That peninsula has a name, you know.

…I mean, I couldn’t say it off the top of my head, but it does have a name!

(it’s the Cape York Peninsula, apparently. Apparently the population there is still 60% Indigenous, and they’ve successfully won native title rights to 45% of the land. The peninsula is largely coterminous with the traditional extent of the Paman languages, one of the two main branches of Pama-Nyungan, the largest language family in Australia — and among the Paman languages is Guugu Yimithirr, the language the word “kangaroo” is from. The Cape York Peninsula is also home to a number of Indigenous sign languages, and there is even a dialect of Auslan heavily borrowing from these, spoken by Deaf Indigenous people on the peninsula. Way cool!)

O-ho-ho, but it’s not a certain geometric shape, it’s a certain geometric shape with a certain color!

Didn’t take long for someone to notice…

Carrying on the torch

Hell yeah

Sometimes I think about making the web browser from my conworld real just because the name slaps a lot harder than something like “Floorp”, but then I remember that the name only really slaps if you have the cultural and linguistic background of a country that literally doesn’t exist

Thus we return to the days of rote memorization and oral storytellers

WHAT’S DONE IS DONE, IT FEELS SO BAD; WHAT ONCE WAS CONTENT NOW IS AD

Hell yeah

It’s still a prison in a bourgeois dictatorship.

I can say that Norway’s prisons are “better” than the prisons in the USA, but to say this feels like it’s ignoring the roles that the prisons actually play in either country, and the historical factors behind why the prison systems ended up so different from one another between the countries — i.e. while in both countries the prisons exist to uphold bourgeois rule, in the USA the prisons serve to more specifically reinforce the economic exploitation of Black people through prison labor and long-term harm to their well-being, whereas this is a non-factor in Norway, where most of the country’s super-exploited can just be outright deported if they’re caught doing a “crime”, right? A 2015 article from Forskning.no quotes an employee of the Oslo police force, “Why should we use so much capacity imprisoning him up here instead of just flying him out again?”

I also feel like the discussion about Norway’s prison system is still pretty dominated by how it’s covered by bourgeois media, which tends to glamorize the actual conditions inside Norwegian prisons, either to frame Norway as a saintly society where even the worst monsters are treated with dignity, or to push an angle that the prisons are “too lenient” — when the truth is that you do have prison suicides in Norway, too, and my only experience meeting an ex-convict in Norway was someone who was a terminally unemployed addict (which, granted, is only an anecdote).

There’s a lot that I don’t know about the prisons in this country, or about prisons in general, but I’m still gonna link some 2023 articles from Tjen Folket on Bredtveit women’s prison and its human rights violations here:

https://tjen-folket.no/2023/07/30/bredtveit-kvinnefengsel-hoy-risiko-for-krenkelse-av-retten-til-liv/

https://tjen-folket.no/2023/05/28/bredtveit-kvinnefengsel-isolasjon-og-manglende-helsehjelp/

Recently finished with mom

• Shikanoko Nokonoko Koshitantan: funny, sometimes low budget, sometimes cringe (mainly because of Anko), it was neat getting to follow along on this show week by week since I haven’t done that in a long time.
• Library War: very strong recommendation, the cliffhanger in the penultimate episode was so good that we had to watch the last episode right after.

Continuing from previous months with mom

• Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water: this is an absolute classic, it’s cartoony but it still tells a very captivating story.
• Samurai Champloo: top class, not much more I can say.
• The Boondocks: also top class, we’re nearly done with season 2 and I’ve heard that it kinda starts to drop off after that point…

Recently started with mom

• Cells at Work: Code Black: it’s not as good as previous seasons of Cells at Work, the “grittiness” rubs me the wrong way, and the new red and white blood cell duo aren’t as charming as the duo from the first two seasons. I still appreciate that they did a boner and cum episode though.
• Hitoribocchi no Marumaruseikatsu: we started watching this one because it has the same original creator as Mitsuboshi Colors. We have really enjoyed these first two episodes but I wouldn’t say it yet stands out as better than Mitsuboshi.

Brought back from years on the paused list with mom

• Barakamon: Mijikamon: these are short chibi-style videos promoting each episode of Barakamon. They’re silly, simple fun.
• Minami-ke: Okawari: the first season of Minami-ke was better, and that was itself fairly middle tier slice of life. Still, we’ve been enjoying the second season, even if we sometimes have to interpret or ad lib new lines when the subtitles randomly decide to cut out.

Anime I’ve been watching by myself

• Dinosaur King: this is a nostalgia watch, I’m only one episode in so far. It was decently entertaining but it’s a 4kids dub of a kids’ anime so y’know only so much.
• Cardcaptor Sakura: Clear Card: I’m only two episodes in, and I love seeing these characters again, but all the changes subtle or otherwise might take some getting used to. I wish it had Norwegian subs, though, since that’s how I watched the OG Cardcaptor.
• Toradora: I’ve stalled out on this one because I feel like I’ve reached a point where my feelings towards it are like a combination of my feelings towards Stardust Telepath and Gurren Lagann as I was watching those, i.e. “this character has some big feelings, and now this character has some big feelings, yawn” + “I want to finish this show but I don’t actually want to watch it”. But at least those shows had things about them that made me finish them despite me feeling kind of bored with them. I absolutely will finish Toradora but I just feel like it’s gonna take a while between each time I’ll actually say to myself, “hey, I feel like watching Toradora right now”.

Asked in that interview if ever [sic] thought of visiting Pearl Harbor, he at first replied, “I wouldn’t know what to say.” He then added: “If I could go, I would like to, I would like to visit the graves of the men who died. I would like to pay them my deepest respect.” […] “I knew that [attacking Pearl Harbor] meant a gigantic war, and that Hawaii would be the place where I would die.”

A bit disappointing that he ended up dying rather uneventfully in Japan rather than having a sudden heart attack while visiting Pearl Harbor like he wanted to, thereby fulfilling his prediction that he would die in Hawaii.

I can see what you’re saying, I wouldn’t be opposed to it…

I think that’s mostly covered by !worldbuilding@hexbear.net for fictional conlangs, and !conlangs@mander.xyz otherwise. There is also a !conlang@lemmygrad.net but that one’s dead as a doornail.

The reason why I want to have a comm specifically for Esperanto is really for the specific subculture/community around specifically Esperanto. That community definitely does have an intersection with both the broader language learning community, and the broader community around conlangs, but it’s also clearly distinct from both, I’d say.

I’d much rather have a toki pona community and we could all learn that together.

There’s already !tokipona@lemmygrad.ml, but really I do agree that Toki Pona is the better or at least more interesting language to promote, even though treating TP as an IAL is sort of a square peg through a round hole. I’ve even brought up the idea of adding sitelen pona as Hexbear emojis such that we can write with them.

Esperanto is extremely Eurocentric and white in nature and in history.

Extremely Eurocentric, yes — it doesn’t even have much of any Slavic vocabulary despite Zamenhof being a native of Białystok — but I’d question how strictly “white” Esperanto is. I’ve recently shared a Congolese band as well as a Sri Lankan artist who make music in Esperanto; Prolewiki’s article on Esperanto talks about a declaration made by Korean Esperantists in the Chosun Ilbo in the 1920s stating that Esperanto should be used to combat Japanese linguistic imperialism.

Now you can of course question whether it is wise of those Congolese musicians to so enthusiastically support such a Eurocentric language as the world language, you can question whether that Sri Lankan artist should think of Esperanto as having a “romantic sound” if this might play into the prestige of Western European natlangs, you can question the choices of those Korean anti-imperialists, but the fact of the matter remains that Esperanto does indeed have plenty of non-white history if you actually bother to look for it. Just because Esperanto is Eurocentric in its design, and originated and first proliferated in Europe, doesn’t mean that non-Europeans can’t engage with the language on their own terms, whether that be from a finvenkist or a Raumist perspective.

It seems to be a dying community and not all that useful.

I don’t get the impression that the Esperanto community is dying at all, and I don’t think the decision to learn Esperanto should be guided by the language’s “usefulness” or its chances of achieving its original goal of becoming the world’s second language. Esperantujo is an interesting country with an interesting history, and I think that’s something that’s worth preserving, regardless of how big the community is or indeed how white the community is. There are today native speakers of Esperanto whose parents were native speakers, and that’s just kinda cool, right?

This is such a fucking scam, Jesus Christ. No wonder my immediate response to this news was “That was a lot sooner than I expected!” — no, it’s still gonna be a long time yet before the Brits and Seps will actually concede their rule of Diego Garcia in any meaningful way. This agreement is as good as toilet paper.

I wonder when Lalit is gonna make a statement about this agreement.

Thank you for the recommendation.

It’s pretty late so I’ll need to try to gather my thoughts tomorrow. Are you speaking from personal experience when it comes to Italy/Spain/France? Let’s hope aaaaaaadjsf does reply and provide some insight.