radical feminists will talk like “i will only accept trans men into my feminism so long as they’re willing to detransition or feminize themselves, if not i dont care if they live or die and actively joke about transsexual male’s difficulties in ‘female’ spaces they need access too” and people will log online and go “wow. can you believe how radical feminists will accept trans men into their feminism? 🤔 suspicious”
I listened to the audiobook narrated by Jeremy Irons which is the correct way to read The Alchemist because at least you get to listen to Jeremy Irons.
The book's like... "if you quit your job to go on a Soul Journey to Follow Your Dream everything will work out for you because we're meant to go on Soul Journeys" or something and it's like... yeah, things work out for the characters, but that's because the world they exist in is controlled by an author that's trying to convince you that going on a Soul Journey will always work out because The Universe Loves You or something. Like he's not going to write that the guy goes on a Soul Journey and just fuckin' dies in the desert.
I just remember tons of bits where the book would be like "see? this happened because Character A did XYZ and Followed Their Dream; this is very deep" and I'm like... no Mr. Coelho it happened because you wrote it to happen that way.
Studying linguistics is actually so wonderful because when you explain youth slang to older professors, instead of complaining about how "your generation can't speak right/ you're butchering the language" they light up and go “really? That’s so wonderful! What an innovative construction! Isn't language wonderful?"
im sorry but i loveeee the scene when katniss yells at peeta after his interview SO MUCH because like that’s gotta be his worst nightmare right there. like this poor guy is like oh guess ill admit to my crush because im probably going to die and maybe she’ll at least feel sorry for me and be nice about it or something and then the first thing she does when she sees you is throw you into a vase and start yelling. like it doesn’t get worse than that my dude. it’s so iconic
first thing that came to mind
so the thing about english is that people think it's so divorced from other germanic languages based on like. words. I've even heard people try to insist that english is a romance language. because of that whole messy business in 1066 with out-of-wedlock willy and his band of naughty normans. and now a good chunk of the vocabulary is french or whatever and they're prestigious so not using them makes you sound like a rube and this and that and the other
and yes william the conqueror will never be safe from me. I will have my revenge on him. he fucked up a perfectly good germanic language is what he did. this will be me in hell
but the thing is that most words in, say, german do have a one to one english equivalent. not all hope is lost, for those who still dare to see it. it's just that you 1066pilled normancels aren't looking in the right place
look with your special eyes. that one was easier. not all of them are this intuitive because of semantic narrowing and broadening and waltzing and hokey-pokeying and whatever else. I'll give you a few more
aha! you think. I've got him on the ropes now.
but then
nooooo!! you whine and cry in gay baby jail. the consonants are different!!! listen to me. listen, I say, putting both my hands on your shoulder. /t/and /d/ are the same sound. you just put your voice behind one of them.
nooooooooo!! you wail. deer are animals but not all animals are deer!!! listen to me. LISTEN. they used to be. animals used to be deer. that's just what we called them. it was a long time ago. it was a weird time in all our lives. it's okay.
let's try for a verb this time
same principle with the consonants, we're just changing a stop (where we completely stop the airflow and then let it through) for a fricative (where we still let some air go through. idk where it's going. maybe to its job or something.)
to starve used to mean generally to die, not just to die of malnourishment. we do that a lot. we take one word for a lot of things and make it mean one thing. or take one word for one thing and make it mean a lot of things. this is common and normal.
"okay but roland," you say, suddenly coming up with an argument. "what about tree? trees are super common. I don't think we'd fuck around too much with that. the german word is baum! what about THAT?"
"when did you learn german?" I ask, but then decide it isn't relevant right at this very moment. but fine.
beam??? you ask incredulously. beam???? BEAM?????? you continue with the same tone and cadence of captain holt from brooklyn 99.
yes. beam. like the evil beams from my eye I'm going to hit you with if you don't stop shouting.
but the vowels!!! you howl.
listen. listen to me. the vowels mean nothing. absolutely nothing. they're fluid like water. it got raised in english.
"WHAT DOES RAISED MEAN"
it doesn't matter right now. they were raised better than you, at least. stop shouting. open your eyes and see what god has given you. they're the same word.
"they're NOT the same word. they mean different things!"
we've been over this. they didn't used to. a beam was (and is) a long solid piece of wood. much like the long solid piece of wood I showed your mother last night.
Q: could english be some kind of germanic-romance hybrid?
A: do you become a sexy thing from the black lagoon just because you dressed up as one for halloween? english may have gotten a lot of vocabulary from norman french, but its history and syntax are distinctly germanic. that's what we base these things on.
Q: okay but what does it matter? this doesn't actually affect my day to day life
A: you come into my house? you come into my house, the house of an autistic man living in vienna austria and studying english linguistics and you ask me what does it matter? sit back down. I was going to let you go but now I have powerpoints to show you
Q: you're stupid and wrong and gay and a bad person
A: I know it's you, Willy
apparently people are now purchasing thick water to make slimes with because of a trend on tiktok
thick water is for disabled people who can’t swallow properly. stores usually have extremely limited supplies of it.
please don’t buy thick water for fun or to make slime with. it’s literally the only way some disabled people can drink anything. It’s not a fucking toy
I’m torn about this. Don’t we normally encourage folks to buy accessibility products to teach stores to carry more of it? Like, if it’s the last one on the shelf maybe leave it for the intended buyer but if there’s a shelf-full and you’re buying one? Idk
there are EXTREMELY FEW DISABLED PEOPLE WHO NEED THIS PRODUCT. A statistically TINY group of people who have to go store to store to buy it in bulk because they don’t keep more than 4 on the shelf
It’s not like a weighted blanket or compression socks. You won’t increase production by buying them all from the store because this product is literally so little-used that most people in the notes don’t know what it is and have never heard of it
also it’s WATER!!!!! WATER THAT VERY SPECIFIC DISABLED PEOPLE NEED TO DRINK!!! WHO WILL GO WITHOUT DRINKING IF THEY CANT GET IT.
YOU ARE 70% WATER!!!! IMAGINE NOT BEING ABLE TO DRINK ANY AND HOW DISTRESSING AND CRUEL THAT IS
DO. NOT. FUCKING. BUY IT. PLEASE.
ITS NOT WORTH IT. YOU WILL NOT SLEEP WELL AT NIGHT KNOWING YOU TOOK SOMEONE’S ABILITY TO DRINK AWAY IN THE NAME OF MAKING SLIME.
I've noticed as someone with physical disabilities and celiac, that while making mobility aids more accessible is generally a benefit to those who do need it, the opposite appears to happen when it's applied to food. Because of fad gluten free dieters, gluten free food has actually become MORE UNSAFE for people who have actual celiac. The manufacturers are catering to the fad dieters, not the people who actually have to rely on gluten free food for health.
More and more often I'm buying gluten free food that look legit but then I get home and see that I've missed "made on equipment that processes wheat" warnings on it. Or if I'm ordering groceries online, it'll be labeled as gluten free only for the box/jar/whatever to have warnings on it in person. In one obscene case that I talk often about, I nearly bought "celiac certified" ramen that was made from BARLEY! Meanwhile the manufacturers of these dangerous foods marketed as gluten free are still jacking up the price for a criminally low fraction of the amount you'd find in regular food. This was happening before covid and has just gotten worse.
Speaking of, at the beginning of covid I went hungry even when my SNAP was plentiful because people panic bought all the gluten free food. I couldn't find anything in multiple stores. I don't know how high the rate is in my city for celiac, but I'm still suspicious that this was due to the celiac population.
I've been told by epileptics that the same thing is happening because of fad keto dieters. Food that is mislabeled as ketogenic for the fad dieters is dangerous for epileptics to eat because the nutritional ratio is off and it's screwing up their careful and strict diet that's supposed to be so they can control their goddamn SEIZURES.
Tl;dr: don't touch specialized diets if you don't need them. You're not making them more accessible to people who need them, you're making the food manufacters cater to people like YOU instead of the people the diets claim to help and making it even more dangerous for us to eat.
(And if all you care about is money, know that you're wasting it on shitty food in the first place which makes no fucking sense to me)
POV your fiance drew short straw and had to go do baby attorney things in whatever hell-journey his employer threw him at
text ID under the cutoff
Lmao how is this real, "the ambient sounds of the world were wrong, sir"
Imagine paying Columbia-amounts of money to be taught by someone with kindergarten-level art literacy. Like, motherfucker, the wholeass point of 4’33” is to emphasize how every performance of live music is inextricably linked to the ambient sounds of the context in which it is performed!!!!!!! Paying attention to and thinking about the context of the performance is the point of the song!!!! If the point was to hear birds chirping and people walking, John Cage would have fucking recorded that instead. Insisting that art is only good when contains good things and makes you feel good things is baby-level art criticism. How the fuck is this dude a professor.
Actually I’m not done going off yet. This pisses me off so much. How can you teach the humanities and be so obstinately ignorant? Like bruh, if the chanting outside makes you feel uncomfortable and upset, maybe you should take about four and a half minutes to contemplate why you feel that way. During that time, you might consider things such as: why are there students chanting? What are they protesting? Why do they feel so strongly about this issue that they’re willing to disrupt their lives to bring attention to it? Should I also feel as strongly? Should I be protesting with them? Is my desire for silence more important than the students’ desire for justice? Why do I find the noise they’re making more upsetting than the genocide they’re protesting?
Being like “loud noise make me angy 😠” is so fundamentally incurious and baby-brained it’s honestly unbelievable
I'd like also to just contrast this with Palestinian poet Marwan Makhoul:
In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political
I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent.
furiously googling “flowers with no romance meaning” because a. I love flower language and b. I love being aro and found exactly what I was looking for!!
image description under the cut
Having autism is like
Having ADHD is like
Having both Autism and ADHD is like
we still get immediately shoved out of our immersion in tv shows or films when The Girl find a dead body and immediately shrieks - we just don't find it realistic because we're pretty confident most people would gasp rather than shriek (i.e. sharp inhale rather than sharp exhale) and it also feels unnecessarily (and predictably) misogynistic too, as men encountering corpses almost never do the same on screen
also of course please do tell us if you've actually encountered a corpse unexpectedly, because tumblr is absolutely a place where some people have done this thing and we love a good anecdote
suddenly imagining "burst into song" as a potential response
I have been waiting all year to post this.
omg
This has been in my queue for months.
I missed it last year and I vowed that would NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN.
YES
omg i didnt reblog this last year!
Replacing physical buttons and controls with touchscreens also means removing accessibility features. Physical buttons can be textured or have Braille and can be located by touch and don't need to be pressed with a bare finger. Touchscreens usually require precise taps and hand-eye coordination for the same task.
Many point-of-sale machines now are essentially just a smartphone with a card reader attached and the interface. The control layout can change at a moment's notice and there are no physical boundaries between buttons. With a keypad-style machine, the buttons are always in the same place and can be located by touch, especially since the middle button has a raised ridge on it.
Buttons can also be located by touch without activating them, which enables a "locate then press" style of interaction which is not possible on touchscreens, where even light touches will register as presses and the buttons must be located visually rather than by touch.
When elevator or door controls are replaced by touch screens, will existing accessibility features be preserved, or will some people no longer be able to use those controls?
Who is allowed to control the physical world, and who is making that decision?
having a long talk about muzzling strahd today, so have a midwork sketch sorry 4 the censor, shoutout to the discord server that got full strahd hog today
i want to make a post about alternian gender roles but my interpretation/opinion is so controversial LMAO
i think some people fail to take into account that porrim (most gender knowledgeable character) is fundamentally beforan in her reading of femininity vs masculinity. she’s right about lord english being a fucking creep and she’s right about the oppression of lower caste trolls but she doesn’t understand exactly how that manifests for alternian gender roles due to the fact that beforus works in nearly an opposite way
jadebloods are meant to be brutal cullers.
that’s why the dolorosa was fucking exiled for showing compassion to a mutated child; jadebloods are not supposed to have sympathy— they’re supposed to be the first and most ruthless of filters the population goes through for culling to make sure that generation is fit for war.
i have been hearing for so long that “alternian jadebloods are forced into a mothering role” they’re not! not how a human would understand it anyway! jadebloods are supposed to be cold and make tough choices. they are meant to thin out the population, weed out the weak and the sick. jadebloods are in charge of rearing grubs, yes, but on alternia that is not a job of compassion. THAT’S WHY THE DOLOROSA WAS KICKED OUT
porrim comes from a society in which culling means the complete opposite. to cull on beforus means to be a literal caretaker, to be in charge of helping those below you. culling is still deeply fucked up and ableist, but on beforus, it’s much more like mothering. this is why porrim sees this type of work as demeaning and sexist— it’s much closer to a mirror of earthly gender roles.
alternia, however, as i’ve mentioned, is not!
that doesn’t mean sexism doesn’t exist (cough lord english) (cough a lot of stuff karkat says) but it is fundamentally alien compared to our understanding of it.
the dolorosa was breaking gender roles by being the first ever mother. vriska was breaking gender roles when she felt guilt over killing a lowblood. karkat was breaking alternian and earthly gender roles in a weird metatextual double-queer-whammy (but that’s a post for another time). women on alternia are still held to horrible idealistic standards, and yes they still face a huge lack of agency! but their issues are not actually….. “oh it’s a patriarchy and women have no rights”.
unfortunately that’s not how alternia works at all. it’s a lot more interestingly fucked up than that. sorry, porrim.
