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Posted by Zach Weinersmith



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Around here we only do cis-substantiation, you hear?


Today's News:

Now free to read!

Sep. 25th, 2025 10:20 am
mrissa: (Default)
[personal profile] mrissa
 In May the subscribers of If There's Anyone Left got to read my short story, The Things You Know, The Things You Trust. Now it's free to read online! Go, read, enjoy!

Flame flickers a soft light

Sep. 25th, 2025 04:11 pm
dolorosa_12: (garden autumn)
[personal profile] dolorosa_12
I had some unclaimed leave that I had to use or lose by the end of September (our annual leave year runs from 1 October-30 September, vaguely in line with the academic calendar), and I elected to use it to give myself two four-day weekends as September drew to a close. I've been doing this job long enough to know that October and November are an absolutely draining slog, and those September four-day weekends are the perfect way in which to gather strength to cope with the new academic year onslaught.

That said, today has mostly been all work, as tends to happen with me when I have a long weekend — I try to front-load all the housework and tedious life admin, so that as the weekend carries on, I have fewer and fewer demands on my time.

However, I did have a small sliver of time, after I got back from swimming at the pool, but before I started making hummus by hand in the food processor for lunch, when I just sat outside on the deck under the yellowing cherry tree, and drank coffee, and ate a slice of spiced pumpkin cake (made by one of my colleagues and transported home yesterday for the occasion), and read my book, and listened to the wind in the silver birch trees next door, and let life stand still for a moment. It was blissful.

Human Kindness!

Sep. 25th, 2025 07:51 am
labingi: (Default)
[personal profile] labingi
7:45 am, and I have already been the recipient of human kindness. Asked the fellow at disability center if they could convert PDFs to Word for me so to spare me screen time during a chronic pain flare. He said the center doesn't do that, but he understands chronic pain & would do it personally. All my gratitude to this caring man!

Postal BS.

Sep. 25th, 2025 01:30 pm
[syndicated profile] languagehat_feed

Posted by languagehat

Remember when I recently announced the publication of Paul Postal’s new book attacking Chomsky and generative grammar? Well, Slavo/bulbul has been reading it and getting increasingly grumpy, and Slavo’s grumpiness produces such eloquence I have no recourse but to quote his Facebook posts in extenso (I have added itals and blockquotes for clarity and fixed some OCR errors). From here:

Aaaand we are at a point where I am reminded that while Postal broke with Chomsky a long time ago and his criticism of Chomsky’s bullshit is 109% valid, Postal himself is a student of Chomsky and thus wholly compromised. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his discussion of NLs as generative systems and the type/token distinction. Postal (2025: 63) argues that

That renders use of NL sentences for communication impossible unless mental tokens of NL sentences are somehow connected to physical things perceptually available to others. It is the function of Expression systems to facilitate this connection. There are different types of known Expression system, the fundamental one evidently being that which links Core elements to the output of vocal tract behavior, that is, to pronunciations. This clearly has biological primacy in humans.

Suddenly we are dealing with Core and Expression systems, but ok, I can dig.

My view then is that while there is an inherent biological connection between the Cores of known NLs and human sound-producing vocal tract gestures, there is no inherent logical connection. I take the existence of the gesture Expression systems of the NLs of the deaf and orthographical Expression systems to justify that conclusion.

Minus five points for the misuse of ‘logical’, but ok. You get the point – the abstract NL can be instantiated as concrete/physical speech, writing or sign language. So far so good. But then:

While I will not be able to address these issues seriously, many linguistic works appear to treat spoken and written expressions as involving separate languages. For instance, De Swart 2010 makes the distinction throughout.

What is it that De Swart is talking about? The fact that spoken French now gets by with pas as the sole verbal negator while in written French, ne is still used!

This is the kind if bullshit this sort of theorizing will led you to. No discussion of the primacy of spoken language, not a syllable on writing as technology, not a beep about where this sort of thinking leads, since the quote from De Swart closes out the section.

From here:

Jesus Christ riding into town on a vintage V3S truck filled to the brim with ancient type molds, Postal is full of shit.

OK, OK, OK, so: we’re on page 79. Postal is still discussing the type/token distinction, this time with reference to what he calls “orthographies” and should properly be termed “graphical representation”. He’s discussing the idea of shape and gives the example below of the “massive variety of shapes” below from Wetzel 2009 who uses it to … Argue against shape theory or whatever (ex. 53), not important.

Postal argues against Wetzel and his argument is basically that one can subdivide those into upper-case and lower-case and then into printed and written. And then goes on to say:

It is at best only the four lowest level elements in the letter tree which need to receive shape definitions. I think this analysis already accounts for much of the variation in (53).

Some of the rest may well involve historical change of the shape definitions. But much of the variation is, I suggest, simply artistic distortion of standard shape definitions.

It seems impossible to me that anyone would use many of the shapes in Wetzel’s diagrams to actually compose serious text, either handwritten or printed.

Absolute ignorance of history or any other writing systems is one thing. It’s the arrogance of the ‘I can’t imagine it therefore it must not exist’ is what gets to me.

And from here (the quote is from Chomsky):

“We therefore take Merge (X,Y) = {X,Y}, where X and Y are either lexical items or syntactic objects in ws, already generated.”

I did not need Postal to remind me of this, I have read this – or equivalent formulations – many times. Each time I marveled at the seriousness of this incredibly inane statement and wondered how people cn take this seriously.

And today I finally realized what this is. It is the linguistic equivalent of Ayn Rand’s “A is A”, a simulacrum of scientific expression, an imitation of analytic thought, playacting at mathematics. Except Rand at least turned it into coherent philosophy.

Go get ’em, Slavo!

james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


More stories should dig into the chemistry, biology, and physics of falling in love.

On Writing Romance as Hard Science Fiction

Further Adventures and Home...

Sep. 25th, 2025 07:39 am
lydamorehouse: (Default)
[personal profile] lydamorehouse
 I don't know what it is about traveling, but it wears me out.

I've been home since Tuesday (a.k.a. failed rapture day), but today is the first day that I sort of vaguely feel human again. I'm up early, so it seems like a good time to recount the last days in DC for you all. 

Speaking of up early, [personal profile] naomikritzer rarely is. To be fair to her and all the other crepuscular folks out there, I am an unusually early riser. Every day of the convention I popped out of bed without an alarm somewhere around 6:30 am CT/7:30 am ET.  The fact that it was an hour later in DC than at home worked to my advantage because by 7:30 am a lot of coffee shops are actually open. So, just like every day of the convention, I wandered across Rockville Pike to get us both a nice espresso drink. But, on Monday, I was in no hurry to get back because I very wisely made us no plans until noon. 

First of all, I figured that after GoHing at a convention, Naomi would appreciate a slow morning. Secondly, both she and I walked a little too far the night before and woke up feeling it. On occassion, I plan fantasy trips for myself and I'm now going to be giving any directions that include "a twenty minute walk" a bit of a side-eye. I can walk for 20 minutes, but I do start to drag if there are lots of those! I mean, it does kind of matter whether or not the view is interesting. Some 20 minute walks feel faster than others. I had, at least, taped up my arches. My arches have been giving me trouble lately (I've been seeing a PT) so I was prepared and had been doing my exercises, but, man.

DC is funny because a lot of touristy stuff in it is both really centrally located AND really spread out. As that ad reminded us last night, the  Smithsonian Mall is big!

My plan for us that morning was to check out the DC fish market.  Maine Avenue Fish Market is the oldest continually-operating open air fish market in the United States. It was founded almost two decades earlier than the one in New York City, believe it or not. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maine_Avenue_Fish_Market).  I will say? It doesn't look like much. 

Maine Avenue Fish Market
Image: fish market, with a haze of... my fingers? Not sure. Pretend it's an old-timey photo, since this was the best one I took.

The market is just off the L'Enfant Plaza metro stop (also on the red line!)  Enough people were headed to the market for lunch that we just sort of followed the crowd down to the wharf area. It is, in fact, little more than you see in the picture (minus my fingers). There's this set of stalls and another set of equal size directly behind. It's one of those places, though, where you can buy your fish or seafood on one side and bring it in a bucket over to the other and they will cook it for you fresh. Naomi bought a handful of shrimp for us to have this way and they were amazing. I ended up wanting something more like a full lunch, so I stopped at the little shop at the end which had prepared (but fresh!) sandwiches. 

crab cake and sweet potato fries
Image: crab cake with sweet potato fries.

I got the crab cake because crab cake is something I used to try to make at home without ever having experienced the "real thing." This was really very good and I will admit that I fed the pigeons, seagulls, and little brown ones (sparrows) bits of fries and hamburger bun. 

We could see the tip of the Washington Monument from the market and so Naomi convinced me (only slightly against my better judgement) that it was an easy "20 minute walk" (now my code word for any walk that I later come to regret) to the Smithsonian Mall. It wasn't bad, really. Washington, DC has a whole lot of really lovely parks along the river. This one had clearly been planted with a ton of cherry trees, many of which had been trained to droop and arch their branches over the walkway. I bet that in the spring, during cherry blossom season, the walk we took would have been absolutely stunning. In late September, it was a little muggy and kind of hot. 

We once again ran into a clot of Naitonal Guard, whom Naomi asked where they were from. Once again, it was West Virginia. She also asked them all what they did when they weren't serving in the Guard and it ranged from "just out of college" to "IT manager." Again, the group was largely white, though at least one person could have qualified as a PoC in my estimation. We wished them a good day, which, I know, was probably a wasted opportunity to yell at them about the current presidential administration, but, frankly, I don't see how being deployed here is their choice. For all I know, the whole lot of them voted for Kamala Harris. I kind of have to wonder at the fact that we rarely saw National Guard anywhere but touristy places (and subway/metro stops) if this wasn't a kind of quiet quitting on their or their commander's part. Like, they weren't actually marching in the streets. They were just boredly wandering the Mall or chatting amongst themselves at metro stops. 

I dunno. I will say, they were carrying guns, so just standing around did also feel threatening? If they were in Minneapolis/St. Paul doing this, I might feel really differently, that's for sure.

These days a lot of the popular Smithsonian museums require that you sign up for timed entrances. Naomi and I debated a lot the night before about how long we thought it would take to get from here to there, and what time would be most conveinent so that we could connect up with our friend [personal profile] mrissa .  We had settled on 3:00 PM for the National Musuem of Africian Amerian History & Culture, which nearly worked out? With our slow wander up from the wharf, it was close to 2:00 PM when we got to the Smithsonian.  We sat for a while in the shade, having bought cold water from the gift shop near the Washington Monument. Even though it was a crap shoot as to whether or not we'd've needed timed tickets, I convinced Naomi to consider wandering the National Museum of Asian Arts as it was directly across the mall, or thereabouts. We lucked out and were able to waste a bit of time in air-conditioning wandering the exhibits. I feel like the National Museum of Asian Arts is one of those museums that could be called "stuff a rich guy brought back from Asia in the late 1800s/early 1900s." Not unlike the Walker's Asian Arts section, honestly? But, it was nice not to have to be sitting in the surprisingly bright sun.  

My feet, at this point, were kind of killing me, but I had a secret plan to solve that once we were inside the Africian American History & Culture museum. Neither Naomi and Marissa like to sit and watch movies at museums, but my plan was to sit through all of them in the back row and massage life back into my feet. Which, once we got in, I totally did. 

I actually came out of that museum feeling almost kind of human again, though when another "20 minute walk" was proposed to get us to the restaurant, I will admit, I baulked and ended up hailing us a taxi cab. 

But, I get ahead of myself. 

The museum is huge. One of the reasons, of course, that the three of us wanted to go (or at least, I wanted to go) is because it is my darkest suspicion that if Trump gets a chance, he will destroy the collection as much as possible. I noticed a lot of people--mostly Black--actually filming everything they saw on their phones. I wonder if there is some kind of community or grassroots effort to collect and preserve the exhibit, particularly the history of enslavement, given just how many people I saw filming.  The musuem as it is set up now has its lower levels devoted to history. Very cleverly, you literally rise up out of slavery, as the story of kdinapping and enslavement starts at the lowest level, C, and you work your way up through the Civil War and Emancipation, B, and end in the Civil Rights to present level, A. Luckily for me and my feet, there was a nice 10 minute movie at the crux of each level (you go up these long ramps to move between eras) and so I watched each of those. 

I suspect I was supposed to do the opposite with the culture sections, ie, start at the top and work my way down? Because the top floor has a lot of physical art, like painting and such; the next level down has what I'd call the art of revolution--so like a lot of art that came out of the sixties and the Civil Rights movement, like this....

famous black power moment at Olympics
Image: statue of the famous moment at the 1968 Olympics when medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in the symbol for Black Power during the National Anthem.

...and then the next level down encouraged people to interact with art by doing a dance-dance revolution type thing to hip hop, etc. It didn't diminish my experience to do it the "wrong" way, but, because the museum closed at 5:30 pm, I sort of wish I'd had more time to explore the art at the very top. Ah well. 

I will say, it was one of the better museums I've been to in a long time. No surprise, I suppose, given that it is a Smithsonian, but I really could have spent the whole day there exploring. 

Marissa wanted to return to a place she'd had dinner at the night before, Oyamel. There is apparently also one of these in New York, but, obviously, we were at the DC location. I was not feeling nearly as adventurous as I normally am, and so I ended up just having a lovely chicken tamale. I absolutely ADORED the atmosphere of the place, however. The three of us sat outside and the evening was fully magical in terms of temperature, the company, and that sense you get when you're traveling that you are having An Experience, you know? 10/10 would again and the next time I would order the cricket tacos. 

The metro was quite close, so we all hopped on and returned to out hotel. 

All and all, it didn't necessarily feel like we did All The Things, but I think we did enough of the things. Oh, and I got to use my superpower of being able to summon a taxi in a world filled with Uber and Lyft in order to get the three of us to the restaurant. It is a superpower that is normally very useless, given that I live in a town where taxis must be called on the phone and appointments made. But, I have rarely failed to catch a taxi any time I'm visiting a large enough city. I've hailed them in Chicago, Los Angeles, and DC. (I was too young to use this superpower when I was last in NYC.) And by hail? I mean, literally, I will be in a street and an available taxi will come by and I will stick my hand out and yell, "TAXI!" and they stop for us. 

Naomi thinks I had a past life as a New Yorker. Because this skill is clearly fairly useless in the modern era. But it is the reason I do not have a Lyft or Uber app on my phone.

So, yeah, there's very little to say about Tuesday other than Naomi and I did discuss the possiblity our pilot getting raptured. Luckily, that did not happen. 

Now, I'm home, returned to the "real world" where dishes must be washed and food prepared. Alas, down to earth once again.

Blackout Bingo 2x2 Pirate Fest

Sep. 25th, 2025 02:01 pm
smallhobbit: (Default)
[personal profile] smallhobbit posting in [community profile] allbingo
Title: Poirot Beside The Sea
Fandoms: Poirot - Agatha Christie
Ratings: G
Pairings: Hercule Poirot, Arthur Hastings, James Japp
Prompts: Peg Leg; Down the Hatch; Heave Ho!; Salt Water

Poirot Beside The Sea on AO3
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Amid economic downturn and political strife, young American teen discovers her hidden potential.

Random Acts of Senseless Violence by Jack Womack

It's a birthday!

Sep. 25th, 2025 06:18 am
shirebound: (Default)
[personal profile] shirebound
Happy Birthday, [personal profile] anna_wing!

Hobbies: Crochet

Sep. 25th, 2025 12:01 am
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Folks have mentioned an interest in questions and conversations that make them think. So I've decided to offer more of those. This batch features hobbies.

Crochet is a fibercraft hobby of making things from yarn with a hooked stick, such as afghans, clothes, toys ,and other stuff. If you feel frustrated by planned obsolescence, artificial intelligence, and other current issues then consider knitting as a form of protest. Nothing says "Fuck off, fast fashion!" like crocheting a 100% natural-fiber garment that will last for years and years.

On Dreamwidth, consider communities like [community profile] crafty, [community profile] crochet, [community profile] everykindofcraft, [community profile] dwsockclub, [community profile] get_knitted,[community profile] intertwined, [community profile] justcreate, and [community profile] knittingpix.

Read more... )

(no subject)

Sep. 25th, 2025 09:41 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] anna_wing!
sovay: (Sovay: David Owen)
[personal profile] sovay
Nothing enlivens an afternoon like hearing from your primary care physician that actually last week you almost died, especially since it didn't feel like it at the time. Continued proof of life offered from the stoplights of rush hour. Have some links.



1. Transfixed by a dapper portrait of Yuan Meiyun, I discovered it is likely a still from her star-making, genderbending soft film 化身姑娘 (1936), apparently translated as Girl in Disguise or Tomboy. In the same decade, it would fit right into a repertory series with Viktor und Viktoria (1933) or Sylvia Scarlett (1936). To my absolute shock, it is jankily on YouTube. Subtitled it is not, but I really expected to have to wait for the 16 mm archival rediscovery.

2. Because I had occasion to recommend it this afternoon, Forrest Reid's Uncle Stephen (1931) does not seem to rate in the lineage of time-slip fantasies, but for its era it is the queerest I have encountered, the awakening sense of difference of its fifteen-year-old protagonist erotically and magically mediated by Hermes in his aspect as conductor of souls and charmer of sleep, dreams figuring in this novel with the same slipperiness of time and identity that can accidentally bring a secret self like a stranger out of an unknowing stratum of the past. It's all on the slant of ancient Greek mysticism and the pollen-stain of a branch of lilac brushed across a sleeper's mouth and a lot of thinking about the different ways of liking and then there's a kiss. It was written out of a dream of the author's and it reads like one, elliptical, liminal, a spell that can be broken at a touch. I have no idea of its ideal audience—fans of Philippa Pearce's Tom's Midnight Garden (1958) and E. M. Forster's Maurice (1971)? I read it in the second year of the pandemic and kept forgetting to mention it. Whatever else, it is a novel about the queerness of time.

3. I am enjoying Phil Stong's State Fair (1932), but I really appreciated the letter from the author quoted mid-composition in the foreword: "I've finally got a novel coming in fine shape. I've done 10,000 words on it in three days and I get more enthusiastic every day . . . I hope I can hold up this time. I always write 10,000 swell words and then go to pieces."

Daily Happiness

Sep. 24th, 2025 10:12 pm
torachan: karkat from homestuck looking bored (karkat bored)
[personal profile] torachan
1. Today I had a meeting about one aspect of the upcoming system change that led us to discover something major that IT had totally misunderstood. Me and the other non-IT guy were pretty freaked out about it, especially when the guy leading the meeting kept insisting that this was the way the new system works and there is 100% no way that it could be changed, and also kept insisting that all of us were in the wrong for not having realized this before because of course it works that way, not the way we expected it to work. But in the end it turns out that the system can work the way we need it to work, and also that previous mockups show the fields we need, so I don't know where it went wrong between then, but I'm glad that we discovered this misunderstanding now and can fix it. Very glad that I am working on this project now, too, because there is just too much of a disconnect from the IT side, since none of them understand anything about how a retail operation actually works or what we need the system to do. They just know how the systems work, but not the reason we need them to work a certain way. (And they were supposed to learn more about the workings, but still have not.)

2. We had a nice evening at Disneyland. Especially nice after a stressful afternoon at work!

3. Chloe knows the cutest poses.

ugh

Sep. 25th, 2025 06:02 am
tielan: Valkyrie blowing out on-fire drink (MCU - Valkyrie)
[personal profile] tielan
That feeling when there was something on, you know you could have/should have gone, but you didn't, and now you have regret.

It was a social night for the tour I'm on, but I was super-tired from the walk today (well, everyone was) so I stayed in. But I think nearly everyone else went, so I missed out on 2 hours of socialising. Then again, I'm (once again) oddball out on this tour.

Which, I know the "once again" should mean I'm used to this, but also, it's slightly harder on this one.

Walked about 7 miles yesterday, up hill and down dale, through cowpasture and sheep pasture. Definitely walking off the meals I've been eating the last couple of days.

2025 Disneyland Trip #63 (9/24/25)

Sep. 24th, 2025 10:02 pm
torachan: aradia from homestuck (aradia)
[personal profile] torachan
We haven't been to the parks for about a week and a half since Carla wasn't feeling well, but since we usually go so frequently it felt like we hadn't been in ages lol.

Read more... )

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