instead of a randomly selected hard number like 6 (adding 6 to 80 is normal, but adding 6 to 8 would be crazy). so i was doing out like okay what's 6% of 80 as a safety margin. BUT there's no way eridians use percent and i frankly did not have it in me to convert what 8% would be if you're using 60ths instead of 100ths for easier decimalization. because i already knew that the reading comprehension on any addition to that post would not be good.

hypokeimena

OKAY sorry i swear to god i'm done talking about this but it's like. i am annoyed by this moment and it seems like a little persnickety detail but it is actually a complaint on a craft level. phm is a book i don't think is particularly good but one of the things i liked about andy weir's previous book was that he was pretty good at setting a chekov's gun up and setting it off. it's a book that at least felt like it was giving the reader a chance to work it out, or even thinking of practical things that the science-focused protag might have overlooked ("the L in LCD stands for liquid; if you take a laptop into freezing temps it will freeze and stop working").

phm has bugged me specifically Because of the way rocky is treated as a primitive savant (extremely relevant to the book's questionable politics on western civilization, globalism, personal responsibility to the collective, and represents a pretty archaically sci-fi concept of first contact as a new 1492)

the fact that he was setting up interesting cultural worldbuilding ideas and then not following through on them consistently ends up demonstrating that there is a hole in this story, in the shape of the aesthetic. it's not that this is a being that doesn't understand that round numbers are easier to work with. it's that this is a being who can do any number of EXTREMELY rapid calculations (estimate, unit conversion, base ten conversion) and yet doesn't think to round off again in base ten when communicating with a species it knows cannot do rapid calculations. that's a weird funny little incongruity, that feels like it should be a hook for SOMETHING: culture clash, or personality development, or just something that should or could be carried forward until it starts pissing grace off, or whatever.

and instead when it comes up again it's just like "i add six to things by default". taking the chekov's gun off the wall and loudly announcing "this is made out of plastic! it's not even a real gun!"

l0stvegas

Some time ago (I think in 2021) I had to go see a neurologist over really scary symptoms that resembled seizures. I was a nervous wreck about what I was feeling and had barely slept all week, which seemed to be apparent to the doc’s assistant when I sat down in the exam room for questioning or whatever. Dude was pretty young and soft spoken, around my age. He was laser focused doing something on one of those tablet-laptop Surface things as I spoke, presumably writing down my symptoms.

Midway through talking about my symptoms my voice audibly started shaking as I was describing them, clearly upset.

In the middle of my monologue he turns the tablet to face me, closes whatever program he has open and the wallpaper is this fucking collage of pictures of lord farquaad from shrek, lovingly decorated. Dude just sat there placidly smiling at me until I noticed and stopped dead in the middle of a sentence. We sat there in silence like this for like a solid minute before I started wheezing laughing. Before I could even say anything else or process it he picked up the tablet and wordlessly left the room, and I just sat there dumbfounded until the doctor showed up. 10/10 doctor experience tbh

I didn’t own a cell phone at the time to get a photo so this rendition from memory is all I can provide you

snow-nose

ID: a digital drawing of a man in scrubs sitting on a wheeled stool, serenely smiling with his elbow on a rolling cart, where a tablet is flipped open to show an approximation of the Lord Farquaad screensaver. end ID

enigma-absolute

l0stvegas

Reblogging this bc it’s making rounds again

thememedaddy

teaboot

Not to be rhe ten millionth person to say “USAmerican President Donald Trump Is An Incoherent Public Speaker Whose Train Of Thought Can Be Best Described As Scat Jazz” but I just remembered that when he talks at international events it is several dozen people’s job to translate what he’s saying and what he intends to say to world leaders in real time

And I desperately wish to hear how they do it

teaboot

If anyone reading this isn’t fluent enough in English to understand the sentences that man says, please know that he has essentially mixed a number of adjectives and topics together in a hat and is pulling them out at random like a horrible children’s game

teaboot

Like that waxy jaundiced bitch will straight up be like “J'étais sur internet l'autre jour – internet, la plus grande invention américaine. Et la Chine a “internet aussi. Pas un bon internet, pas comme le mien, j'ai un internet formidable. Les gens me disent : « Donald, ton internet est génial ! » On adore l'internet de Donald. Mais la Chine… Chine, Chine, Chine… Vous savez qu'ils mangent des oiseaux ? C'est terrible. J'adore les oiseaux. La Chine mange des oiseaux. Pas comme nous. Pas comme mes oiseaux. Mais vous savez, c'est comme ça, et c'est terrible. Mais voilà ce que je vais faire : je vais sauver les oiseaux. Je vais sauver internet et sauver les oiseaux. Tous ces magnifiques oiseaux. Pour l'Amérique. Et la Chine va nous détester pour ça. Ils vont nous détester parce qu'on est les meilleurs sur oiseaux”. And people will lose their minds

angryraptor13

International translators have had this problem for A While - if they *don't* clean up what he says to sound coherent, they look like they're doing a bad job.

Explore Trump translation challenges, tips for interpreters, and 2025 strategies for accurate political translation and Trumpslation success

teaboot

oh my god

freckles-a-constellation

There was a scandal in Poland because one translator decided to translate him accurately, tone, vocabulary level and word salad tangents and all. Polish conservatives who don't speak English and previously only heard smoothed out translations that sounded coherent and used big words were up in arms about how the translator was "inserting her political agenda", "mocking him", "exaggerating", "purposefully trying to make him look bad" and "incredibly unprofessional". I listened to the translation in question. It was literally just accurate.

kimbureh

5. Sensitive and Controversial Language Trump’s speeches occasionally contain misogynistic, sexist, or inflammatory language. Japanese interpreter Tsuruta, for example, faced challenges when translating sexualized remarks, ultimately opting for standard terminology to maintain professionalism. Similarly, Chinese translator Kumiko Torikai found certain lewd expressions ethically challenging, ultimately leading to her retirement. Navigating these situations requires skillful balancing of accuracy, professionalism, and cultural sensitivity, ensuring that the translation is appropriate without distorting the original intent.

I don't know why the authors of PoliLingua act as if Trump's verbal misogyny and racism wasn't very much part of his "original intent".

it only now dawns on me that millions of people on this planet think Trump is way smarter than he is because translators have neglected to relate his violent speech accurately out of misunderstood politeness. Make the ape sound like a ape

cosmogyros

We had a mini-scandal in the German translation/interpretation community last year about exactly this – the interpreter for the inauguration got sick of Trump's incoherence and made a remark into his mic that was not intended to be heard (here's my post on it).

cosmogyros

The live-TV interpreter who said "Sag mal, wie lange wollt ihr bei dem Scheiß bleiben?!" has made a statement. I admire him hugely for not apologizing for what he said, or even technically retracting it, at any point in this statement. Instead, he takes the opportunity to make a jab at Trump's inability to put a reasonable sentence together:

Jetzt reagiert auch Dolmetscher Frank Deja, der für den Fauxpas gesorgt hatte. "Ich war überzeugt, ich hätte mich stumm geschaltet. Ich habe aber im Eifer des Gefechts die falsche Taste gedrückt. Wir haben als Dolmetscher sogenannte Räusper-Tasten, mit denen wir uns stummschalten können. Dann geht das eben nicht über den Sender – und meine Aussage sollte natürlich auch nicht über den Sender gehen", erklärt er "n-tv". Seinen Zwischenruf solle man nicht als politisches Statement deuten. "Nein, das wäre ganz verfehlt. Die politischen Inhalte sind nicht das Problem", meint Deja und fügt hinzu: "Ich dolmetsche ständig Leute, mit deren politischen Inhalten ich nicht einverstanden bin. Das Problem bei Trump war, dass er auf einmal anfing, frei zu assoziieren oder dreimal hintereinander dasselbe zu sagen. Diesen wirren Gedankensprüngen zu folgen, ist die Schwierigkeit beim Dolmetschen." Er erklärt: "Wenn ein Redner mit geordneten Gedanken redet, dann kann man, sobald der Satz angefangen hat, schon ungefähr erahnen, wie es weitergeht. Man kann auf dieser Welle weiter surfen. Aber bei Trump ist das unmöglich."

(source)

cosmogyros

I didn't think I'd have the energy to make a translation, but what the heck, I guess I will.

Background for the non-Germans: a German professional interpreter was live-interpreting the TV broadcast of the Trump inauguration when he suddenly broke off in the middle of his interpreting and said loudly, "Tell me, how long do we have to watch this shit?!"

Of course they immediately cut his mic after that, but it was too late :D

Anyway here's my rough translation of the article excerpt above:

Interpreter Frank Deja, who committed this faux pas, has now made a statement. "I could have sworn I'd muted myself. However, in the heat of the moment, it appears I pressed the wrong button. We interpreters have what's known as a 'cough cut' button on the interpreter console, which we can use to briefly mute ourselves. Then, whatever we say next doesn't get broadcasted – and obviously that sentence wasn't supposed to be broadcasted," he explained to n-tv. His exclamation is not intended to be understood as a political statement. "No, that's not it at all. The political content is not the problem," says Deja, adding, "I often interpret for people whose politics I don't agree with. The problem with Trump was that he suddenly started free-associating or saying the same thing three times in a row. Following these incoherent mental leaps is quite a challenge for an interpreter." He explains: "When a speaker presents their thoughts in an organized way, the interpreter can more or less guess where each new sentence is going as soon as it's begun. You can surf that wave. But with Trump, this is impossible."

stargazers-satellite

btw guys managing your symptoms also means apologizing for things you didn't mean to do. sometimes you do things because of your disorders that you genuinely didn't mean to do, but if it hurt someone you still have to take accountability and make up for the hurt you caused

fuckyeahreligionpigeon

wizardshark

Listen I get it but you CANNOT use "sensory nightmare" as an excuse to avoid essential things. You HAVE to find a way to make it work, such as finding effective alternatives. But you can't just avoid it.

You need to eat some vegetables in your diet or you will become a lich.

You have to wear a life jacket or you will literally drown and die.

You need to be able to exist in public spaces with children.

You have to find a way.

wizardshark

good LORD the piss is flying all over the place in that comment section! If you're poor do NOT leave your house you're definitely gonna get caught in the crossfire.

fatmasc

Sometimes ur fat bc u were born that way. Ur parents are fat, ur cousins are fat, u always have been fat.

And sometimes, you become fat. Something happened (puberty, change in diet, change in ability, anything) and someone who was once skinny is now fat. This doesnt make you a failure. It just means ur fat now. Its okay. You didnt do something wrong.

No matter how you are fat, its okay to be fat

meadow-of-daisies-and-lavender

That anything also includes trauma and stressors.

anarchopuppy

The GI Rights Hotline is a non-profit run by civilians that offers free, confidential counseling and resources for anyone trying to leave the US military, whether by conscientious objection, going AWOL, or any other means. Their toll-free number is 1-877-447-4487

The Center on Conscience and War is a non-profit run by civilians collects resources for people who might be targets of the US military’s predatory recruitment process, including this list of alternatives to enlistment, organized by state, that offer the same benefits that the branches of the military (claim to) offer, such as experience, travel, money for college, etc - without killing people in the name of western imperialism. If you want to register as an official conscientious objector or otherwise avoid combat in any way, their toll-free number is 1-800-379-2679

War is a racket. Don’t throw your life away for a government that doesn’t care about you. If you know anyone who’s considering enlisting or who’s already enlisted and considering getting out, please talk to them and share these resources

angelofthemornings-deactivated2

One thing I really like about Beverly Engel's book It Wasn't Your Fault, which is about PTSD-induced toxic shame, is that quite a bit of it deals with people who haven't broken The Cycle of Abuse (TM) and have gone on to hurt others. That's a really underserved and vulnerable patient population, and statistically, it's also MASSIVE. I don't think I've read a single other self-help type book on PTSD and self-loathing that confronts the possibility that you're exactly as bad as you think you are.

angelofthemornings-deactivated2

I felt better that it so much as mentioned that children can react to abuse with ungovernable rage. Everybody likes the image of PTSD patients as internalizing everything and becoming doormats, which does happen, and often, but it's not the only narrative. Personally I've always hated my abusers and have always wanted everyone who so much as breathed wrong in my direction from ages 0 to 18 to burn eternally in hell. I *never* thought any of it was my fault and ever since I was a toddler I was willing to make it everybody else's problem, and it's really relieving to read a clinical perspective that acknowledges that abuse victims can act that way too.

reasonablywittyatbest

It's wild to me that its such a neglected subset of abuse victims. Its really common. When I still lived with my parents and was still subjected to my father every fucking day I would lash out terribly at my mother, to the point when i went to visit them for years afterwards she was afraid I would lash out again. We've worked it out, I'm a much better person when I'm not regularly subjected to mental and emotional abuse, but like, its just so common.

I think it must be, at least partially, because, people hate the imperfect victim. Its easy for so many people to sympathize with someone who never lashed out. Less so for people to sympathize with people who are angry and lash out. Even though its a perfectly sensible reaction to being hurt over and over. I'm sure most people would like to think they would simply never.

I don't think this is the whole reason, but, I think it plays into it.

sunspotpony

Similarly, there’s a narrative of, you cannot experience grief over having fucked up. That if you are hurting because you caused harm, because you were the cause of harm, that you’re not allowed to grieve, because you “earned your sorrow. You deserve to bottle it up and to hurt for the bad things you have done,”

Which is punitive logic. It’s copthink. Which is bad.

angelofthemornings-deactivated2

important

In fact, you can actually give yourself trauma over fucking up too badly and doing, witnessing, or failing to prevent something evil that goes against your morals; for instance, if you steal your mother's life savings due to drug addiction, kill a civilian during a military operation (please do not join the military), or became abusive because you didn't have the tools and skills yet to handle BPD. In the field of psychology this is called "moral injury" or "perpetrator trauma."

going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi

getting lost in boston is fun because I turned around on a street corner three times and some guy yelled "hey stupid! the bus is that way!" very helpful interaction and accurate insult, 10/10 no notes

going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi

one time I walked around a building a couple times looking for a bathroom and this guy went "this bitch thinks she's on a merrygoround, where the fuck are you tryna go? bathroom? one floor down to the right behind the door that says bathroom."

mentohol-blog

My very first time in Boston. I was absolutely miserable, trying to drag my giant suitcase up a lengthy set of stairs in the pouring rain. This guy who had already reached the top looked back at me with the most pure expression of disgust I’ve ever seen in anyone’s eyes, marched back down the stairs, grabbed my suitcase, carried it to the top, left it there for me, and walked away without ever saying a word. I think about him often.

just7frogsinapeoplesuit

For the people in the notes going "why is Boston like this": a) the insults are a way to show you have no ulterior motives when helping someone (and don't need to be thanked or repaid), and b) Boston was settled by the Irish

direhydroid

also the Italians. mixing Irish and Italian sociocultural attitudes had the effect of multiplying the Sass Levels by the power of infinity, in the sense that you get all of the clever dry wit of the Irish and all of the bitchy gossipy condensation of the Italians rolled into one very stereotypically overly-friendly American package.

also worth noting that who you are to them doesn’t matter. they’ll talk to strangers like that and will also talk to their best friends like that. they’re just Like That.

just7frogsinapeoplesuit

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