interolivary

interolivary, 1 year ago

Ha, I never actually paid attention to that. I think the fact that I’m not a native English speaker could be why “dampener” never sounded weird to me.

Although looks like the Oxford English Dictionary says both have the meaning “thing or person that has a restraining or subduing effect”, so I guess they’d both be correct in that sense?

interolivary, 1 year ago

Humans, Vulcans, Klingons and Romulans are descended from Jeffrey Combs

interolivary, 1 year ago

Because everybody has to know that they’re mommy’s special little munchkin who doesn’t use Gnome

interolivary, 1 year ago

Why is there more matter than antimatter?

interolivary, 1 year ago

Heh, I think you have much more faith in people than I do

interolivary, 1 year ago

And don’t forget Miles O’Brien, union man. Or Quark’s employees forming a union for that matter

interolivary, 1 year ago

As a programmer and Linux user, I have some ideas as to what an extra virgin is

interolivary, 1 year ago

It’s a flork

interolivary, 1 year ago

Ah, I see you’re extra virgin as well

interolivary, 1 year ago

For all their talk about how they’re the freest country in the world etc, the US is honestly weirdly rule-oriented and there’s a lot of surprising restrictions in different aspects of life – at least from this particular Finn’s perspective.

High school is an interesting example. I did an exchange year in South Carolina, and I was really struck by how strictly regulated school was. So things like needing a pass to go to the bathroom during class, or needing yet another pass that you have to get from an office if you’re even a minute late from class, not being allowed to be in the hallways between classes, not being allowed to leave school grounds, and so on. And don’t get me started on the whole pledge of allegiance thing.

Work seems to also be more regulated, with some companies having stricter controls on how employees spend their time, and for example policies on appearance (and I don’t mean just the service sector) and apparently some even have “fraternization policies” that forbid romantic or sexual relationships between coworkers.

Then there’s the Homeowners’ Associations – HOAs – which seem to have surprising amounts of power to regulate things about eg. the appearance of houses, or what you can and can’t have in your yard.

Varying levels of censorship in movies and TV has also been common through the years, some of it official and some just “this is how we do things”. Censorship of cursing and nudity is somehow especially odd since often violence is totally OK in the same contexts, but somehow showing a nipple or saying “fuck” will lead to the degradation of the moral fiber of everyone who’s exposed to that smut. I still remember the moral panic caused by a few hundred milliseconds of Janet Jackson’s nipple during some Superb Owl (🦉) thing or another.

And just as some background, on top of that exchange year I’ve spent probably a half a year if not more in the US, from vacations to eg. a zillion work trips I had to do at least once a month when I worked for a company headquartered in SF. Haven’t been to all that many states though, but more than just one anyhow; off the top of my head I’d say New York, Michigan, California, Florida, South & North Carolina, and Georgia.

interolivary, 1 year ago

You don’t say?

interolivary, 1 year ago

I mean, reich-wingers think that even telling kids about the existence of gay, trans etc. people will turn them into huge flaming queers, soooo…

Funny how seeing representations of cis-het people & relationships as a kid didn’t turn me cis or hetero.

interolivary, 1 year ago

Ah, thank you. Been a while since high school chemistry and I was too lazy to check just for a meme post 😅

interolivary, 1 year ago

As someone who speaks a language in which potassium is “kalium”, I want to know how the hell English ended up with potassium

interolivary, 1 year ago

Sidenote, but as a Finn it’s always so fun to read or hear Estonian. Very often I can get at least the gist of what’s being said, and with this phrase I was like 75% sure of what it meant (the 25% comes from the fact that many Estonian words look familiar but actually mean something completely different than what I’d expect.) Finnic languages are pretty rare with like 7 million speakers total, so getting this “oh this language sounds so familiar” feeling isn’t exactly common for us.

Somebody actually did a fun video on this where a Finn and an Estonian tried to guess what the other was saying.

interolivary, 1 year ago

I studied German around 3000 years ago and Dutch feels somewhat more intelligible to me (at least when reading it, heh) compared to Estonian; it really does sound like someone took English and German and made them do unspeakable things to each other. German & Dutch definitely are a good enough comparison in any case, and I guess eg. Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and maybe Romanian might be too.

But even eg. Italian and German are related, even though it’s not immediately obvious. You Indo-European speakers are surrounded by related languages, and here’s us, the Estonians, the Sámi and a bunch of dying minority cultures in Russia speaking our crazy moon speaks that nobody understands.

interolivary, 1 year ago

Lol szönözökémül. I get what you mean though, Hungarian is such a distant relative of Finnish that it’s not mutually intelligible with Finnish in any way, so it feels just as alien to me. The grammar has some familiar constructs and there’s like a handful of words that, when they were specifically pointed out to me and I was told it’s the same as some word in Finnish, I went “oh right I can see how those are related” but I would never have noticed them otherwise.

At least Finnish has related languages but eg. Basque speakers will never hear a foreign language that makes their brain go “I totally understand this! Trust me nothing will go wrong!”, and how sad is that?

interolivary, 1 year ago

Jack’s whole “This is a weapon of terror: it’s made to intimidate the enemy. This is a weapon of war: it’s made to kill your enemy” speech made sense though. The goa’uld were so damn full of themselves after they’d spent way too long subjugating some poor backwards fucks whose most advanced military tech was pointy sticks, that their main weapons weren’t actually all that great for murderizing their opponents but worked wonders to keep the poor backward fucks in line. On top of that the armor that jaffa used often seemed more showboat-y than functional, and the personal shield kajiggers the system lords tended to have were honestly a bit shit in many ways, sort of like Dune’s shields but worse.

So hurling a piece of piece of lead at supersonic speeds at a hapless wormy dude is definitely going to be pretty effective in many cases, and their return fire – if any – is going to be more spray’n’pray than anything else because lol good luck aiming with a fucking hip-fired stick, lasers or not.

interolivary, 1 year ago

Who says you can’t try‽

Believe in yourself! With persistence you can overcome any obstacle (such as only having one skeleton inside your body)

interolivary, 1 year ago

They for sure dislike secure browsers

What do you mean with this? I haven’t used Amazon in a while so I have no idea what shenanigans they’ve gotten up to

interolivary, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

And, frankly, without conservatives in general. They’re an existential threat, starting from the fact that they’re opposed to doing anything about climate change (well anything that doesn’t make it worse, anyhow), not to mention that a nontrivial percentage of them would love to see me and others like me murdered because of our gender identity