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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • I speak English. And, as James Nicoll said,

    The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

    I speak some Spanish and some Dutch, but I don’t know if I borrow many words from them that aren’t “normal” borrow-words.


  • So, face shields are clear shields that cover your face. You’ll see really thin plastic ones in doctors sometimes (they were common during covid), and there are heavier ones for welders and such. Cops often wear them as part of their riot gear get-ups.

    Thing is, the medical-type shields aren’t going to very useful during the LA protests, and the higher-grade ones that would be useful are pretty expensive to be just handing out to people. And then you come to this line in the article

    along with a broadcast clip from Fox News appearing to show a man providing masks to protestors from the back of a pickup truck.

    So - masks. He was providing some kind of masks to people - surgical, N95, carnival, Halloween - hell, little ballroom masks on sticks or thin cloth Zorro masks. But I’m pretty sure that the prosecutor will decide the charges against him are overstated and drop the charges.

    It’s mostly a tactic to get this guy off the streets for a bit because he was prepared more than they liked and was helping other demonstrators potentially hide their faces, and to give anyone else with similar ideas reason to pause before they do it themselves.














  • Apparently there was some school of teaching for a while, where the teachers were emphasizing getting your ideas down on paper quickly, without regard for spelling, spacing, paragraph-ing, punctuation, verb tense, etc. I ran across it when I was trying to find out why there was this generation of fanfic writers who had interesting concepts but couldn’t write to any kind of standard - and who were extremely resistant to any suggestions. Some of the concepts sounded really interesting, too, but it was entirely too much work to try to parse the story.





  • “Harvard’s got to behave themselves,” he told reporters gathered in the Oval Office. “Harvard is treating our country with great disrespect, and all they’re doing is getting in deeper and deeper and deeper.”

    Years ago, someone on Tumblr had a comment on respect, which very much applies to Trump and his fascists:

    Sometimes people use ‘respect’ to mean “treating someone like a person”, and sometimes they use ‘respect’ to mean “treating someone like an authority”.

    And sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say, “If you won’t respect me, I won’t respect you”; and they mean, “If you won’t treat me like an authority, I won’t treat you like a person.”

    And they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.


  • I’m a depressive who goes to Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance meetings. Your son might find some meetings (either online or on person) useful.

    If he goes, a friend of mine always used to say that you should try every meeting twice. You try every meeting, because each has a different group ‘personality’, and you go twice because any group or person can have an ‘off’ night. If DBSA doesn’t work out, there are other groups that may help (NAMI, Recovery, etc), but those have a more general focus that may or may not work for him.

    The people at my meeting go there because it provides understanding and support and helps keep them on their meds. I will say that a number of the bipolars in my group have gone on manic spending sprees at times, that they’ve later had to walk back because they didn’t have the money for the purchase(s). Like, at one meeting, one bipolar said they’d been off their meds once, walked into a car dealership and bought an expensive brand-new car. At this point, several other bipolars said they’d done the same thing, with one person adding that she’d bought a horse, and the final person confessing that she’d bought a house. They each did walk back their purchases, but it did cause some stress in their relationships. I don’t know if this is typical of bipolars in general or just the people in my group.