October

an early look at the electro bobblewobble QZ designed by ash kron

STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE — 4.26 "Broken Link"

It’s on the video, Mulder. I can’t prove it was you, but I know what I saw. This man is a murderer. He is a terrorist. I have a report to give this morning. I expect you to give me an answer. I expect you to tell me the truth.

my gurlsss

grunt does some mental math

some mass effect sketches i made

im so fucking tired. yeah plenty of jews are zionists but all of these protests have a large jewish contingent and proportionally speaking jews are overrepresented in pro palestine organizing. so fucking tired of seeing nonstop slander and lies about student groups that are probably 50% jewish anyways

piplup grain entrapment

piplup cares a lot about his work

piplup reports on the company's finances. layoffs are inevitable.

piplup takes a sick day

piplup considers some jorts

piplup forgives his father.

piplup goes grocery shopping

piplup jumps your battery

piplup lights the menorah

piplup sees the pale blue dot

piplup catsits

piplup hides a zombie bite from you

piplup studies plein air

piplup goes overboard at shopping therapy

piplup tells you it's a fiction. we made it up.

flash commission #9: @endquestionmark requested "piplup experiencing a moment of pure contentment" :)

[ko-fi]

War profiteering but for polycule drama

Emotional support side piece strategically hooking up with people who don't speak anymore building up a psychological profile of everyone's attachment styles in preparation for establishing their own polycule on the ruins of the former like a steppe nomad warlord claiming the mandate of heaven

“I am the crime that will not be forgiven”.

I feel the pain, every time.

"chat is a pronoun" has officially joined my list of internet linguistics pet peeves. "emojis are hieroglyphs" is welcoming them to the club.

undergrad linguistics student here. why is the concept "emojis are hieroglyphs" annoying to you? not arguing, i would just like to see your take on this since it's likely more knowledgeable than mine

hieroglyphs (regardless of origin) are just a writing system, like an alphabet or syllabary. ("hieroglyph" is actually a nondescriptive term when it comes to system typography.) every symbol has linguistic value tied to a specific language and must be interpreted through the framework of that language to carry meaning. emojis are at best semasiographic.

it annoys me because it feels very dismissive of hieroglyphic systems' value as writing. they're not just pictures, they encode language, even in cases where we haven't yet deciphered them.

and the addendum

OP i think what people mean when they say “emojis are hieroglyphs” is that they are becoming semasiographic but they don't know linguistics so they don't know terms like “semasiographic”.

maybe instead of being annoyed be excited to teach people a new word? they aren't using hieroglyphs to insult hieroglyphic writing systems. they are doing it because they see an interesting linguistic thing happening and don't have the language to describe it.

same with chat is a pronoun. pronoun is not the right word. but they mean it is sorta a 4th grammatical person. neither “other" like "third person that is not there” but also not “addressee” like second person. but i also dont know linguistics maybe im also annoying you by imperfectly conveying an interesting linguistic phenomenon.

with all due respect, i don't think any of these things are true.

i don't expect randos to have the same level of linguistic knowledge that i do, but i do think the burden of proof is on the people making claims like "chat is a pronoun," "chat is 4th person," or "emojis are hieroglyphs." that proof does not exist and there is significant evidence that explicitly contradicts all these claims.

I don’t think you understood my point either about chat or about emojis. As I said I’m not a linguist. People aren’t trying to win a debate and be right they are trying to communicate about new phenomena and concepts and don’t have the language to do so.

Nobody *needs* to be educated about hieroglyphics — that isn’t a moral imperative or relevant to most people. People are busy and hieroglyphics are low down on the list, sorry. But people *do* want to talk about para social relationships and pictographic communication because it is a big part of their life and not a thing they are taught in school about. Pronouns and hieroglyphics are clearly the wrong words for this. They just don’t have the right words. The conversation isn’t about the nature of hieroglyphics or pronouns — it is about internet communication patterns and how to describe them.

Saying “chat” is not the same as saying y’all and it is clearly a noun not a pronoun — and maybe the linguistic conversation ends there but there is a social conversation as to why people who interact with participatory video talk that way even when no chat is present. Saying “it is not a pronoun” is shutting down the conversation of that social phenomenon because the words they used are wrong — and I fully admitted I didn’t know if there was a right term for it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a phenomenon worth discussing. Previously in human history you couldn’t talk to an amorphous blob of 10K people who talk mostly in pictographic signs. How do you convey the simultaneous sense of alienation and intense community found in social networks when out in the real world?

ok, but i am a linguist, and i'm out here trying to correct the linguistic misinformation that's poisoning the conversation you see happening. you can't start from a rotten foundation and expect to accurately describe the actual phenomena based on that. you can't get anywhere sociologically, psychologically, or anthropologically from these assumptions, at least not in a valid way. the discussion must involve interrogating assumptions. when people get stuck on the false novelty of "4th person pronoun," they're not actually moving past it to the real implications of mass communication and parasociality.

emojis aren't hieroglyphs: so what does that mean for their discursive function?

chat isn't a pronoun, and we don't have the 4th person in english: so how are we conceptualizing a massive, anonymous audience in terms of conversational convention? how do inevitable parasocial connections impact the way we interact with both known and unknown parties?

i'm addressing the topics i have answers to, and it's absurd to scold me for not speaking beyond my expertise. especially on a post where, again, i made a one-off comment about misinformation that annoys me.

Twenty years ago, February 15th, 2004, I got married for the first time.

It was twenty years earlier than I ever expected to.

To celebrate/comemorate the date, I'm sitting down to write out everything I remember as I remember it. No checking all the pictures I took or all the times I've written about this before. I'm not going to turn to my husband (of twenty years, how the f'ing hell) to remember a detail for me.

This is not a 100% accurate recounting of that first wild weekend in San Francisco. But it -is- a 100% accurate recounting of how I remember it today, twenty years after the fact.

Join me below, if you would.

Who doesn't love barbershop conversations?