velartrill

drunken journal entry//2017

some people think i learned braille for Cool Points but i actually learned it bc my medicine holder has the days printed in braille and i forget to take my medication a lot. i didnt feel like turning on a light one night just to see my medication so i learned braille out of spite. now everytime i go anywhere i have to read the braille signs and i have seen “woman” misspelled as “noman” SEVERAL times.

Tired Of Waking Up To Take Medication? Learn Braille

deer diary: today i got a death threat for learning a language

It is a flippin’ writing system, not a language!

some people think i learned braille for Cool Points but i actually learned it bc my medicine holder has the days printed in braille and i forget to take my medication a lot. i didnt feel like turning on a light one night just to see my medication so i learned braille out of spite. now everytime i go anywhere i have to read the braille signs and i have seen “woman” misspelled as “noman” SEVERAL times.

Tired Of Waking Up To Take Medication? Learn Braille

deer diary: today i got a death threat for learning a language

It is a flippin’ writing system, not a language!

like legally, you should die

oh my god, how is this real lol? (check out the Twitter thread, it immediately gets worse, too)

whorfian economics

“Shell has decided to restrict the sale of energy drinks to persons under the age of 16”

a fine example of the ambiguity of English prepositional phrases:

“restrict [the sale of energy drinks] to under-16s”

Or “restrict [the sale of energy drinks to under-16s]”?

Hot take: English does have a vocative case and it’s indicated by the prefix @

In discussions about design flaws in the human body people always say “What idiot decided to have our breathing and digestive passages cross?!” but, uh, it’s actually a pretty great thing that they do since if we could only breathe through our nose then colds and allergies would frequently be fatal or lead to brain damage due to suffocation or oxygen deprivation, nosebleeds would lead to fatal inhalation of blood, and someone could kill you just by pinching your nose. Oh, and we’d drown if we attempted to swim underwater, since we wouldn’t be able to close off our nasal passage with the velum. Now, obviously, if we’d evolved differently, something would have most likely arisen to address these issues, but I’d just like to point out that it’s not a simple fix. So if a genie ever offers to make modifications to your body, definitely don’t ask to have your breathing passages rerouted away from your esophagus.

Also, in the aftermath of such a body modification, you’d immediately notice that you’re no longer capable of speaking, since oral language depends entirely on the lungs and trachea having output through the mouth.

Some of the best screenshots of despair are irl (part 2).

tag urself im used, cheap, and available

— Inventive druid.

Definitely a problem with the kind of semi-professional middle-class upbringing I had was that I never, ever, ever once had a meaningful interaction with an adult outside the context of an explicitly deferential relationship (parent-child, teacher-student, boss-worker). The very few relationships that didn’t fit that script were either forced into them or avoided like the plague - if you were visiting a friend’s house, you thanked their parents for hosting you, perhaps the way you would with an aunt or uncle, but otherwise interaction was minimized and you stayed out of their way, not only for politeness, but because there was literally no script for how to interact with them beyond “Hi, Mrs. _______!” “Bye, Mrs. _______!”

And by all this I don’t mean I want adults to be ~friends~ with teenagers in the way they’re friends with each other, but just that it would have been helpful if we’d normalized interactions with adults as peers, people who you lived with as members of the same society, and maybe friends in that way. Undergrad did not actually help this all that much, since all of my interactions with adults were with professors, which of course isn’t the same as grade school teachers, but due to the nature and size of undergrad classes it ends up being fairly similar. (There were very few grad students at my college.)

The first time I really ever interacted with adults - or rather, by then, “people who were noticeably older than me”, since I was an adult then, too - was at my first full-time job. It was extremely new to me to neither defer and obey nor absorb their knowledge and complete their tasks - but rather, to fulfill my responsibilities as they fulfilled theirs to me. And it has been a truly mind-blowing experience in grad school to be a true peer, not just an employee, to the people I work and study with on a daily basis, no matter how much older or more experienced they are than me - I learn from them, but they also learn from me and treat me as someone with equally valuable contributions to make. Nothing in my 18 years of childhood and grade school ever prepared me for that.

I know I’m not saying anything new, but wow, thinking back on high school it’s just shocking how authoritarian the whole thing was - especially for all the ~15-19-year-olds. It’s no joke to say it was like a prison. And all the rules about when and where we had to be - the kids they were intended for broke them anyways (plus they weren’t the kind of motivation or help they needed), while the kids who could have done with a bit more responsibility and benefit of the doubt were the ones who were frightened into obeying.

Now, I don’t know what exactly I would’ve done with a freer environment in high school, I’m not exactly ambitious now and I was even less so in high school, but just in terms of benefit of the doubt - seriously! I remember once, probably only one of a couple days in my entire grade school career that I arrived late without an excuse, my alarm clock battery died overnight, I missed the bus, and I was driven to school by my mom and got there maybe 10 minutes late.

So I go up to the attendance office to get a pass - since I was too afraid to show up in class without one - and I make up some excuse about a doctor’s visit. And the attendance lady initially refuses, since I have no doctor’s note, but then she scowls and grudgingly relents, writing me a pass. And do you know what would have happened if I didn’t have a pass? I could’ve been written up and handed after-school detention - sent to a literal miniature jail inside the school where you sat silently at an empty cubicle in a windowless room guarded by some staff member. All for being ten minutes late once in an entire year. It’s absolutely no wonder so many young people are woefully unprepared for independent life and crippled by various psychological pathologies for years after high school.

high school broke me and i'm still so fucking angry about it

I can’t believe you got us banned from the moon.

im going to have a stroke

Instead try… Person A: You know… the thing Person B: The “thing”? Person A: Yeah, the thing with the little-! *mutters under their breath* Como es que se llama esa mierda… THE FISHING ROD

As someone with multiple bilingual friends where English is not the first language, may I present to you a list of actual incidents I have witnessed:

Bilingual characters are great but if you’re going to use a linguistic blunder, you have to really understand what they actually blunder over. And it’s usually 10x funnier than “Ooops it’s hard to switch back.”

the athiesm of women/people of color/lgbt people is absolutely different than the athiesm of cishet white men and i feel like people forget that a lot

how?

Don’t have spoons for long explanation - also this is only speaking for christianity - but religion has been a force of oppression for women, people of color, and lgbt+ people and the rejection of the religion is often coupled with the rejection of how religion treats them.

I’ll also say that abuse survivors are included in this because it is a reaction to and an attempt to reconcile how (christian) god would allow abuse to happen.

For straight white men atheism is usually rooted in intellectual and rational superiority complexes. It’s a “i am more rational and intelligent than you, how can you believe in something so obviously fake” thing as opposed to a reaction to a societal institution that upholds their oppression and abuse.

Women, PoC, Queer people, immigrants, trauma survivors, etc:  How can I believe in something that teaches you to be cruel?  How can I trust the books that tell me of peace and love, when you use your faith to hurt me?  How can a loving god allow [insert injustice of the day]?

White Men: I, as an Intellectual, eschew silly superstitions that say I might, someday, after my death, face one (1) single consequence.

^^^^

This post is evil

I genuinely hope everyone who reblogged this unironically will one day be released from the throes of identity politics because this is honestly just the worst