Updates from the One and Owenly

1970.

Then, years later I read that Norway forbids school fees.

You only really have one thing in common with everyone else who has ever lived, which is you are alive. You're part of a marching band of billions of people -- homo sapiens and the other variants of our species who added their DNA into the gene pool. So you're afraid of the big thing we all share. They were here, and then they weren't. We are here and one day we won't be here. And whether we fear mortality or regard Death as a comforting friend, we are all travelling down the same road, the one everyone travels.

By existing as a citizen in and paying taxes to the imperial core, we automatically hold complicity in imperialist oppression because we are literally footing the bill for it. That is just the basic nature of being born to privilege in systems of oppression in general. We can be disadvantaged and marginalized in every single other consideration and we still have to understand and cope with this, and ensure we leverage it as effectively as possible.

I don't make these kinds of posts, but Rio Grande do Sul (a brazilian estate) is going through its worst natural catastrophe in recorded history and I need everyone to know about this. Its currently looking like this:

What is going on

Most of Brazil suffers from yearly floods during the rain season. These floods most of the time aren't bad, with water going away a few hours later. Sometimes they are a nightmare, with people losing their homes and most if not all belongings. But this?

This is not fucking normal.

Currently (May 6th, 2024) there's +80 confirmed deaths and 873 thousand people are being affected by these historical floods. Eight hundred and seventy three THOUSAND people. Once again: THIS. IS. NOT. NORMAL.

Rio Grande has 496 cities, and currently, 364 are reporting problems related to this. It's almost the entirety of Rio Grande - and you know how big Rio Grande is? If you're from the USA, its just a bit bigger than Colorado, and just a bit smaller than Nevada. If you are European, Rio Grande is bigger than the United Kingdom. Can you imagine if almost the entirety of the UK was underwater? Because I sure fucking can just by watching brazilian news!

Rio Grande expects floods. It rains a lot in Brazil. What no one expect is having to deal with 2,30 meters - 7'7 feet for reference - ABOVE the expected flooding level, which is 3 meters (9'10 feet). This means that there were 5,26 meters (17'3 ft) of water. Chart for comparison:

I live in São Paulo, which is completely unaffected by what is going on over there, but I need people to be aware of this. Why?

How YOU can help

A single US dollar is almost five reais. One euro is around 5,50. This may not be much to a lot of people reading this, but literally anything helps. If you donate U$10, it's R$50 for us. If it's euros, then it's R$55,00.

If you can't donate, please just reblog this post.

INTERNATIONAL DONATIONS INFO

If you use euros, here's the donation info:

Standard Chartered Bank Frankfurt Bank

Swift: SCBLDEFX

Bank Account: 007358304

If you use dollars, here's the donation info:

Standard Chartered Bank New York Bank

Swift: SCBLUS33

Bank Account: 3544032986001

You need to inform this in order to donate:

IBAN Code: BR5392702067001000645423206C1

Name: Associação dos Bancos no Estado do Rio Grande do Sul

CNPJ: 92.958.800/0001-38

NATIONAL DONATIONS INFO

If you're brazilian, oi, aqui tá o Pix do canal SOS Rio Grande do Sul para você ajudar:

This is a trustworthy organization that helped in last years flood and showed accountability for all the money previously donated. They are helping now, with food, medicine, clothes and rescuing:

PLEASE HELP BRASIL

For donations in british pound GBP

For donations in Euro EUR

For donations in US dollars:

As OP said, most of your donations will be multiplied by five, so even your small or average will be FIVE TIMES MORE what an average brazilian can donate!!!!!!!

A satirical papyrus showing a lady mouse being served wine by a cat while another cat dresses her hair, a third cares for her baby, and a fourth fans her. The mice have hilarious huge, round ears.

Where: Egyptian Museum Cairo

there are so many posts about ~tumblr is so broken, you can’t find any post on your own blog, it’s impossible, bluhrblub~

I am here to tell you otherwise! it is in fact INCREDIBLY easy to find a post on a blog if you’re on desktop/browser and you know what you’re doing:

url.tumblr.com/tagged/croissant will bring up EVERY post on the blog tagged with the specific and exact phrase #croissant. every single post, every single time. in chronological order starting with the most recent post. note: it will not find #croissants or that time you made the typo #croidnssants. for a tag with multiple words, it’s just /tagged/my-croissant and it will show you everything with the exact phrase #my croissant

url.tumblr.com/tagged/croissant/chrono will bring up EVERY post on the blog tagged with the exact phrase #croissant, but it will show them in reverse order with the oldest first 

url.tumblr.com/search/croissant isn’t as perfect at finding everything, but it’s generally loads better than the search on mobile. it will find a good array of posts that have the word croissant in them somewhere. could be in the body of the post (op captioned it “look at my croissant”) or in the tags (#man I want a croissant). it won’t necessarily find EVERYTHING like /tagged/ does, but I find it’s still more reliable than search on mobile. you can sometimes even find posts by a specific user by searching their url. also, unlike whatever random assortment tumblr mobile pulls up, it will still show them in a more logically chronological order

url.tumblr.com/day/2020/11/05 will show you every post on the blog from november 5th, 2020, in case you’re taking a break from croissants to look for destiel election memes 

url.tumblr.com/archive/ is search paradise. easily go to a particular month and see all posts as thumbnails! search by post type! search by tags but as thumbnails now

url.tumblr.com/archive/filter-by/audio will show you every audio post on your blog (you can also filter by other post types). sometimes a little imperfect if you’re looking for a video when the op embedded the video in a text post instead of posting as a video post, etc

url.tumblr.com/archive/tagged/croissant will show you EVERY post on the blog tagged with the specific and exact phrase #croissant, but it will show you them in the archive thumbnail view divided by months. very useful if you’re looking for a specific picture of a croissant that was reblogged 6 months ago and want to be able to scan for it quickly 

url.tumblr.com/archive/filter-by/audio/tagged/croissant will show you every audio post tagged with the specific phrase #croissant (you can also filter by photo or text instead, because I don’t know why you have audio posts tagged croissant) 

the tag system on desktop tumblr is GENUINELY amazing for searching within a specific blog! 

caveat: this assumes a person HAS a desktop theme (or “custom theme”) enabled. a “custom theme” is url.tumblr.com, as opposed to tumblr.com/url. I’ve heard you have to opt-into the former now, when it used to be the default, so not everyone HAS a custom theme where you can use all those neat url tricks. 

if the person doesn’t have a “custom theme” enabled, you’re beholden to the search bar. still, I’ve found the search bar on tumblr.com/url is WAY more reliable than search on mobile. for starters, it tends to bring posts up in a sensible order, instead of dredging up random posts from 2013 before anything else

a caveat on op’s caveat is that if your blog/the blog you want to search is older than [whenever they forced everybody into the tumblr.com/user change], most of these tricks will still work whether or not they have enabled “custom theme.”

I keep seeing people recommending Open Office as an alternative to Word, and uh... look, it is, technically, an open source alternative to Word. And it can do a lot of what Word can, genuinely! But it is also an abandoned project that hasn't been updated in nine years, and there's an active fork of it which is still receiving updates, and that fork is called LibreOffice, and it's fantastic.

Seriously, if you think that your choices are either "grit your teeth and pay Microsoft for a subscription" or "support free software but have a kind of subpar office suite experience", I guarantee that it's because you're working with outdated information, or outdated software. Most people I know who have used the latest version of LibreOffice prefer it to Word. I even know a handful of people who prefer it to Scrivener.

god this tickles me

no need for a more specific word because it all falls under classism and/or racism.

west virginia is home to some of the strongest labor & union movements in U.S. history, from miners’ strikes to the 2018 teachers’ strikes (where 20,000 teachers went on strike together with community support).

For the last 100 years it has become very beneficial to those in power for the rest of the country to think of us as very stupid, backward, “inbred,” etc. It’s not an accident. there were real efforts made to create & proliferate the stereotype of the stupid hillbilly.

at some point you likely had an “ah-ha” moment where you realized an unconscious bias you held needed to be unraveled. likely someone else pointed it out to you, whether that was in a conversation or something you read/watched online.

"Accent bigotry" - Irish = stupid & possibly a drunk; Northern Irish = bigoted & possibly a terrorist; RP English = educated & probably trustworthy (though also nowadays possibly a villain) - is one of the reasons I'm ... let's call it "ambivalent", about what TVTropes calls "Funetik Aksent".

"Phonetic" misspellings and dropping letters in favour of apostrophes happen at both ends of the literary social scale, but there's seldom any doubt about who's in "Who's Who" and who isn't.

The person who said this:

"Bless your ’eart, sir! I'll go up and tell 'Er Lydieship now, sir, and I bet you’ll be ’earing something in ’arf a jiffy."

didn't go to the same school as the person who said this:

"Dinin' at a London club, deah boy, then huntin' an' shootin' an' fishin' in th' countreh. Whatevah could be bettah?"

Further lot development may and should reveal that neither of those speakers are what they seem - salt-of-the-earth working class or disdainful peer-of-the-realm - but what they SEEM is telegraphed instantly by the way their speech is set in print.

(Sharon McCrumb did this in "Zombies of the Gene Pool" - a big burly man who sounds like a hillbilly villain from "Deliverance" is a linguistics professor born in the region and doing it deliberately to mock the assumptions of the people hearing him.)

Unless there's a good reason for it (for example, a character revealing their true origins by accident or for emphasis) often the only thing writing speech like that does, is to indicate These People Here Speak Properly whereas Theyum Fohx Theah Tawks Funnih.

That comes complete with baggage which the writer either doesn't know about, doesn't care about - or is fully aware of and using deliberately.

*****

Other reasons for ambivalence: a little Funetik Aksent goes a long way; it's often tiresome to read (and to write); most of all, if readers are unaware of some important detail - such as what sounds the weird spelling is meant to imitate - it's pointless.

There's an example of Unaware right in the TVTropes article, which states:

Neil Gaiman's short story "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar" in "Smoke and Mirrors" parodies the New England accent found in Lovecraft stories.

No it doesn't.

For one thing, just looking at them would have shown that speech from Lovecraft stories (here "The Dunwich Horror")...

“They know it’s a-goin’ aout, an’ dun’t calc’late to miss it. Yew’ll know, boys, arter I’m gone, whether they git me er not. Ef they dew, they’ll keep up a-singin’ an’ laffin’ till break o’ day. Ef they dun’t they’ll kinder quiet daown like. I expeck them an’ the souls they hunts fer hev some pretty tough tussles sometimes.”

...is nothing like speech from "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar"...

"And for me, too," said his friend. "I could murder a Shoggoth's. 'Ere, I bet that would make a good advertising slogan. 'I could murder a Shoggoth's.' I should write to them and suggest it. I bet they'd be very glad of me suggestin' it."

For another thing - this is much more excusable - that writer clearly didn't know about "The Dagenham Dialogues", a series of British comedy sketches from the 1960s. performed by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

(Not knowing isn't a surprise. Those sketches aren't as famous as they might be because of the infamous BBC policy of wiping / reusing programme tapes to save on costs and storage. "Monty Python's Flying Circus" almost went the same way; a lot of "Doctor Who" and many other popular shows DID.)

What's actually being parodied are the "Dialogues" characters "Pete and Dud", playing two acolytes of Cthulhu. They're described thus:

"Sitting in one corner were a couple of gentlemen wearing long grey raincoats and scarves ... sipping dark brown foam-topped beerish drinks..."

Rather, or indeed very, like this.

The Defence rests, m'Lud.

These acolytes discuss H.P. Lovecraft's style and vocabulary (overblown and eccentric), the location of sunken R'lyeh (just off the end of the pier, but handy for the shops), Great Cthulhu who lies dreaming (though temporarily deceased), and so on and so forth.

It's an excellent simulation of Pete and Dud and yet, apart from a couple of dropped-letter apostrophes, der's nun uv d'yoojul kunstruksh'n trikz. Instead it's done by matching the repetition, pace and rhythm of the originals.

*****

Incidentally, "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar", the titular beer of the story, is itself a parody of Theakston's Old Peculier, a not half bad dark ale.

Note the difference in spelling: "PeculiAR" means strange or odd, "PeculiER" means a kind of Christian ecclesiastical court, so that's another beery association with a temporarily deceased god. Accidental, coincidental or deliberate?

Knowing @neil-gaiman, my money's on deliberate. :->

*****

Here he is, reading "Shoggoth's Old Peculiar": Part One, Part Two, Part Three.