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IDEK Anymore

@mysticalstarfishpolice

UK, she/her, I post whatever,
Engaged to @sociallyawkwardautistic

You know, it occurs to me that the known internet phenomenon of Reddit “am I the asshole?” posts having completely misleading headers is actually a really great example of a far less known but far more common practice of extreme journalistic spin in cases where there are large monetary incentives to diminish the story in question.

Like, if you see a Reddit post titled “Am I the asshole for buying my wife a new dress?”, the post is pretty much always something totally deranged like: “I (48) really dislike the way my wife (20) dresses, because I think it’s too revealing and makes her look slutty, which was fine when we started dating five years ago, but it makes me feel like she’s going to cheat on me now that we’re married. I’ve politely asked her to get new clothes multiple times, and every time she refused because she said she liked her clothes, and didn’t want to waste money buying new ones. Yesterday I couldn’t take it anymore so I threw out a bunch of her old dresses and bought her a new one that was more modest looking. She started crying because one of the dresses I threw out had been left to her by her mom who died when she was a teen, but I couldn’t have known that it had sentimental value. She said that I should have asked, but obviously if I asked she’d have just told me not to throw out any of her clothes, including the ones that weren’t sentimental. Also, the more modest dress I bought was pretty expensive, and she never thanked me for it. Am I the asshole here, or is she being unreasonable?”

Similarly, whenever you see a headline like “Woman Wins Millions From McDonald’s Because Her Hot Coffee Was Too Hot”, if you dig a bit, you’ll almost always quickly find out that what actually happened was: A 79-year-old ordered coffee which, unbeknownst to her, was being served extremely dangerously hot, because McDonald’s was trying to have coffee that stayed warm over a long commute without spending any extra money on cups with better insulation. The coffee spilled on the old woman’s lap, giving her severe third degree burns over a huge portion of her body, including her genitals. She got to a hospital and they managed to save her life with skin grafting, but she became disabled from the accident, and her genitals and thighs were permanently disfigured. She tried to settle with McDonald’s for her medical costs, and McDonald’s refused to cover any portion of her medical expenses at all, and so she sued. At trial, the jury discovered that this same exact thing had happened seven hundred times before, and McDonald’s had still decided not to change their policy because paying out individual suits was cheaper than moderately reducing their coffee profits. As a result, the jury awarded punitive damages designed to penalize McDonald’s two days worth of their coffee profits, in addition to the woman’s medical costs.

I think it’s largely the same phenomenon, but I know a lot of people who are familiar with the first case, but don’t know to look for the second. If you see some totally outrageous “how could a person ever sue over this stupid thing?” case, you should immediately be incredibly suspicious that that’s all that actually happened, because a lot of the time, it absolutely isn’t. The people who have the most incentive to make their opponent look not only wrong, but completely crazy for having any sort of grievance at all, are often the actually unreasonable ones. 

Anyway this is all to say that if I see ANY of y’all automatically siding with McDonald’s over the recent case where 4-year-old girl was severely burned by their chicken nuggets because “hurr durr dumb kid didn’t know that chicken nuggets were hot, people sue over anything lol”, I will grab that McBoot you’re licking and shove it all the way up your McFuckingAss.

lawyer fun fact! sometimes you need to sue someone before your insurance will pay for your medical bills (because your insurance would rather the other person pay for your medical bills so they don’t have to)! sometimes you need to sue because what you’d get from insurance isn’t enough to pay for all of your medical bills! sometimes you want to change a specific thing, like a dangerous practice or defective part, and that’s not going to happen if you just ask nicely!

most truly ridiculous lawsuits get screened before they’re even filed (because someone goes to an attorney and that attorney is like “yeah you don’t have a case here”) or very shortly after they’re filed (because judges can toss out cases that have zero merit). 99% of the time, if it sounds ridiculous but somehow it went all the way to someone suing and winning in a jury trial, it probably wasn’t actually as absurd as it sounds.

had a genuine revelation in therapy that made me burst out laughing, been a while since I had one of those

therapist was talking about urge surfing (the idea that urges are waves that come and go if you ride them out, so the more you delay acting on the urge, the more likely you are not to do it) and then I was talking about how the transient nature of my emotions is actually what gets me so mad, like it’s actually very very annoying to be so so sad but to also be thinking “I know I’m very sad right now but unfortunately I am going to feel better later so I can’t destroy my life for one minute’s gratification,” and it’s just so annoying because if I knew or at least believed that I was gonna be sad FOREVER it would make things much easier, but instead I’m so mad at the knowledge that this too will pass. like it’s a manifestation of weak will to not feel bad forever.

and my therapist was like, “so even at the worst times, you still have hope”

and I was like “holy shit dude” because never once in my life have I considered that the little bastard voice that tells me not to smash all the dishes because they’ll be a pain in the ass to clean up in ten minutes is the last gift/curse of Pandora’s box

hope is a thing with wings, i.e. a bird and like most birds is 1) very beautiful, 2) very annoying, and 3) sometimes shits on you

One of the ballsiest things Tolkien ever did was write 473k words about some hobbits called frodo, sam, merry, and pippin and then write in the appendices that their names are actually maura, ban, kali, and razal. 

This just in: Eowyn and Eomer’s names actually start with the letter “L.” [source for other nerds

No, they have Westron names and English names.

What you’ve got to understand is that everything Tolkien wrote was him pretending to merely translate ancient documents. He was writing as if the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were actually been written by Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam (or Bilba, Maura, and Ban) and he was just some random contemporary academic translating it all into English for us. 

There are many languages in his books, but generally speaking, everything written in English in the books is a translation of the language “Westron.” Therefore any names that come from Westron, he translated. Names coming from other languages, like Sindarin, he left as they were. Why? IDK. Maybe because the stories are from a hobbit perspective and hobbits speak Westron, so he wanted the Westron parts to sound familiar and the other languages/names to remain foreign? 

“But Mirkwoodest!” you cry, “The word ‘hobbit’ isn’t an English word! And the names Bilbo Baggins, Frodo Baggins, Samwise Gamgee, Peregrin Took, and Meriadoc Brandybuck” all sounds super weird and not like English at all!”

Psych! They are in English! (Or Old English, German, or Norse.) Once again you underestimate what a nerd Tolkien was. Let me break it down: 

In Westron, hobbits are actually called “kuduk,” which means “hole-dweller,” so for an English translation, Tolkien called them “hobbits” which is a modernization of the Old English word “holbytla” which comes from “Hol” (hole) and “Bytla”(builder)

“Maura” is a Westron name which means “Wise.” Weirdly enough, “Frodo” is an actual Proto-Germanic name that actual people used to have and it means the same thing. 

“Banazîr” is Westron for “half-wise, or simple.” In Proto Germanic, the prefix “Sam” means half, and wise is obviously a word we still use. 

“Razanur” means “Traveler” or “Stranger” which is also the meaning of the word “Peregrin(e)” This one is a twofer because  “Razar” means “a small red apple” and in English so does “Pippin.”

“Kalimac” apparently is a meaningless name in Westron, but the shortened form “Kali” means “happy,” so Jirt decided his nickname would be “Merry” and chose the really obscure ancient Celtic name “Meriodoc” to match. 

Jirt chose to leave “Bilba” almost exactly the same in English, but he changed the ending to an “O” because in Westron names ending in “a” are masculine. 

I’m not going to go on and talk about the last names but those all have special meanings too (except Tûk, which is too iconic to change more than the spelling of, apparently). 

The Rohirrim were also Westron speakers first and foremost, so their names are also “translations” into Old English and Proto-Germanic words, i.e. “Eowyn”  is a combination of “Eoh” (horse) and “Wynn” (joy/bliss)

“Rohirrim/Rohan” are Sindarin words, but in the books, they call themselves the “Éothéod” which is an Old English/Norse combo that means “horse people.” Tolkien tells us in the “Peoples of Middle Earth” that the actual Westron for “Éothéod” is Lohtûr, which means that Eowyn and Eomer’s names, which come from the same root word, must also start with the letter L. 

The names of all the elves, dwarves, Dunedain, and men from Gondor are not English translations, since they come from root words other than Westron. 

The takeaway from this is that when a guy whose first real job was researching the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter “W” writes a book, you can expect this kind of tomfoolery.

Notes: Sorry I said “Razal” instead of “Razar” in my original post I’m a fraud. 

Further Reading: 

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I’m having a stroke

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perfectionistdia

Tolkien was the most extra son of a bitch my goodness

This is why C.S. Lewis wanted to punch Tolkien in the face sometimes. 

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dashas-hideous-laughter

In the great hierarchy of nerds, Tolkien remains at the very top.

No one can top Tolkien.

pretend? pretend to translate????

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linguisticparadox

He also gave instructions for translators, directing them to translate English-derived names like the hobbits’ but not to translate Elvish/Dwarvish/etc names like Arwen.

This is also why I think a fanfic written from the perspective of another scholar arguing with Tolkien’s translation would be fun

more substantive thing about Glass Onion and then i think this is all my thoughts: i really liked something i feel was clearly shown in the flashbacks but not outright stated, which was that andi knew damn well miles bron was a dumb huckster.

that's what she wanted him for. she needed that ability to throw himself into his latest shill with total commitment, because of his need to believe in his own hype. the 'reality distortion' of his hard sell.

she knew that to get what she wanted out of life, she needed to harness that confidence of a mediocre white man we all talk about.

that it would open doors that would stay unmoved in the face of all her brilliance, and polish, and perfected rich bitch voice.

there's a lot of these guys out there, and she picked a dumb one because she planned for him to be the front man to her mastermind. (apologies to paul mccartney lol i don't mean to impugn your intelligence.) a smarter man would have had his own plans, would be harder to use as a mouthpiece for her better ones. she would have needed to find an actual partner and not a tool, and she didn't trust like that.

duke wasn't actually wrong to say they were all playing the same shitty game and andi lost. i mean, he was morally wrong but he wasn't incorrect.

like blanc says, she thought that because she was better than bron, because she was the genius and he was the cheap con artist, he wasn't dangerous. and in the end that was where it all fell apart.

okay i guess i lied i wasn't out of thoughts.

so like i said in the tags i really like that it's duke who said it, because duke and andi make a mirrored pair within the Shitheads.

duke--I've been through the tag and noticed a lot of people missed this entirely--duke isn't real.

duke is a man born in probably the late 70s with superhero knuckle tattoos. he's a gaming nerd whose natural genetic predisposition toward being built let him surf the gamergate wave into its current toxic cultural aftermath.

and sure, the persona has become most of his personality, but he pivots away from it easily enough, when it's not useful or fun.

he's genuinely sexist, but in a casual, unexamined way--his misogyny isn't actually emotionally important to him. he doesn't actually have any ideals about society, toxic or not, that he values beyond the advantage espousing them will get him.

he'll apologize to his abusive mother for backtalking and plead with his girlfriend to bounce on the casting couch on his behalf without experiencing any cognitive dissonance, because the MRA thing is just a grift.

and he still knows that about himself.

andi's persona, in contrast, was premeditated and designed with clear eyed intent, with a genuine desire to become what she portrayed, but she wore it very much the same way.

andi was also a shithead, who voluntarily sought out other shitheads. andi didn't stop bron from shilling NFTs to children; she tried to stop him when he was imperiling the company and thus her.

she and helen very much stayed in contact after parting ways, judging by the amount helen knew about the glass onion crew from back in the day despite never having met them, but she found out about Rich Bitch voice by seeing it on TV. andi code-switched with her, the same way Duke drops character with his mom.

they match, opposite examples of sewing yourself into an aspirational skin in order to conform to the unreasonable demands of the world and its hierarchies, and achieve success on its terms.

just like lionel and claire, who aren't trying to pass themselves off as anything but 'competent,' but they know themselves and one another as liars. the politician and the walking talking case of impostor syndrome.

(if they're opposites it's in how the whole world knows lionel is miles bron's creature, while for claire it's a guilty secret.)

whiskey and peg are both the hangers-on of hangers-on, contorting into the shapes required to retain patronage, but whiskey's bland comfort with the mutual exploitation of her relationship and intention to separate herself from duke as soon as he's not useful is in stark contrast to peg's hopeless enmeshment with birdie.

and birdie and bron, of course, are so much alike in the privilege to mostly believe their own exact-opposite yet effectively identical lies, of being too stupid to be culpable and too smart to be wrong.

both of them genuinely expect to always have yet another second chance, another round to try to win, and no true consequences for losing. the parallel drawn out between the 'wait out the media cycle before tweeting another slur' approach to scandal and the throwing-spaghetti-at-the-wall-until-you-strike-gold startup bro treadmill is great. like it's right there, but i hadn't thought about it quite like that before.

anyway i like the way these pairs fall together. it gives us multiple angles on each way to live dishonestly, to wear a lie as the self, so no one character becomes the single archetype of any of them. and at the same time the answer to blanc's little salvo early on about how they're all so different is--nah. they're really not different at all.

Yang Liu practising her 獨竹漂 (du2zhu2piao1; single bamboo drifting) skills. As it is a dying skill, she aims to promote it to the whole world so that it will not be forgotten.

(See my other post here for a bit more info on what bamboo drifting is)

[eng by me]

some of yall use "amab" and "afab" as like, a woke substitute for "male" and "female" and its real weird. agab terminology is useful for talking about like, your personal life experiences and very specifically medical and legal problems you might run into. if you use it to describe a stranger then you're just going back to gender essentialism in a new hat. and implying you can clock everyone, to boot.

yall have just gotta stop commenting on strangers' genders. you don't know them, you don't know their childhood "socialization" or whatever, and you definitely don't know how they personally identify. i've said before, but personally i would much rather someone i never met referred to me as a woman rather than "an afab person" or "female presenting." (don't call me a woman. i'm not a woman. i'm just saying the other two terms are worse.) one of those is just an assumption i can correct. the other two are, in order, making weird overly clinical reference to my body that feels akin to a "whats in your pants" kinda thing, and pushing the misgendering onto me by implying I'M the one leading the VIEWER to these assumptions.

if you want to be gender neutral, just say "person." if you don't, the woman/man binary will still serve you well like 80% of the time, and personally i think affords a lot more dignity to the people you do get wrong.

the thing about language is, you want to be a specific and accurate as you can be to avoid misinterpretation. if you want to replace a term like "women" in a sentence, you need to actually think about what, specifically it's referring to. if you have a "women's bookclub," then "afab" would just be transparently transphobic, "women and nb" is making weird implications about gender, and "female-presenting" is just kind of strange. in this case the best word to use is still "women's," because you're presumably trying to find other people that identify with the social aspect of womanhood.

if, however, you were talking about a "women's clinic," then we're looking at things related to menstruation and giving birth and all that jazz. since that can cover people all over the gender map, you'd probably want to come up with something like "reproductive clinic."

there simply isn't a linguistic shortcut that you can copy paste into all the places you use gendered words, because the problem we're trying to solve is that the old binary is imprecise and inaccurate. any copy-paste solution will continue to be imprecise and inaccurate.

TV Executives: “if the strike goes in, you won’t get new episodes of your favorite shows! You won’t get new movies you were looking forward to! Isn’t that terrible, what the writers are doing to you?”

Me: Bitch, that might have been an effective threat in 2007, but we have since survived a Covid shutdown and discovered ways to amuse ourselves while we waited, we can outwait this shit, too. I got a pile of shows saved I haven’t even watched yet, and a Mt. TBR waiting for me.

Compensate (and respect) your writers for their work, assholes.

It's just hilarious that they're trying to pull this whole "but your favorite shows!" nonsense.

Oh, you mean the shows you cancel after the third season no matter how good they're doing to avoid paying writers residuals? The shows that get produced and then never aired because you found a nice tax writeoff? The shows whose writing suffers because the writers' room got six weeks to write before getting booted and making the showrunner adapt all their scripts? The shows you straight up pulled from your streaming service to scam their crews out of rewatch money?

I will happily sacrifice my shows for the writers that gave them to me, no questions needed, but if anyone tries to say that the blatantly terrible way streaming treats its writers is somehow beneficial to shows, remind them of Infinity Train and Batgirl. That's the ideal they're pushing towards if someone doesn't say no, and we should be thankful that the writers are doing that for us.

So in the past few years I’ve seen so many videos / posts that are like:

“Actually wolves don’t have hierarchies!  They live in family groups where the ‘alphas’ are mom and dad and the other wolves are their CHILDREN and offer their respect willingly! :D”

and I just have to say

how dare you try to make normative nuclear families out of wolves

Yes, a lot of the old “nature red in tooth and claw” stuff about wolves is nonsense. (Like anything from Jack London.) And anything ‘alpha’ you see sleazy men trying to relate to dating (yikes!) is especially nonsense.

But wolves are complex social creatures and they create complex social structures. Just as you can’t say “THIS is the way human society is structured. Just THIS single way and no other”, so too there is no single form for a wolf pack.  

Some packs are a mom wolf and a dad wolf and their wolf children.  Others are two small ragged packs that combine to form a large pack.  Others are packs where a lone wolf joins and eventually becomes a leader. Others are packs where a grown child-wolf has pushed their parent out of the leadership role.

Speaking of the latter, let’s look at the tale of Wolf 40 and Wolf 42.

Wolf 40, Wolf 41, and Wolf 42 were wild Yellowstone wolves, daughters of the alphas. Their father was illegally killed by hunters and shortly after ambitious Wolf 40 ousted her mother, driving her out of the pack.  Wolf 21 became the new alpha male, and 40′s mate.

Wolves have personalities, and Wolf 40′s personality was “volatile”.  Imagine Scar from The Lion King combined with the boss from Office Space, and you have Wolf 40.  She habitually bullied the other female wolves, attacking them until they expressed abject submission.  And the wolves that got the worst of it were her sisters, Wolves 41 and 42.

Wolf 41 got tired of the bullying and left.  Wolf 42 remained, perhaps because she was close to Wolf 21, the alpha male.  Despite that, Wolf 21 did not interfere when his mate harassed Wolf 42.

Unlike 40, Wolf 42 got along well with the other female wolves, spending time grooming them and relaxing with them. Wolf 40 could have followed her sister’s example and built up positive social bonds. But she didn’t.

One day, Wolf 40 went out on an important task.  She was going to kill another litter of her sister’s pups–having done the same in two previous years.  This isn’t uncommon wolf behavior (but is not universal, as we will see.)  Typically only the alphas breed.

However, Wolf 40 never returned from her important task because Wolf 42–who previously had submitted to her alpha and sister, who had allowed the killing of two previous litters of pups–had had enough.  She fought back.

And the other female wolves jumped to aid her.

Collectively, they killed Wolf 40. Because “alpha” isn’t a magic cloak of protection, it doesn’t even mean “strongest wolf”, it’s just a job title.

The next day Wolf 42 carried her pups, one by one, to her sister’s den.  She set her children among the pups of her dead sister and raised both litters together. And when another wolf in the pack had pups, Wolf 42 carried them to the den to be communally raised as well.  She was the alpha female now and she made the rules, and the first rule was “we don’t hurt pups here.”

As for Wolf 21, he became the mate of Wolf 42.  Maybe he understood that Wolf 40 had been riding for a fall. 

As alpha female, Wolf 42 continued to be supportive and kind towards the other pack members.  Wolves who had been nervous wrecks under Wolf 40 began to relax and come into their own; one of the former omega wolves gained self-confidence and became one of the best hunters.

“Alpha”, for wolves, just means leader.  They might be good leaders, whom you respect, or they might be bad leaders, who fill you with dread.  They might be your parents, or they might not.  Even if they are your mother or father, wolves don’t contextualize those relationships the same way humans do.

But one thing wolves have in common with humans is that they have individual personalities and experiences, and their actions derive from those.  There is no “typical wolf pack.” And I think that’s beautiful.

If you want to learn more about wild wolf dynamics, I recommend reading the annual Yellowstone Wolf Project Reports.  Which are FASCINATING.  There are also some good wildlife specials out there.

Wolves are my favorite animal. <3  It pains me to see them misunderstood as crazed bloodthirsty brutes, but it also pains me to see them woobified.  They deserve better than that.

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Look, this is probably going to end up as an unpopular post, because God knows the level of brainrot capitalism and fast consumption caused in people's brains, but I'd rather not get TV shows for a while if it means writers get their rights defended and recognized.

Entertainment can't come at the cost of fair pay, healthy work environment and ethical practices.

Entertainment can't come at the cost of fair pay, healthy work environment and ethical practices.

Entertainment can't come at the cost of fair pay, healthy work environment and ethical practices.

Entertainment can't come at the cost of fair pay, healthy work environment and ethical practices.

I gotta say, this is one of my favourite mugs. the green might turn out more black than expected, it was a mix of a few things and ...who knows. I can't wait for this to get out of the kiln

Do you sell your work? Bc I would pay much monies for this mug.

I do! I’m on Etsy, where I post my finished pieces, and I take commissions too. you can message me here, or on instagram if you’re interested.

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I love the people in the notes going 'uhm actually he was German' because it's made fairly clear by other points in the post that it's not referring to Marx (Marx didn't write about monopoly-capitalism forming into imperialism, and Marx wrote closer to 200 years ago than 100) to the point that, in as much of a Gotcha as it is, it implies they themselves've never read Marx, let alone Lenin.

tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva

elon musk has been straight up giving checkmarks to prominent accounts who have been making fun of him, including matt binder, chrissy teigen, and dril

this is the most pathetic “no u” imaginable and he’s already got 30-follower sycophants asking why he can’t pay for their blue checks too

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he also keeps changing his name to clear the checkmark and someone at twitter keeps putting it back