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Presaged the conclave

Cardinal singing outside my window just fucked up his call and had to start over. Lmao

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It’s like my lexicon was just waiting for “baby want smoko”

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Die

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I just wonder how long we will stand to be told we are the richest most powerful country in the world—about a world that contains countries that have effectively solved all of the problems we face as a county insofar as they had the money and power to do so. Because all it took was the adequate leveraging of those things and not, like, “innovating” a solution or explaining it as hopeless because of “human nature” (citation needed) rather than risk having to spend either.

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#a daggerfall remake would be way more interesting than an oblivion remake

Idk how to quote tags and “remake” could be “remaster” idk who cares

I think I would also just prefer a media environment that would rather remake Daggerfall than Oblivion. Oblivion would still be playable if we supported old(er) consoles and Skyrim would have, like, minimum standards of writing quality if they had been intent on refining their craft (like they were between Morrowind and Oblivion) instead of optimizing their product. Daggerfall was legitimately too expansive for its technical limitations. More people would be unfamiliar with it because it was inaccessible and made when video games were more niche. It would be a challenge to create a remake that blended old and new conventions not only in the series but in the medium at large. But we only want to make safe commercial bets and support obsolescence so we graphically updated Oblivion so you can have More Skyrim but only on your fuckass PS5, you stupid peasants.

for every 29 year old saying they shouldve remastered morrowind instead theres a 42 year old saying the same shit about daggerfall and a 60 million year old saying i miss my dinosaur

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I feel like if I ever met a non-autistic person who played Stellaris and asked them what that was like they would probably learn something about themselves when they explained it

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i actually am consistently very annoyed at the prescriptivist universalist proclamations of words having certain connotations.

"dude" as a singular (and sometimes plural but this isn't as common in general) term of address, "guys" as a plural term of address (tho not the singular, although i've never heard "guy" alone as a singular term of address), and "you guys" as a second person plural pronoun are all commonly used by women, both cis and trans, amongst ourselves, to refer to each other, in multiple different dialects of the english language. this is even occasionally true for the term of address "bro" (tho not the third person singular pronoun "bro" or the third person plural pronoun "bros") depending on sociolect.

it is incredibly commonplace to hear cis women and mixed-gender groups calling each other dude, guys, saying you guys as a pronoun, calling each other bro, etc. when tmes go and do this around trans women who don't like it, and then get defensive and say they always use it in a gender neutral way, they literally are telling the truth; they just are doubling down in a cruel way because: at the same time, these words when used as nouns are heavily masculinely gendered, as are certain variations of these terms of address and pronouns depending on dialect, and these terms of address and pronouns are frequently also used in targeted ways to misgender trans women. to say that these terms are ungendered in certain contexts but can (re)gain dormant gendered connotations in others literally is just accurate. The degree also varies - ungendered "bro" is less common and more marked than ungendered "dude" than ungendered "guys" and "you guys" - but the latter two esp are completely unmarked in some dialects.

in this context ofc it is not surprising that many trans women adopt a zero-nuance policy about this and it also ofc is completely reasonable to request that anyone ever not refer to you using any common term of address or pronoun for any reason whatsoever. of which the sneaky regendering of generally ungendered (in certain dialects) terms for the purpose of transmisogynistic microaggression is ofc a very good reason.

at the same time, the ubiquitous insistence that ungendered use doesn't exist is completely absurd. maybe i'm being a grammar nazi but it actually does piss me off quite a lot to be frequently told that me and my friends are misgendering each other when we refer to each other with the normative second person plural pronoun used by practically everyone who grew up speaking one of these dialects to refer to any group of people no matter the gender makeup of that group, or when we call each other terms of address that you can hear cis women who speak these dialects naturally and unmarkedly calling each other anywhere you go in the regions where these dialects are spoken.

whether usage of these terms in reference to trans women is misgendering or not literally is a case by case basis and i do not see the point in making claims about language that are simply not true, or in making sweeping claims about trans women's feelings towards these terms that are similarly simply not universally true, when it is insanely easy to just be a descriptivist, acknowledge the complicated and varied reality of these terms, and take the nice simple and easy position of "if these terms are legitimately ungendered in your idiolect, then take note of dialectical variation of these terms, common sensitivity to gendered usage of these terms amongst trans women, and either/both a. ask people whether they're comfortable being referred to with certain terms or if it bothers them, and b. if someone tells you they don't like it don't be a fucking asshole about it and instead just apologize and accommodate their wishes going forward"

this post brought to you by annoyance at the umpteenth paternalistic post on the subject making completely absurd universalist claims about language

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Probably the worst is reading about the Battle of Mogadishu and then watching Black Hawk Down. Never mentions the reason people were shooting at American helicopters was that some Cobras blew up a peace conference that could’ve ended a still-ongoing civil war.

you really can’t unsee american military propaganda in movies like once you start thinking about it you are doomed to be the friend who’s too political when people put on an action movie for the rest of your life

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Ed, Edd, ’n’ Oedi

rancid news! apparently my sister’s friend’s boyfriend’s name is oedipus, he goes by ‘oedipus’, and he’s named that because it apparently it is his mom’s favorite greek myth

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I love what we can do to language if we believe in ourselves.

Cannot wait for Sphube 2: Hypersphube

Guys I just refreshed the site and everyone's profile pics went round

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I have read a few times that the Greeks innovated vowels from “unused” consonants in Phoenician. That’s bullshit. Matres lectionis—certain consonants of an abjad, an alphabet that is entirely consonantal for scripts that use diacritical marks, like the tittle above English “i,” for vowels—were vowels or semivowels in scriptio plena (literally “full script,” Latin for “longhand”). Further, the alefs (𐎀, ʔa; 𐎛, ʔi; and 𐎜, ʔu) in Ugaritic—the mother script of Phoenician, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Punic/neo-Phoenician (in ascending order of plena writing)—are all purely vocalic, while in the third/second century BCE Hebrew that was transliterated (converted from script to script rather than translated) into the Septuagint Greek Bible, alef is only ever a vowel, as in Aramaic, and ayin (ע) is only rarely consonantal “ghan” (a separate sign in Ugaritic: 𐎙, ġ; while 𐎓, ʕ, Phoenician 𐤏, became the vowel o in Greek; the Hebrew form appears to be an inverted Old Arabian 𐩶/𐪖, itself from Ugaritic 𐎙), as in the name Gomorrah, Hebrew עֲמֹרָה (ʕOmōrah).

Based on the Ugaritic evidence and the difference in medium (Phoenician on perennial stone where space is at a premium, Hebrew on more ephemeral material preserved by copying), it is also bullshit to say that Hebrew innovated vowels, which I have also seen claimed by at least one scholar (he’s a pop Biblical studies author and modern linguist so he has no citations but, based on his “scholarship,” also wouldn’t have the ability to generate the theory, especially since it’s historical linguistics/philology). We have had all of this information for decades now, early last century for Ugaritic and late century-before-last for Phoenician. There is no excuse to continue saying vowels were “innovated” by people whose localized scripts postdate Ugaritic or its oldest daughter, early Phoenician. It’s all pathetic, nationalist cope and reminds me of an author who wrote in the white supremacist rag Mankind Quarterly that the Greeks independently innovated ship-building because their nautical vocabulary were not loans—except that some nautical vocabulary is Pre-Greek, ie, from a non-Indo-European “substrate” (surviving vocabulary from the languages spoken by the as-yet-inconclusively-identified people who lived in Greece before the Indo-European Greeks), like κυβερνᾶν, “to steer,” whence our “govern” and “cyber.”

I describe my studies as Biblically oriented, but I am constantly frustrated by the field of “Biblical studies” or “Biblical archeology” whose biases are naked to people with a non-Biblical philological, historical, philosophical, or archeological background.

Effective Biblical studies involves less a “grain” of salt and more a “Lot’s wife after he looked back at her fleeing Gomorrah” amount of salt, which literalists and believers in inerrancy are dogmatically incapable of. Regardless of personal belief—and I am no atheist—you must, must, must study the Bible with the conviction that its God is no more real than Zeus is considered to be by Classicists to accomplish academic analysis of it. If you don’t, you will fall into the trap of “proving” the Bible, which will always fail under scrutiny—and that is why your faith will suffer too. If you need God to be proven to you by the accuracy of the Bible, or worse, its authority, you will either tie yourself in knots or lose faith and gain alienation from your faith community, where you will not feel God in the only surefire place God can be found, even if (or especially if) he really is just a psychosocial projection: other people.

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It is an all-male Bund…

But also Roman Empire Guys (who never learned Latin beyond military vocabulary) exclusively support the kind of hawkish oligarchs with reckless disregard for treaties that destroyed both Roman Empires it’s maddening

i hated that "all men think about is the Roman empire" meme bc like, literally all of the Latinists I know are women who talk about Roman senators like they're members of a boy band.

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where the divide between left and right can be located and it truly is individual/community.

An individual is in constant competition and under a lot of tension trying in vain to be self-sufficient when we are, genetically and historically, the most social species that has ever existed (as evidenced by our singular linguistic complexity). Because of the premise of self-sufficiency, our actions are the actualization of our essence rather than, as communal organisms, an expression of what our environment has shaped us to be within the potential of our social systems (that is, we offend because offense is possible and offensiveness was put in us).

In our punitive (crime-and-punishment) system of “justice” that emphasizes the hyperindividualist ideas of free will and personal accountability, you are a criminal because you committed a crime. You are what you do, one who sins is a sinner. There is no separation of essence and action. This is why the right (or people who grew up in right wing environments like nearly everybody in the US) have this immediate reaction to something they said being characterized negatively, because in the right-wing individualist paradigm it reflects who they are, for which they alone bear the ultimate responsibility.

In nationalism, the community is turned into an individual in competition with every other community, which necessitates ideas of ethnic guilt and national (racial/ethnic) supremacy. Pointing out systemic flaws meets the same gut reaction, because each individual is a manifestation of their nation: a hero, and soldiers who literally “fight for their country” are the most heroic. The country can do no wrong (when governed by a conservative) because that would make the country and every individual manifestation of it condemnable, villainous (and “villain” etymologically means, approximately, “proletarian”).

A healthy (and successful) community is one in which needs are identified and collaboratively addressed, rather than turned into a competition to make profit that exacerbates the need or even prolongs it rather than risk losing profit by eliminating a problem (health insurance companies have studied whether it is profitable to find cures!)—or worse, creating a problem (arcane, individualistic taxing with underfunded public entities) to profit from its “solution” (TurboTax, et al). But because we have privileged the individual, profit (and the loss elsewhere which it necessitates) is more important than actual benefit… ironically very un-Christian for a supposedly “Christian” country. Jesus would say that their faith is in Mammon—an Aramaic word from the same place as “amen,” signifying that they put their faith in financial “trust” rather than God or his Kingdom, which it is famously hard for the rich to enter.

Some of y'all gotta uncouple your personal self worth from your thought patterns. Me saying something is a reactionary thought pattern and urging you to examine it is not me personally calling you a fascist lmao. Everyone has thought patterns and some of them are going to be reactionary since yknow. We live in a society etc etc

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(co-founded with Marsha P Johnson)

Santa Barbara, CA was where I was at my queerest, dating two married lesbians.

Apparently she is also venerated with cherry branches and I once had a… brief… romantic encounter with a cherry tree. I was in a difficult but very spiritual place, it’s hard to explain.

Santa Barbara is lovely. Nice to know that Saint Barbara also fucks (… metaphorically, she was a virgin)

Christians keep stealing shit from other esoteric traditions when St Barbara is right there.

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He doesn’t want to die