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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • When I started learning Japanese I was impressed by how reliably phonetic their alphabets are, with only a few exceptions (and even the exceptions are phonetic, just by a different set of rules). I was like damn, would be real nice if English’s letters were like this. Then I found out that Japanese wasn’t always this way; prior to the 19th century reading it was a huge pain, with a lot of “i before e except after c…” rules to memorize, no diacritics to distinguish pronunciations, etc. At some point they had a major overhaul of the written language (especially the alphabets) and turned them into the phonetic versions they use today. Again I was like damn, would be real nice if English could get a phonetic overhaul of its written word. But it’s a lot easier to reform a language only used in a single country on an isolated island cluster with an authoritarian government and questionable literacy rates… Can you imagine the mayhem if, say, Australia decided to overhaul the English language in isolation? It would be like trying to get all of Europe to abandon their native tongues in favor of Esperanto.



  • fireweed@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzEUROBEE
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    6 days ago

    This is one reason why I love my native lupine plants. They occasionally get honeybee visitors, but I’ve noticed honeybees struggle with getting the flowers open to access the nectar. Bumblebee lands and his big fat body causes the flower to open right up. Gee it’s almost like they co-evolved!







  • In virtually every way that can be measured, Gen Z’s mental health is worse than that of previous generations […] What’s gone wrong?

    Answer: Shit’s bad and getting worse (especially for younger generations) while the old & rich people in charge twiddle their thumbs because “I got mine, fuck you.” Any other questions?

    I definitely wouldn’t conclude that anything the mental health industry did or didn’t do has anything to do with the mental health of youth today; given current circumstances the kids who are alright are the abnormal ones.



  • I think it’s because a lot of things are bad (and many are getting worse) yet the only power most people have to do anything about them is to raise awareness of the issues, which means engaging with negative news. Sometimes it can be hard to tell what’s real news and what’s rage bait; sometimes non-news can seem like news when it’s part of an ongoing pattern (such as “Elon’s dumb take of the day”). I think there’s also some degree of trying to maintain one’s sense of reality. To the previous example, despite being a massive fuckwit, Elon is still among the wealthiest people in the world, is incredibly influential, and has maintained some degree of fanboy army; posting/reading/discussing/upvoting an article about what dumb thing he said today is grounding for some folks because it reinforces reality by demonstrating that yes, he is still a fuckwit, even though somehow everything still hasn’t come crashing down around him like it karmically should.






  • I grew up during the “don’t ask don’t tell” era, so I didn’t even know homosexuality was a thing until late middle school, and didn’t personally know any open LGBTQIA+ folks until some of my friends started coming out as gay in high school (and even then it wasn’t until years later that I met an out adult). As a result, my first exposure to LGBTQIA+ was through manga, anime, and webcomics. While it was far from the best way to learn about the topic (especially back then as it was almost always presented more as exploitation than representation), it was still enough to turn me into a lifelong ally.

    While there are mountains of examples of LGBTQIA+ representation in comics and animation today (Shimanami Tasogare is one of my favorites), I thought it would be fun to highlight some earlier examples from an era when non-straight-cis characters were an extreme rarity.