Something funny about posting this comic or linking to it is that algorithms start showing me links to the very listicles I’m mocking. As if I really was interested in the bullshit notion that ‘creative people’ ask for something different for lunch or have a special arrangement of their desks. (They don’t. In short: Everybody gets ideas, sometimes even good ones; those who work in creativity-related fields tend to keep the awareness switch on, remembering and processing things that could be useful. Write down your ideas, give them room to breathe, think the same thought backwards. Don’t idolize ideas. What you do with them is the work. Beautiful things come from clichés. The Work is the work.)
Commission for Aeto of their intimidating snake demon character. I have drawn them before a handful of times if you go back in my gallery and working on him is always a bit different because of the multitude of heads :)
I had a nice busy day today, converting the Indigo’s enclosure to bioactive, which means there are bugs in there, which will eat her poops, and plants which will… eat, kind of, the bugs’ poops. Looks prettier, can be more healthy, and no constant cleaning! Here’s the progress through resetting the enclosure.
old people really need to learn how to text accurately to the mood they’re trying to represent like my boss texted me wondering when my semester is over so she can start scheduling me more hours and i was like my finals are done the 15th! And she texts back “Yay for you….” how the fuck am i supposed to interpret that besides passive aggressive
Someone needs to do a linguistic study on people over 50 and how they use the ellipsis. It’s FASCINATING. I never know the mood they’re trying to convey.
I actually thought for a long time that texting just made my mother cranky. But then I watched my sister send her a funny text, and my mother was laughing her ass off. But her actual texted response?
“Ha… right.”
Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.
Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.
So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:
“Yay! That sounds great - where are we meeting?”
My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:
‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”
And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.
On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master.
So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like we’re scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like she’s expecting her Eighth grade English teacher to come and mark them in red pen. She has learned that proper punctuation and mistakes are more acceptable, but when she considers putting effort into how she’s writing, it’s always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and not along the lines of ‘how would this sound if you said it out loud?’
the linguistics of written languages in quick conversational format will never not be interesting to me like it’s fascinating how we’ve all just silently learned what an ellipsis or exclamation mark implies and it’s totally different in different communities or generations or whatever
I’m one of those “old people,” BUT I’m one of those people of that generation who DID grow up typing things in real-time conversations. I was involved in IRC from the earliest days with the “secondary” networks following on EFNet’s heels, and some of the BBS-based online chats even before that. (Don’t ask me about the chat program on the 11/780 when _I_ was in high school. :) ) “Text messaging” may be new, but the idea of typing to talk in real time is pushing 40 years old, itself (maybe more).
Given that, I tend to use ellipses like the mother is described. I don’t use a lot of exclamation points, but do PUT THINGS IN ALL CAPS to stress them! The old text-only emoticons date back to the earliest days, as well. :)
The shift to dash over ellipses is actually pretty recent, in my experience, even over text chats. Whether to use ellipses or dashes doesn’t really impact that final question above, “how would this sound if you said it out loud,” since that’s really just a matter of HOW you translate ellipses into the spoken work. Like that mother mentioned, I just translate it as a pause in speaking, so tend to use it that way.
And the bad news for the younger folks is… you’re going to grow old, too. In 10 years, you’ll be using whatever the latest thing is, and you’ll think you’re up to date, but somehow not catch the subtle details as they morph over time. IMHO to me will always be “In My Humble Opinion,” which this is. Habits are hard to change, in typing as well as speaking, so things like ellipses are likely things people will keep running into, and being confused by.
The flip side is, a lot of the things we take for granted now are straight out of those old real time chats: When we wanted to stress something, we’d *surround it with stars*, which some systems make bold now. Similar, _underscores_ around something would serve to highlight that specific thing, which often translates to italics.
Anyone else getting real fuckin fed up with this guy
to expand on this: as rescue teams were racing to save those kids and their coach, elon musk decided to use the crisis as a PR stunt.
he tweeted about how he was going to send his engineers to Thailand in order to look like a hero. he threw out ludicrous rescue ideas, including a 3 mile long tube and a small submarine, neither of which had a chance in hell of working.
the diver being discussed here is Vern Unsworth. he’s a 63-year-old British caver who lives near and has extensive knowledge of the Tham Luang cave system.
Unsworth is the reason the boys were found: he used his knowledge of the caves and deductive reasoning to pinpoint where he thought the team would be. when rescuers followed his directions, they found the boys only 200 meters away.
Unsworth also called in the British divers who would go on to first locate the team. he didn’t know these boys, but he remained outside of thebTham Luang cave system for the full 17 days in order to assist in their rescue anyway.
he has since rightfully called out Musk for trying to exploit the situation for attention and explained why Musk’s suggestions would never have even worked. Musk responded by throwing a tantrum and, based on literally NOTHING, calling Unsworth a pedophile.
Petition to throw Elon in a cave so he can bootstrap his way out with his apartheid daddy dollars.
I met a lot of people like Elon Musk going to a male-majority tech school. I dislike him because he encourages the worst behavior that these men exhibit. The way Musk acts tells them that it’s okay to never take criticism, it’s okay to bully those around you, and it’s okay to belittle those both inside and out of your field, because that’s how you become successful. Musk illustrates to them that when you act like you know everything and storm when someone suggests otherwise, well, that’s just how you make it to the top.
Actually, I’ve been thinking about this for a bit, and the stories of Musk remind me of one person more than anyone else: Edison.
If you think about the way Edison treated people (especially Tesla, but I’m certain he wasn’t alone), how he went about promoting his inventions, and even the process he used of developing his work, there’s a certain similarity, at least superficially.
Calling Unsworth a pedophile… That so much seems like something if you told me Edison had done, I’d have no trouble believing it.
My favorite self care tip is to pretend you’re a demon inhabiting a humans body and you gotta look after it, treat it right, cause these things are weak af man and you gotta protect your host
…You know, that might actually work.
Always and forever reblogging this
Sigh. No self-respecting demon would let the body go this long without showering. Brb.
XD wtf that’s great.
This worked for me quite a few times. Especially when I have a hard time getting out of bed in the morning just like
The vessel must be present.
This may actually work, motivation by “to be a successful infiltrator on the mortal plane my host must be as successful as possible”
THIS SHOULDN’T BE AS CONVINCING AS IT IS…WHAT THE FIERY-HOT BALLS OF SATAN IS MAKING THIS A CONVINCING ARGUMENT?
*Gil looks around innocently*
(Though, seriously, that’s WAY more Odon’s style.)
even with those four numbers there are countless possible combinations good luck with figuring out which one is the right one you punk
*straightens calculator*
It’s pretty likely that it’s a four digit number, and as there are four digits chosen there, that means that there cannot be any repetition. This mean that there are:
n!/(n-4)! possible orders. As ‘n’ is 4 (number of digits available). 4!/0! which becomes 4x3x2x1/1 which simplifies to 24. That means that there are 24 possible combinations of codes. This would take you about two or three minutes to input all possible codes.
Unless an alarm goes off if you don’t get it right in 3 tries
*straightens calculator again*
Kick the fucking door in
well ‘technically’ the code is most likley 1970. statistically, a majority of people, when told to choose a 4 digit code will choose their birth year. and this key pad is obviously a few years old to put it nicely, thats most likley it.
some sherlock holmes shit just went down over here
No, no, no. Don’t base your deductions of psychology. Let’s talk chemistry. When you first press a button, there’s more of the natural oils on your skin, and therefore it wears down the numbers on the keys faster. Obviously 0 is the first one, then. Try 0791 first.
Sherlock out.
woah.
it got better
and this is why the sherlock fandom could either rule the world or end it….
Close, but not quite, I think. People will almost always choose a number they can remember. What’s memorable about 0791? Try 0719 - a birthday, 19th of July. That is more likely.
Those deductions are great and all, but unnecessary.
The light is green.
The door is already open.
And that’s why we have a John Watson.
This is “top 10 favorite posts” level.
Omg, it’s actually on my dash! This post is like a fossil!
I have to reblog this
yES
No, no…
The combination is 45666. I just rubbed off the paint on the other numbers to fool potential thieves!
