got a pistol for a mouth

““I have to make sure my hands are not ashy before I sign,” Nakia Smith, who is deaf, explained to her nearly 400,000 followers.

In one of the dozens of popular videos she posted to TikTok last year, Ms. Smith compared her habit of adding a quick dab of lotion to her hands before she starts signing to the sip of water a hearing person takes before beginning to speak.

Since Ms. Smith created her account last April, the small ritual has caught millions of eyes, drawing attention to a corner of the internet steeped in the history and practice of a language that some scholars say is too frequently overlooked: Black American Sign Language, or BASL.

Variations and dialects of spoken English, including what linguists refer to as African-American English, have been the subject of intensive study for years. But research on Black ASL, which differs considerably from American Sign Language, is decades behind, obscuring a major part of the history of sign language.

About 11 million Americans consider themselves deaf or hard of hearing, according to the Census Bureau’s 2011 American Community Survey, and Black people make up nearly 8 percent of that population. Carolyn McCaskill, founding director of the Center for Black Deaf Studies at Gallaudet University, a private university in Washington for the deaf and hard of hearing, estimates that about 50 percent of deaf Black people use Black ASL.

Now, young Black signers are celebrating the language on social media, exposing millions to the history of a dialect preserved by its users and enriched by their lived experiences.

Nuances of Black ASL

Users of Black ASL are often confronted with the assumption that their language is a lesser version of contemporary ASL, but several scholars say that Black ASL is actually more aligned with early American Sign Language, which was influenced by French sign language.

Ms. Smith, whose sign name is Charmay, has a simple explanation of how the two languages differ: “The difference between BASL and ASL is that BASL got seasoning,” she said.

Compare ASL with Black ASL and there are notable differences: Black ASL users tend to use more two-handed signs, and they often place signs around the forehead area, rather than lower on the body.

“Here you have a Black dialect developed in the most oppressive conditions that somehow, in many respects, wound up to be more standard than the white counterpart,” said Robert Bayley, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Davis.

As white deaf schools in the 1870s and 1880s moved toward oralism — which places less emphasis on signing and more emphasis on teaching deaf students to speak and lip-read — Black signers better retained the standards of American Sign Language, and some white sign language instructors ended up moving to Black deaf schools.

According to Ceil Lucas, a sociolinguist and professor emerita at Gallaudet University, many white deaf schools were indifferent to Black deaf students’ education.

“The attitude was, ‘We don’t care about Black kids,’” she said. “‘We don’t care whether they get oralism or not — they can do what they want.’ And so these children benefited by having white deaf teachers in the classroom.”

Some Black signers also tend to use a larger signing space and emote to a greater degree when signing when compared with white signers. Over time, Black ASL has also incorporated African-American English terms. For example, the Black ASL sign for “tight” meaning “cool,” which comes from Texas, is not the same as the conceptual sign for “tight,” meaning snug or form-fitting. There are also some signs for everyday words like “bathroom,” “towel” and “chicken” that are completely different in ASL and Black ASL, depending on where a signer lives or grew up.

The same way Black hearing people adjust how they speak “to meet the needs” of their white counterparts, Black ASL users employ a similar mechanism depending on their environment, according to Joseph Hill, an associate professor at Rochester Institute of Technology’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf.

As one of the first Black students to attend the Alabama School for the Deaf, Dr. McCaskill said code switching allowed her to fit in with white students, while also preserving her Black ASL style.

“We kept our natural way of communicating to the point where many of us code-switched unconsciously,” she said.

Ms. Smith said she noticed that others communicated differently from her around middle school, when she attended a school that primarily consisted of hearing students.

“I started to sign like other deaf students that don’t have deaf family,” said Ms. Smith, whose family has had deaf relatives in four of the last five generations. “I became good friends with them and signed like how they signed so they could feel comfortable.”

Remarking on how her relatives sign — her grandfather Jake Smith Jr. and her great-grandparents Jake Smith Sr. and Mattie Smith have all been featured on her TikTok — Ms. Smith notes that they still tend to use signs they learned growing up.

Generational differences often emerge when Ms. Smith’s older relatives try to communicate with her friends or when they need help communicating at doctor’s appointments, she said, exemplifying how Black ASL has evolved over generations.

the fact that supernatural has a hugely misogynistic and homophobic past is directly entangled with why destiel works so well as a bait; the lack of fleshed out female characters means that male bonds are prioritised and homophobic jabs are thrown in for humour which just pushes it over the top. but bc nowadays its passé to murder all ur women and make weird homophobic digs at ur characters just means that u cannot make a show like that anymore.

yeah, sure…. if they want shitty, shitty marijuana.

It would be like growing sweet corn and dent corn together.  Yeah, they look similar at a distance and they’re closely related, but you don’t want them next to each other as they’ll cross pollinate and you’ll end up with bad versions of both.

Same deal here.  a patch of marijuana grown in an open field of hemp IS going to get contaminated and it’ll lower quality of BOTH crops.  Your hemp farmer doesn’t want that and if likely going rip out any patches trespassers try to add for same reason. 

and the big issue is not even the THC content.  Because most quality marijuana is intended to be grown indoors or greenhouses, its a dwarf variety. Short.  Fiber hemp is bred for height so as to maximize fiber production.  super tall. It’s going to be really obvious, really fast if you’ve got both in the same field even before you get to the point of pollination. what’s this runty bullshit doing in my field?

They also have different growing needs with regards to spacing, harvest time, etc. so the argument that you can hide marijuana in industrial hemp fields are basically bullshit.

anyway… aside from paper, hemp fiber can also be used to make earthquake resistant concrete that’s actually LIGHTER than conventional concrete while being stronger. It’s better at resisting flexing or warping, so ideal for stuff like bridges and highway supports as it’ll better resist large temperature swings and vibration. (”hempcrete” is slightly different, but makes great fire resistant insulation)

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Fish have somehow colonized isolated water bodies all over the world without human assistance. It has long been speculated that these colonization events are assisted by waterbirds, transporting fish eggs attached to their feet and feathers, yet empirical support for this is lacking. Recently, it was suggested that endozoochory (i.e., internal transport within the gut) might play a more important role, but only highly resistant diapause eggs of killifish have been found to survive passage through waterbird guts. Here, we performed a controlled feeding experiment, where developing eggs of two cosmopolitan, invasive cyprinids (common carp, Prussian carp) were fed to captive mallards. Live embryos of both species were retrieved from fresh feces and survived beyond hatching. Our study identifies an overlooked dispersal mechanism in fish, providing evidence for bird-mediated dispersal ability of soft-membraned eggs undergoing active development. Only 0.2% of ingested eggs survived gut passage, yet, given the abundance, diet, and movements of ducks in nature, our results have major implications for biodiversity conservation and invasion dynamics in freshwater ecosystems.

-had to undergo very painful surgery to get automail

-had to relearn how to write because of his prosthesis (there’s a post going around showing he had to switch hands etc) and his handwriting is likely a lot worse due to that. This means automail isn’t super good for delicate work, unsurprising, considering what it’s made of. 

-experiences phantom limb pain and therefore other associated stuff (this was only really shown in the manga)

-cannot go anywhere too cold without changing his automail or he’ll get really bad frost bite and it will stop working

-cannot go anywhere too hot, period, because the metal attached and under his skin will overheat and he will be badly burned

-Reattachment is painful, but needs to be done frequently if he breaks or outgrows his automail

- it’s HEAVY so much so that the strain has the potential to cause stress on his body, enough that it’s even theorized as possibly stunting his growth.

-it requires regular maintenance or it will break down, as shown when he forgets to do that and it…breaks down

-when it does need to be repaired, it takes time to do that, during which Ed uses regular prosthetics (that usually don’t quite fit him).

-costs a lot of money (not a problem for Ed due to high state alchemist salary/having mechanics as surrogate family, but explicitly noted to being the reason why most people in the fmaverse stick to regular prosthetics along with the painful surgery)

So Ed can’t actually do everything perfectly and experiences a lot of extra hassle, problems and pain people without automail don’t have to deal with!  And any advantages he does have are more suited to fighting than day to day life (being able to incorporate weapons/fake out people who want to blow up his arm). 

Do you know the definition of the word disabled. Have you ever looked up what a disability is.

Plus, in HTTYD 2, Valka proceeds to introduce her son to several dragons who became disabled as a result of injuries from traps: one with a torn wing, one with a missing foot, and another that’s entirely blind. Plus, there’s Gobber, who’s missing two whole limbs! He has a gangling walk from his peg leg, and has to deliberately switch “hands” with his other and cannot always be properly equipped. We need not get into Drago, but the point remains that Hiccup, Gobber, and these dragons very much are disabled characters.

One could easily call Sol Regem of The Dragon Prince disabled as well, since the burns on his face completely and utterly ruined his sight. He can go by smell and hearing only, which was the saving grace of two beings that he normally would’ve been able to kill within moments. Plus, there’s the ever lovely General Amaya…who is deaf and communicates predominantly by sign and lip reading.

Plus, there’s the ever famous Toph, who while she greatly improved her life when she mastered vibration sight, it’s still imperfect. She still would rely on her friends when she couldn’t properly see (read, during the airship fight during the finale, or when they were putting up Appa’s Lost posters). Plenty of other disabled characters were also shown there.

Tony Stark is disabled, mentally ill (PTSD and anxiety in the third movie), and has an entire movie where the driving force of his arc was the fact that he was terminally ill.

Steve Rogers and Yennefer of Vengerberg were both disabled during their formative years, and although they’re both cured (bc fantasy stories), their history of disability (and abuse, in Yen’s case) has fundamentally shaped them as characters. Steve is the person worthy of being picked to become a super soldier because of his disabilities.

Even if you discount Matt Murdock’s blindness (although he still is disabled by the inaccessible society that surrounds him, even though he can counter most of that with his superpowers), he also had sensory overload. Which is a disabling symptom. He goes through training to be able to dampen it, and it’s his primary reason in the Netflix show for becoming a superhero.

Deadpool suffers from chronic pain. Nebula has so many fantasy prostheses that she was turned into a cyborg. Oracle used a wheelchair in the comics for years. Furiosa is missing a hand, as is third-trilogy Luke Skywalker. Nemo the clownfish has a ‘lucky fin’.

So you build your protagonist. She has no personality traits beyond being decently strong-willed, so that her quirks and interesting traits absolutely can’t get in the way of the audience’s projection onto her. She is dainty, birdlike, beautiful despite her protestations that she is ugly–yet she can still hold her own against significantly taller and stronger combatants. She is the perfect mask for the bashful, insecure tweens you are marketing to to wear while they read.

You think, as you draft your novel, that you need to add something that appeals to the basest nature of teenagers, something this government does that will be perversely appealing to them. The Hunger Games’ titular games were the main draw of the books, despite the hatred its characters hold for the event. So the government forces everyone into Harry Potter houses. 

So the government makes everyone choose their faction, their single personality trait. Teenagers and tweens are basic–they likely identify by one distinct personality trait or career aspiration, and they’ll thus be enchanted by this system. For years, Tumblr and Twitter bios will include Erudite or Dauntless alongside Aquarius and Ravenclaw and INTJ. Congratulations, you just made having more than one personality trait anathema to your worldbuilding. 

Your readers and thus your protagonist are naturally drawn to the faction that you have made RIDICULOUSLY cooler and better than the others: Dauntless. The faction where they play dangerous games of Capture the Flag and don’t work and act remarkably like teenagers with a budget. You add an attractive, tall man to help and hinder the protagonist. He is brooding and handsome; he doesn’t need to be anything else. 

The villains appear soon afterward. They are your tried and true dystopian government: polished, sleek, intelligent, headed by a woman for some reason. They fight the protagonists, they carry out their evil, Machiavellian, stupid plan. You finish the novel with duct tape and fanservice, action sequences and skin and just enough glue and spit to seal the terrible, hollow world you have made shut just long enough to put it on the shelf. 

And you have just destroyed YA dystopian literature. Because you have boiled it down to its bare essentials. A sleek, futuristic government borrowing its aesthetic from modern minimalism and wealth forces the population to participate in a perversely cool-to-read-about system like the Hunger Games or the factions, and one brave, slender, pretty, hollow main character is the only one brave–no, special enough to stand against it. 

but divergent was clumsy make-believe the whole way through. it aped the forms and functions of dystopian lit but the writer didn’t actually have any real, passionate, sincere anger to put on the page. she didn’t know what it was talking about, so she didn’t have anything worth listening to.

You contrast that with how the marketing for the Hunger Games films directly contradicts the messaging of the text, and how Divergent seems ready-made for the big screen, and it becomes really apparent why the genre folded in on itself. Capitalism tried to recuperate dystopian fiction criticizing capitalism, and in doing so, butchered the genre.

We talk a good bit about how queer-coded Billy Hargrove’s behavior and circumstances are, but I think Harringrove shippers, as a fandom, are missing something. Today I want to talk about Billy’s leather jacket, both the significance of the clothing item itself and the circumstances in which he wears it in season 2.

The jacket Billy wears is a leather bomber jacket, very similar to the styles worn by James Dean and Marlon Brando. Which is pretty significant. Yes, they are both celebrities who popularized wearing the leather jacket, but they’re also, significantly, men who’ve been with other men. They’re also gay icons. The leather bar subculture, which is notoriously gay, was an outgrowth of gay men imitating Dean and Brando’s look and the look of many motorcycle clubs at the time. Later, of course, it became a haven for gay men who wished to practice S&M.

In the early 90s, as far back as 91, it was seen that a piercing in the right ear was seen as gay. “Left is right, and right is wrong,” wrong being gay. I remember this rumor even as a young middle school kid in rural Alabama in 97 when I wanted my ear pierced, but the thing of it is we had it the other way around. Thus, I got my right ear pierced because heaven forbid I’d be thought of as gay, right? (Seriously though, if I had any idea then, I’d still wouldn’t do it simply because it wasn’t safe).

And I think that’s a part of the reason that Billy has one ear pierced. Billy could’ve chosen the easy way out and got both ears pierced as a sign of “normal.” No, he wanted to rebel enough where it gave you that one minute second of wondering, “which ear is the gay ear?” That bold moment of sexual ambiguity. 

As for why we associate right with gay and left with straight, let me take you on a BDSM journey. In the 80′s, more clubs were being opened in the gay scene that opened up to more possibilities than just being openly gay in an area. 

To walk in a club like this, in order to attract the attention that you desired, you followed the hanky code. For those of you unfamiliar, it was a complex signal to a potential partner that depending on the color of the handkerchief and the back pocket it went into, what you wanted to do, or have done to you. 

The basis of the code? Wearing a hanky on the left meant you were the giver, and the right, you were the receiver. Or, “Right means passive and Left means active.” 

This code goes back into the “left is right, right is wrong.” Because we all know that as long as you’re doing the fucking, it’s not gay, right?

25th entry. practice

Let’s talk about serious problems. In any fandom. We all used that outside of fandoms it’s not safe to talk about your preferences, hobby or interests. But recent tweets showed clearly that even in your fandom you can’t feel fully comfortable and can be judged as well when you’re turning 30.  Anyone of you can be Alfi in any fandom.I’m tagging harringrove fandom bc this bullshit with ageism came here as well.

die Welt = world

die Umwelt = environment

ver = prefix to indicate something difficult or negative, a change that leads to deterioration or even destruction that is difficult to reverse or to undo, or a strong negative change of the mental state of a person

der Müll = garbage, trash, rubbish, litter

-ung = -ing

die Vermüllung = littering

ver- = see before

zweifeln = to doubt

-ung = see before

die Verzweiflung = despair, exasperation, desperation

das Monster = monster

das Wort = word

der Groll = grudge, anger, malice, rancor

die Imitation = imitation

un- = un-, in-

fähig = able

-keit = -ility

die Unfähigkeit = inability

die Fehde = feud

der Handschuh = glove

der Fehdehandschuh = gauntlet

der Wurf = throw

Apps

PROTONVPN: A free VPN with out-of-US options. PROTONMAIL: A lightweight Gmail alternative. FIREFOX: A lightweight browser with good privacy protections. SIGNAL: A secure, encrypted messaging service.

Firefox Extensions

More recommended service & software alternatives, browser plugins, etc.

Tor browser for desktop or mobile. Slower and may break parts of your internet experience but is generally safer than any single VPN.

Alternate VPNs with monthly data caps for free usage include Windscribe (10 gb) and Tunnelbear (500 mb). Both are based in Canada, which, while not the US, is still a Five Eyes member, so—not ideal, but it’s helpful to have backups. 100% free VPN services can be shady data-harvesters themselves, so be wary. I like this comparison chart of ≈200 services.