90% Puns 20% Bad At Math

And about halfway through listening to this, I went and read the comments, literally I could not stop reading I was there for hours, here are some of my favorites

Give them a try here

Also…honorable mention

#this is important context #if you weren’t around at the time it is easy to miss but #anti-corporate sentiment was pretty much the lynchpin of cyberpunk until there were movies and games making money off it #it was the 1980s you guys #the entire point was that corporations are evil and technology should be used to circumvent them and escape their control over our lives #and not be used to make ourselves into another product #now that the internet is entirely monetized and corporate it’s harder to remember that originally it was synonymous w freedom & independence

“Eat the rich” means 1%ers and billionaires

middle class is closer to poverty than being a multimillionaire

“The rich” does NOT include children of billionaires (come on we’re at least slightly better than the plagues of Egypt)

Upper middle class children SHOULD NOT feel guilt over having money

Being aware of privilege and using your privilege to help others IS NOT a guilt trip

Constantly feeling guilty helps no one

Billionaires, however, should feel guilty over hoarding wealth.

Upper middle class is NOT rich

Black Lives Matter

223,000 dollars is what Jeff Bezo makes in a minute

1. She never yells at her students- her record breaking 121 decibel shout happened during an event she’d been invited to. She was defending her title after setting the previous shouting record during a competition at a church camp, where she got to 119.4 decibels 

2. The only reason she entered the first competition was because her twin sister had entered and was about to win with a shout of 119.1 decibels. 

If you’re interested in learning more to prepare yourself, so you can be as effective as possible if you witness a scenario that requires bystander intervention, here are some resources on copwatching to look over. I highly recommend reading over them several times and taking good notes – or anything else that will help you commit the contents to memory – because this stuff will escape you in an actual stressful scenario (signed, someone who has attended multiple copwatch trainings and still totally blanked on most of what I learned the one time I’ve directly confronted an officer)

For those local to the Minneapolis, where we’re very likely to see the highest amount of police retaliation in the days to come, the Twin Cities Worker’s Defense Alliance has a How to Copwatch manual, as well as a printable Know Your Rights zine

United Against Police Terror San Diego has a Copwatching Manual intended to be fairly broadly applicable to copwatchers in the US

The ACLU offers advice on copwatching in the form of Fighting Police Abuse: A Community Action Manual

WeCopwatch have a large variety of resources on copwatching and copwatchers rights’ on their site

It’s not a stupid question! 

There are many known Ancient Egyptian jokes and puns, just the reason you don’t hear of them is that they require a lot of background cultural and linguistic knowledge for someone in the present day to a) get the joke and b) understand why it’s funny. Their jokes are very involved sometimes, often making words that sound the same as a pun in a sentence, but if you don’t know that those two words have the same consonantal value (i.e. two words both sound like ankh) then it doesn’t make any sense.

So let’s start with an easy one. This one is from the Instruction of Ankhsheshonq, and is a Ptolemaic text (c.100-30BC) that sets out maxims/proverbs for the way one should live their life through a fictional narrative, as do many older Sebayat texts, but largely strikes a far more humorous tone:

“If a crocodile loves a donkey it puts on a wig.“ (page 24, line 7)

An instruction about how someone dangerous will disguise themselves in order to get close to someone, but gives the humorous image of a crocodile in a wig.

“Man is even more eager to copulate than a donkey; his purse is what restrains him.” (page 24, line 10)

The ancient Egyptian version of ‘dating is expensive’, but also refers to men being hornier than donkeys and unable to do much about it. 

You can have this one from Late Ramesside Letter no.46 (c.1095 BC) between a unknown family members:

“I say every single day to Amun Re Harakhty when he rises and sets, ‘Give youlife, prosperity and health, long life and great and good old age, and very many favours in the presence of Amun, your lord" As follows: I heard that you are angry. You have cause me to swell up with insults, on account of this joke which I told the chief taxing-master in this letter, when it was Henuttawy who suggested to me, “Tell some jokes to the chief taxing-master in your letter.” You are like the story about the woman blind in one eye who was in a man’s house for 20 years and he found another one, and he said to her, I will divorce you, for you are blind in one eye,” so the story goes, and she said to him, “Is this the discovery you’ve made during the 20 years I’ve spent in your house?” Such am I; such is the joke I have played on you”

The joke here is two fold; one in the original joke for the man pretending to only notice his wife was blind in one eye when it was convenient for him, and two the second implied joke that the recipient is as foolish as the man in the story for conveniently ruining his relative’s time with the chief taxing master.Then you have the much more involved jokes, which often occur in ‘magical’ or religious texts, that require more explanation than I’ve just given for the ones above. Take some examples from the Chester Beatty Dream Book, which is a document that was supposed to help the Egyptians interpret their dreams:

If a man is eating the flesh of a donkey (aA.t): Good. (It means) he will become great (aA.t)“ (recto 2, line 21)

If white bread (HD) is given to him: Good. (It means) something at which his face will light up (HD) (recto 3, line 4)

If a man is seeing his penis stiffen (nxt): Bad. (It means) the stiffening of his enemy (nxt) (recto 8, line 2)

All three of these are linguistic puns, which, without the use of the transliteration in brackets, most people wouldn’t know were even puns. Here you can see Donkey (aA.t) and Great (aA.t) (pronounced ah-aht) being juxtaposed as a aural/visual pun because both words sound the same and are spelt the same (donkey has the added ‘donkey’ determinative, but essentially they are the same word). Same goes for HD (hedj), because it’s a pun on HD meaning silver/white/light, so the white (HD) of the bread will light (HD) up his face, and nxt (nekhet - stiffen) can also mean strength, which means as your virility increases so does the strength of the enemy. Basically, don’t fuck too much or your enemy gets stronger. 

Hi, I have a degree in philology, I work in translations and I kinda love world literature and old(er) literature (but not, like, Ancient Egypt old).

So, a few things come to mind here regarding these jokes:

1. If you’re not really laughing, that’s to be expected. The stuff above is scholarship, aka, “we will dissect this to the best of our abilities to see what makes it tick”.

This makes you understand jokes, but not necessarily laugh at them. Because an explained joke is no longer that funny. Fascinating, maybe. Funny? Eh.

2. This is not what those jokes sounded like to Ancient Egyptians. You know, this one might go without saying if you think about it, but… if you don’t think about it, it’s not that obvious.

Languages are fascinating because they’re way, way different from each other than you’d assume if you only know one, or even a few that have the same roots. Grammar is different, the numbers of homonyms are different, the underlying assumptions are different, the euphemisms are definitely different. 

But no matter what the language is like, the people who speak it natively will always be fluent in them. They can be witty, funny, clever without the slightest hesitation, and their language will feel perfectly natural to them because it’s their own and it thus comes naturally to them. It’s not archaic or exotic if it’s what you use at home. 

Not a joke, but let me show you the reverse of this - what happens when you  give English a similar treatment:

Everyone Swing* your body [* A pun with a type of music; but also with the idea of excitement and energy] Everyone Swing your body correctly* [* This is probably inserted for rhythm purposes, rather than an indication of how to swing] The back alley* has returned, for sure [*This is the name of the band, but it contains the word for “return”, thus creating a pun] Wow* we’ve returned again [* This literally translates as “My divinity!”, but the expression has lost its religious connotations, becoming an interjection of shock or excitement] Male and female siblings, everyone sing

Yes, this is the broken down and annotated “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys, now with synonyms to reflect what happens when translating. It sounds very different in the original.

3. In your standard translations, there’s a lot of adaptation happening.

The reason why the novels and poetry you read in translation sound much friendlier isn’t that modern languages are somehow special in this regard, or that we’ve come a long way since Ancient Egypt, or what have you. 

It’s because:

we know a lot more about them, generally speaking, and we can have bilingual people and natives checking them out

our assumptions of what those books should look like are different

or purpose in reading those books is different

If I read a Japanese novel, I want to know the story, the characters, the style. It’s pretty much the same desire as if I read an English novel. But when I read about Ancient Egypt, which isn’t easily comprehensible or close to me, I expect a distance and difficulty in the text. And also, maybe I want to understand how their language and jokes were, because they’re so far away.

Now, there’s a lot that can be said about what translators do when the author Speaks in Funny Ways even for their own language (for reasons of poetry, for example), but generally, and we won’t get into that. 

And she’s supportive of my writing about queerness but also kind of bitter about how quickly her entire generation’s history has disappeared into a bland “AIDS was bad, gay marriage solved homophobia” narrative, and now we’re having to play catch-up to educate young LGBTQ+ people about queer history and queer theory. It gets pretty raw sometimes.

I mean, a large part of the reason TERFs have been good at educating the young and queer people haven’t is, in the 80s and 90s the leading lights of TERFdom got tenured university positions, and the leading lights of queerdom died of AIDS.

When an epidemic happens, public health agencies spend millions of dollars trying to understand what happens: Why are people sick or dying? What caused it? Who else is at risk? Government health departments like the Centres for Disease control and private companies both invest hundreds of millions of dollars into preserving public health. This happened in 1977, when military veterans who all attended the same gathering began to get sick with a strange type of pneumonia, with 182 cases and 29 dead, and the CDC traced the illness to a bacterium distributed by the air conditioning system of a hotel they all stayed at, and in 1982, when seven people died of tainted Tylenol, and pharmaceutical companies changed the entire way their products were made and packaged to prevent more deaths.

Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic took six years to be recognized by the CDC (1975-1981) because at first the only people dying were intravenous drug users, which is to say, heroin addicts; when it was recognized, President Reagan’s government pressured the CDC to spend as little time and money on AIDS as possible, because they literally didn’t think gay lives were important. So yes, hospitals refused to treat them and medical staff treated them as disgusting people who deserved to die, but also, there was very little funding for scientists to understand what this disease was, what caused it, where it came from, how it spread, or how to stop it. The LGBTQ+ community had to organize and fight to get hospitals to treat them, to fund scientific research, to be legally allowed to buy the drugs that kept them alive, and to have access to treatment. An effective treatment for AIDS wasn’t found until 1995.

And it’s ongoing; a lot of the difficulty of fighting AIDS in Africa is that it’s seen as “the gay disease” (and thanks to European colonialism, even African societies that used to be okay with us were taught to think LGBTQ+ people are bad).  Even now that we have medications that can treat or prevent AIDS, they’re incredibly expensive and hard to get; in 2015, New York businessman Martin Shkreli acquired the exclusive right to make a drug that treats an AIDS-related disease, and raised its price from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill. 

Here’s one history on what it was like to have and fight AIDS, one history on how politicians responded to the epidemic, and if you can get a copy of the documentary How to Survive a Plague, it’s a good introduction, because it’s about how AIDS patients had to fight for their lives. A lot of these histories are imperfect and incomplete, because privilege played a big part in whose lives and deaths were seen as important–Poor people, people of colour, trans people, and drug addicts were less likely to be able to afford or access medical care, and more likely to die without being remembered; histories often tend to focus on straight people who got AIDS through no fault of their own, and then white cis gay men who seem more “respectable” and “relatable”.  

Hospitals refused to treat them, and when they did get admitted, treated them like dirt so their will-to-live was eroded - refused to let long-term partners visit them, staff acted like they were disgusting nuisances, etc.

Very little funding was put into finding causes or cures - AIDS was considered “god’s punishment” for immoral behavior by a whole lot of people.

Once causes were understood (effective treatments were a long ways off), information about those causes weren’t widely shared - because it was a “sex disease” (it wasn’t) and because a huge number of the victims were gay or needle-drug users, and the people in charge of disease prevention (or in charge of funding) didn’t care if all of those people just died.

Not until it started hitting straight people and superstar celebrities (e.g. Rock Hudson) did it get treated as A Real Problem - and by that time, it had reached terrifying epidemic conditions.

Picture from 1993:

Before my diagnosis, I, like many others, was clueless to how far treatment has come. I was still under the belief my diagnosis was a death sentence. Moving forward, even if only one person hears my story, that’s one more person that’s educated and can raise awareness.

A bottle of Truvada (a month supply commonly used for treating this) is at least $3,000 out of pocket and insurance doesn’t usually take a lot off of that. But the pharmacy I work at is an HIV specialty and we always get te price down to less than $10.

My brother’s first boyfriend was kicked out/disowned by his parents for being queer, got AIDS, couldn’t afford treatment, and died.  He died in 2019, at around 20 years old.

In 2019.

Barely more than a kid.

Of a treatable disease.

Because of homophobia.

Because his parents cared more about not being associated with a queer person than they cared about their son’s literal life.

By 1996, all of the men facing the camera in the picture were dead.

Every.

Single.

One.

Eric Luse, the photographer, said this in a more recent article :

By 1996 the obituary list was almost 50 names longer than the entire choral roster. All of the positions plus four dozen more, gone. The obituary list continued to grow, too. The cost and availability of any treatments in the mid-late 90s continued to cause more death.

If you were queer in the 80s and 90s, you knew someone who had it and knew people who died from it. Period. I cannot stress the impact this had on the queer community and those of us who were alive at the time, and I know the scope of it is almost unimaginable to younger people today.

By 1996, there were NO surviving original members of the SFGMC. You need to know that when you see this picture.

Dozens of the men turned away from the camera here in this shot were also dead alongside the men in white. It is vital to recognize that.

There is no hope in this picture, it isn’t a display of a lucky few who avoided death. There is no “Well at least some of them survived” because no, they didn’t, and this time was so fucking bleak and painful it’s astonishing that anything got done. They’d march one week and die the next. Their friends would bury them in the morning and march in the afternoon. This went on for years.

Bigotry and hate and ignorance killed generations of queer people. It speaks to the sheer resilience of the community that from that all but state-sanctioned genocide, we have gained so much ground in the last few decades. Much is owed to the people who refused to stay quiet and who fought even on their deathbeds, so please consider learning about LGBTQ+ history as a way of continuing the fight and showing respect. Many of us coming of age at that time didn’t have that opportunity, and made it a point to learn and get involved as teenagers and young adults because we saw what we were losing.

When talking about LGBTQ+ history, often we have to be really careful with the language we use, because how we understand things now is not how the people we’re talking about understood themselves at the time. We end up using phrases like, “People who we would now understand as gay or lesbian” or “experiences which modern transgender people often identify with”.

In this case? It’s because that’s the word they used.

(Many of them also used the words “fag” or “dyke”, but “queer” is more inclusive.)

When I talk about “the leading lights of queerness” I mean Queer Nation. I mean the people who contributed to Queer Theory. I mean people who deliberately chose to use that word. I mean me and my ex-girlfriend. We exist.

During the AIDS crisis especially, homophobia was so bad that a lot of people didn’t want to be known by any word associated with the gay community: Not gay, not homosexual, not queer, not anything. Epidemiologists had to create the category of “men who have sex with men” because there was literally no existing term that didn’t carry the weight of a slur. The purpose of using the word “queer” was for people to say, “Let’s stop running from the things society is calling us; let’s pick up the weapons they’ve hurled at us and start hurling them back. There is no level of socially acceptable we can be that will make them suddenly decide our lives matter. We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it.”  It meant very specifically embracing and defending their/our marginalized position.

Every word we’ve ever been known by has been a slur. We all have our own histories and flinch reactions. I grew up with “gay” and “lezzo” being used really hatefully around me, as well as “queer” and “dyke” and “fag”, and I have different comfort levels with all those different words.