there was a time in my life where I painstakingly trained myself out of using “likes” and “ums” for public speaking, and then when I started learning about like basic linguistics and shit I realized that fillers are completely normal and useful parts of language and now I use them even in text all the time. I feel like if anyone suggested that I should remove them from my speech at this point I would genuinely just be like “alright well you’re not ready to engage with the topic I’m discussing yet.”
until you stop needing communication & language to be just one specific way for you to view it as skillful, authoritative, persuasive, educated, etc. then you aren’t prepared to engage in deeper conversations about language. if you can’t handle “likes” and “y'know?"s then you certainly won’t be able to handle the ways in which multilingual speakers can use one language’s grammar while speaking in another, you won’t be able to handle AAC, you won’t be able to handle discussions with people with verbal tics or stutters… like you’re not going to be able to engage with a lot of language and therefore your understanding of language is not going to be enough, currently, to really get into studying the ways in which power interacts with language or analyzing creative writing on a granular level of phrasing, word choice, punctuation, spacing
Gandhi has been historically the most aggressive character in Civilization due to an original bug in the first game that caused him to go all-out once he reaches democracy. They just kept the thing going ever since.
To further explain this bug, because I was chatting with mothmonarch about Civilization and other strategy games last night and I never got around to explaining this fully, but I love this story:
Gandhi’s AI in the original game had its aggression set to the absolute minimum (0 on a scale of 0 to 10, I believe, I may have this wrong but the basic idea I’m about to explain is accurate, as far as I can tell). Adopting democracy lowers an AI civ’s aggression by 2 points, so when someone who is fully peaceful loses two points of aggression, they should still be nice and polite, right?
Except this is an old DOS game, and so computer math is in place. What actually happened was that Gandhi’s aggression level ticked backwards two steps, from 0 to 255. On a scale of 0 to 10, Gandhi is now 255 points of pure nuclear rage.
And that’s the story as I recall it, but again I may have gotten some details wrong, so feel free to correct me! After that, as the original poster said, the devs loved the bug so much that they just kept it in as a running joke!
“On a scale of 0 to 10, Gandhi is now 255 points of pure nuclear rage.”
We sharing anaesthetic stories?? I had to have dental surgery when i was in middle school.
According to my mom and sister the very first thing i did upon waking up was BOLT upright and proceed to try and shove my ENTIRE fist in my mouth as fast as possible.
I had to be physically stopped, and i proceeded to sob my eyes out for the next 20 minutes. Somehow, i didnt damage anything 🤣
As summer is approaching, I’d like to share this bird-friendly beach etiquette reminder. A lot of people let their dogs roam freely on the beach, but dogs that chase wildlife can have a detrimental effect on the animals that have no choice but to share the shoreline with us. Please enjoy the summer with your pets and make sure to give wild animals plenty of space!
Potentially controversial opinion here, but this goes for any other natural place too. Your dog shouldn’t be running off-lead and disturbing wildlife outside of specific designated dog areas. The amount of damage free-roaming dogs cause to the rare ground-nesting birds on the heathland near me, despite constant appeals for people to keep them on-leash, is disgusting. And for the love of FUCK, stop letting your dogs run off-leash in fields with livestock. Especially pregnant ewes and young lambs.
“But my dog is a nice dog and my dog would never hurt any animal!”
I don’t believe you.
The other animals don’t know that. Stress is enough to make ewes miscarry. Having to panic and flee costs precious energy. Dogs trampling nests is enough to destroy eggs.
Keep your fucking dog on a leash.
Important generally but also specifically for shorebirds. Many are endangered or threatened and nest in very specific places, and one loose dog among eggs or chicks can devastate a colony.
today the supreme court has ruled that businesses are allowed to discriminate against the LGBTQ+ community, in addition to taking steps to dismantle affirmative action. absolutely sick to my stomach right now. generations of progress gone within a day. on the last day of pride month they had to get their last fucking laugh huh?
Describing my own writing that I accidentally misplaced before posting it anywhere as “lost media” because, you know, technically
This is the digital equivalent of the underside of a refrigerator.
Lotta folks in the notes trying to offer helpful suggestions who are clearly still in the stage of their life where they know where all of their archival storage media is physically located.
I give you this classic from bash.org’s Top IRC Quotes list:
There was a place I was doing on-site tech support for about fifteen years back that had a server that was acting up, but nobody knew where it was physically located, and a cable trace failed because the cat 5 disappeared under a baseboard and just plain never came out the other side. It was eventually determined that they’d somehow pulled a Cask of Amontillado: the door to the server closet had accidentally been drywalled over during some past renovation, and nobody noticed because the affected server had never gone off the rails badly enough to require physical servicing until just then.
Friendly reminder that LGBTQ+, Queer, and LGBT+ are the preferred terms for the community (x).
Friendly reminder that Queer is approved by 72.9% of the people, and the groups who don’t prefer it’s use as an umbrella term are straight people, exclusionists, transmeds, truscums, sex-negative people, and sex work critical people (x).
Friendly reminder that aros and aces are excluded only 9.2% /
8.1%
of the time respectively while being included
78.9%
/ 81.2% of the time (x)
Friendly reminder that exclusionists are in the minority and aro/ace people are included in the LGBTQ+ community by the people within the community.
Also, i checked out the survey the second claim sources a while back: this is not OP choosing the words truscum, exclusionist, etc. These are labels that the survey gave people the option to self-identify as. It’s self-proclaimed exclusionists who dont like the word queer, not random accusations
yeah that’s super important.
This one gets reblogged on main. The reclassification of ‘queer’ as an inexcusable slur is a recent development which stems in part from exclusionist rhetoric. We reclaimed it decades ago. Learn our history. You are not immune to TERF propaganda, but you can absolutely choose to educate yourself to spite it.
“Remember, if you die in the simulation-” “Yeah, yeah, we know, you die in real life.” “What? No! You need to reset the simulation with this terminal! What is WRONG with you humans?!”