A Rose Among Thorns

@wheezecheese

This has gone beyond "I cannot explain this to my spouse" and is firmly in "Archaeologists of the future will decide this is the point at which a group of people diverged from mainstream humanity and developed a new, indecipherable form of communication."

I love that opera sits in this limbo where it's extremely well-known but not really beyond a surface level recognition, so you get commercials for makeup or whatever to the tune of the I Hate Women So Much It's Unreal aria

i don't really want to weight in on the "using big words in your writing is ableist" discourse happening on tiktok because i'm like 90% certain it's an anti-intellectual psyop to stir up drama in online circles to promote the use of ai to summarize literally everything and thus feeding the LLMs and lowering the populace's mistrust of such tools but i also have to say: dictionaries and thesauruses are the most accessible they've ever been. if you use an e-reader of any kind you can look up a word without leaving the page. there's a plethora of online dictionaries and if you just type a word + "meaning" into google it'll usually give you a definition. we used to have pocket dictionaries we used when reading in class. i have two on my shelf right now that i used in high school. stop letting the fascists purposefully misuse anti-ableism rhetoric to trick you into never thinking again.

I am once again begging you to get your hands on physical media and/or save your fave stuff OFFLINE.

My Shakespeare students (they are 12) wanted to summarize the lessons they learned this semester. If. Um. Anybody would like to see.

Abraham. Do you bite your thumb at us, bro? Sampson. I do bite my thumb, bro. Abraham. Do you bite your thumb at us, bro? Sampson. [Aside to GREGORY] Is the law of our side, if I say ay? Gregory. No. Sampson. No, bro, I do not bite my thumb at you, bro, but I bite my thumb, bro. Gregory. Do you quarrel, bro? Abraham. Quarrel bro! no, bro. Sampson. If you do, bro, I am for you: I serve as good a man as you. Abraham. No better. Sampson. Well, bro. Gregory. Say 'better:' here comes one of my master's kinsmen. Sampson. Yes, better, bro. Abraham. You lie. Sampson. Draw, if you be men. Gregory, remember thy swashing blow.

There were a few variations of this but my favorites were “you tryna’ go, bro?” [do you quarrel, sir?] and “is the law on our side if I say sh’ya?”

I love all of this for so many reasons.

I suspect Shakespeare would, too.

We go through a lot of pickles here and this recipe is a good way to use leftover brine.

really recommend getting a partner with a different religion than you and very little knowledge of your religion because the opportunities for explaining things to each other are just exquisite

yesterday she told me some story about the Buddha's wife and child and I was like. Wait. He fucked? And she was like yeah of course he fucked, why wouldn't he, he was the most attractive and loveable and and wise and etc. person who ever lived. why would he not fuck.

this morning she looked perplexed in the kitchen at me and said "did Jesus not fuck?"

anyone else notice how when "digital assistants" were just supposed to do specific tasks when you asked for them we had Alexa and Siri and Cortana, but now that they're being marketed as smart enough to take actions and make decisions on their own they've got names like Claude and Devin