The thai for “5″ is pronounced roughly “Ha”, and so where english internets would generally put “lol” or something, they put “555555555″.
I was looking for this post for so long
Finally it has returned
Japanese has a verb tense exclusively for complaining
@mikkeneko u can’t just say something like that and then leave us hanging
Okay, so Japanese has a verb construction using a linking conjugation and the helper verb shimau, which translates to something like “to happen unfortunately.”
The curse word shimatta! comes from the same verb, to give you an idea.
So you can take any verb and add -te shimau on it to change its meaning from “this happened” to “this happened and it sucked.” Ame ga furu means “it’s raining,” but ame ga futteshimau means “it’s raining and I hate it.”
I mean, I guess you could use it for other purposes, like apologizing or something? But in practice, it’s pretty much always used for complaining.
who wants to hear the story about how a girl in my spanish 2 class fought back against the horrible spanish teacher and won
if this gets 2 notes i will tell it
one note is good enough for me.
so there’s this girl in my spanish 2 class. we’ll call her kayla.
kayla is a sophomore. she is funny and outspoken and a little crazy. the main thing to remember about kayla is that she will stand up for herself when needed. and that’s why something happened with her and my spanish teacher.
we’ll call my teacher miss irving. miss irving has been teaching spanish for 30 years. she’s a little forceful, hates technology, and hates when people don’t just listen to her without questioning it.
it began when kayla entered class late near the beginning of the school year. “sorry, ma’am,” she said to miss irving. “i was at the counselor’s.”
miss irving looked up at kayla and asked for a pass. kayla didn’t have one, but she said that miss irving would be able to call the counselor and the counselor would verify her visit. miss irving refused to do so and gave her detention on the spot. kayla started trying to justify her own actions, and she received yet another detention.
this marked the beginning of a long, long feud. every time kayla did something, miss irving would reprimand her for it. kayla put on chapstick or began to eat in class and miss irving began to yell. kayla read a paragraph slower than the rest of us and miss irving would snap at her. slowly, kayla began to get fed up.
the last straw for her was when she asked miss irving to go to the counselor during class, and it changed everything.
“miss irving? i have an appointment with the counselor down the hall. may i go?”
“obviously not,” my teacher snapped back. “you can’t leave in the middle of the class.”
“but i need to see her, i have an appointme-“
“i don’t care. you’re going to translate that paragraph-“
“ma’am, i already translated it-“
“well, then i’ll give you more work to do-“
“no.”
at that word, all of the heads in the clasroom turned. it’s an unspoken rule that you don’t say no to miss irving. but kayla had fire in her voice, and was now standing up and glaring at the teacher.
“excuse me?” miss irving responded, and kayla went off.
“no matter what i do, you get on to me about it. i have issues that i need to take care of that you refuse to understand. you’re a teacher. you’re supposed to care about us. it’s your job! listen to me carefully: i. have. mental. health. problems. and there are times i need to eat in class or i need to go to the counselor’s office because of it, so could you just get off of my ass about it and try to understand?”
miss irving turned beet red and sent her to the principal’s office.
what followed was a battle between the two. miss irving kept emailing kayla’s parents, but kayla’s parents took their daughter’s side. then my teacher emailed kayla’s other teachers and asked them to take her side, but the other teachers said they didn’t ever have problems with kayla.
kayla went to talk to the principal about the situation and told her what was going on. the principal talked to miss irving, and miss irving lost her teacher of the year award for that year. she also received a strike on her teaching record for refusing to respect a student’s mental health protocol. and kayla won.
miss irving still teaches our class and we still have kayla with us. now, miss irving doesn’t hide her hatred for kayla at all. she expresses it fully to her other classes. and most of those other classes hate her as well.
but my class and i love kayla. because kayla has a newfound power, and she doesn’t take it for granted. instead, she uses it to help us.
and this matters so much to me because, one day, she helped me.
i have generalized anxiety disorder. one of the methods i can use to calm myself down is by doodling, and doodling also helps me listen more closely to the teacher’s lesson. so i started doodling on the edges of my papers in spanish a lot, especially when we started having tests every class period and it became very anxiety-inducing for me.
miss irving started taking points off for every doodle i made. and i mean A LOT of points. i drew an eye in the corner of a worksheet once and i got an 80 instead of a 100. when i tried to explain that it was for my anxiety, she didn’t care. so now i had even more anxiety because i couldn’t reduce my anxiety.
one day, miss irving was lecturing and i was doodling, when she started to yell at me for it.
i can’t remember a lot about what happened because at that moment i went into a full blown panic attack. but what i do remember is kayla standing up and yelling at her.
“what are you doing? stop! she’s obviously having a panic attack!”
she came over to my desk and led me through breathing exercises. calmed me down. told me my doodle of half a face looked really good, asked me how long i’d been taking art and about my disorder. the entire class was silent, watching, and miss irving was fuming.
when i was calm enough to, i thanked kayla, and she squeezed my hand in a silent alliance.
then miss irving walked back to the whiteboard and never said anything about my doodles again.
the moral of the story? just because a teacher or principal or parent is older than you doesn’t mean they deserve to be obeyed no matter what. if what your “elders” say to you or do to you belittles you, tears you down, or keeps you from being able to get help or be a better person, they are not doing their job, and you can stand up for yourself and others.
don’t be afraid to question the authority just because they say they shouldn’t be questioned.
One overlooked thing that really sets the Lord of the Rings films apart from other franchises is how earnest they are-
Most movies are so afraid of being “cheesy” that whenever they say something like “friendship is the most powerful force in the world” they quickly undercut it with a joke to show We Don’t Really Believe That! 😉 Even Disney films nowadays have the characters mock their own movie’s tropes (”if you start singing, I’m gonna throw up!”) It’s like winking at the camera: “See, audience? We know this is ridiculous! We’re in on the joke!”
But Lord of the Rings is just 12.5 hours of friendship and love being the most powerful forces in the world, played straight. Characters have conversations about how much their home and family and friends mean to them, how hope is eternal, how there is so much in the world that’s worth living for…. and the film doesn’t apologize for that. There’s no winking at the audience about How Cheesy and Silly All This Is; it’s just. Completely in earnest.
And when Lord of the Rings does “lean on the fourth wall” to talk about storytelling within the film, it’s never to make jokes about How Ridiculous These Storytelling Tropes are (the way most films do)…. but instead to talk about how valuable these stories can be. Like Sam’s Speech at the end of the Two Towers: the greatest stories are ones that give you something to believe in, give you hope, that help you see there are things in a bleak violent world that are worth living for
Here’s a fascinating finding: When the NRA holds its annual convention, the national rate of gun injuries goes down temporarily by 20% – seemingly because the 80,000-odd attendees are hanging out and listening to talks, instead of handling their guns.
That’s the finding by two researchers
– Anupam Jena of Harvard Medical School and Andrew Olenski of Columbia
University – who crunched the numbers. They looked at the rates of
hospital ER visits and hospitalizations for firearm injuries, during the
actual days of NRA convention dates and in periods three weeks before
and after. Sure enough, the accident rate dropped significantly during
the convention dates.
One would expect, if you took the NRA’s own arguments at face
value, for its members to be among the best-trained folks around guns,
with a relatively low accident rate. But as Scientific American writes …
“I’m not surprised by the findings,” says Daniel Webster,
director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research who was
not involved in the study. They are “consistent with a variety of
studies that show where there are more guns, more people get shot in
unintentional shootings, suicides, domestic homicides and criminal
assaults with guns, after controlling for other factors.” It makes
sense, he adds, “those with the greatest exposure to firearms take a
break from handling loaded firearms in their homes and in other
contexts, and fewer people are shot.”
The Jabari tribe is known for worshipping the gorilla god Hanuman; in the original comics, M’Baku was actually introduced as “Man-Ape,” a name abandoned by the film adaptation for obvious reasons. But by contextualizing the Jabari religion, Duke found an elegant way to sidestep negative or racist perceptions: “They haven’t been affected by colonialism and all the narratives that are associated with developing a sense of inferiority and people comparing them to animals,” he says. “To them, this is just who they pray to, and they find their strength and agency in this religion. So being a bit gorilla-influenced was a sense of pride for them.”
He also came up with certain ape-inspired characteristics for the film, including a scene in which the Jabari men grunt at an outsider who speaks without permission—a threatening cue for that person to shut up. To find M’Baku’s voice, he researched and imitated Nigerian accents, further separating the character from the South African-inspired T’Challa. It’s just one of many ways the Jabari differ from the city-based Wakandans, who largely worship the panther god Bast.
“The panther is sleek, the panther is sneaky, the panther is covert—meanwhile, the gorilla will show up and bang on his chest and make noises to warn you about what is about to happen if you continue to cross the line,” Duke says. “We don’t hide, we don’t sneak. We come through the front door.” – Winston Duke, Vanity Fair
Two years ago, I wrote If dishwashers were iPhones,
a column in the Guardian that took the form of an open letter from the
CEO of a dishwasher company that had deployed DRM to make sure you only
used dishes it sold you in “their” dishwashers.
At the time the US Copyright Office was holding hearings on Section 1201 of the DMCA,
and learning that companies were routinely using the law against
breaking DRM to force their customers to buy consumables, parts, service
and apps from them, and exploiting the fact that the same law let them
silence whistleblowers who discovered defects in their products.
There is literally no reason a “connected” dishwasher couldn’t do this right now.
With the W3C’s Director, web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, signaling that he will greenlight standardized DRM for web browsers
even before the W3C’s members have voted on the subject, this feels
like a good time to remind us of one of the consequences of DRM: it’s a
way for companies to make their business strategies into laws, and to
make crimes out of using your own property in ways that thwart those
strategies.
In the US, the maximum penalty for breaking DRM is a 5-year prison sentence and a $500,000. For a first offense.
The Kitchen Store and Speckless Disher are the best dishwashing experience in the world
Before the Speckless Disher, there was no way to be sure that your
dishes would come out of the dishwasher clean. Outside of the Speckless
Community, people are accustomed to “pre-washing” their dishes before
they put them into the dishwasher. This tremendously wasteful practice
spills billions of gallons of precious water down the drain every year,
and is a danger to our planet.
Speckless means safe
Food-borne illnesses are some of history’s greatest killers, and they’ve
kept up with the times, mutating into virulent, antibiotic-resistant
strains that are potentially fatal. We vet every foodable – bowl, plate,
pan, pot, fork, knife and spoon – in the Kitchen Store to ensure that
its geometry and surface properties are compatible with our
best-of-breed jets, so that everything that touches your food is
sterile. That’s a guarantee we’re able to make because we’re able to
manage and control the whole dishwashing experience.
Anyone can make Speckless foodables
The Kitchen Store is the most successful platform for the discovery,
rating and consumption of kitchenware that the world has ever seen. If
you have a great idea for plate or spoon, all you need to do is sign up
for our Foodable Developer Network, pay $100, sign our Developer License
Agreement, and get creative! Anything is possible – so long as it fits
within our guidelines, of course.
“Hackers” break dishwashers
With so many choices of foodables in the Kitchen Store, there’s no need
to modify your Disher to fit non-store items from outside our ecosystem.
We understand that some community members have sentimental attachment
to Grandma’s wedding china or the baby dish that Mum saved for your own
kid to use (some of you have even made your own dishes without signing
up for our Developer Network), but when you “chip,” “mod” or “bend” your
Disher’s prongs to fit these noncompliant items, you make impossible
for the Disher’s internal sensors to accurately gauge the washing
performance. The technical term for a “modded” Disher is broken.
No matter what you call it, stealing is stealing
Of course, not all “modding” comes from such an innocent place. There
are plenty of counterfeiters who want to offer you a great deal on
“foodables” that “look just like the real thing” – they’re able to offer
such a great deal because they don’t have to pay the hardworking
foodable developers who created those designs. That’s why Congress made
it a felony to “circumvent” the Disher’s detection systems, and why we
continue to oppose an exemption to this rule at the FTC’s triennial
hearings. Commissioner Gonzales may well ask “Is it proportionate to put
potters in prison for loading the dishes they bought into the
dishwashers they own?” But any potter who wants to make foodables for a
Speckless Disher can sign up for our Developer Program – there’s just no
good reason to sneak around like a thief.
We have the right to protect our trade secrets – and your Disher’s integrity
Commissioner Gonggrijp asks why people wishing to join the Developer
Network have to agree to a 21,000 word license-agreement, which includes
confidentiality and nondisparagement clauses prohibiting them from
discussing their affairs with us. The answer is simple: to protect us,
and to help us protect you. Our agreement spells out the terms of doing
business in our marketplace, including the painstaking care we insist
upon from our partners.
It’s a matter of choice
No one was ever forced to buy an Absterge product. From the day that
Peter Stints founded Absterge in his fabled garage in Los Gatos to the
day he died, he worked tirelessly to create a different kind of
dishwashing experience: to bring a thoughtfulness and intentionality to a
product that everyone else took for granted. We know that your family
teased you for spending a little extra on one of our products back in
the old days, and we share your pleasure in escorting them around one of
the many Absterge stores around the world, so that they can see the
growing family of revolutionary kitchen appliances that we continue to
make.
Fans of the Broadway musical Hamilton have been all in a tizzy because “Weird Al” Yankovic worked with Lin-Manuel Miranda on the latest “Hamildrop.” It’s a squeezebox ditty called “The Hamilton Polka”
and it’s described as “remixed medley of ‘Hamilton’ hits, featuring
Weird Al’s twist on songs like ‘My Shot,’ ‘Wait For It,’ ‘The Schuyler
Sisters,’ and more.”
