almightygarf - Tumblr blog

[almightygarf]

i hope they give trump sensory toys in jail so he doesn’t get stressed out

[almightygarf]

message to de west:

get sillay

[almightygarf]

new contender for best community note of all time

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[almightygarf]

one interesting quirk of english spelling in braille is the use of the letter [⠬] (ing). according to the standard rules of Unified English Braille, [⠬] is equivalent to the latin letter sequence ING, regardless of pronunciation, for example in "ginger" [⠛⠬⠻] (G-ING-ER) and "stinging" [⠌⠬⠬] (ST-ING-ING).

however, for unclear reasons, the letter is not used word initially? so like it's not used in "ingot" [⠔⠛⠕⠞] (IN-G-O-T). this is weird because there are other characters corresponding to sequences of multiple latin letters that are restricted to certain contexts in english braille, but all the other ones like. mean something different, in the context you're not supposed to use them as a letter. like, you can't use [⠖] for FF at the end of a word, because it's also used for an exclamation point so using it as a letter at the end of a word would be ambiguous. but as far as I can tell there isn't a different meaning that [⠬] has word initially in english braille, it just isn't allowed to be used there.

then what's really bizarre is that there's a bunch of common words that are respelled to be abbreviated, and even though these abbreviated respellings make use of multi-latin-letter characters sometimes, as in "herself" [⠓⠻⠋] (H-ER-F), they don't use [⠬]? like there's "perceive" [⠏⠻⠉⠧] (P-ER-C-V) and "perceiving" [⠏⠻⠉⠧⠛] (P-ER-C-V-G), spelled with a [⠛] (g) instead of with an [⠬], even though it doesn't make the abbreviation any shorter. weird, huh?

[almightygarf]

[id: a black and white image of an eye with braille embossed on top. it reads:

The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision.(Hellen Keller)

end id.]

via: Cobra_11 on Flickr

[almightygarf]

we ask that the defense not say "me when i lie" while the witness testifies

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[almightygarf]

Actually the portrait of Charles is red to represent enthusiasm, energy, determination, passion, strength, leadership, and love. It doesn't matter that it looks like he's walking through fountains of blood spilled by the British empire! Some of you people need to learn color theory

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[almightygarf]

dude im not applying to your job on squeamix dot com.

[almightygarf]

ernest femmingway

[almightygarf]

A lot of people in mainland China are perfectly capable of getting around the so called 'Great Firewall of China' and interacting with the internet beyond it but the thing is a lot of them just flat out don't want to or don't really care all that much. Yeah sure the internet is heavily censored, but outside of that non-English spaces have gotten smaller and smaller while English takes over as the lingua franca of the internet, and they may or may not be able to read and understand English very well.

Also a lot of people on the internet beyond the 'firewall' are very hostile to them, they get treated like naive idiots or brainwashed infiltrators for the ccp. I remember a few years back when a lot of Chinese fanfic writers started uploading their stories on ao3 en masse because there had been a big uptick in websites that host fanfiction getting taken down and some people were so utterly vile about it, making jokes about how they could get the fics taken down by mentioning the Tiananmen Square massacre in the comments and things like that.

All because they were apparently offended by their favorite tags having more non-English works that can very easily filter out so they don't have to look at them at all. Because God forbid a fanfiction website that already greatly skews towards English fics have more works in other languages, right? That's like the only thing I miss about fanfiction.net, it had way more non-English fics, well that and more stories for certain fandoms than ao3 does.

And it's not like a lot of tech companies and other governments don't censor the internet to some extent or another, China isn't unique in that regard, it's just particularly infamous for being so heavy-handed and easy to use as a red herring.

[almightygarf]

I went outside to the field of wild flowers and bugs and bees and they all knew you. btw

[almightygarf]

telling a joke on tumblr is fun but watch out! if it gets over 1000 notes your joke is automatically exposed to people who have never once heard a joke in their life.