I’ve been listening to Ai/Solate a lot recently and it got me to think about Unknown Mother Goose again and how it’s an absolutely fantastic song that’s such a deep personal view into wowaka’s relationship with Vocaloid and how it was ultimately what made him successful in music but also completely isolated him as an artist and one thing that wasn’t ever brought up in ForgetfulSubs’ translation nor have I seen ever brought up anywhere else is a Japanese-specific grammar oddity.

If you know literally anything about Japanese you’re probably aware that unlike English, which only has one first person pronoun of “I”, Japanese has multiple, each with their own levels of politeness and implications of gender and rank etc. etc.

Generally, in songwriting, the pronoun used is 僕 (boku), a pronoun that is polite and familiar. It implies the speaker is male but many female songwriters will use it too, as it’s become sort of a lyrical standard.

This is the first line of Unknown Mother Goose:

Noticeably, the first person pronoun used is あたし (atashi), an exclusively female first person pronoun almost never used in lyrics (and even less frequently in lyrics not about romantic love/not trying to appear ‘cutesy’ to a male audience). Why this unusual pronoun choice? Though あたし has three mora, it is pronounced as two syllables, and 僕 could be easily substituted. Even if wowaka didn’t want to use 僕, he could have used 私 (watashi), a word nearly identical in sound with the same number of mora but with fewer gendered connotations.

Japanese is a pronoun drop language, so not every line that has “I” translated into it actually contains a first person pronoun. However, あたし is used a couple more times until–

a bunch of archives of incredibly important government datasets like maternal mortality statistics are about to be deleted forever. in a regime where they're known to fudge numbers, we can't trust a lot of the data coming from them to not be altered. open source backups like those found on data.world are vital to being able to verify that the data coming from our government is still intact and not altered. and they're about to delete all of it.

i don't know if we need to start a petition or what. nobody seems to fucking care. there are millions of users on data.world and yet nobody is raising the alarm bells and it makes me feel like I'm going insane. somebody needs to do something. i don't know what to do. it feels like more and more of this world is being destroyed and dismantled. it's not only US centric data, either! it's all sorts of countries from around the world! and they're about to fucking delete everything.

the only things that won't be deleted are private companies who happen to use the paid version of their platform (which isn't accessible data to the open source community; some people have just been using their service to host their own data on privately)

and the kicker? this announcement was made... via an AI generated blog post. so not even any sort of human touch. just a generic, soulless announcement made by a soulless human about to take a wrecking ball to one of the more important websites that exists on the internet.

an example of some of the things that will be deleted on July 11th:

https://www.re3data.org

There are over 3500 respectable data repositories on one respectable global registry; to a researcher there’s no point in data existing if not findable; if you’re trying to find a new home for your dataset, start there

Here are some of the scripts I’m using to email University Research Librarians and department chairs/assistant and associate deans who I know oversee faculty who use resources from data.world for their lessons:

Please try to support and help us.

Please try to share our story and speak about our suffering. 🥹💔

Over the past few days, I asked for your help to cover Eid expenses and to buy medication for my parents. Yesterday, we experienced a very nearby airstrike that caused significant damage, including damage to our tent.

We are living with fear every moment. Every minute feels uncertain, and the war has never truly ended. The situation continues to worsen, and I could lose my life at any moment.Please do not forget my family and loved ones. Any support you can provide, even to help us repair the damage, would mean so much to us. We urgently need your help.These are some photos showing the damage and the area that was bombed. Please support and help us in any way you can. We need everything.😭💔

You can watch a wider video of the area through this link.Click here

- Anjal Prakash, the former research director at the Bharti Institute of Public Policy

I'd also like to elevate this linked study from the article:

New York Times article

"Sunil Rastogi, an auto-rickshaw driver in New Delhi, normally works 12-hour days to make ends meet and save for the heart surgery he needs. But in summer, as temperatures climb above 100 degrees, he faces a dilemma.

Should he work fewer hours, bringing home less for his family and delaying his surgery, or press ahead and risk worsening his fragile health?

“I feel tired as it is,” Mr. Rastogi said last week. “This heat makes me even more tired.”

For millions of workers like Mr. Rastogi — wage laborers, construction workers, street vendors, delivery drivers — the scorching summer in New Delhi often forces them into a bitter trade-off between health and income. They keep the machinery of this city running, and they are among the most susceptible to its harshest conditions.

Visual kei banner / blinkies from old italian blog