who was the fool who was tasked with naming the galaxy and the only adjective they could think of was ‘mmmmmmmmmmmmilky…’
scientist: (gazing up at space) scientist: ……….. it sure is a milky boy
NO
YOU DONT UNDERSTAND
ASTRONOMERS ARE THE SHITTIEST EVER AT NAMING THINGS I KID YOU NOT.
When it came time to name the two theoretical particle types that might be dark matter THEY INTENTIONALLY CHOSE THE NAMES SO THAT THE ACRONYMS WOULD SPELL “WIMPS” AND “MACHOS” I SHIT YOU NOT
THEY ARE FUCKING TERRIBLE AT NAMING ANYTHING
I just listened to a talk by Neil deGrasse Tyson himself LAST NIGHT and he went on about this more than once.
“I’m walking down the street and I’m like ‘ooh pretty rock…’ and some Geologist is like ‘actually, that’s anorthosite feldspar’ and I’m like ‘Nevermind, I don’t want it anymore.’ Any biologists in the audience? [some clapping] Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. The most important molecule in the human body, what did you name it? It has NINE SYLLABLES and it’s so long that even YOU GUYS abbreviate it as ‘DNA’!
But astrophysicists and astronomers? No, man, we call it like we see it. Star made of neutrons? NEUTRON STAR. Small white star? WHITE DWARF. You know that big red spot on Jupiter? Know what we called it? JUPITER’S RED SPOT.”
okay i’m glad you mentioned the biologist nonsense bc their naming methods are the bane of my existence
I see your astrophysicists-are-shit-at-names and raise you Marine-Biologists-Are-Fucking-Maniacs.
See this beautiful creature?
It’s a carnivorous deep-sea sponge that lives off of Easter Island and never sees the light of day, as it’s about 9000 feet down. Those delicate-looking orbs are covered in millions of tiny hooked spines, which latch onto anything unfortunate enough to bump into it, and hold it in place as it is digested alive by the sponge’s skin. Amazing, beautiful and profoundly creepy. They could have given it so many cool names. Could have drawn on mythology (I think Scylla would have been an appropriate reference), the region it was found in, the textured skin, PHAGOCYTOSIS, anything!
Glad Republicans took the time to understand how health insurance works before they put together a health insurance bill that will impact millions of Americans.
Oh my fucking god.
I am a licensed insurance agent, let me tell y’all something.
There is a thing in our lives called RISK, okay. Risk exists because there is a chance of loss. If you have a car, you could crash the car. You would then have to pay to fix the car, pay for your injuries, pay for someone else’s injuries, pay for THEIR car, and also pay any fines and tickets you might have incurred thanks to the crash. Plus if they sue your ass for more money, you have to pay for a lawyer. That’s the RISK of having a car. How do you get rid of this risk? You don’t have a car. Having a car is what we call ‘exposure’ – the circumstance that opens you up to the risk of a loss.
Y’all with me so far about risk and exposure?
There are four key methods of managing risk. The first is Avoid. In this instance, you can Avoid the risk by not having a car. Of course, this method isn’t perfect because other people could still hit you, a pedestrian, with their cars.
You can Retain the risk. Basically, this means you own the car and you don’t have any insurance. Shit happens, you pay for it. A digression, but some states actually have laws in place for this – if you’re rich enough to conceivably pay all your own loss bills, you can prove it by putting up a $50,000 bond with the state insurance board, and then you are formally excused from having to buy insurance.
You can Reduce the risk. Buy a very safe car, follow all traffic laws, drive very seldom. You can minimize your risk this way, but you haven’t eliminated it, so there’s still the chance of a serious loss, especially because there are other people on the roads and some of them are careless and stupid.
So here we have three methods of managing risk. One only works for the super rich. The other two are far from foolproof. So what the hell are we supposed to do, so that a car accident, which happens every day, doesn’t cause such a catastrophic financial event that we’re in debt for the rest of our lives because we missed a stop sign?
That’s why insurance exists. Insurance is a manifestation of the final and most successful method of managing risk: TRANSFER.
When you transfer your risk, someone else agrees to share that risk of loss with you. You both help insulate one another against loss. When large communities pool their risk, the entire community has better financial stability and better protection against catastrophic loss. Yes, it means some people may pay for a service they never use, but they are part of the community too. What helps the community helps them, whether they recognize it or not.
For instance, let’s say that it wasn’t required to buy car insurance to drive (I’m aware that in at least one state it’s not, just bear with me please, and don’t all look at New Hampshire at once, it’s rude and they might shoot you). Buying car insurance is an absolute choice. Only those who actively choose to pool their risk do so. Think about how much they would have to pay if only a few people were members of the pool. Think about the rates we’d have to charge to ensure these people were covered in the event of a catastrophic loss.
When EVERYONE pays a little, EVERYONE pays less. That’s a fundamental aspect of risk transfer.
Now we’ve been talking about auto insurance, which is my wheelhouse. But let’s talk about Health Insurance.
Every single person here has a human body. BEING ALIVE exposes us to health risks, and there is no Avoiding it. Only the truly wealthy can afford to Retain that risk but thanks to the fuckery of various incarnations of our government, many of us are FORCED to, and as a result, if we suffer a catastrophic loss, we are helpless in the face of exactly the sort of life-destroying debt and retribution that insurance exists to insulate us from! Sure we can reduce the risk in a few ways, by trying to be healthier, but many conditions are hereditary and some people just plain don’t have that fucking option – they were born broken and they’ll always be broken and they are not served in any way by others telling them “JUST DRINK MORE WATER”.
The ONLY REASONABLE METHOD of managing health risk is widespread transfer. It’s creating a massive pool into which everybody pays a little, so the money is there when someone needs a lot. And if you don’t believe me, look at the other countries that are doing this successfully and waving it in our goddamn faces because fucking Americans can’t get our act together.
Now you have read a handy primer on what the fuck insurance is, why it’s necessary, and how it works. Please spread this like wildfire, because ignorance hurts everybody, kind of like how really fucking expensive opt-in health insurance hurts everybody except people who were already rich enough not to need it.
So… put in these words… (correct me if I’m wrong- I’m kind of making a mental leap and a lot of the insurance stuff was never actually explained to me.)
Insurance already works on a socialist model of co-operative payment. You pay your share, and if you don’t use your share it goes towards a possible emergency in the future OR someone else’s emergency. Which is why it’s important to have as many people in as possible- because it (in a perfect world) would lower the cost.
Am I understanding this right? That the phrase ‘socialized healthcare’ is kind of a redundancy?
Yes, you are understanding it right. The entire concept of insurance is based on socialized transfer of risk to remove the burden from individuals so that everyone can actually be covered.
That is LITERALLY the entire point.
If only one person is paying into the insurance pool, and that person has a $20,000 loss, then that person has to pay the $20,000, whether or not they can afford it. The insurance company, to make sure they have the money to indemnify (a word that means ‘restore to their condition prior to the loss’ or ‘make whole’) that person, has to collect $20,000 in premiums in order to pay out on that $20,000 loss.
If 20,000 people are paying into the insurance pool and someone has a $20,000 loss, then all those people only have to pay one dollar. The Insurance company would only have to collect $1 from those 20,000 people in order to cover that $20,000 loss.
The way insurance premiums work is the insurance company looks at loss information. Sometimes they purchase studies and reports from third parties who literally exist to do NOTHING ELSE but track certain kinds of loss. They figure out how much of that loss they will be financially responsible for in a given fiscal year, as well as their administrative costs, and they divide that number by the number of people paying premiums. That’s how you get your insurance premium. It’s literally called the Law of Large Numbers – we figure out how much we have to charge you by figuring out how much risk we’re taking on by studying thousands of people who are, in this case, driving cars and having accidents.
If, for example, in Tornado Valley the number of claims for hail damage have gone up thirty percent since last year, then we will have no choice but to charge 30 percent more for the coverage that pays for hail damage to your car. Car insurance costs have gone up recently because more people are texting while driving, so the number of accidents have gone up sharply. Car insurance costs have gone up recently because medical payments have increased in cost, and we also cover that. Car insurance costs have gone up because a bumper that used to cost $200 to fix now contains sensors and back-up cameras that cost $5000 to fix.
If we didn’t rate for that, you’d be on the hook for all those increased costs… not indirectly, by a relatively small increase in your premium, but DIRECTLY, to the tune of thousands of dollars.
There are arguments to be made about American healthcare and how it’s tantamount to price gouging. There are also arguments to be made about how if you’re extremely wealthy, you should contribute more to the insurance pool than people who are making very little money (which would occur anyway, we hope, because health insurance is contributed to through taxes, not through private companies charging premiums). But the fact remains that the very institution of insurance RELIES on huge pools of people paying in so that nobody is financially destroyed by a loss.
Excellent commentary/explanation.
Your Friendly Local Insurance Underwriter says THIS. OMG THIS. Also, I think 22k people could pass at least one CPCU exam with this post.
There is a reason why the ACA has the mandate, and that’s so healthy, generally younger people pay in so that those who aren’t so healthy can actually have insurance.
It’s also why the big insurance networks are generally better than smaller. My health insurance from a fortune 50 Insurance Company through Blue Cross is pretty awesome, and the premiums do keep going up, but it’s less than before ACA.
In at least one of the school districts where my husband work, they were self-insured. That means only people from the school district paid in. A teacher has a baby or gets cancer? PREMIUMS SKYROCKET.
BTW, Trumpcare? still has penalties if you have a lapse in coverage. But instead of giving it to government, you just give it to an insurance company.
I see conservatives doing the thing where they go “but if I’m not sick I’m paying for someone else’s healthcare? UNFAIR” and they do this a lot, there are complaints about welfare and unemployment benefits and food stamps and public school funding and property taxes and the minimum wage that run on this, and they go on about how unfair it is but you never see them offering to trade places with the people who’ve supposedly got it so much better than them.
Thing is, if you’re paying for someone else’s health care in a universal system, and not getting more than you paid in back out of it in health care for yourself, that happens when you’re healthy.
Which means you’ve already won the bigger prize, avoided the risk that the insurance system was set up to mitigate.
(I mean, it’s a work in progress, no guarantee that something won’t happen to you in the future, you might end up the recipient of thousands of people’s insurance premiums someday, that sort of thing is why we have insurance.)
Complaining that you’re healthy and don’t want to pay for someone else’s healthcare is like a kid winning some competition and then throwing a screaming tantrum over not getting a participation ribbon like everybody who finished after 10th place did. Like, you had that option. Going to forfeit the top prize and the accolades that come with it? No, I didn’t think so.
This actually happened in some of the cartoons! I gasped out loud when I saw it for the first time. (Go to about 10 minutes in for the full scene.) I thought I’d do something a little different, because while I love Erik in the First Class movies, I always wanted a happier ending for him…
The Howling Commandos, as a forward team focused on Hydra, hadn’t liberated many camps; the ones they had were Hydra slave labor camps, where the men were, if not well-fed, then at least not the gaunt, barely-alive prisoners they’d heard about from Red Army soldiers and Allied units.
This camp was different; at the heart of it was some kind of lab. When Steve battered down the last reinforced door, he found a man holding a gun to the head of a young boy.
“I’ll kill him,” the man said. Steve didn’t bother with an answer; the shield took the man’s head off before he could threaten the kid again.
Still, in that second before death, Steve had seen the man’s finger spasm on the trigger, and felt the thickness in the air when the trigger wouldn’t move. He looked at the boy, looked at the body, and had a sense of destiny resettling itself in the world.
“Was he the camp commander?” he asked the boy, who nodded, huge-eyed. “Commander…Shaw?”
The boy nodded again. He turned and pulled Steve’s now bloody shield out of the concrete wall like it was nothing. Then, with narrowed eyes, he floated it across to him, through the air, without touching it.
Steve took the shield out of the air, shook off what he could, put it on his back, and said, “Thank you.”
“My pleasure,” the boy said, in trembling English.
“What’s your name, son?”
“Erik Lensherr.”
Steve had seen a lot of things in the war; nothing like this, but there had been signs of strange experiments in Hydra labs. This was comparatively harmless.
“Well, I’ll make you a deal, Erik,” he said. “I won’t tell what I saw here just now, and you help me close this place down. Then we’ll take you to HQ and get you a hot meal. Sound good?”
Erik nodded, then offered, “They knew you were coming. They destroyed all the records.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Steve said. “Come on.”
In the convoy, bringing the prisoners out of the camp, Steve brought Erik up to the cab of the lead truck, and put him in next to Bucky at the wheel.
“Who’s this?” Bucky asked.
“Erik,” Steve said. “He’s riding with us.”
“Sprichts du English?” Bucky asked.
“Yes,” Erik replied. “I can speak. English, German, Yiddish, some Russian. Good interpreter. I can work for Allies?”
“How old are ya?” Bucky asked.
“Sixteen,” Erik said.
“You are twelve,” Bucky told him.
“I’m just small,” Erik replied.
“Yeah, because you’re twelve,” Bucky insisted. “Well, we’ll make sure the folks handling the refugees take good care of y – “
“No, he’s coming with us,” Steve said.
“What?”
“Erik’s coming with us to HQ. We could use an interpreter. And he’s small enough to make a good spy. He’s had enough of camps, ain’t ya, kid?” he asked, and Erik nodded.
“You wanna join the allies, huh?” Bucky asked.
“I go with Captain America,” Erik announced.
“Yeah, that’s what I said, and now I know better,” Bucky replied, but he was grinning. “Fine, on your own head be it. Sixteen my ass,” he said to Steve.
Steve took off his helmet and plopped it onto Erik’s head. “Sorry, got a new sidekick now,” he told Bucky, who laughed.
Years later, when a magazine asked Erik Lensherr why he agreed to become Captain America after the disappearance of Steve Rogers, he said, “Steve took a terrified twelve-year-old Jewish kid out of a slave labor camp, gave him a helmet, and told him he had power. I believed him. Turns out he was right.”
ALSO IMAGINE MAGNETO AS CAPTAIN AMERICA WITH THE SHIELD. HOLY CRAP. 😀
I had a dream last night that I was writing a sequel to this in which Erik is on the train when they’re going after Zola, and manages to yank Bucky back up into the train by the metal snaps and buckles on his uniform. So Bucky is part of the assault on Schmidt’s fortress, and he and Steve go down in the ice together, and are thus brought out of the ice together in the sixties.
And they’re in a SHIELD conference room waiting to have what the HELL HAPPENED explained to them when they see through the glass wall Captain America and a guy in a blue jacket with a sniper rifle walking through SHIELD, and Steve is like “….TINY ERIK LENSHERR?” and Bucky meanwhile is like “And who the fuck are you?” to the young guy in the blue jacket and Erik’s like “Uhhhh this is my sidekick I’m training, his name is Tony, you may remember his dad…”
Also there was a bit where they went to Westchester and Charles was like “You really should pick a mutant name, all the kids have them and it sets a good example” and Erik’s like
Erik: I’m already Captain America, can’t that be my mutant name? Charles: It’s your name, Erik, you get to pick it. Please don’t pick Captain America. But I don’t approve mutant names for other people. Erik: That’s a terrible policy. You let that one kid name himself Asskicker. Charles: We’re working on it, Bobby has a troubling sense of humor. Erik: Uh okay lol my name is….MAGNEEEEETOOOOO” *wiggles his fingers menacingly* Charles: *rubs forehead*
DAMMIT
Also I changed Shaw to Schmidt because apparently that was his alias in First Class, and I may wander off into an AU where Johann Schmidt and Karl Schmidt were brothers.
I rewatched bits of First Class for this and I am once more reminded how I would watch an entire movie that was nothing but Erik Lensherr running around the world in a sharp suit fucking up Nazis.
Anyway here’s Wonderwall.
***
Erik had been reasonably well-fed and looked after in Schmidt’s lab, but he hadn’t let his guard down once; the entire time he was there he’d eaten only what he was giving and usually not all of that, never wanting to have indigestion or a full stomach when he didn’t know what would happen from one minute to the next. Schmidt had been…volatile.
But Steve, giant, smiling Steve with his white star and his shield, had killed Schmidt in front of him, unkillable Schmidt. The shield had a strange feel to it; for some reason Schmidt hadn’t been able to absorb its energy the way he had other attacks.
Schmidt was dead and Erik was free, and just from listening to the soldiers Erik could tell the tide of the war was turning.
When they reached HQ, it turned out to be a collection of sturdy tents, and Steve sent Bucky (Erik hadn’t decided whether to trust Bucky yet) off to report to someone. Then he led Erik straight to the mess tent and started piling food on a tray for them both.
“No – that’s got pork,” he said, when Erik reached for the beans. Erik widened his eyes.
“Are you – ?” he asked.
Steve shook his head. “I had friends in the Jewish neighborhoods growing up,” he said. “And the Jewish fellas in the unit talk. You can’t get real Kosher in the army, but don’t eat the beans, they got salt pork in ‘em.”
Erik nodded soberly. He probably would have taken a bullet for Steve Rogers just then.
good job giving them all that money suckers. its almost like this could have be forseen by looking at how the ACLU has approached nazism and white supremacy for the entire history of the organization but that might involve a single critical thought
they also protect rapists. My city was/is threatened with a lawsuit from them cause the city has stricter rules about where rapists/sex offenders can live than the norm and apparently ACLU considers it a violation of the rapists’ rights since effectively they can’t live in the city cause there are so many schools and the school zones overlap.
The funny thing about constitutional rights is that they still apply to terrible people.
Believe me, when constitutional rights are not protected, nazis and rapists are not the ones that suffer the most, its religious and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ people and left wing activists.
But hey, rally against your own rights to punish rapists and nazis, and watch how quickly they’re forgiven and we’re the ones pursued. Happens every single time.
The ACLU isn’t perfect but they’re vital to the US and that this can’t be understood means they either don’t get law or don’t get how law interacts with society.
Legally we need ALL speech free, on a governmental level.
Sorry. It would probably delight Milo Yappyweinerdog to NO end to get some kinda ruling against free speech so the people he is playing troll for could immediate turn around and use it against those they hated. You know…us? At what point do you think “The Government had the right to control what a person can talk about.” is going to work out in the favor of minorities? You know, the Government currently run by Trump? You wanna give him that power so you don’t have to deal with Milo Yappyweinerdog showing up on your facebook feed?
It’s not like that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t tell him where to shove it.
Re: the ACLU and the rapists, I’m assuming you live in San Diego and you’re talking about the In Re Taylor case.
Here’s the thing: under Megan’s Law, registrants on the 290 registry (”sex offenders”) were barred from 97% of available housing, and the remaining 3% was often not available to them because, understandably, not many private landlords want to rent to people with sex offenses. What that effectively meant is that registrants, including people who were registered for sex work, public indecency or Romeo-and-Juliet violations, were being forced into homelessness by the government. Because if you are on parole and on the registry, you can’t just decide not to live in San Diego. You’re ordered, by the government, to live in the county you’re assigned to until you’re transferred or off parole. If not, you go back to prison.
So what this meant is that San Diego had a huge homeless population of people with sex offense convictions. People who were living on boats – not yachts, but literal canoes – tied to random docks because it was the only place they could live without being thrown back in prison. And you know who suffers from this? Not just the registrants, but the public. Public safety is not enhanced by making people homeless.
People who cannot live anywhere legally will drop off the grid and dodge their supervision. They won’t check in with their parole officers. They won’t bother to follow the law. They’ll commit more crime just to go back to jail so they have a roof over their head and shitty bare-bones medical care. They’ll steal and lie and beg so they can get enough food to fill their stomachs and they’ll get involved in trafficking and drug-dealing and worse just so they’ll be able to rest their head at night.
What the court found in In Re Taylor, which decided the California registration requirements were unconstitutional, was that those registration were putting more people at risk. It put registrants at risk of homelessness and it put the public at risk of registrants breaking supervision and committing survival crime. The ACLU understood that treating everyone with human dignity and freeing people from oppressive government action – even convicted rapists – was in the internet of public safety.
Human rights apply to everyone, even nazis and people convicted of sex offenses. The question should never be “does this person deserve to have their rights taken away?”. The question should be “do we trust the government to take those rights?”. A government with a history of racism, classism and transphobia, with documented history of suppressing leftist voices?
Right now I don’t trust the government with a plastic fork, and neither does the ACLU.
I keep trying to like red wine like a grown-up but like … it’s rotten grapes, guys. You can drink things that don’t taste like rotten grapes. Why
Okay I don’t know when this post is from (I came across it stalking multiple blogs). But in case this might help, here is a brief science/wine lesson.
To start off, some facts:
-White wine is made from sweet pulp inside of the grape (minus the seeds).
-Red wine is made from both the skin and the grape (and the seeds and stems…sometimes? Can’t remember).
-Tannin is the substance found in red wines, coffee, dark chocolate. Tannins are responsible for the bitter taste in those foods.
-Tannins are found in the skin of the grape, as well as the seeds and the stems. Therefore, most red wines will have tannins, versus most whites will not have tannins.
-Red wines vary in level of tannins, depending on variety of grape, climate, and fermentation process. Pinot noir tends to be very low tannin. Shiraz/Syrah, choice of poison for our beloved brunette surgeon, is very heavy on the tannins.
-Some white wines (most commonly Chardonnay) are aged in oak barrels instead of metal containers. Oak barrels have tannins, which seeps into the wine during the fermentation process. That’s why Chardonnays tend to be “drier” aka it has tannins.
-White wines like Sauvingnon Blancs are usually fermented in steel barrels (aka no tannins. Aka usually very fruity and light and sweet).
Your ability to taste tannins is genetic.
There is a genetic marker determining whether your taste cells are sensitive to tannins.
Basically two people can drink the exact same wine and have wildly different reactions because: 1. Person A can’t taste tannins, so they taste the actual wine flavor. 2. Person B can taste tannins, and that tends to overpower ALL the other flavors in the wine. Basically all they taste is tannins and none of the wine.
I am super tannin sensitive, so if I drink a wine like Cabernet Sauvignon (very tannin heavy, aka “very dry”, it tastes like bitter ethanol alcohol to me, whereas my best friend can’t taste tannins so the same wine is maybe a little bitter but they can actually taste the grape and different flavors. To her, a wine like Sauv Blanc is too sweet, tastes like sugar water. But to me it tastes good.
So unless it’s the taste of the alcohol or all wines you hate, chances are you might hate the taste of red wine, especially the heavier red wines, because taste the tannin overpowers everything else. And all you taste is bitter bitter ethanol bitter more ethanol.
More tannin info: -Tannins bind to fat.
-This is why tannin heavy wines are recommended with fatty foods (Shiraz and steak). Whenever you eat food with high fat content, the fat builds up on your tongue. A sip of red wine will bind with the fat on your tongue and clear it away. That’s why the sip of wine between bites of fat heavy foods is considered a palate cleanser.
-By that logic, this is why white wines are recommended with low fat foods, like fish. Salmon is fattier than most fish, which is why Chardonnay (tannin heavy white wine) or Pinot Noir (low tannin red wine) is recommended with salmon.
-People who are sensitive to tannins can drink tannin heavy red wines with fatty food and generally the wine won’t taste gross. The fat on your tongue (from that steak) will bind with the tannin and neutralize the tannin taste. Aka the only time I ever drink Cabernet Sauvignon or Shiraz is with a steak or heavy, creamy pasta. Aka never bc I don’t often eat either.
-The reason dairy helps coffee taste better is because the fat in milk/creams binds with the tannins in coffee and neutralizes the bitter taste. This is why people who can’t taste tannins can generally drink coffee black without milk (sugar is a different story). It’s also why almond milk in coffee is the worst idea (almond milk is already bitter and has no fat).
More wine facts: -90% of the “aromas” of wine are marketing BS
-You know the labels that say like “cherry with a hint of blackberry?” There’s no real way to infuse cherry or blackberry into grape wine without screwing with the fermentation process. It’s all created by the wine marketing industry to sell you win. Sometimes if you smell cherry before you drink the wine, you might taste it in the wine (because majority of flavor comes from smell). Or if you think there is cherry flavor in the wine, your brain can trick your taste buds into tasting it.
-The only true flavors found in real grape wine are grapes (obviously), oak/earthy flavor (the barrels), vanilla (barrels, oak sticks), tannins. (There are a few others but can’t remember. I think maybe cinnamon?).
-People’s perception of wine often affect how good it tastes to them. Social psychology studies show that people will rate the exact same wine differently if they’re told the wines are different in price. (They rated the more expensive wine as tastier).
tl;dr Whether you can taste tannins is genetic. Exact same wines taste different for different people depending on your genetic makeup. If you’re sensitive to tannins, red wines won’t taste like anything other than bitter alcohol. Genetics/tannins are why people generally have preferences for red or whites.
this is extremely informative and i have learned a thing about myself, which is that i CLEARLY inherited the tannin-tasting genes from my teatotaling mother and not from my dad who subsists entirely on espresso and cabernet sauvignon.
so i just googled the phrase “toeing out of his shoes” to make sure it was an actual thing
and the results were:
it’s all fanfiction
which reminds me that i’ve only ever seen the phrase “carding fingers through his hair” and people describing things like “he’s tall, all lean muscle and long fingers,” like that formula of “they’re ____, all ___ and ____” or whatever in fic
idk i just find it interesting that there are certain phrases that just sort of evolve in fandom and become prevalent in fic bc everyone reads each other’s works and then writes their own and certain phrases stick
i wish i knew more about linguistics so i could actually talk about it in an intelligent manner, but yeah i thought that was kinda cool
Ha! Love it!
One of my fave authors from ages ago used the phrase “a little helplessly” (like “he reached his arms out, a little helplessly”) in EVERY fic she wrote. She never pointed it out—there just came a point where I noticed it like an Easter egg. So I literally *just* wrote it into my in-progress fic this weekend as an homage only I would notice. ❤
To me it’s still the quintessential “two dudes doing each other” phrase.
I think different fic communities develop different phrases too! You can (usually) date a mid 00s lj fic (or someone who came of age in that style) by the way questions are posed and answered in the narration, e.g. “And Patrick? Is not okay with this.” and by the way sex scenes are peppered with “and, yeah.” I remember one Frerard fic that did this so much that it became grating, but overall I loved the lj style because it sounded so much like how real people talk.
Another classic phrase: wondering how far down the _ goes. I’ve seen it mostly with freckles, but also with scars, tattoos, and on one memorable occasion, body glitter at a club. Often paired with the realization during sexy times that “yeah, the __ went all they way down.” I’ve seen this SO much in fic and never anywhere else
whoa, i remember reading lj fics with all of those phrases! i also remember a similar thing in teen wolf fics in particular – they often say “and derek was covered in dirt, which. fantastic.” like using “which” as a sentence-ender or at least like sprinkling it throughout the story in ways published books just don’t.
LINGUISTICS!!!! COMMUNITIES CREATING PHRASES AND SLANG AND SHAPING LANGUAGE IN NEW WAYS!!!!!!!
I love this. Though I don’t think of myself as fantastic writer, by any means, I know the way I write was shaped more by fanfiction and than actual novels.
I think so much of it has to do with how fanfiction is written in a way that feels real. conversations carry in a way that doesn’t feel forced and is like actual interactions. Thoughts stop in the middle of sentences.
The coherency isn’t lost, it just marries itself to the reader in a different way. A way that shapes that reader/writer and I find that so beautiful.
FASCINATING
and it poses an intellectual question of whether the value we assign to fanfic conversational prose would translate at all to someone who reads predominantly contemporary literature. as writers who grew up on the internet find their way into publishing houses, what does this mean for the future of contemporary literature? how much bleed over will there be?
we’ve already seen this phenomenon begin with hot garbage like 50 shades, and the mainstream public took to its shitty overuse of conversational prose like it was a refreshing drink of water. what will this mean for more wide-reaching fiction?
Without the electoral college, the determining factor of the elections would be California, Chicago and New York just because they have more people concentrated in one area. Our system is the best of the best and the people spoke. I’m hurt as well as most of America but the best thing we can do is keep an open mind, accept, and move on.
So what? Why does it matter if the majority of votes come from one area? If most of the people in the country want one person to be president, then that person should be president. Why should it matter where they’re from?
And that’s not even the reason the college was made in the first place. It was made for 2 reasons. 1. The founding fathers didn’t trust the citizens. They thought the citizens were too uneducated to make a good choice. And 2. It’s easier to count the votes of a small group of people all in one place rather than millions across the country when there’s no cars or internet.
In today’s age, neither of those reasons are valid anymore. There is no good reason for the electoral college to exist. If the majority of people want someone as president, that person should be president.
Here is why the electoral college sucks:
Without the electoral college, every single vote would count exactly the same. No vote anywhere in the country would be worth more than any other vote. Now you may ask, but Raymond, isn’t it like this already?
NO. IT FUCKING IS NOT.
Take Wyoming for example. Wyoming has a population of 584,000 people. They also have 3 electoral college votes. This means that each 194,667 votes is worth one electoral college vote in Wyoming. Now let’s look at California. California has a population of 38.8 million people and 55 electoral college votes. This means that it takes 705,455 votes for each electoral college vote.
A VOTE IN WYOMING IS WORTH 3.5X MORE THAN A VOTE IN CALIFORNIA.
It literally takes 3.5 times more votes to get 1 electoral vote in California than it does in Wyoming. How tf is that fair?
Don’t come in here and tell me how it’s the best system and without it the only determining factor would be certain cities. How does that even make sense? Without it, a vote in New York City is worth the exact same amount as a vote in any other city, or town, regardless of population. I personally would like my vote to count for exactly the same as anyone else. My vote shouldn’t count as less because I live in a more densely populated city.
I’d also like to point out that getting rid of the electoral college would probably increase voter turnout and could help people feel less disenfranchised by the system.
I vote blue, but I live in a red state. So red that I thought political ads were a thing we learned about in history class that didn’t exist anymore, because I had never seen one until I left the state for college. I saw maybe two this year, and that’s not from a lack of watching TV. It’s because my state is so red that no one ever bothers to campaign in it because they know how it’ll vote.
With that said, I know a good number of people in my state who would vote democrat but don’t because they feel like their vote doesn’t matter. The state will go red regardless of what they do, so they don’t vote. I’m not suggesting these people are a majority, but they aren’t insignificant either. Having their vote count on a nationwide scale rather than a statewide scale would make them feel like their voices would be heard and would give them no excuse not to vote.
It’s like this for people in the political minority in every non-swing state. Doing away with the electoral college could easily increase citizen involvement in politics and keep people from feeling like their voice doesn’t matter.
Zynn's Exodus 