we are the daughters of parents who should not have had kids
she lets me hit because she hasnt memorized my attack patterns
ALT
I want to be very clear on this. You can be out drinking with your friends on Friday night and dead on Sunday because of meningitis. Does that sound a little specific? Guess why I have such a specific scenario in mind.
And getting vaccinated is an easy way to prevent that. There is no medical reason to stop recommending that vaccine. There's no new study that shows that it's unsafe, there's no replacement that's better. This is literally the government making its citizenry less safe for no reason.
ineffablepretzel asked:
This little kitten that I recently had the pleasure of babysitting wants to say hi
Her name is Bella, she is very soft, and very cuddly
OH MY GOD HOW DID I MISS THIS SHE IS SO PRETTY 🤩
Hi Bella!!!!! Please give her fusses from me if you still have the opportunity!!!!
ALTThings are going well
Spoiler
Okay normally I'm on the side of "words mean whatever we need them to mean".
but guys, I don’t like the suggestion that it’s what is happening here. Being unfamiliar with the term, and guessing its meaning based on vibes, doesn’t mean you have equal authority on whether it’s “correct” with the community who actively use this word in a technical sense.
please do consider that if you haven't been exposed to the word in the context it's used in, "both are correct" and "you can interpret it differently" and “there is no right or wrong answer” and “it feels like it SHOULD be X” cannot be a fully realised take. Sure, linguistics recognises there are rules in which meaning changes - but “laypeople being unfamiliar with the word, and liking vibes better” isn’t one of them.
You can do that with most words, especially slang, and shape them to the needs of the majority, but this isn't like... a fanfiction word, invented for fanfic and, like, solely used for injured hockey players where it doesn’t matter if the injured limb swaps sides 4 times in a sex scene and phases through a stomach. It is, in its context, a bit more load-bearing (ha) than that.
It's fine to be unfamiliar with the context, and it's fine for words to change, but do just take a quick second to hear it in a native sentence!
One of the most common ways of using this word is to assess four-legged animals. "Favouring" is a specific grouping of behaviour - a hesitancy in gait, stiffness, reluctance to put weight on a limb. It’s often inconsistent, as the animal tries to compensate or conceal the pain. It may not be a full limp or obvious lameness, since prey animals especially will actively try to conceal this; favouring is a subtle reluctance, and a useful word for a very specific recognisable behaviour that the animal is usually trying to lie about. (That’s probably why it’s used in romance fiction, as it’s an interestingly romantic and stoic way to react to pain, and doesn’t mean the limb is inconveniently disabled. A fictional character favouring a wounded leg can wince attractively when it’s jostled, but it doesn’t matter too much if the author forgets and has them run to the door suddenly - “favouring” isn’t incompatible with “running” in horses either.)
The sentence “Favouring the off hind” is equestrian jargon: it means “pain behaviour on the back right leg.” It does not mean “opposite-pain in the not-on deer” and is not confusing in its professional register.
If you've only vaguely heard of "myeloma", and most people in a poll are guessing it's a skin cancer, that doesn't mean that myeloma and melanoma can now readily collapse into the same word - they're under active use in their native contexts, where the people frequently using them do need to communicate the difference between skin and blood cancer.
A poll of laypeople misunderstanding “myeloma,” or non-horse-people misunderstanding “favouring,” isn’t quite enough to indicate a full semantic shift and change of meaning of the term. The community that uses the term “favouring” in the context of “limb injury” - vets, farriers, farmers, commentators, equestrians - knows what it means and uses it consistently in the same way. They’re not confused. because to them, it isn’t a vibesy, sex-scene-hand waving word. It’s a cluster of pain signals.
If you aren’t familiar with that usage, then that’s really more about your own lack of familiarity. Not all interpretations DO carry equal authority, especially when one is just confusion/unfamiliarity. You just haven’t met it before, and that’s fine.
Tl;dr: I’m all for words changing meanings, but we shouldn’t be too quick to declare that when it’s based entirely on unfamiliarity and vibes-based readings.
"[L]inguistics recognises there are rules in which meaning changes - but 'laypeople being unfamiliar with the word, and liking vibes better' isn’t one of them."
anyway. official linguistics post
Deleting twitter was a great choice proven by the fact that Elon Musk’s AI, Grok, is willingly churning out child sexual abuse images because paedophiles on the site are asking it to undress minors.
Quick update!
It's now a paid subscription!
ALTSo now people can pay to digitally undress minors. Gross.
UK Government has said the changes are insulting to victims.
Would be genuinely nice if the UK Gov actually has a backbone on this. More than happy for the UK to move to ban Twitter in its entirety. It’s a cesspool of nazism and, now, child sexual abuse imagery.
no. stop. wrong. incorrect.
generative AI is not procedural generation as most people understand the phrase, and it is deeply harmful to conflate the two.
procedural generation is, generally, a deterministic process in which prefabricated elements are stitched together, and it is typically used for level design when you don't want to have static levels. it's also used for generating items in games like Diablo.
this is an established technology that has existed for over 30 years, before oligarchs came along to take a gigantic shit in human knowledge and expression.
conflating it with generative AI harms independent game developers who actually do give a shit about the quality of their work.
^^^^
Procedural Generation is absolutely not Generative AI.
underrated female character of the day is Angela Moss from Mr Robot.
all she ever gets is disrespect, misogyny, and sexual harassment and degredation from all her way older male bosses. she is deeply unhappy and alone and on the edge and misunderstood.
and she still stays so strong, holds herself high with dignity, and claws her way up into financial and vocational success and demands respect from those she can.
Angela is so widely misunderstood by the fandom and it legitimately makes my blood boil when people call her all sorts of horrible things because the never took the time to understand her and how the things she went through drastically altered her way of thinking throughout the series.
I wrote a whole ass essay on Reddit a few years ago explaining Angela’s motives to the best of my ability in case anyone’s interested.
Justice for Angela Moss, she deserves so much better from the Mr. Robot fandom
”getting thicker skin” is great in theory but I think for some people “get better at handling your thin skin” is gonna be way more helpful advice. I have strong emotional reactions to criticism and they might never go away, but i can continue to try and handle each situation maturely and that’s the important part. Sometimes irrational feelings are chronic and living with them is better than trying to beat yourself up into not having them.
This is great advice because it still recognizes that "handle the situation maturely" still needs to be the endgame.
the more educated you get on fat issues the more you realize that almost everything that supposedly justifies fatphobia is actually complete bullshit.
most of the health conditions that are treated as almost divine punishment for being fat (like heart issues and diabetes) are being revealed to actually *cause weight gain* instead of being caused *by* it.
this goes for social 'consequences' of being fat, too. is that "neckbeard" redditor actually fat because he spends all his time online, or is it that he spends all of his time online because he's not treated like a person if you can see that he's fat, so the internet is his best option?
everything is less accessible to fat people. seats on busses, at restaurants, and even at things like amusement parks, are frequently too small to comfortably sit in for a fat person. people treat you worse if you're fat, or even try to avoid you entirely. you get judged for doing leisure activities, or even for exercising at a public gym, (which proves the claims of trying to motivate you to get fit are bullshit btw) getting filmed and laughed at, posted online for your body to be a punchline.
if you want to be progressive or body positive you *need* to be examining your beliefs. oppressed people are routinely forced into positions that, from the outside, may justify the narrative about these people. black folk are pushed into poverty, so that crime is often their only means of survival, enforcing the idea that black folk are criminals. queer folk are made unsafe in public so that we use codes to identify each other, enforcing the idea that queer folk are trying to secretly seduce people to be gay. and yes, fat folk are forced indoors and online so that they can enforce the narrative that we are lazy shut-ins.
defend your fat friends.
ineffablebookgirl