Carpe Diem

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style. 

Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.

A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin. 

The tags are absolutely a factor. You want someone to take a breath in the middle of a sentence, you start a new tag. You want to have, as seen here, this removable piece between commas (does it have a name?) - you have 5 tags in this sentence alone. And sometimes you just

pause in the middle of a sentence…

and let your voice

language is this constantly evolving thing tbh, it doesn’t remain the same unless it’s dead and the people who used it gone so seeing the evolution of the language used on tumblr is literally so fucking amazing i want to cry with joy at it

because we also add in words from other languages, or make entirely new words up as additional terms to denote something (see ‘tol’ and ‘smol’ in relation to ‘tall’ and ‘small’) and this is constant. we are doing this daily without any sort of breathing space because there’s millions of us on this hellsite and we are constantly talking and so the language changes day-by-day until we have general, universal rules for what to do in a post, what to add in our tags, how to add it, why we add it, what we mean by it

we’ve created a language in the same way our ancestors all did: by building on the ones that came before and changing them to suit our needs and our system

and that’s fucking awesome okay

What?

What.

I am a social worker. I have worked in community mental health and in home-based healthcare. And it is much, much easier for me to help you when the situation you're in is not yet a full-blown crisis.

"I'm out of money and have been for a while and now I haven't eaten for three days." This is a crisis. A crisis where I'm likely going to have to put you in the car and take you to the nearest food bank--except food banks require appointments now, and the next opening is in four days, so you're staring down the barrel of a week with no food. That's obviously not going to work, so, let's call eight different food banks until we've found one that has an appointment the next day...except it's in the neighboring county and you can't drive. So now I'm calling your doctor to try and brow beat an emergency plan of care update out of him so I can come back the next day and drive you to the food bank. And we haven't even started on the "constantly broke" part of the problem.

"I don't think I have enough food to make it to my next paycheck. I have (xyz) in my house and that will only last until (date)." This is bad, but not a crisis. We have a few days. We make you an appointment at the food bank and contact your brother to make sure you have a ride there. Now we can spend our visit talking about what bills are causing you the most problems and make a jump on a long-term solution, like looping in a community action agency to cover your utilities and getting you an OTC card from Medicaid to cover some of your groceries every month.

"I'm ten months behind on rent, and my landlord said I have a week to get out, or the cops will throw me out. I don't have the money, and if I get evicted, I have nowhere to go." This is a crisis. Every single thing we do here is going to be some version of a Hail Mary. In Michigan, we have the state emergency relief fund for rent issues, but process time is well over one week. There are community action agencies that we can call to assist you with payment, but they are unlikely to have sufficient funds to cover nearly a year of back rent. We can contact legal aid clinics to try and prevent your landlord from evicting you, but they may look at your case and determine that too much "fault" lies with you. Most likely, I'm going to have to put you in touch with homeless shelters and the public housing office.

"I'm two months behind on rent and I don't think I'll be able to pay next month either." This is bad, but not a crisis. This is solvable. We have time to apply for SER, or put you in contact with community action agencies. We have time to review your finances and see if you qualify for a public housing wait list or other forms of ongoing rental assistance. We have time to talk about a million possible adjustments to try and ease the burden of your rent.

"I am the sole caregiver for my elderly parent who has dementia and is emotionally volatile and fully dependent on me. I have not slept through the night in weeks and I have not had an actual break for over a year. I am having screaming meltdowns multiple times a week and I am threatening self-harm unless someone comes to collect my parent and take over all caregiver duties." This is a crisis. This is a crisis where the ethical code of my profession demands that I call 911 and report the conversation to them. They will likely come to the house and interview you. If they determine your threats were serious, they will have you forcibly committed to a psych ward. Your parent will either be dumped into a random hospital or rehab center, or left in the house on their own. Upon release from your psych hold, you will be expected to resume caregiving duties as though nothing happened. Except, now, adult protective services is actively investigating you, because it was determined you may be an ongoing danger to your parent.

"I am the sole caregiver for my demented parent, and I have not had a break in a couple of weeks, and I feel angry and weepy most of the time." This is bad, but not a crisis. We can get you in touch with volunteer groups for respite, and apply for state funded programs to get more day-to-day help, and talk about long-term planning for when the dementia symptoms get worse. We can get you the phone numbers for crisis lines and enroll you in a support group.

Occtis + watching and learning

+ bonus

See, part of the conceit of the PotC trilogy is that all myths are true. Nearly every supernatural element in the franchise has a root in some real world mythology or pirate lore, although some of them are mashed together.

Another thing is that they take place at the end of the Golden Age of Piracy, and the more the map gets filled in, and the more the Royal Navy takes power, there less room there is for the mystical and supernatural in the world. This is explicitly called out in At World's End with the death of the kraken:

Barbossa: The world used to be a bigger place. Jack: The world's still the same. There's just... less in it.

The only way to access the world of the supernatural is through the supernatural itself. You can only get to the Isla de Muerta with Jack's compass that points to whatever you desire, or if you already know where its is. You need Tia Dalma's map to find the edge of the world. To access the supernatural, you need to already be immersed in it.

When we go to Tortuga (or any pirate controlled space) we leave behind the sensibilities of the real world and enter this bizarre perpetual revel of debauchery and violence that could never sustain itself in a world bound by sense.

That makes Jack our Puck character, a trickster of tricksters who can invert your fortunes just by letting him talk to you.

薫秋元 - Dress Down (1986)

Arwen (Kelpie, 60lbs) is 15(ish?) now and while she has a high prey drive and history of successful hunts, she's also 15 and doesn't give many fucks. I also have my dogs. Charleston (Sighthound/pointer mix, 50lbs) is 10 and another proactive carnivore, but he's also JUST finished making his Perfect Couch Nest and doesn't want to get up.

...Herschel (Corgi, 40lbs and extremely tube-shaped) is 5 and has no Prey Drive, but he does have a PLAY Drive, which i found out last time I was up here and found him, having cornered a baby bunny, play-bowing and shaking his ass at it because he just had a Great Time chasing it, now it was the bunny's turn to chase HIM! Even though all three of these assholes spent all day dragging me hither and yon through the rockies, he still has the endurance of an athenian messenger and still looking for a reason to careen around the house at Mach Fuck.

A Reason has Arrived.

"Ah!" I told him.

As much crime Herschel commits, he's actually quite biddable, and stopped, little paw raised, staring at me before slowly lowering it.

"Good job!" I tell him, and he wiggles with joy. "Figure it out!"

Herschel returns his attention to the wobble, circling and sniffing it with small boofs of excitement, looking bac at me for approval eery so often, before giving the bottom of Wobble the smallest, gentlest push with his nose, which doesn't make it rock, but does scoot it along the carpet.

"Okay!" I tell him, and for the last few minutes he has been slowly scooting the mouse inside the wobble across the living room floor an inch at a time.

This has, however, made charlie actually sit up and watch, so I may need to intervene soon.

FUNNY STORY-

I mean my whole life is a funny story but in this particular case, it's funny because while I do not have a broken ankle, I do have a pretty severe sprain, and a new appreciation for the horrors of Wordle.

I'll get there.

Anyway, when we last left off, Herschel was doing the Canine equivalent of Playing Cars with the wobble, scooting it around the living room with his nose, which was enough to wake up both Charlie and Arwen, who were squinting at him with matching expressions of "What is the Ginger Idiot up to now?"

Sister: So I saw the mouse story???

Me: oh god don't tell mom.

Sister: oh no, they'd worry too much.

Sister: ok but if I tell you something you can't tell them, okay?

Me: now what

Sister: were you up at North Shields Pond? The one with the turtle sign?

Me: yeah?

Sister: okay that's just spooky.

Sister: so you know that huge dent in the back of Beyond? (my car, formerly her car)

Me: Yes, it's how I find it in parking lots?

Sister: never tell mom but I didn't back into a Ballard.

Me: oh my God.

Sister: I think it was like 2019, but Arwen had cornered a mouse that climbed into her old puzzle ball so I took it out to the meadow there to release it, and it was suuuuper late at night so I didn't see the moose either...

Me: what the fuck

Sister: I mean I didn't eat shit and fuck up my ankle but that thing hit the car harder than that time I got hit by that pickup.

Me: what the fuck kind of Bethesda-ass glitchy specific trigger videogame cutscene bullshit is this?

Sister: I DON'T KNOW???? MAYBE THE MICE ALL HAVE A TELEPATHIC LINK TO THAT MOOSE SPECIFICALLY??

Discworld Textposts III

i asked my mum if it was weed butter hours ago and just after i made the last post she sent me this

no one but professional trainers has a full team of 6 in the pokemon universe because it would be a fucking gigantic hassle to deal with 6 animals, let alone different types that need different things

Y’ALL!!

Jack Dorsey funded this with his nonprofit AndOtherStuff. The home page for the organization explicitly lists AI as one of its pillars, saying a goal is "making NOSTR the best social protocol for open source AI development and implementation"

What is open source AI?

It's a program that publicly shares its code for free online, so that anyone can use it for themselves. This means that anything this AI is trained on could eventually make its way into any business, social media site, etc. That uses this code. Or, if not, it'll have the ability to harvest content as well as this.

Even since the app doesn't allow AI openly on the videos themselves, the app is likely to use our original content to train its AI. You might have seen that some AI have experienced a positive feedback loop of declining quality, training itself on other AI slop until anything it produces is unintelligible.

This is likely an attempt to prevent that in video format

Then, any other company that wants to use the code can use this better trained AI to make it even harder to recognize AI across the board.

You can read about the connection to AndOtherStuff, as well as the developers' reasons for the project here: