fault-tol

[fault-tol]

ok ok back at it again. drink your tea clean the dishes and draw something and then code

[fault-tol]

View on Twitter

[fault-tol]

Some sources about the British gay slang of Polari:

“How gay men used to speak - A short film in Polari”

“A brief history of Polari: the curious after-life of the dead language for gay men”

“Polari: The code language gay men used to survive”

“Polari, a vibrant language born out of prejudice”

The Polari Bible

Glossary of Polari terms with additional readings (books, magazines, films)

[fault-tol]

[fault-tol]

[tears in my eyes] my baby is increasing in accuracy instead of decreasing

orz 6am and the machine learning model is doing WORSE than randomly guessing

[fault-tol]

.

[fault-tol]

this course is teaching me I don’t want to do this, I think.

[fault-tol]

50/50 whether or not I get really good at math or start binging manga at 2am

[fault-tol]

Blind people must save a lot on electricity.

[fault-tol]

me in my "i have to get an A" to "atleast i submitted the paper" arc

[fault-tol]

so, this is a project I've been alluding to that I've been involved with for the last little bit:

some friends have taken on the task of raising money for the last remaining secular Yiddish bookstore in NYC. we have some big dreams and schemes for the work on top of that, but I'm just gonna go down the list of basics that I can say as a Friend of CYCO officially:

------------- what CYCO is -------------

CYCO (ציקאָ) is a bookstore based in a loft in Long Island City, but that's really just the most recent chapter. the Central Yiddish Cultural Organisation, founded in 1938, was, at various times in its history, a left-leaning Yiddish organisation and publisher affiliated with the Congress for Jewish Culture- they published a major encyclopedia of Jewish culture, and were still publishing new books into the 80s.

for the last few decades it's been under the stewardship of Hy Wolfe, a Yiddish actor and klal-tuer, who has been selling books by appointment for at least the last decade, hosting readings, and holding the space down as one of the last physical outcroppings of a secular Yiddishland, that isn't in a university library or held by a non-profit, where you can leaf through literature without emailing the archivists or presenting your bona fides at the door; as he puts it, וווּ מע קען טרינקן א גלייזלע טיי און רעדן א איידיש וואָרט (have a cup of tea and speak a word of Yiddish).

but, also, for the last couple of decades, CYCO's been having money problems, which hit crisis levels in the last few years- Hy lost access to the website and became harder to get a hold of for book sales; the pandemic hit and he couldn't hold in-person events; the private funders who've been paying the rent for the last while pulled out due to a lack of programming.

so, because, one, we don't just want to see CYCO exist only as a collection somewhere, and it's important to us that there be as many physical spaces for Yiddish as possible; and two, we have dreams for what that can look like: we've come in to try and, hopefully, not just raise rent, but get CYCO back up and running as a bookstore and cultural space.

------------- where we're at -------------

we have, as of March 13th, 20 days left on our fundraiser, our halfway point, and at a bit under 1/3 of the way to our stretch funding goal.

we are now right at the fundraising milestone to have rent covered for the year, which means we have the basic emergency that led to our stepping in solved, i.e. keeping CYCO in the loft space, taken care of (tfu tfu tfu).

but it would also be really wonderful for us to get to *at least* the 2/3 mark by the end of our fundraiser, so we can actually offer people fair pay for the things we want to do in the space: namely, operating it as a bookstore with regular hours, getting an accurate catalog of the materials, having a reading library of every single book in the collection open to the public, and some online / hybrid programming.

and, in order to do that- or open online / pick-up sales, or really even just function properly as a bookstore- we need to staff open hours, and to start cataloging the collection- over 8,000 books and an unknown amount of documents and ephemera from the 84 years of CYCO's existence and from other Yiddish organisations that ended up entrusting their ephemera to Hy.

a hurdle in making plans is, we have a core of people who are willing to volunteer some labor, but we don't want most of the work to be unpaid- and there's a lot, between organising programming, cataloging the vast unknown holdings CYCO has accumulated over time, and staffing the bookstore- and we don't think it's fair to reach out to a lot of the people we want coming to do programming without being able to offer them fair pay. most projects in the Jewish world, the yidishe svive, and in the community library world run on un- and under-paid labor, and we *really* don't want to replicate that, or only host events with people who can afford to go unpaid.

any donations from this point on make it so we can have CYCO not just exist as a physical space, but as an entity operating on basic principles of labor equity- which is also scarce and worth preserving!

--------------------------

so, that's all with my Friend of CYCO hat on. please distribute this as widely as you can, tell your friends, shore up your nickels and dimes, and help us make CYCO truly a sustainable community space into the future!

more info here: https://www.friendsofcyco.org/

זַאָל לעבן ציקאָ!

[fault-tol]

look: our neanderthal ancestors took care of the sick and disabled so if ur post-apocalyptic scenario is an excuse for eugenics, u are a bad person and literally have less compassion than a caveman

[fault-tol]

the japanese “-ne?” particle and the british slang term “innit” serve the same function

[fault-tol]

tbh I want to be friends with my philosophy prof but at this rate I’m going to be remembered for constantly having health problems during his deadlines

[fault-tol]

done done done third massive report-essay of the weekend now i can reply to messages & enjoy life for once or. finish the second -_-

[fault-tol]

Re: that post on academic jargon you reblogged. I don't want to reblog and add commentary bc I refuse to read all of those notes to make sure I'm not repeating someone else.

ANYWAY there is a legitimate place for jargon in complex discussions, but I do not believe for a GOD DAMNED SECOND that academics could not simplify their language to some extent to make it more accessible. It's not just about "putting in the work to educate yourself"! I've read sentences with more clauses than I have fingers! That's never necessary and it presents many neurodiverse people from participating in academic conversations. Simplify your fuxking sentence structure, is all I'm saying. Consider if the words you are using can be switched for more common ones *without* sacrificing meaning or nuance.

I struggled through so much in my sociology courses in college, and it was absolutely not necessary. I still couldn't tell you what "discursive" means or why they needed to use that word, and I have a masters degree.

Presented without comment