This is why I get so tired about “whose a real women” and “are transgender people real” and the like because it’s so irrelevant. We have group or people that have an insane suicide rate and we have a solution that reduces that by an insane amount.
No matter how you slice it no theoretical reason nor gender rhetoric can change the gender affirming care is improving more lives than it’ll ever hurt
i think this belongs here too
all the statistics are massively in favor of gender affirming care no matter how you slice it.
Adding to that last one bc that statistic made me feel nervous post top surgery- post surgical depression is an extremely common response to ALL SURGERY. You feeling really bad in the weeks after gender affirming care does NOT mean you made a mistake or even that you’re part of the regret statistic. Those knee surgery and back surgery folks also got it too!!
Had several years of photography in high school and played with photo-emulsion you could paint on stuff, but mostly I just used different fabrics... Should have tried some more interesting objects
if you told diogenes the cynic about being trans he'd be like "lol that's a sick troll you're epic" and you'd be like "diogenes no i'm serious" and he'd be like "lol that's even better lmao those guys are so mad about it" and then he'd start going by new original neopronouns every single day specifically to piss off the whole symposium
I just had an idea for a really dumb comedy sketch where a transphobe starts ranting about what really makes a women a woman, and diogenes returns each time with a different cis woman or outwardly femme intersex person that doesn't meet the criteria saying "behold, a man!"
"a woman has XX chromosomes"
*Diogenes with an androgen insensitive XY cis woman*: behold, a man!
"Nono, a woman can bear children!"
*Diogenes with someone who has medical complications associated with pregnancy*: "behold, a man!"
"nono, a woman produces the large gamete"
*Diogenes with a postmenopausal cis woman* "behold, a man!"
Not back at a computer to edit the real photos yet, but the lights were visible in Southern California.
We drove into the desert to get away from light pollution. For about 20 minutes before we got to our spot we were seeing a light place in the sky - we couldn’t tell if it was the lights or the instrument panel reflecting on the dashboard.
When we stopped, it was obvious that we were seeing aurora borealis; it was faint, but visible - to a certain extent it *looked* like light pollution because it was an orangey-pink haze above the horizon, but there was visible banding and the light continually changed in intensity.
We weren’t able to photograph it at all on our cellphones, but we could see it unaided, though it was faint. The photos that I took where it is very visible are long exposures - for instance that photo of Large and Tiny Bastard was a 3-second exposure with a 3200 ISO where I swept them with a flashlight.
Green light was not visible to the naked eye, but the camera occasionally picked it up close to the horizon.
So it was *visible* in Southern California, but it didn’t look like what the photos are showing unless you were using a camera to capture it.
I just want to be very honest about this for the folks who were saying that they couldn’t see it or wondering what I did differently and were sad about it. What i did was drive a hundred miles into the desert with a prosumer DSLR, wide-aperture lens, a tripod, and three decades of photography experience.
You weren’t doing anything wrong and there’s a good chance that if you were close to a city you would *not* have seen it, even if you were north of me.
I’m with Lorde on this one (as if my parasocial crush on her for destroying Hot Ones and her insta consisting of nothing but onion rings wasn’t sufficient).
Like, I respect Mr. Byrne as an artist, but he eats grapefruit like a madman.
The best part about grapefruit is the serrated killing spoon.
I think I found my new favorite rabbit hole. This voice actor does Shakespeare scenes in a southern accent and I need to see the whole damn play. Absolutely beautiful
if you’re not from the us american south, there’s some amazing nuances to this you may have missed. i can’t really describe all of them, because i’ve lived here my whole life and a lot of the body language is sort of a native tongue thing. the body language is its own language, and i am not so great at teaching language. i do know i instinctively sucked on my lower teeth at the same time as he did, and when he scratched the side of his face, i was ready to take up fucking arms with him.
but y'all. the way he said “brutus is an honourable man” - each and every time it changed just a little. it was the full condemnation Shakespeare wanted it to be. it started off slightly mock sincere. barely trying to cover the sarcasm. by the end…it wasn’t a threat, it was a promise.
christ, he’s good.
the eliding of “you all” to “y’all” while still maintaining 2 syllables is a deliberate and brilliant act of violence. “bear with me” said exactly like i’ve heard it at every funeral. the choices of breaking and re-establishing of eye contact. the balance of rehearsed and improvised tone. A+++ get this man a hollywood contract.
Get this man a starring role as Marc Antony in a southern adaptation of this show PLEASE.
This man is fantastic. 💕
The thing that just destroys me about this, though – we think of Shakespearean language as being high-cultured, and intellectual, and somewhat inaccessible. And I know people think of Southerners as being ill-educated (which…let’s be fair, most are, but not the way it’s said). But that whole speech, unaltered, is so authentically Southern. And the thing is: Leaning into that language really amps the mood, in metalanguage. I’m not really sure how to explain it except… like… “Thrice” is not a word you hear in common speech…unless you’re in the South and someone is trying to Make A Fucking Point.
Anyway. This was amazing and I want a revival of Shakespeare As Southern Gothic.
One of the lovely things about this, and one of the reasons it works so well, is that from what we can piece together of how Shakespeare was originally pronounced, it leans more towards an American southern accent than it does towards a modern British RP.
In addition, in the evolution of the English language in america, the south has retained many of the words, expressions, and cadences from the Renaissance/Elizabethan English spoken by the original British colonists.
One of the biggest examples of this is that the south still uses “O!”/“Oh!” In sentences, especially in multi-tone and multi-syllable varieties. We’ve lost that in other parts of the country (except in some specific pocket communities). But in the south on the whole? Still there. People in California or Chicago don’t generally say things like “why, oh why?” Or “oh bless your heart” or “Oh! Now why you gotta do a thing like that?!” But people from the south still do.
I teach, direct, and dramaturg Shakespeare for a living. When people are struggling with the “heightened” language, especially in “O” heavy plays like R&J and Hamlet, a frequent exercise I have them do is to run the scene once in a southern accent. You wouldn’t believe the way it opens them up and gives their contemporary brains an insight into ways to use that language without it being stiff and fake. Do the Balcony scene in a southern accent- you’ll never see it the same way again.
This guy is also doing two things that are absolutely spot-on for this speech:
First, he’s using the rhetorical figures Shakespeare gave him! The repetition of “ambition” and “Brutus is an honorable man”, the logos with which he presents his argument, the use of juxtaposition and antitheses (“poor have cried/caesar hath wept”, etc). You would not believe how many RADA/Carnegie/LAMDA/Yale trained actors blow past those, and how much of my career I spend pointing it out and making them put it back in.
Second, he’s playing the situation of the speech and character exactly right. This speech is hard not just because it’s famous, but because linguistically and rhetorically it’s a better speech than Brutus’ speech and in the context of the play, Brutus is the one who is considered a great orator. Brutus’ speech is fiery passion and grandstanding, working the crowd, etc. Anthony is not a man of speeches (“I am no orator, as Brutus is; But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man”) His toastmaster skills are not what Brutus’ are, but he speaks from his heart (his turn into verse in this scene from Brutus’ prose is brilliant) and lays out such a reasonable, logical argument that the people are moved anyway. I completely believe that in this guy’s performance. A plain, blunt, honest speaker. Exactly what Anthony should be.
TLDR: Shakespeare is my job and this is 100% a good take on this speech.
definitely one of the challenges I have with reading Shakespeare is that it sounds so weird to me. “The good is oft interr’d with their bones”?? Who talks like that?
Well,,, rednecks. Despite being Elizabethan English, none of this is really out of character for a man with that accent; southern american English has retained not only (I am told) the accent of Shakespeare, and the “Oh!” speech patterns, but also so many of the little linguistic patterns: parenthetic repetition (“so are they all - all honorable men”), speaking formally when deeply emotional, getting more and more sarcastic and passive-aggressive as time goes on, etc.
Someone sent this to me a while ago and I dropped it in my drafts because I wanted to comment on how RIGHT this sounded but I couldn’t express why it sounded right, so I’m glad other people have picked it up
There’s a theory that Appalachian English in particular retains a lot of the qualities present in Shakespearean english that are now gone elsewhere. Thinking of my Mamaw, who says “twice’t” instead of twice and other things like that…
This is right up there with Gary’s Cook’s Hamlet soliloquy
First of all, this is brilliant acting. Second of all, the language analysis above is great for anyone interested in it. And lastly, this video, to me, does a great job of pointing out the effect of type of media on the story you’re trying to tell. Shakespeare’s plays work best as plays. Not as scripts, not as movies. Plays.
At first I figured the $10k, but then I thought I could do the hustle for ~3 years and be able to retire with a nice place somewhere and have more than a $10k monthly allowance with a modest finance set-up
There was a really cold day in March when I went into Manhattan to return library books and people were anxiously lining up at the ice cream truck in their winter coats and everything, just because it was there.
I was a Good Humor Man….which is funny cuz’ I am both lactose intolerant and have reactive hypoglycemia….much like keeping a eunuch in charge of the harem. I was driving it in my old neighborhoods getting high and giving some treats away to my friends and driving out to Ann Arbor to pick up my GF to fool around in the blistering hot un-air conditioned back.
Yes, the Simpsons had it right…..folks do pester you about “what costs a quarter?”
You have to know things like what is Kosher or not. Snoopy bars were Kosher….the Hulk was not. We went out of our way to get sno-cones for the Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Oak Park, MI (almost considered part of the greater Southfield suburb system).
i’ll be honest the “man vs bear” thing is so fucking funny like the only way you’ve never ran into a man in a forest is if you’ve never been in a forest. when i’m in a forest and i run into a man (happened so far every time i’ve been hiking in a forest) what happens is i say “good morning” and he says “good morning” and then we continue on our way. on the other hand if i ran into a bear in the forest i would shit myself.
it has the same energy as that video that has been spreading with the woman setting up like 100 security measures when her husband leaves and “hoping he returns soon and she can sleep calmly”
like obviously men being violent towards women is a huge problem that we need to talk abt and address but like. it’s 1000x more likely someone you know and not some random stranger and acting like men are somehow inherently dangerous to you (and like your husband would be able to protect you somehow in the situations that require those security devices) is some bioessentialist shit
LITERALLY. that video is also what it reminded me of lmao. and also those stories abt people calling the police on like some guy in a hoodie for “acting suspiciously” (standing around). like it’s this overly self-victimizing irrational fear that every stranger is A Potential Threat instead of… literally just a person existing in a place. just like you.
I grew up where black bears are pretty common. The recent video of the guy chasing a black bear out of his BBQ happened literally in my old school district. You get used to them. If I ran into a black bear, I’d either ignore it and keep walking or yell and raise my arms up over my head and stomp my feet as I have … many times. It all depends on how close they are to you. I’ve never felt bothered by a bear, unless you count the one that woke my entire family up the one and only night that my dad put the trash out at night instead of in the morning & said “the bungee cords will keep them out.”
(That was true. The bear didn’t get into the trash, but we were all treated to Ursine Symphony No. 1 for Paws, Steep Hill, and Trash Can for about an hour. My mom will never let my dad live that down.)
On the other hand, I have been sexually assaulted by a man in the woods. More than once, actually. I have women (and queer men) friends who have had deeply frightening or injurious experiences, including assault and being followed back to their campsites by strange men.
Yes, this meme is kind of annoying, but ignoring the fact that, even purely statistically, a man in the woods is more likely to harm you than a black bear just because that isn’t your experience, and framing this as equivalent to the hyperperformance of home security by fearmongers, is equally exhausting. You don’t need to view every other person as a threat to know that, yeah, actually, the man is more likely to hurt you than a black bear is, all other things being equal. This isn’t because men are all terrifying monsters but because black bears are big, scaredy babies that don’t want anything to do with you. The question is not “are all men terrifying monsters,” it’s “which would you rather,” and… yeah. For me, it’s probably the black bear. Men in the woods have hurt me. A black bear never has.
Now, if it were a grizzly or a polar bear, or if I only saw a cub? I mean, fuck that shit. Grizzlies are fucking mean, and to a polar bear you’re just a burrito on legs.
They did try. And they did capture Navajo men. However, they were unsuccessful in using them to decipher the code. The reason was simple. The Navajo Code was a code that used Navajo. It was not spoken Navajo. To a Navajo speaker, who had not learned the code, a Navajo Code talker sending a message sounds like a string of unconnected Navajo words with no grammar. It was incomprehensible. So, when the Japanese captured a Navajo man named Joe Kieyoomia in the Philippines, he could not really help them even though they tortured him. It was nonsense to him.
The Navajo Code had to be learned and memorized. It was designed to transmit a word by word or letter by letter exact English message. They did not just chat in Navajo. That could have been understood by a Navajo speaker, but more importantly translation is never, ever exact. It would not transmit precise messages. There were about 400 words in the Code.
The first 31 Navajo Marines created the Code with the help of one non-Navajo speaker officer who knew cryptography. The first part of the Code was made to transmit English letters. For each English letter there were three (or sometimes just two) English words that started with that letter and then they were translated into Navajo words. In this way English words could be spelled out with a substitution code. The alternate words were randomly switched around. So, for English B there were the Navajo words for Badger, Bear and Barrel. In Navajo that is: nahashchʼidí, shash, and tóshjeeh. Or the letter A was Red Ant, Axe, or Apple. In Navajo that is: wóláchííʼ, tsénił , or bilasáana. The English letter D was: bįįh=deer, and łééchąąʼí =dog, and chʼįįdii= bad spiritual substance (devil).
For the letter substitution part of the Code the word “bad” could be spelled out a number of ways. To a regular Navajo speaker it would sound like: “Bear, Apple, Dog”. Or other times it could be “ Barrel, Red Ant, Bad Spirit (devil)”. Other times it could be “Badger, Axe, Deer”. As you can see, for just this short English word, “bad” there are many possibilities and to the combination of words used. To a Navajo speaker, all versions are nonsense. It gets worse for a Navajo speaker because normal Navajo conjugates in complex ways (ways an English or Japanese speaker would never dream of). These lists of words have no indicators of how they are connected. It is utterly non-grammatical.
Then to speed it up, and make it even harder to break, they substituted Navajo words for common military words that were often used in short military messages. None were just translations. A few you could figure out. For example, a Lieutenant was “one silver bar” in Navajo. A Major was “Gold Oak Leaf” n Navajo. Other things were less obvious like a Battleship was the word for Whale in Navajo. A Mine Sweeper was the Navajo word for Beaver.
A note here as it seems hard for some people to get this. Navajo is a modern and living language. There are, and were, perfectly useful Navajo words for submarines and battleships and tanks. They did not “make up words because they had no words for modern things”. This is an incorrect story that gets around in the media. There had been Navajo in the military before WWII. The Navajo language is different and perhaps more flexible than English. It is easy to generate new words. They borrow very few words and have words for any modern thing you can imagine. The words for telephone, or train, or nuclear power are all made from Navajo stem roots.
Because the Navajo Marines had memorized the Code there was no code book to capture. There was no machine to capture either. They could transmit it over open radio waves. They could decode it in a few minutes as opposed to the 30 minutes to two hours that other code systems at the time took. And, no Navajo speaker who had not learned the Code could make any sense out of it.
The Japanese had no published texts on Navajo. There was no internationally available description of the language. The Germans had not studied it at the time. The Japanese did suspect it was Navajo. Linguists thought it was in the Athabaskan language family. That would be pretty clear to a linguist. And Navajo had the biggest group of speakers of any Athabaskan language. That is why they tortured Joe Kieyoomia. But, he could not make sense of it. It was just a list of words with no grammar and no meaning.
For Japanese, even writing the language down from the radio broadcasts would be very hard. It has lots of sounds that are not in Japanese or in English. It is hard to tell where some words end or start because the glottal stop is a common consonant. Frequency analysis would have been hard because they did not use a single word for each letter. And some words stood for words instead of for a letter. The task of breaking it was very hard.
When translated directly from Navajo into English it is:
“SILVER TWO BLUE JAY CHICKEN HAWK SHEEP AXE NOSE KEY BLUE JAY IRON FISH AND WHALE. “
You can see why a Navajo who did not know the Code would not be able to do much with that. The message above means: “CAPTAIN, THE DIVE BOMBER SANK THE SUBMARINE AND BATTLESHIP.”
“Two silver bars” =captain. Blue jay= the. Chicken hawk= dive bomber. Iron fish = sub. Whale= battleship. “Sheep, Axe Nose Key”=sank. The only normal use of a Navajo word is the word for “and” which is “dóó ”. For the same message the word “sank” would be spelled out another way on a different day. For example, it could be: “snake, apple, needle, kettle”.
Here, below on the video, is a verbal example of how the code sounded. The code sent below sounded to a Navajo speaker who did not know the Code like this: “sheep eyes nose deer destroy tea mouse turkey onion sick horse 362 bear”. To a trained Code Talker, he would write down: “Send demolition team to hill 362 B”. The Navajo Marine Coder Talker then would give it to someone to take the message to the proper person. It only takes a minute or so to code and decode.
In June 2010, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the American Civil Liberties Union were retained by Nasser Al-Aulaqi, the father of Anwar Al-Aulaqi, to bring a lawsuit in connection with the government’s decision to authorize the killing of his son, a U.S. citizen who had been placed on secret “kill lists” maintained by the CIA and the U.S. military’s covert Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) earlier that year. Shortly thereafter, the Secretary of the Treasury designated Anwar al-Aulaqi a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist,” which made it a crime for lawyers to provide pro bono legal services for his benefit without first seeking a license from the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). CCR and the ACLU sought a license, but after the government’s failure to grant one despite the urgency created by the outstanding authorization for Al-Aulaqi’s killing, CCR and the ACLU brought suit challenging the legality and constitutionality of the licensing scheme. The government thereupon provided the license.
In August 2010, CCR and the ACLU filed suit on behalf of Nasser Al-Aulaqi, challenging the government’s decision authorizing the CIA and JSOC to target and kill his son in Yemen. Outside of the context of armed conflict, the Constitution and international human rights treaties the U.S. has ratified prohibit the state from depriving persons of life without due process, except as a last resort to protect against an imminent threat of deadly harm. Anwar Al-Aulaqi was being targeted far from the United States’ war in Afghanistan, and the standing order for his killing flew in the face of the plain meaning of the law’s imminence requirement. The district court in Washington, D.C., dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds, without reaching the merits. This case is part of CCR’s work challenging unlawful drone killings by the United States and other fundamental rights violations being committed in the name of national security.
Date Filed:
August 3, 2010
Current Status
The case was dismissed on December 7, 2010, on standing and because the court ruled that it raised “political questions” not subject to court review. The court did not rule on the merits of the case.
Yeah, note that last thing: the Obama administration’s legal team specifically petitioned the court to dismiss the case on the grounds that nobody has legal standing to sue the US government for a death by drone strike, and the court agreed with this. That is actually a scarier legal precedent than almost anything else in the last 24 years.
The Great Lakes and Saint Lawrence River superimposed on a map of Europe
…OH.
I googled it once and the only reason why the Great Lakes aren’t called inland seas is because they are entirely freshwater, not salt.
By any other metric they’d be seas. Superior especially (the big one in the upper left) behaves like a small ocean, and has claimed at least 250 ships and over 1000 people. Gordon Lightfoot wrote a frankly chilling song about her that I’ll include here:
Lake Michigan has never fully frozen. Leading to some absolutely terrifying images
Layers of ice created, shattered, and built up like this.
Hey, here’s a picture of that lighthouse in 2015, when we had a polar vortex
I love the Great Lakes, you know how all boats look like shit, like just rusty hulks, you don’t get that on the Great Lakes because it’s fresh water, like the shipwrecks are incredibly well preserved
ALT
