i havent read the new dominion of the beast

so my friend is studying abroad in germany this semester

My mom is German and told me what the fuck these were actually trying to mean.

“You can me once” is supposed to mean “you can kiss my ass ONCE ” As in like,, you can be a suck up once.

“What must, THAT MUST” is supposed to be “it is what it is”

“Now butter by the fishes is a German saying that is more like ” can I have some butter with the fish?“ Which basically means ” get to he point of the story. “

These are somehow just as confusing as the coasters

Ok, so small German linguistics lesson coming up:

It’s a common meme in Germany to take a German saying or phrase and translate it word for word into English without adapting the grammar.

A very popular one is “My English is not the yellow from the egg but it goes” which comes from “Mein Englisch ist nicht das Gelbe vom Ei aber es geht” and basically means someone’s English skills aren’t very good but it’s alright. “Nicht das Gelbe vom Ei” is a common way to express that something is not great or barely passable. “Es geht” means something like “it’s okay” or “it’s manageable”.

As for the examples above, I find the explanations severely lacking so here goes:

“You can me once” is “Du kannst mich mal” which is in turn is an abbreviation of “Du kannst mich mal am Arsch lecken”. It’s effectively “Kiss my ass” or “Fuck off” in a less vulgar form.

“What must, that must” comes from “Was muss, das muss” and is an abbreviation for “Was getan werden muss, muss getan werden” so something like “what needs to be done, has to be done” or “it is what it is” fits quite well.

“Now, butter by the fishes” is more complicated. It’s an old North-German saying which stems from the tradition that fried fish is traditionally garnished with butter in that region. The butter is added to the dish right before serving, so a fried fish without butter is incomplete. Saying “Jetzt mal Butter bei die Fische” is akin to telling someone to finally get on with it and get to the point so we can finally eat or carry on. The saying itself is actually grammatically wrong. That’s because it comes from Plattdeutsch or Low German and the articles work a bit different there than in standard German and are actually more similar to English.

So yea those are supposed to be almost indecipherable for anyone without a cultural lens.

Post corrections/clarifications are my favorite genre of humor: a compilation

Fantasy setting where there is an enforced upper limit on how much wealth and power someone can attain because if they get too much, a dragon will eat them and steal all their stuff.

Dragons like treasure hoards absolutely but they also looove to eat the rich. Trying to hide your wealth in various smaller deposits and behind false identities and the like doesn't work because it's magic, the magic still knows you have wealth/power, and the dragon smells it on you and decides you are tasty.

Being magical themselves, dragons don't actually need to eat. If nothing arouses their hunger they will just sleep for however long in their lairs, with their previously accumulated treasures all heaped up around them, maybe coming out once every few hundred years to breed or move house. Brave adventurers can try and steal treasures from sleeping dragons, but it's a risky move not because it's hard to steal from the sleeping dragon, but because if you succeed too well you will immediately start to smell tasty in their vicinity and they will wake up. How tasty you smell depends on how good of a thief you are, so it's a major catch, and there is a lot of speculation on what the max upper limit of wealth you can take from a dragon is before they'll wake up.

Rational approaches often don't work, however, because treasure that's been exposed to dragons for any significant length of time usually gets cursed. You might embark on the quest thinking you'll only take one or two golden goblets and be able to retire comfortably off of the resale, but then you get into the dragon's lair and your brain fries at the mountains of treasure and the next thing you know you're trying to escape with a trunk load of rubies and strings of pearls all wrapped around you and golden coin pouches weighing down your pack, and the dragon's eyes are opening, and, well. That's you done for.

Anyway, every now and again there's some aspiring emperor or proto fantasy capitalist who gets the idea of hiring dragon slayers to go kill all the sleeping dragons and rid the world of this menace, etc etc, but the only thing that wakes a dragon up faster than the smell of a tasty morsel is someone actually attacking them. So, it's never gone well.

as a smoker one of the fastest way i dissuade people from smoking is i go you know how your headaches suck. imagine a permanent headache that slowly gets more and more expensive to cure and also you cant stop coughing in the middle of all of this. yeah? this sucks.

i have said this before but end stage liver failure did not dissuade me from starting opiates. what dissuaded me was someone telling me "do you want to be itchy for the rest of your life? this is how you be itchy for the rest of your life."

people in the tags keep bringing things that are terminal, and i need you to understand some thing critical here. people do not conceptualise what they've not experienced properly and the 'inconvenient' side-effects come faster, and are far more likely than the Big Scary Ones. "dont start cocaine because your liver will fail" -- means nothing to me, have never experienced liver failure, also it takes forever for me to get to that stage. "do you want to know what cocaine shits are" -- paying attention, do not alter my shits habits.

Taking up Japanese as a side project for myself has reminded me of something.

So like a long time ago I had a professor that I absolutely adored. She happened to be Japanese American. She grew up speaking Japanese at home but never really spent a lot of time in Japan. She mostly spoke with other Japanese Americans and read books.

So one day early in her teaching career there’s an exchange student from Japan who’s having a hard time understanding a concept so she explained it to him in Japanese and then he looked absolutely rattled. Like in shock. Pale.

This is how she learned that the way she speaks Japanese makes her sound like a gang member.

Japanese doesn’t exactly have cuss words in the same way as English does but imagine that the nicest professor you’ve ever had pulls your paper over and says “Okay listen here you little piece of shit I’m gonna fucking explain this to you. Violently.”

This is the best description I’ve heard for this method, I always thought it was bullshit because I never heard a description that actually explained how to do this other than “tap your head 20 times”.

I have anxiety-induced hissing, which sounds/feels different from sound-induced tinnitus (which I have also experience). Sound-based tinnitus actually sounds like you’re “hearing” something in your ears, whilst the hissing I have feels like it’s “inside my head”, if that makes sense. But this technique still helps!!

Here’s a visual I found because I couldn’t understand the instructions well

My ringing just went away for the first time in years. What is this blissful quiet.

wait wait i gotta try this, i don’t think i’ve had Actual Silence since i was like 5

HOW THE FUCK

Reblogging to save a life, and also because, even if you don’t have tinnitus, this is totally worth trying if you like new sensory experiences.  

@theshaddowedsnow

what

HAVE THOSE BIRDS AND WIND BEEN THERE THE WHOLE FUCKING TIME

woke up this morning, rolled over, and very confidently tried to blow out my alarm clock like a candle. absolutely no precedent for that.

Ebeneezer in 1742 wakes with a start as for some reason he has put out his guttering candle by slapping atop it ith the palm of his hand. His hand is burned and his nightgown and cap are spattered with hot wax.

Fascinated by the perceived necessity of an Equivalent Exchange

"please don't scroll past this" is a spell that makes me scroll right past this

Will Wood // Laplace’s Angel (Hurt People? Hurt People!)

I am whatever the opposite of a speed runner is. I am a game meanderer. I have to look at literally everything. I am overly cautious in every way. I forget to pause and wander away from the game. I take a minimum 7 hours to get through any given level. If you give me a timer I will cry.

Boy ain’t that the truth