Ayy nice

Here's the thread I made on Hexbear.

https://hexbear.net/post/1232126

Four comments as of me writing this comment:

Putin really is a big fan of the Russian Empire. He's even doing his own pogroms that will inevitably lead to a brain drain.

Russia is so fucked. People who identified as not-religious has been constantly falling from since 1991 from 60% to 20%. Orthodox Christianity from 30% to 70%. Russian youth (16-29 yo) are 75% religious (62% orthodox) https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2014/02/10/russians-return-to-religion-but-not-to-church/

Man, fuck Gorbachev for allowing the USSR to be dissolved by the west.

[an emoji titled "russia-cool", depicting a burning Russian flag]

So yeah, if you're looking for Hexbears criticizing Russia, then there you go.

got sold to Microsoft while Newell still lives.

Surely you mean while he's "Still Alive", right?

Columbo addressing his ancestor, lol

Honestly? Based. I've always thought that the idea of building a car at home sounded kick-ass.

You might wish to be aware that your instance's top-level domain was chosen because ML stands for "Marxism-Leninism", and that the main admin of lemmy.ml has a photo of Mao as his profile banner. So you're probably going to have a hard time convincing your instance's admins to defederate from Hexbear and Lemmygrad, all things considered.

With Chinese the situation is well that in spoken language, the pronouns aren't gendered, but in written language, they are. This was as a European influence, I believe.

All of these are third-person pronouns read as "tā" in Standard Chinese:

• 他 - masculine, originally/occasionally gender-neutral human; human radical
• 她 - feminine; woman radical
• 牠 - animate non-human, Traditional usage; cow radical
• 它 - inanimate; animate non-human in Simplified usage; historically general
• 祂 - divine, primarily Abrahamic usage; spirit radical
• TA - gender-neutral, also used in other letter case forms
• X也 - gender-neutral, handwritten form has no Unicode support

I currently list my pronouns as she/xe/it/thon/ꙮ, with the idea being that people will have a range of options regarding which word to use: if they like, they can choose to just stick with one pronoun, probably she or it, and forget the rest; and if people do choose to refer to me using a neopronoun, then they can more or less use the spellings or pronunciations or inflections or agreements that work best for them. And this seems to be how most neopronoun users are: virtually all neopronoun users also go by an auxiliary pronoun (he, she, they, and/or it) for accessibility's sake, and virtually all neopronoun users are also very forgiving about how their neopronouns are used.

For me it goes a step further, since I'm good with being called pretty much any neopronoun, even though xe/thon/ꙮ are my favorites; and I'm even OK with being called he or they in a few specific contexts. I don't really bother explaining all that, though, since nobody wants to hear a treatise about autistic non-binary transfemininity in the middle of a pronoun circle, so that's why I usually just list my five favorite pronouns and call it a day.

So all in all, while we all have our linguistic preferences or sometimes complicated feelings regarding how we're referred to, the main thing that matters is that people just try to use our pronouns at all. So the problem with neopronouns, in my experience, is that most people end up either dismissing "made-up words" out of hand, or they get so hung up on using the neopronouns "correctly" that they end up just not using the neopronouns at all. So either way, it all comes back to people's discomfort with using non-prestigious, non-standard language, and this discomfort is sort of justified by the stereotype that people have about neopronoun users being 100% self-centered and unaccommodating.

I think part of the problem is that most neopronoun users don't really think or know much about the linguistics (especially the pragmatics) of neopronouns, and this causes neopronoun users to be worse advocates for neopronoun usage... But I also don't think that people need to have a scientific knowledge of which words they prefer to be called, in order to have their preferences respected.

Potential solutions:

• while saying "they", hold up one or two fingers depending on if the word is singular or plural (also possible in emoji: ☝️/✌️)
• mutter "singular" or "plural" under your breath before saying "they"
• replace plural they with "theys" or "thy'all", à la "yous" or "y'all"
• pronounce singular they as /θeɪ/ and plural they as /ðeɪ/

I once wrote a semi-satirical short story for a writing contest about Norway in the future, and I haaaate how much I had to trim that story down for word count, because I had a ton of ideas for it. I was going to write at length about how rising sea levels and more frequent flooding due to extreme weather had encouraged a shift to canal-centric reconstruction of Norwegian cities. These canals were known to locals as "moats", because their primary purpose was not to facilitate transport, but rather to hinder it: traveling around cities now required either a fancy boat, or crossing one of a limited number of drawbridges, which frequently broke down for extended periods of time in poorer areas, and universally prioritized boat traffic over foot traffic.

The growing underclass of Norway still found some use for the canals, though, as they could fish for drift-litter in the contaminated waters, which they would use for crafts and gardening and such. Meanwhile in other areas, the canal water had been purified: the parks and plazas of Norway's cities had all been transformed into public swimming pools, leaving would-be protestors with virtually no choice but to don their favorite bikinis and swim-trunks while holding up water-proof signs.

Ting Tang Wallawalla Bingbang

Jesus but only if He's vibing with His roommate the Buddha in some small apartment like in that one manga