catboy-outputs - Tumblr blog

[catboy-outputs]

*washing my hands*

(ah, the verdant Depths of the liquid hand soap. small air bubbles, the interplay of light and shadow suspended in the colorful chemical. there is the Soap.)

*washing my hands again later*

(wait a minute, the soap wasn't on this side of the sink yesterday,,, someone moved it)

(and then i looked into the soap bottle at the place to which it had been moved)

(and during that instance i didn't notice it had moved even though i was staring directly at it)

(in a completely new way that wasn't possible with the previous position of the soap)

(and nothing has changed between then and now but only now am i noticing the information that was present both then and now)

(whuh)

[catboy-outputs]

tfw the internet connection on my phone (and only my phone) is a Miserable Pile of Horse Scheiß

[catboy-outputs]

N°0003 - the emperor

they should call the japanese emperor who died in 1989 "the Shōwa Emperor" instead of "Emperor Shōwa"

let me explain

so japan has different Eras with fortuitous names that all years are grouped into, right; used in keeping track of years whenever they're not using the Gregorian years

right now it's the Reiwa era (令和, 2019-) and before that it was the Heisei era (平成, 1989-2019)

before the Meiji Restoration, the imperial court used to declare the end of the current Era and the beginning of a new one on various occasions, like natural disasters or auspicious events or the accession of new emperors, but apparently not consistently, and multiple Eras could happen within the reign of a single emperor

they changed it in the Meiji Restoration so that an Era could end and a new one begin when, and only when, the reigning emperor vacated the throne (whether by death or abdication) and a new one took it; so the current system is basically "one emperor = one era, new emperor = new era"

another thing: in this day and age's Japanese, emperors are never called by their given name once they start being emperor (they also have no surnames btw)

once someone becomes emperor, people usually just call them "The Emperor" for the rest of their life without attaching their given name; after that, (as of the post-Meiji present) the emperor is given the name of the Era they reigned in as a Posthumous name

so the emperor who died in 1989 (whose given name was "Hirohito") reigned in the Shōwa era (which began when he became emperor in 1926 and ended with his death)

in Japanese this emperor is called 昭和天皇 after the era of his reign; the official English rendering of this is "Emperor Shōwa" which doesn't feel right to me!!! "Shōwa" isn't his name!!!

then one day i remembered this wikipedia article:

a chinese emperor, called "The Qianlong Emperor" in English; "Qianlong" being the name of the era during which he reigned over China, hence "the emperor of the era of Qianlong"

well that sounds way better than "Emperor Qianlong" to me!! considering he himself was never named "Qianlong"!! and it's the same thing with post-Meiji Japanese emperors too!!

so why are we calling 昭和天皇 "Emperor Shōwa" like he was a guy named "Shōwa"?! can we call him "The Shōwa Emperor" instead?! that feels more Accurate to me i think!! because he was emperor during the era of Shōwa!! we should do that!! i think

(this post is exclusively about the English-language naming conventions of Japanese emperors, not about whether the institution of monarchy should exist at all, which is a whole different topic that this blog post is not intended to address thank you goodbye)

[catboy-outputs]

do you ever post accidentally

[catboy-outputs]

makes me smile

https://youtu.be/2HtiqkDpzSs

[catboy-outputs]

they should let me live for 200 years. not sure what i'll do with all that time but i'll figure something out

[catboy-outputs]

N°0002 - The Unexploded Boer by Erich Rautenbach (and something else)

The Unexploded Boer is a 2011 book (that i have just now finished reading) by an South African Afrikaner? guy named Erich Rautenbach about the first 21 years of his life

it's an autobiography i guess? that tells the guy's life story in the 1960s and 1970s during the latter Apartheid times of South Africa

i found a copy of it by chance at a used books store in a big shopping mall. i don't know what series of events brought it here to the Philippine countryside but that must be one heck of a story too

the book's pretty wild i think, full of Bonkers anecdotes and heavy traumatic painful experiences and liquor and weed and hitchhiking and strange fascinating people and English-speaking bands from those old times some of which i vaguely know because the Philippines likes absorbing Western pop culture just as much as white people in South Africa apparently did back then; also the guy got arrested at least once

the main through-line through that time in the author's life (as he tells it in the book) is his Resistance against the Evil Empire of Apartheid and Racism and all its Injustice-Justifying Legal Institutions, listening to lots of hippie-ish songs? and dodging the army draft on various occasions; his ultimate goal was to save up enough money to leave South Africa and deprive the "Empire" of his service and submission and his Very Soul (spoilers, he succeeded eventually)

also, there are some ruminations about Identity and Religion and Ideology and such. i read the book in irregular bursts so i can't recall specifics unfortunately but i found it interesting

i love the guy's writing style; it's so memorable and hilarious and poetic, and so contemplative when it needs to be; his occasional use of Capitalization for emphasizing Important Things is something that i do sometimes (after first seeing it in A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh) but he does it more sparingly and to greater effect

—

the most thoughtful and insightful and genuine thing i can say after reading this book is: "wow this guy has Lived a Life" , as opposed to me

the something else

all my life i have lived in Rooms and been Comfortable and peeked out at the world through car windows and Wikipedia articles and YouTube videos and i am an Asocial Worm. i have not experienced much suffering and generally my life has been uneventful, and i guess most of this is something i should be grateful for

on the other hand, i am unsure if i can honestly say that i have experienced any great delights in my life; sometimes i feel like i only have three emotional states, Nervous, Neutral and Amused; in my brain it occasionally feels like my Self is this unfeeling shadow that puppeteers an internal monologue and makes it think of feelings that my idea of a human being would feel at the appropriate time

other human beings in this world that most likely exists have experienced such Joy and Wonder and Sorrow and Suffering and been Moved by Works of Art and here i am; understanding things only on an Intellectual level and making a voice in my head say things while memories and experiences and feelings vanish into a tiny black hole at my core. i think i'm a person but i don't know what that's supposed to feel like. am i doing it correctly? did i really love Erich Rautenbach's writing style or did the simulacrum piloting my inner monologue assess that a human being with my experiences and memories would love it?

do i need to talk to people more? i think i might need to talk to people more

[catboy-outputs]

t

tomorrow i will finally read my copy of Dune Messiah

[catboy-outputs]

hmm

if i could voice chat with my online friends it would fix me

[catboy-outputs]

N°0001 - ang

as a partially Filipino (Philippines Number One) catboy who has so foolishly allowed his brain to become colonized by the very language he writes in right now, i have always Struggled somewhat with Tagalog, and/or its "standardized register" known as Filipino, the national language of the Philippines, surely the least confusing language(s) name(s) in the universe

my Strugglings with the language have very slowly become less Struggly over time (i can write extremely basic essays in it) — but they have done so Too very slowly because Even Now i can barely speak, write or listen in the language, and it is such a shame because Tagalog is (by my own subjective opinions) so such an interesting language (paradoxically, all languages are equally interesting)

there is a Word in the Tagalog language: "ang"

popular knowledge likes to translate this word into English as the definite article "the", which is kind of correct but not entirely accurate, because "ang" isn't used in the same broad contexts as the English "the"

so the English definite article "the", right

you (often) use it whenever a noun phrase refers to “a unique, familiar, specific referent” (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), like this:

The block of cheese you left on a table (referring to a specific thing—the block of cheese—previously mentioned in conversation)

The biological urge to sleep (referring to a single general concept? maybe)

The shoe (referring to the singular and definite species of physical objects commonly known as "shoes")

there are not many strict limitations on what noun phrases you can use "the" on, such limitations being the presence of Genitive pronouns, like "his" and "their" (people don't say "the her table" unless it's funny), and sometimes but not always personal names

the Grammaticality of "the" on a noun phrase is independent of the noun phrase's role in the sentence, so you can say things like:

"The man who brought the bag filled with the books gave it to the teacher who was the only person in the room"

The man who ... (subject)

the bag filled with the books (direct object + adjectival/prepositional phrase)

the teacher who was ... (indirect object)

the only person in the room (relative clause + prepositional phrase)

this does not hold true for Tagalog's "ang" because Tagalog and English are Somewhat different languages

you know how English has a "passive voice" that's used sometimes right, whenever the speaker is talking about Something that an Occurrence happens to, so they'd have to mention that Something in the role of a direct object, but they want to keep the Something in the prominent role of the grammatical Subject

the purpose of the passive voice is basically to take a sentence with a subject and an object, and demote the subject to the Less Prominent status of an optional Oblique argument (which is neither a subject nor a direct object) to replace it with the direct object, which becomes the new subject, like so:

Active voice: The cat have broken the plate. Passive voice: The plate has been broken [by the cat].

with the passive voice the subject is made less prominent and the object more prominent

this sort of thing is far more prominent in Tagalog, where there are like four or five Grammatical Voices (also known as "Focus" and by several other terms) for the verbs, marked directly on the verb using various affixes; the Object Focus, Tagalog's equivalent of the passive voice, is used much more frequently than its English counterpart, for the same purpose of keeping a prominent topic of conversation as the grammatical subject

like this:

Agent focus (≅ Active voice) : Sumirà ang pusà ng pinggán. Object focus (≅ Passive voice) : Sinirà ang pinggán ng pusà.

pusa = "cat" pinggan = "plate" sira = "to break"

notice the words "ang" and "ng" (pronounced "nang"), used in both sentences

these two are Case Markers, having the same function as the case particles of Japanese, the noun endings of Latin and Russian, and the subject-verb-object word order of English; they differentiate the subject (action doer) from the direct object (action done-towards entity)

despite being prominent in Old English and related languages like German, cases are only marginally a thing in Modern English; they are retained in many pronouns, which have a few cases remaining; English has the Subjective ("I" "we" "she"), the Objective ("me" "us" "her") and the Possessive ("my" "our" "her[s]")

Tagalog has three cases:

the Direct (marked by "ang")

the Indirect (marked by "ng")

the Oblique (marked by the particle "sa")

returning to the example sentences; transitive Tagalog sentences with a subject and an object have the subject in the Direct Case and the object in the Indirect Case

Sumirà ang pusà ng pinggán. Here ang is attached to pusa because pusa is the subject of the verb sumira ("broke", Agent focus)

Sinirà ang pinggán ng pusà. Here ng is attached to pinggan because pinggan is the subject of sinira ("was broken", Object focus)

This is the purpose of the Tagalog word "ang" — it is the Direct Case marker, used to indicate the grammatical subject of a sentence

"ang" can be considered roughly analogous to English "the" because the Tagalog verb focus system has a purpose roughly analogous to the concept of Definiteness, which is the purpose of "the"

Definiteness indicates that a noun phrase refers to something specific that is previously known in a narrative or conversation, differentiating it form Indefinite noun phrases which are not previously known or unspecific and could be anything (Definite "The cat" vs. Indefinite "A cat")

the Tagalog system of verb focus has the purpose of keeping an important topic of the narrative/conversation in the prominent grammatical role of Subject, differentiating it from other noun phrases that may be less specific, less definite or otherwise not as prominent

"ang pusa" can be translated as "the cat" because a sentence like "Sumira ang pusa ng pinggan" usually refers to some specific or previously known cat breaking some plate

but "ang" isn't a one-to-one analogue of "the" because "ang" has an additional responsibility that "the" doesn't have, namely to mark the one and only grammatical subject of a sentence; so in a sentence where "A does something to B", the Tagalog speaker must choose either A or B as the more prominent verb argument to use as the subject, selecting the appropriate Focus for the verb as necessary

"pusa" more prominent: "Sumira ang pusa ng pinggan" "pinggan" more prominent: "Sinira ang pinggan ng pusa"

and the thing is that both "pusa" and "pinggan" may or may not be a Definite noun phrase; however since Subject Marker is the main job of "ang", only one of the two nouns can attain the role of Subject and acquire the "ang"; you can't put it on both

The plate was broken by the cat — Acceptable *Sinira ang pinggan ang pusa — Ungrammatical (only one noun phrase can be the subject, so only the subject can take "ang", even if both are Definite nouns)

so yeah

English "the" is the definite article for definite noun phrases in any grammatical role Tagalog "ang" is the subject marker, and the subject in Tagalog is usually the most prominent noun throughout the conversation; and definite nouns are more likely to be made the subject than the object in Tagalog.

fucking heck this is way too long and rambly, my next post will be much shorter i swear

[catboy-outputs]

ok

i figured it out

[catboy-outputs]

why the

why the fuck cant i make my titles lowercase

[catboy-outputs]

meowdy

in this Blog i will attempt to turn my nebulous Thoughts into solid, tangible, eternally lasting Ones and Zeros

that way i will get better at this "Thinking" thing and i will write a best-selling visual novel/paperback novel/rpg/animation/comic/whatever the fuck and i will become the most successful catboy ever

i got the idea from this youtube video btw it seems legit