the dextrous, the sinister.

Can we please, PLEASE talk about Sharon D. Clarke as Lady Bracknell? MY GOD WHAT A WOMAN. The commanding presence she emanated throughout the play. What a force of nature. She played a constantly disapproving auntie down to a pat! She will have none of this tomfoolery, thank you very much!

And when she threw it down at the curtain call, I was yelling, "YESSSS QUEEN! EAT THEM UPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP!" at my screen.

“A Fragment out of Time”, published in 1974. Kirk / Spock. page 1 page 2

This is chat gpt trash prompted to “sound Japanese” and it’s based off of racist old movie dialogue. There’s zero correlation here to Japanese grammar and how Japanese translates into English or how a native speaker of Japan uses English. It’s slop. It’s racist ai slop rehashing Western exceptionalism, fantasizing about a Japanese person being in awe of how great the USA is. It’s depressing that people fell for this. I know it feels good to think that other people like us, and sometimes they do, but this only works if you assume Japanese people have extremely limited experience and worldview. It’s mortifying.

So I've been to Japan. I have been to Japan a lot. Probably something like 10-15 times in the last 20 years. I also have several friends who lived and worked in Japan for years. And over the course of these years that I've been to Japan I've also had people come from Japan who would talk about their experiences and we eat out places like Mexican restaurants (side note: the most common place after a good steak dinner that our Japanese a visitors would want to go to was an American sushi restaurant because American style sushi and Japanese style sushi are very different)

I have been to a Mexican restaurant in Japan. It wasn't great. It was probably on the level below what you could get in the Midwest of America. But at the one Mexican restaurant that I have been to in Japan you absolutely had free tortilla chips come to the table because it was a thing. I've also been to Italian restaurants in Japan where we got free breadsticks.

I have also been to many many many other non-western restaurants in Japan. And while most of them you don't get a free appetizers/snack at the table. At some you do. Most memorably at an izakaya that we went to brought a crap ton of fried fish skin as their free to the table appetizer. And I know for a fact that nobody ordered it ahead of time, because it just appeared as we sat down. But at another restaurant we got an entire plate full of fresh in season persimmon. But yet another boiled and roasted ginkgo nuts.

This doesn't even get into the completely racist bullshit way of speaking that is portrayed in the op screen grab.

I have absolutely seen Japanese people being in awe of stuff that they've encountered in the US. The cereal aisle at the grocery store being a big one. But I've also had Japanese guests who have very very shyly asked me "Can we go to a Japanese restaurant, I'm feeling homesick. Can we please go to an Asian grocery store so I can pick up some snacks?" Because in their mind, Japan is home and better than the US. Which, fair Also many Japanese people speak English fairly decently even if they don't feel comfortable because they're worried about being perfect. So there was something about the way that this tweet was presented with the grammar that they were using that just didn't hit right.

A lot of Blue Ticks on Twitter are faking these "naive foreigner is amazed by the wonder of America" posts to earn engagement from gullible people. Either people who don't know enough about non-American countries to spot the errors or people who do know about other countries who are rage baited by the obvious and offensive errors.

They're making some decent money off it. I've mostly been seeing British ones, but they're starting to shift to non-anglophone nations (but obviously still posting in English because American users are their target audience) as people were starting to catch onto the grift and stopped engaging with the posts.

It's very good, and was prescient for a lot of the early days of the covid pandemic. I found myself returning to it often in the first couple of years because of how steadfast it was in its hopefulness.

Last year she wrote a novelette, "The Year Without Sunshine," which attacks a similar problem in a similar way; instead of pandemic, this one is about the aftereffects of a distant nuke or a massive volcano explosion (it doesn't say), which has churned a great deal of dust into the air, causing massive damage to society and agriculture. The story covers one neighborhood, pulling together to keep each other alive--not through violence, but through lawn potatoes and message pinboards and bicycle-powered oxygen concentrators.