i feel like a lotta people are wildly unhappy and resistant to the concept that the answer to most things is "well, it depends"

take the 2024 dostoyevsky-official challenge: every month, learn one poem by heart. it could be in any language, it could be poetry you already know, it could be poetry you're reading for the first time, it could be a sonnet, it could be a ballad: go wild (but for this, i recommend choosing canonical poetry in your chosen language, not poetry in translation, nor something new). above all, poetry, language charged with meaning to the ultimate degree, is meant to be read aloud, to be felt with the tongue. by the end of the year, you'll have a better intuitive understanding of the poet's craft, of the possibility and beauty of language, an improved reading style, and, through the memorization process, a deep knowledge of each chosen poem—and you'll have committed 12 poems to heart, sitting around for any occasion, keeping you company wherever you go

Huge shout to my friend from an undergraduate philosophy program who started working out every single day, not for health benefits or to become conventionally attractive or whatever, but because -- and this is a direct quote -- he was concerned that otherwise he might "become lost in the world of signs and forget the things they signify". I have thought about this every single time that I've worked out since.

I love it when people use "shrimp" to mean "beyond the human range". like "shrimp colors" but applied to other things. "shrimp emotions" "shrimp sounds" "shrimp morality", as if shrimp are living some kind of transcendent existence that humans can never comprehend

Unlearning How White People Ask Personal Questions

http://www.samefacts.com/2014/05/culture-and-civil-society/unlearning-how-white-people-ask-personal-questions/

Holy shit. I have ALWAYS thought the people around me were being unconscionably intrusive and power-playing in their starter conversations and they told me I was antisocial and oblivious to culture norms. Turns out, maybe I’m just from a different culture.

****new link****

by Keith Humphreys - May 5, 2014           

When I met my fiance’s African-American stepfather, things did not start well. Stumbling for some way to start a conversation with a man whose life was unlike mine in almost every respect, I asked “So, what do you do for a living?”.

He looked down at his shoes and said quietly “Well, I’m unemployed”.

At the time I cringed inwardly and recognized that I had committed a terrible social gaffe which seemed to scream “Hey prospective in-law, since I am probably going to be a member of your family real soon, I thought I would let you know up front that I am a completely insensitive jackass”. But I felt even worse years later when I came to appreciate the racial dimension of how I had humiliated my stepfather-in-law to be.

For that painful but necessary bit of knowledge I owe a white friend who throughout her childhood attended Chicago schools in a majority Black district. She passed along a marvelous book that helped her make sense of her own inter-racial experiences. It was Kochman’s Black and White Styles in Conflict, and it had a lasting effect on me. One of the many things I learned from this anthropological treasure trove of a book is how race affects the personal questions we feel entitled to ask and the answers we receive in response.

My question to my stepfather was at the level of content a simple conversation starter (albeit a completely failed one). But at the level of process, it was an expression of power. Kochman’s book sensitized me to middle class whites’ tendency to ask personal questions without first considering whether they have a right to know the personal details of someone else’s life. When we ask someone what they do for a living for example, we are also asking for at least partial information on their income, their status in the class hierarchy and their perceived importance in the world. Unbidden, that question can be quite an invasion. The presumption that one is entitled to such information is rarely made explicit, but that doesn’t prevent it from forcing other people to make a painful choice: Disclose something they want to keep secret or flatly refuse to answer (which oddly enough usually makes them, rather than the questioner, look rude).

Kochman’s book taught me a new word, which describes an indirect conversational technique he studied in urban Black communities: “signifying”. He gives the example (as I recall it, 25 years on) of a marriage-minded black woman who is dating a man who pays for everything on their very nice dates. She wonders if he has a good job. But instead of grilling him with “So what do you do for a living?”, she signifies “Whatever oil well you own, I hope it keeps pumping!”.

Her signifying in this way is a sensitive, respectful method to raise the issue she wants to know about because unlike my entitled direct question it keeps the control under the person whose personal information is of interest. Her comment could be reasonably responded to by her date as a funny joke, a bit of flirtation, or a wish for good luck. But of course it also shows that if the man freely chooses to reveal something like “Things look good for me financially: I’m a certified public accountant at a big, stable firm”, he can do so and know she will be interested.

Since reading Kochman’s book, I have never again directly asked anyone what they do for a living. Instead my line is “So how do you spend your time?”. Some people (particularly middle class white people) choose to answer that question in the bog standard way by describing their job. But other people choose to tell me about the compelling novel they are reading, what they enjoy about being a parent, the medical treatment they are getting for their bad back, whatever. Any of those answers flow just as smoothly from the signification in a way they wouldn’t from a direct question about their vocation.

From the perspective of ameliorating all the racial pain in the world, this change in my behavior is a grain of sand in the Sahara. But I pass this experience along nonetheless, for two reasons. First, very generally, if any of us human beings can easily engage in small kindnesses, we should. Second, specific to race, if those of us who have more power can learn to refrain from using it to harm people in any way – major or minor — we should do that too.

This is really useful stuff – as someone who’s on disability and knows a ton of people in the same boat, “What do you do for a living?” can be such a loaded question. “How do you spend your time?” is a much more compassionate thing to ask, because you can just enthuse about what you’re writing or how great your cats are or whatever.

See this is the shit they should have been teaching me in therapist school.

"average cat owner spends 3 years in prison" factoid actualy just statistical error. average owner spends 0 years in prison. Miette's mother, who kicked her body like the football and went to jail for One Thousand Years is an outlier adn should not have been counted

I love how every single Georg post observes the original's typo

i like that you said "observe" instead of "preserve," implying this has religious importance.

"how dare you hide this in the tags" -> "you sir have won the internets"

"none of these words are in the bible" -> "thats enough internet for today"

"op check your carbon monoxide detector" -> "were you on drugs when you made this"

and so on and so forth

my partner doesn’t use pet names nearly as much as i do, which is very funny because i will crack my gay little knuckles and say some shit like “good morning my sun and moon, my loveliest boy, my baby my sweetheart my darling dearest” and he will reply “hello adrian”

Team “not actually oblivious to flirting, just terrified of appearing presumptuous” represent.

“Yes, in the balance of consideration this person’s behaviour could certainly be interpreted as flirtatious, but it would be purest arrogance for me to just assume they actually meant what they said. I should gather more evidence. Forever.”

Source

listen

even if you love being at home and you don't like going outside and you just want to spend all your time at home (which is totally ok!) it's still healthy to leave the house every once in a while if you can.

if you go outside, it means you get to do this thing called "going home" at the end of the trip, which is pretty neat. you don't get to "go home" if you're always home already.

going home is good for you and it's good for your home. it gives your home a chance to do its job, which is to welcome you back into safety and privacy after an adventure in the outside world. you get to shut out all of the other parts of your life that shouldn't be intruding on your personal time.

if your entire life happens inside your home, you're bringing all that stuff inside with you, you don't get to physically shut out stressors, and you never get to experience the relief of leaving your busy day behind as you shut the front door behind you.

this is part of why mental health walks, going to the grocery store, or sitting on your porch are good for you. it's not so much what you do when you're outside that matters, but the being away from home and then coming back to it. going outside improves your quality of life and it makes being at home much more comfortable.

It drives me insane how many people dont realise how often they break the law and that if the full force of it was ever applied life would basically be unliveable. Like between traffic violations, petty workplace theft, account sharing and piracy alongside how common it is to have been in posession of some illegal drug at some point in your life. People still manage to get away with thinking "criminals" are people who commit crimes not just populations that are surveilled enough to be routinely prosecuted

the more i try to explain gender to cis people the more i understand plato's allegory of a cave

plato: the shadows are like a surface level understanding and coming out of the cave and seeing the actual objects is what being a philosopher is like

me: this is stupid and pretentious

cis person: girl is when pink and flower and boy is when blue and guns

me: oh no theyre still in the cave

I guess friendly reminder that you can't actually judge someone's socioeconomic status based on what they own and the classic republican "they can't be poor they own a smart phone/computer" argument doesn't suddenly stop being complete out of touch nonsense when a poor person makes it.

Anyway insert "y'all can't be trusted to eat the rich bcs you'll target taco bell shift leaders and people with playstations instead of actual billionaires" post here.

the whole thing with subtitles saying '(speaks foreign language)' is like. aside from logistical issues with outsourced transcription services, the solution is seemingly very obvious - just transcribe the foreign language itself. like, someone who hears the audio can, if they're familiar with the 'foreign' language, glean some understanding from it, even just from individual words that are loaned or widely known - and by transcribing it accurately, that isn't denied to those reading the subtitles. even if you can't understand anything, the experience of having a character respond 'Non, mais votre chien oui!' or ‘好久不见’ is better than having them respond '(speaks foreign language)'. just like when expletives are censored in subtitles but not in audio, it's a case of the richer, fuller experience being denied for a sanitised version compatible with a production pipeline that does not see subtitles as a method of genuinely conveying meaning, but as a regulatory requirement