The fact that this joke is from the very first episode (which aired in January 1997) is messing with me.

yeah, this was not unforeseen

Because smallpox used to kill about 30% of everyone who caught it. The successful vaccine program run by the world’s medical community means that no one will ever die of smallpox ever again.

Because rabies is 100% fatal without a vaccine. No one needs to die of rabies ever again. It is entirely preventable.

Because 1-2 in 1000 who get measles, die. Vaccines let us contain outbreaks or fully wipe them out. There is no specific treatment for the disease once you have it. Your immune system either wins or you die.

We like vaccines because vaccines save lives and raise our standard of living.

My mother, now in her 70s, talks about how her mother wept for joy when her children received the polio vaccine. Because she didn’t have to be afraid of polio anymore.

There's just no rhyme or reason to webcomic fandom. A webcomic that's been keeping a regular update schedule for 25 years and boasts a six-figure readership will have absolutely no online presence outside of its own official forums, and a webcomic that ran for six weeks in 2008, went on hiatus mid scene and never updated again will have a more extensive TV Tropes writeup than fucking Star Wars.

This was so interesting I love yuval

"English is the universal language for a reason"

"I agree" with the British Empire Wikipedia page open had me rolling

Yes!

Also: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is a grammatically correct sentence in English.

#i feel like dude just feels personally attacked bc he only knows english but who knows idk him#but also lol at some stuff he said???#the outer part of the word wheel for angry is like mainly words that english borrowed from french :')#the insanely complicated sentence is dumb af bc noone talks like this you can make super complicated sounding sentences in any language????#i can understand the had had had had it's not my native language xD#i really think chinese and Japanese alphabets are inherently more complex than the bloody latin alphabet of 26 letters my guy#also this whole thing pisses me off bc of it's just one girl mindlessly chatting while doing making made to look stupid by a dude doing#a bunch of research on anything he says#ye maybe english has a bunch of complicated words but noone uses them#i took an online english vocab test and ranked higher than the average american but lol ok english is so hard#it does not declinate it does not conjugate the only thing to know is how things are pronounced bc it's hella randon but BESIDES THAT???#learn your irregular verbs#i did this as a 5th grader idk man#and she's right about bilingual brains seem to work differently than brains that only know one language#which is the same for a lot of english speaker#s#also feeling like girl talking about high iqs was talking about north east asia so dude kinda implying the other countries are stupider wtf

Let's unpack this.

'i feel like dude just feels personally attacked bc he only knows english' Disclaimer, I am about to defend English brains as a Ukrainian, English being my third language. Oh, I also got a degree in English linguistics uwu.

'#the outer part of the word wheel for angry is like mainly words that english borrowed from french :')' Yeah, this is how languages work, actually. I just looked up German loanwords in French, and the list is so long they had to separate it into three separate articles.

'the insanely complicated sentence is dumb af bc noone talks like this you can make super complicated sounding sentences in any language????' Yeah, that's called academic language and is actually a perfect example.

'i really think chinese and Japanese alphabets are inherently more complex than the bloody latin alphabet of 26 letters my guy' I actually super agree on that! Moreover, latin alphabet doesn't suit bunch of languages that use it, IMO

'also this whole thing pisses me off bc of it's just one girl mindlessly chatting while doing making made to look stupid by a dude doing#a bunch of research on anything he says#' Yeah she deff mindlessly chats implying that English speaker's brains are less developed which IS kinda xenophobic, but also, could be said about literally any monolingual person who doesn't care for other languages. Are monolinguals stupider? I agree. Are their brains less developed? Wtf are we on.

Grammatically English IS simpler than a lot of languages and the boy definitely is up in the arms defending what isn't there but for the most part man idk. Saying speakers of a certain language have less developed brains that other is not alright.

I wouldn't say that English grammar is simpler than a lot of languages; while there's a lot less morphological inflection, you have to memorize stress on not just a word-by-word basis, you have to remember that some words have a different stress pattern when they're used in a different part of speech, e.g. "process" as a noun vs a verb. And that vowel sounds are inconsistent, not just orthographically but contingent on stress! And yes, English orthography is a nightmare! It's rote memorization for both spelling and pronunciation!

And then there's the semantic nuances around various constructions! In English, "I run," "I'm running," and "I do run" all mean different things, even before we get into idioms, when all of these are expressed through the present tense in both German and every Romance language I know anything about. And what morphological inflection we do have can turn into a hot mess:

And then there's our utterly ridiculous lexicon, where we just pile words into common use like we're running out of synonyms and need to restock. And I haven't even started on center embedding, which can be a nightmare for L1 English speakers, let alone L2 learners.

You know how l'Académie française tries to promote French neologisms over English loan-words? Yeah, English likes to coin neologisms while also raiding other languages for vocabulary for the same thing. And then there are abominations like "throuple" like polyamorous people haven't been saying "triad" for decades, because have you met English speakers?

Oh my god how bout we don't do this. There are myriad reasons someone can't learn a second language and NONE OF THIS HAS TO DO WITH INTELLIGENCE. When we're deconstructing why someone's take is bad, we are NOT going to refer to what's basically the same IQ argument he tore down in the video. Legitimately, this is a shit take, ableist, rude, and just demeaning to anyone with language difficulties (which btw have nothing to do with intelligence because that term is so nebulous as to be useless) and you CANNOT fucking deconstruct shit while being ableist as fuck.

Not directed at you, asymbina, this shit just pissed me off.

And as a reminder to anyone out there: We do. Not. Call people stupid for not being able to learn something. We don't talk about their intelligence (again, because SO many outside influences come into play when talking about people's abilities to learn), because language difficulties do not equal intellectual abilities, and even if they ARE tied into intellectual difficulties, all you're doing is making people feel awful about themselves. Stop. Insulting. People's. Intellectual. Difficulties/abilities.

I co-sign all of this. While I love languages, and like to say I know π languages (as in, totaling up how competent I am in each language I have some practical knowledge of, where 1 is native competency and 0 is no knowledge at all), like most people in the Anglosphere I am not only monolingual (as in, I only speak my first language with native competency; even my best second language, French, isn't great), but I have little opportunity to gain any kind of competence in a second language. Second language instruction for anything other than English is terrible here, in general, because until you get to the university level you often have non-native speakers teaching, with material that isn't rigorous at all and pedagogy that doesn't really facilitate practical use, let alone immersion. For most of my life, media in another language was not easily accessible, save for Univision.

Moreover, even though I'm really good at languages, intuiting grammar and lexical spaces and all these other nuances that are often stumbling blocks for L2 learners, I have auditory processing problems, such that I need subtitles to watch a lot of video and if it's not there I have to concentrate to be sure I don't miss something, which is exhausting, and that's for video in English. I can read German, French, and Spanish to some extent, and I can often get the gist of the text in most Romance and Germanic languages, even ones I haven't studied, but I struggle to comprehend often even fairly basic spoken sentences in French, because my brain has trouble even locating the word boundaries, let alone working out the words being said. I don't think anyone who has read anything I've put in any effort into would say I'm bad at words, but understanding spoken language is a trial for me.

(Weirdly, however, I can understand spoken Scots much better than I can understand some English accents/dialects. I think it has something to do with rhoticity and prosody.)

(Also, I can listen to people speaking in Standard Mandarin Chinese and if I can get myself to not try to consciously parse it but instead just listen, I can sometimes get the gist of a conversation and I have no idea how I'm doing it. My vocabulary in the language is very limited and I can't produce it with much competency at all, as my consonants are off, my prosody is hilariously Western L2 learner, and I've lost a lot of my tone control because of a lack of practice.)

Sometimes twitter be hitting

This is even funnier with context attached

Hello Americans I need your help with my vegetable thing

TL;DR: If you are able, could you email your senator and tell them that you support the Fresh Produce Procurement Reform Act? They will actually give a shit this time I promise, they just need to know you care*. Email is fine! All you have to type is “I support the Fresh Produce Procurement Reform Act”. You can tell them Tumblr sent you if you want.

HERE’S WHY: In my day job I help administer paperwork for one of the best government programs you’ve never heard of, the Local Food Purchase Agreement. This program:

^ This is a stock photo but the produce genuinely looks like this. I have both worked in and lived off food aid programs in my lifetime and if you ever have you know that “brown bananas” and “fun game! find the squash that isn’t moldy” is usually the best it gets. Produce that is actually fresh and high-quality and tastes nice and is heritage varieties of culturally important foods is basically asking for the moon. Except they might actually give us the moon this time. It turns out that the moon only costs, like, twice what my small town spends on police every year. Let’s get the moon!

*Here’s the thing, no one hates The American Farmer. Farm stuff is almost always bipartisan. This makes it easier to get food to people! Let’s do the thing!

Here’s a link to the text of the act if you want to read it for yourself.

So I think the best strat here is for the users who did get the new layout to just stop using the desktop version of the site for a while, like a week or a month or however long their 'experiment' is supposed to last, while the users who didn't get the new layout should keep using the desktop version like normal or, perhaps, use it even more than usual.

My guess is that they're doing basic A/B testing on the new layout to see if it would boost engagement: the userbase is split roughly 50/50 between the 2 versions and they are going to be comparing the engagement data between the 2 groups of users to see if it's worth it switching everyone to the new layout or not.

Basically, if you got the new layout and don't like it - don't use it. If engagement metrics of group B (new layout) are lower than those of group A (no change), the experiment will be considered a failure and they will have to reverse the change.

If your tumblr suddenly looks like twitter - it's a sign to log off and go touch some grass! (or just use the mobile app since that engagement data isn't relevant to this particular experiment)

Don't just not use it, send feedback too!

There's a "contact us" option to send feedback about features being launched. GIVE FEEDBACK IN THE APPROPRIATE SPACE!

Not to "As a professional UX researcher" on this thread, but yeah, as a professional UX researcher, now is the exact time to provide clear (but kind!! the poor UX team is usually not responsible for these decisions) feedback on what your thoughts are in regards to this change.

In my job, if I were doing an AB test on a site layout and every person I interviewed said "I hate it, it looks like knockoff twitter, please put the old one back" then I would be very excited to include a nice little bullet point in my report that says "[x] number of participants disliked the new layout :)"

This was so interesting I love yuval

"English is the universal language for a reason"

"I agree" with the British Empire Wikipedia page open had me rolling

Yes!

Also: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is a grammatically correct sentence in English.

#i feel like dude just feels personally attacked bc he only knows english but who knows idk him#but also lol at some stuff he said???#the outer part of the word wheel for angry is like mainly words that english borrowed from french :')#the insanely complicated sentence is dumb af bc noone talks like this you can make super complicated sounding sentences in any language????#i can understand the had had had had it's not my native language xD#i really think chinese and Japanese alphabets are inherently more complex than the bloody latin alphabet of 26 letters my guy#also this whole thing pisses me off bc of it's just one girl mindlessly chatting while doing making made to look stupid by a dude doing#a bunch of research on anything he says#ye maybe english has a bunch of complicated words but noone uses them#i took an online english vocab test and ranked higher than the average american but lol ok english is so hard#it does not declinate it does not conjugate the only thing to know is how things are pronounced bc it's hella randon but BESIDES THAT???#learn your irregular verbs#i did this as a 5th grader idk man#and she's right about bilingual brains seem to work differently than brains that only know one language#which is the same for a lot of english speaker#s#also feeling like girl talking about high iqs was talking about north east asia so dude kinda implying the other countries are stupider wtf

Let's unpack this.

'i feel like dude just feels personally attacked bc he only knows english' Disclaimer, I am about to defend English brains as a Ukrainian, English being my third language. Oh, I also got a degree in English linguistics uwu.

'#the outer part of the word wheel for angry is like mainly words that english borrowed from french :')' Yeah, this is how languages work, actually. I just looked up German loanwords in French, and the list is so long they had to separate it into three separate articles.

'the insanely complicated sentence is dumb af bc noone talks like this you can make super complicated sounding sentences in any language????' Yeah, that's called academic language and is actually a perfect example.

'i really think chinese and Japanese alphabets are inherently more complex than the bloody latin alphabet of 26 letters my guy' I actually super agree on that! Moreover, latin alphabet doesn't suit bunch of languages that use it, IMO

'also this whole thing pisses me off bc of it's just one girl mindlessly chatting while doing making made to look stupid by a dude doing#a bunch of research on anything he says#' Yeah she deff mindlessly chats implying that English speaker's brains are less developed which IS kinda xenophobic, but also, could be said about literally any monolingual person who doesn't care for other languages. Are monolinguals stupider? I agree. Are their brains less developed? Wtf are we on.

Grammatically English IS simpler than a lot of languages and the boy definitely is up in the arms defending what isn't there but for the most part man idk. Saying speakers of a certain language have less developed brains that other is not alright.

I wouldn't say that English grammar is simpler than a lot of languages; while there's a lot less morphological inflection, you have to memorize stress on not just a word-by-word basis, you have to remember that some words have a different stress pattern when they're used in a different part of speech, e.g. "process" as a noun vs a verb. And that vowel sounds are inconsistent, not just orthographically but contingent on stress! And yes, English orthography is a nightmare! It's rote memorization for both spelling and pronunciation!

And then there's the semantic nuances around various constructions! In English, "I run," "I'm running," and "I do run" all mean different things, even before we get into idioms, when all of these are expressed through the present tense in both German and every Romance language I know anything about. And what morphological inflection we do have can turn into a hot mess:

And then there's our utterly ridiculous lexicon, where we just pile words into common use like we're running out of synonyms and need to restock. And I haven't even started on center embedding, which can be a nightmare for L1 English speakers, let alone L2 learners.

You know how l'Académie française tries to promote French neologisms over English loan-words? Yeah, English likes to coin neologisms while also raiding other languages for vocabulary for the same thing. And then there are abominations like "throuple" like polyamorous people haven't been saying "triad" for decades, because have you met English speakers?

This was so interesting I love yuval

"English is the universal language for a reason"

"I agree" with the British Empire Wikipedia page open had me rolling

Yes!

Also: “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is a grammatically correct sentence in English.

#i feel like dude just feels personally attacked bc he only knows english but who knows idk him#but also lol at some stuff he said???#the outer part of the word wheel for angry is like mainly words that english borrowed from french :')#the insanely complicated sentence is dumb af bc noone talks like this you can make super complicated sounding sentences in any language????#i can understand the had had had had it's not my native language xD#i really think chinese and Japanese alphabets are inherently more complex than the bloody latin alphabet of 26 letters my guy#also this whole thing pisses me off bc of it's just one girl mindlessly chatting while doing making made to look stupid by a dude doing#a bunch of research on anything he says#ye maybe english has a bunch of complicated words but noone uses them#i took an online english vocab test and ranked higher than the average american but lol ok english is so hard#it does not declinate it does not conjugate the only thing to know is how things are pronounced bc it's hella randon but BESIDES THAT???#learn your irregular verbs#i did this as a 5th grader idk man#and she's right about bilingual brains seem to work differently than brains that only know one language#which is the same for a lot of english speaker#s#also feeling like girl talking about high iqs was talking about north east asia so dude kinda implying the other countries are stupider wtf

Let's unpack this.

'i feel like dude just feels personally attacked bc he only knows english' Disclaimer, I am about to defend English brains as a Ukrainian, English being my third language. Oh, I also got a degree in English linguistics uwu.

'#the outer part of the word wheel for angry is like mainly words that english borrowed from french :')' Yeah, this is how languages work, actually. I just looked up German loanwords in French, and the list is so long they had to separate it into three separate articles.

'the insanely complicated sentence is dumb af bc noone talks like this you can make super complicated sounding sentences in any language????' Yeah, that's called academic language and is actually a perfect example.

'i really think chinese and Japanese alphabets are inherently more complex than the bloody latin alphabet of 26 letters my guy' I actually super agree on that! Moreover, latin alphabet doesn't suit bunch of languages that use it, IMO

'also this whole thing pisses me off bc of it's just one girl mindlessly chatting while doing making made to look stupid by a dude doing#a bunch of research on anything he says#' Yeah she deff mindlessly chats implying that English speaker's brains are less developed which IS kinda xenophobic, but also, could be said about literally any monolingual person who doesn't care for other languages. Are monolinguals stupider? I agree. Are their brains less developed? Wtf are we on.

Grammatically English IS simpler than a lot of languages and the boy definitely is up in the arms defending what isn't there but for the most part man idk. Saying speakers of a certain language have less developed brains that other is not alright.

Yuval Ben-Hayun has a masters in education and a bachelors in computer science. He was a teacher for 5 years before being able to just focus on creating TikTok content. He is fluent in English and Hebrew.

He didn’t feel attacked by this girl, he felt that she was saying incorrect and baseless things about the complexities of language and was using his platform to help address the issues.

She took her video down after receiving similar feedback from so many creators on TikTok and also tried to publish a video backtracking on the comments.

What the sneef? I'm snorfin' here!

Hey? You doin alright @ghost--bot ??

ils ne sont pas les "dogs," ils sont les chiens

took a bit but heres Pride dragons part 2! thanks for all the love for the first set

and again id love some suggestions for more flag designs

Part 1

(edit, changed to higher resolution images)

@draconicrose

Most incredible facet of today’s ruling against affirmative action IMO

on a truly unrelated note it took me multiple tries to not misread this guy's name as Anthony Kiedis

Pls be true

Tony Hawk’s Twitter is a gold mine honestly

We Stan this San Diego Man

this

C o m e d yy

Some recent gems:

And of course there’s

#where is race war tony hawk tweet thats my fav (via @laughingfish​)

I gotchu, bro:

i’m wheezgJmf stoP

Honestly every time this thread just makes me laugh. And new additions…excellent.

this man is an absolute gem of a human being, I swear

Hello, tumblr! I mentioned this in my stream last night with my friend and collaborator @lakemojave, but here is the official tumblr announcement: I've started a fundraiser to pay for GAS that I can't afford on my own.

I...try my best to appear pretty unflappable on this site, because my online persona relies on that. But about two years ago I was harassed by TE/RFs and no matter how much I tried to forget or get over it, there was a comment that a 17 year old made towards my appearance the has probably been the most devastating thing I've ever felt, and ever since that insult I've grown steadily and steadily more disgusted and anxious about my appearance--specifically my hair.

As an AMAB trans person, I'm of course going to experience male-pattern baldness. Even in cisgender men, more than 75% of them experience some form of heightened anxiety and dysphoria due to hair loss or fear of it. I don't know how those numbers change when talking about trans people, but I can't imagine it's not even higher.

In the interest of full transparency at the cost of, frankly, my pride: I have reached the point in my dysphoria where I am growing to be borderline suicidal. I've struggled with suicidal ideation since I was a young teenager, but this is the first time in over a decade that I've reached a level where I am terrified what will happen when it gets worse.

And so with all that said, I've started a fundraiser on PayPal to try and raise money for my gender-affirming care. Y'all might remember me from the Great Soy Sauce Conspiracy of late December of last year, and maybe also how I stopped working on the project due to mental health reasons. I remember how kind all of you were when I was struggling with living newly on my own trying to afford food and things like convection plates, and it's my hope that I could rely on you all to help me again.

With that said, I've made the decision that if I am able to fulfill this fundraiser's cost...I'm going to pick back up The Mysterious Appearance of Miss Appleton and finally finish it once and for all...in video essay format, because that feels most appropriate to me. I think I'm going to be ready for it this time.

If you've read this far, thank you so much. If you need it, though:

TLDR: I need to get myself gender-affirming surgery because i'm getting real close to suicidal over my dysphoria. I've made a fundraiser for it. If the fundraiser is successful, I'm going to finally finish the video essay for The Mysterious Appearance Of Miss Appleton. Thank you for your time and your help.

We're already a third of the way to the goal and I'm losing my mind about it!!!!! Thank you all so much for getting us this far so quickly!!!!

UPDATE: I got off the phone with the surgery clinician early this morning and got some information.

The TLDR of it is that the total cost of the procedure was quoted at $5,700USD, which included all the amenities of where I'd be staying, food, and so-on, but didn't include flight tickets, which are going to be roughly another $1,000 for the round-trip. So the total goal of the fundraiser as $7,000 was actually right on the money (pun intended)

As you can see, we're already almost at the 40% mark. I'm so deeply grateful for everyone who's already helped by donating and spreading the word--it's literally because of y'all that this looks like it might be possible.

I don't have any social media presence outside of this site, so I can't really share this anywhere else, but if y'all felt willing to post the fundraiser on Facebook or Twitter or Reddit or....is there somewhere else? Mastodon I guess?? then I'd be super grateful, the one thing I'm worried about is that it'll just drain to a trickle and then stop when we've already gotten this far

We're nearly at the halfway mark!!!! Y'all I'm so extremely grateful, I hope we can keep this up!

This is why I always recommend having an emergency cheese. Mine is parmesan.

wonder woman out here still saving lives

right, I need to get a container to carry emergency snacks in

just painted an onion on a cutting board and i think it’s the peak of my artistic career

look at her…

she gets stronger!

the full painting is finally complete!

This is giving me emotions that I myself do not fully understand

Maybe you're just tearing up because someone has been cutting onions

I was half expecting a series of paintings detailing the dicing of the onion