culmaer - Tumblr blog

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lmao wat

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i hate when i send someone a meme in another language and they're like "uhm... translate? 😒" fucker i sent you a meme where 90% of the words have an english cognate and/or you don't need to know what they're saying to find it funny. can you at least TRY

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What do conductors even do like actually

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When people get a little too gung-ho about-

wait. cancel post. gung-ho cannot be English. where did that phrase come from? China?

ok, yes. gōnghé, which is…an abbreviation for “industrial cooperative”? Like it was just a term for a worker-run organization? A specific U.S. marine stationed in China interpreted it as a motivational slogan about teamwork, and as a commander he got his whole battalion using it, and other U.S. marines found those guys so exhausting that it migrated into English slang with the meaning “overly enthusiastic”.

That’s…wild. What was I talking about?

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Turkish dramas have become incredibly popular in South Africa recently. they even get high quality dubbing into Afrikaans

everywhere I go, aaah ahhhhh ateşe düştüm ahh bak, evlerden uzak ahhh 🎶 is playing

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I've always been curious about my ancestors. not in a "race purity" kind of way, to be clear, I'll never do one of those dna tests because I don't care about abstract percentages (also I don't know how those companies store that data. which makes me nervous)

I'm just curious to know my ancestors' names, where they were from, what jobs they did, what languages they spoke, etc... perhaps it's also partly due to being African, and calling upon your ancestors is a thing (like how cultural catholics might call upon saints even if they're not personally religious)

but genealogy in South Africa is... tricky. like, I've seen a few episodes of the bbc show Who do you think you are, and they always start with the census records to find people. and then you can take it from there.

however South Africa doesn't store census data like that. we do do censuses, but then StatsSA will extract all the data for like how many people there are, and what the ethno-linguistic breakdown is, and what the unemployment rate is etc — but all the names and identifying personal data is apparently destroyed. for privacy reasons apparently.

so working through the censuses isn't an option. if you know which ancestor you're looking for, you might be able to request a baptismal or marriage certificate... but that kinda assumes they're Christian and it doesn't help if you don't know their names or where they were from

you could, I suppose work back through birth certificates. but — only abridged birth records are digitised and even so they're not publicly available.

what you need is the Unabridged Birth Certificate (UBC), which will list the child's parents and where they were born, which will in turn allow you to track down their UBC and chain together the data that way. however, UBCs are not digitised. and even if you, a living 21st century person, need your own UBC for immigration purposes or to marry a foreigner, you have to apply and pay for a government employee to go find the physical paper copy in the archives, transcribe it and have it certified at the High Court. which can take anywhere from 8 to 24 weeks. so. not exactly efficient

and when all is said and done, those records only go back to the 1800s, which Britain annexed the Cape Colony, because the Dutch didn't really keep rigorous records, especially not of "the natives" or slaves. if you're a white person and very very lucky, there may be records from the 1680s

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When this lot appeared on screen in The Boy and the Heron, I said to my friend “Ghiblies gonna Ghible” and indeed the Ghiblies were Ghibling their Ghibliest right until the end of the film

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WWII era isekai movies be like

The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe: my spiritual guide is an allegory for Jesus - kind, loving, and showing me how the be better

Pan’s Labyrinth: my spiritual guide may be intimidating, but is ultimately trying to protect me from the much greater evils of the real world

The Boy and The Heron: I Am Going To Beat My Spiritual Guide To Death With Hammers

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I keep hearing about Robert Pattinson's excellent performance in The boy and the heron ; the cinema I watched it at today played it in Japanese with subtitles though —which is how I normally watch Ghibli films— but so I'm still curious about the RobPat voice

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as terrible as the tories are, maybe criticise Sunak without being racist ? maybe give that a try ?

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[image id: a youtube comment which reads "Good talk! Except you used Handel's old name. Not nice to 'dead name' people."]

I'm losing my mind at this comment because I cannot tell if it's serious or not. if it is a joke then I feel like it's transphobic, making fun of the concept of deadnames, so I'd rather it be serious. but in that case, it's still misguided

for context, in the video (which is in English) a German musician says Georg Friedrich Händel instead of George Frideric Handel. and again, yes, it is indeed not nice to deadname people. but that's... that's not why Händel changed his name ? I'm not even sure it would've been considered a name change per se in the historical context, back when it was still common to translate names between languages even for non-monarchs/popes.

Mozart (who was born around the time of Händel's death) has the middle name Amadeus. except he never actually used that name. he was baptised Theophilus, called Gottlieb in the German sprachraum and used Amadeo/Amadè while working in Italy. but they all mean the same thing and his death certificate was in Latin so Amadeus it is.

even today my mother and sibling have two versions of their names depending on if they're speaking Afrikaans or English. and my friend Nicola goes by Nicole in France (because the French hear the pronunciation of /nikola/ as the name Nicholas)

I feel like there's a difference between people who actually change their name (for whatever reason, and that absolutely should be respected) and people who are just multilingual

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Do you know the dwelling(s) either of your parents grew up in?

Yes, I live(d) there

Yes, I’ve been inside it

Yes, I’ve seen it from the outside

Yes, I’ve seen it in a photo

No, I have never seen it

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uuuhh since when is Meta AI integrated into whatsapp and how does one disable it ?????

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I don't know what paddington is doing on that list, but it made me think of the time someone drew a picture of the queen with paddington after she died, and we had scores of people losing their minds at the idea that paddington bear wasn't the same kind of communist as them