idk what to put here

[discoursedrome]

seems very arbitrary that we specify pronouns in a form like "they/them", with the subject and then the object form. nobody changes the case relationships when defining pronouns, so it would be totally clear to just use one form by itself, like just "they" or just "them", and conversely if the goal is to fully specify the format then there should also be a possessive in there, right: "they/them/their"

this is the sort of thing that probably originated in a single place in a fairly arbitrary way, if you could trace it all the way back, but my personal theory is that people didn't want to write out three forms because it's pointless, but they didn't want to write just one because it looked too much like ordinary language. the subject/object formula is distinct in a way that sets this custom apart from direct use of pronouns, or from references to them as words or grammatical units. this also seems to be why we say "pronouns" -- some people are happy with more than one set, but the plural seems to have originated as a reference to this subject/object presentation, which again marks it out as a distinct social tendency, since outside of that context one almost never uses the plural possessive "one's pronouns" to refer to anything other than a language

[endofunktor]

This has leaked into German too, in which we now declare our pronouns as a set of two arbitrary cases of at least four. Like, nobody says "my pronouns are er/ihn/ihm/seiner and my possessive pronouns are sein/seine/seinen, sein/seine/seinem and seiner/seinen/seines/seiner", which is fine, because I just happen to know how to speak German, but if you like me to use some set of neo pronouns like "dei/deren" it becomes a bit more complicated, because not only have I no direction to what case which word corresponds, there are also far too few cases given to guess a general pattern.

"Ich gehe mit dei spazieren" (I am going on a walk with them) sounds un-flexed but I really have no idea how to form that kind of sentence.

I suppose the correct flexion would be analogous to "them" which of course germanized would be "dem" but "dem" is already Dativ (3rd case) of the masculine definite article "der". Definite articles are used for shorthandedly pointing at objects or people. So saying "Ich gehe mit dem spazieren" sounds more like "I am going on a walk with that guy over there" rather than "I am going on a walk with them".

So this was my boomer-esque rant on German neo pronouns.

[wiregarden]

in the English case I always assumed it was becsuse, when spoken, "my pronouns are he" and "my pronouns are she" can be difficult to tell apart in a noisy room. "he/him" and "she/her" provides better discernment

[vriskakinnieaynrand]

my job on the leftist commune will be maintaining high-frequency trading infrastructure to provide liquidity to capital markets

[injuries-in-dust]

Watch to the end...

The joy when he did it!

[wiregarden]

Aesop throws his hat onto the ground, stomps on it

[wiregarden]

funniest result of the night

the green councillor:

[ozu-teapot]

Stalker | Andrei Tarkovsky | 1979

Anatoliy Solonitsyn, Nikolay Grinko, Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy

[wiregarden]

Chekhov's fence: if a fence is introduced in act 1, it must be torn down by act 3

[wiregarden]

Chesterton's gun: before you fire a gun, you must first be able to answer why it wasn't already fired

[wiregarden]

Chekhov's fence: if a fence is introduced in act 1, it must be torn down by act 3

[wiregarden]

a country with its priorities straight, banning fictional depictions of acts which are [checks notes] legal

[wiregarden]

man and all this just to be able to call people retarded again

[phaeton-flier]

It is still insane to me that we, as a society, let card companies just extract a 4% rent on 90% of consumer spending. "sending money from one bank to another" was a solved system for a century and all they had to do was make checks digital. Fucking hell

[wiregarden]

Sending money from one bank to another was very much not a solved problem! Though yeah interchange fees in America are crazy high -- but on the other hand, your guys' credit card rewards are much higher!

[phaeton-flier]

I was referring to "checks" here, which to my knowledge were imperfect but still usuable; can you shed more light on their issues?

[wiregarden]

Well I guess the main issue with checks is the days turnaround until as a merchant you actually get the funds, or indeed know whether the check-writer has sufficient funds at all, during which time they have absconded with your goods and/or services. There is still an extension of credit here, which has to be paid for (generally by poor people, as opposed to credit cards, where it is paid for by interchange).

Anyway patio11 has written various essays on and around this subject, e.g.

The Long Shadow of Checks

A lot of more modern financial infrastructure follows the paths blazed by checks, at least in the U.S.

[phaeton-flier]

It is still insane to me that we, as a society, let card companies just extract a 4% rent on 90% of consumer spending. "sending money from one bank to another" was a solved system for a century and all they had to do was make checks digital. Fucking hell

[wiregarden]

Sending money from one bank to another was very much not a solved problem! Though yeah interchange fees in America are crazy high -- but on the other hand, your guys' credit card rewards are much higher!

[argumate]

Andy Serkis is directing the Hunt for Gollum?? he's behind the fuckin' camera!

[wiregarden]

it's The Search For Spock all over again

[argumate]

"slop" also becoming a general term for cheap or thoughtless lack of intentional design seems like a sensible development.

[notaaronsroommate]

I also think it is important culturally to make a distinction between slop and disposable/ consumable.

disposable art is important. Not all creative endeavors can be either capital i Important or rote practice. Some stuffs just gotta be workaday bullshit. We used to have proletarianized art, where a person could work as an artist illustrating produce for local grocery store ads and make enough to feed a family. That type of thing. And a lot of peoples favorite stuff comes not out of the romantic solipsism of the Artiste but from the disposable and crass commercial art that gets thrown by the wayside. The most notable and direct example being that The Muppets and all the resultant stuff there comes out of the Wilikins coffee ads. an ignoble origin to be sure.

I just hope that as we come to understand slop as a dominant form of thoughtless space filling tripe that seems to plague the first quarter of the 21st century, we understand that it's actually good for human beings to create disposable New Images.

[argumate]

hmm I'm not sure if there actually is a distinction, or what a distinction would imply; given that intention/attention is expensive, perhaps a more neutral axis would simply be the degree of investment: cheap or disposable design simply has less budget for the attention that could lead it to have unique or well-designed attributes, so slop is just a more pejorative name for undifferentiated filler.

[notaaronsroommate]

eh fair enough. im not married to the idea and your definition sounds as good as any. Mostly, i just see people being anti AI slop, which is good and I get, but also don't want it to swing back around to folks thinking there's anything wrong with disposable and impermanent art. The reason AI slop is bad (aside from low quality and surrounding political contexts) is that it increasingly forces creative work to be the domain of the independently wealthy or the petite bourgeoise. dwindling art worker jobs, making the kinda midgrade disposable art of the world, those allow people to develop their skills while getting paid to do so, and without having to pigeonhole themselves into the mindset that anything which isn't auteur and well considered is just banging out shading studies of fruit. Making of New Images cannot be solely the domain of only the people who can afford to do so without working.

but, that's probably just contextualizing more on top of the idea of slop than really needs to be there.

[argumate]

yeah that's unfortunate, in much the same way that horse riding skills used to be far more widespread when they were the standard way of getting around, and are now basically restricted to a hobby of the wealthy.

[notaaronsroommate]

i think there's maybe a significant difference between horse riding and art. like, you understand why there's a pretty big difference between writing books and making images versus just a trade skill that isn't terribly useful anymore.

[argumate]

we're specifically talking about trade skills that aren't terribly useful any more though, it was photography that first decimated the ranks of working illustrators in the mid-20th century.

[wiregarden]

there's a rhetorical shift there maybe when you go from "disposable art is a workaday trade" to "ah but as a trade it is fundamentally more important than others, because it is capital-A Art"

[argumate]

Trader made nearly $1 million on Polymarket with remarkably accurate Iran bets

is that so 🙄

[argumate]

Traders made bets worth half a billion dollars in the oil market about 15 minutes before Donald Trump’s post touting “productive” talks with Iran sent the price of crude tumbling and ignited volatility in other assets.

that's where the real money is

[wiregarden]

I meeean, not saying there wasn't chicanery, but surely the other side of that is "trader loses $1mm making remarkably inaccurate Iran bets"

[argumate]

presumably if there are say a hundred people making bets and one of those people has inside information then ninety nine will lose a little money and one will earn a lot of money.

[wiregarden]

Maybe, but we don't know that, all that's public is the trades! Anyway commodities futures was where the real money is anyway.

[wiregarden]

Though in fairness I was primarily reading this through the lens of commodities futures trading, where my previous statements were more accurate, idk whether you can infer a given user from public Polymarket data

[argumate]

Trader made nearly $1 million on Polymarket with remarkably accurate Iran bets

is that so 🙄

[argumate]

Traders made bets worth half a billion dollars in the oil market about 15 minutes before Donald Trump’s post touting “productive” talks with Iran sent the price of crude tumbling and ignited volatility in other assets.

that's where the real money is

[wiregarden]

I meeean, not saying there wasn't chicanery, but surely the other side of that is "trader loses $1mm making remarkably inaccurate Iran bets"

[argumate]

presumably if there are say a hundred people making bets and one of those people has inside information then ninety nine will lose a little money and one will earn a lot of money.

[wiregarden]

Maybe, but we don't know that, all that's public is the trades! Anyway commodities futures was where the real money is anyway.

[argumate]

Trader made nearly $1 million on Polymarket with remarkably accurate Iran bets

is that so 🙄

[argumate]

Traders made bets worth half a billion dollars in the oil market about 15 minutes before Donald Trump’s post touting “productive” talks with Iran sent the price of crude tumbling and ignited volatility in other assets.

that's where the real money is

[wiregarden]

I meeean, not saying there wasn't chicanery, but surely the other side of that is "trader loses $1mm making remarkably inaccurate Iran bets"

[wiregarden]

I'm sorry I can't keep my silence anymore, "Sphinx of Black Quartz, Judge My Vow" sucks ass, just one thunderous syllable after the other plodding along the tongue. "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," by contrast, trips along like music.