Motherfucker’s got moving candles!

Hyper-individualist cultures go, “Your emotions are your personal responsibility. Don’t burden others. Regulate privately. Maintain functionality. If you’re upset, process it offstage so the machine keeps moving.” Meanwhile certain collectivist or harmony-focused frameworks go, “Your emotions disrupt group cohesion. Don’t create discomfort. Don’t impose disharmony. Transcend or contain your reactions for the sake of the whole.”

Y'all, it gets better. She found out.

update:

Horses exist in zoos, you're pretty sure. That's where they, more or less, belong. It's not like there's a stable next to the auto shop or something. Are there… wild horses? In… nature? Presumably, at some point, there must have been. Probably not, anymore. Oh, the race tracks, though. Duh. They probably have stables. Couldn't lose twenty thousand wen a day if there weren't losing horses to bet on. Horses don't belong at the gas station, but there's one here anyways. Its rider is wearing a leather jacket studded with old military medals; what looks like a torso-sized cogwheel, slung over her back like a shield; a broadsword, underneath the cog-shield; and a pair of holo-screen shades. She dismounts. She slides her card through the machine. The pumps start pumping. The horse sticks out its neck, dips its snout, and begins drinking gasoline directly from the nozzle. The rider holds the spout up to the horse's mouth, at a bit of an awkward angle. She meets your eyes, and shrugs. You know how it is. You don't know how it is. Later, you will see her on the news, clotheslining a police officer on horseback at seventy miles per hour. You will understand even less, and also, so much more.

You decide it’s best to find out what you can about this person. Cautiously, you approach his desk. He’s a handsome man, tall, but with a disarming smile. How could such a friendly guy with such cute, dorky glasses be dangerous?

It’s been a few weeks, and one of Clark’s friends shows up.  She’s pretty and all, enough muscle that she must work out.  First thought would be that she should be maybe a 6.

The day Bruce Wayne shows up for his long promised interview with Lois Lane, you can’t help it, the mug your holding drops from your fingers and sends a shock of hot coffee and ceramic shards across the floor.

At this point, you’ve seen it all. Miled manner reporters and billionaires at a 10 and a model-like woman at 11. You were really starting to doubt your power. The day you really stopped believeing in it was when Bruce Wayne came for another visit, and this time with a kid. The kid couldn’t be more than 10 years old, a bit on the short side.

The day you started believing in it again was when you saw on tv the formation of something called the justice league.

sorry i can't ever shut up about this musical but this show is a foundational text in transmasc studies. to me.

The fun thing about finnish is that the way you ask for things in a polite way has been in-baked into the suffixes you use, so you don't have to use many words when few do trick. Like asking someone "could you give me [-]" is "voisitko antaa" in written and some variation of "voisiksä antaa" in spoken dialects*, but instead of asking "could you", the polite polite way to ask is "haluaisitko", not as can you, but would you want to. The tone distinction is so clear that asking someone "could you [do thing]" instead of "would you want to [do thing]" is less of a polite request and more of instruction - someone's gotta do it, and the task is being assigned to you.

Since I use it a bunch in my speech, I also want to shout out "viitsisitkö antaa". I don't think there's a proper english word to translate it with, but the closest approximation of the meaning is "could you be bothered to give me" - however while the tone of the translation could easily be read as passive aggressive, if you're just saying it politely, it moreso has this tone of, like... "if you would be so inclined I'd appreciate it".

One more option is to state "you wouldn't have x" (ei sulla ois x:ää) and that's somehow interpreted as a polite request

You can certainly say "you wouldn't happen to have a [thing] that I could borrow?" in english, too, but I do like how in finnish, the latter half of the sentence is not stated out loud, just implied. You don't word that question like that unless you're asking whether you could borrow it. Which also gives the other person the opportunity to soft launch a "no" by pretending to not notice the implied part. So a conversation can go two ways, it's either:

Circling back to the conditionals - you can also tack the conditional right onto the verb you want someone to do, without the "would you like to/could you/could you be bothered to"