Eh...lots of interesting stuff or not....
Aug. 1st, 2019 09:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. One can find interesting items on social media and the internet, if one looks hard enough. By the way, the great part of utilizing the word "one" over personal pronouns is that it doesn't connote gender or an individual per se. In short, it can be anyone. Lovely thing that. Don't know why I stopped. Oh that's right someone on social media kicked me for using it. (Probably more than one someones, when I was in my 30s and cared about such things. Now? Really don't give a shit. Entering one's fifties does tend to lead to not giving a shit about a lot of things that you used to. It's really quite freeing actually.)
Anyhow...
In case you didn't know this existed and there's really no reason why you should, heck I didn't know it existed or I did and forgot about it -- here it is The Internet Digital Library .
What is this? Ah...Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
[I'm beginning to feel like I'm wasting money on buying content to entertain myself, since there's all this stuff available for free. Also, various deals out there that I need to figure out how to take advantage of -- since T-Mobile is apparently paying for Netflix for various customers, yet not for me and I've been with them for years. Also, I can't figure out how to borrow electronic books from my library onto my Kindle. I'd done it once before, but I can't seem to get it to work again. Not that I necessarily need it at the moment -- there's no shortage of reading material on my Kindle. But I did want to borrow Little Fires Everywhere.]
And this weird book... Because, Internet - Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch
Because Internet is for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are.
I'd be happy if they punctuated the text message at all. And I'm pretty sure I already know where memes come from...I was on the fanboards that created the damn things back in 2002 before we had all this other stuff.
2. Hmmm..it's that time of month (which was why I was so irritable and depressed aka hormonal the last few days, but oddly fine today), yes it is shark week (TM conuly, who I swiped it from because fitting, if I have to explain it to you, you obviously don't have a vagina.).
Anyhow...what's weird is on flist, I came across a bunch of interesting items...
* ...hmmm..the comic book version of the Kauma Sautra in scans daily, which has some interesting imagery. (Scans Daily pretty much provides scans from every comic on the planet.) Some interesting NSFW and NC17 imagery.
* Also, Smartbitches rec'd a new non-fiction book coming out by an ob-gyn about the Vagina, debunking myths and providing health related information on taking care of it -- regardless of age. (I've read some really bad books on the subject, so may take a wait and see attitude.)
*(BTW SmartBitches also had recs for Lesbian or F/F romances...it's not my thing, but it may be yours. [The lovely thing about SmartBitches is they are delightfully broad minded and progressive. You will find book, movie, television recommendations for Straight, CisGender, TransGender, LGBTQIA...etc. Mainly romance, but they rec other books as well. Hit and miss, I've found, but always interesting. I've found a lot of fantasy and sci-fi there, which is interesting.)
3. A vampire's remains were found 30 years ago and now DNA is giving him new life
Hee Hee.
He had been in his grave so long that when his family dug him up to burn his heart, the organ had decomposed and was not there.
Desperate to stop him from stalking them, they took his head and limbs and rearranged them on top of his ribs in the design of a skull and crossbones. He was a “vampire,” after all, and in rural New England in the early 1800s, this was how you dealt with them.
When they were finished, they reburied him in his stone-lined grave and replaced the wooden coffin lid, on which someone had used brass tacks to form the inscription “JB 55,” for his initials and his age.
Now, 200 years or so after the death of what has become the country’s best-studied “vampire,” DNA sleuths have tracked down his probable name: John Barber.
He was probably a hard-working farmer. Missing his top front teeth, he was no neck biter. He had a broken collar bone that had not healed right and an arthritic knee that may have made him limp, and he had died an awful death, probably from tuberculosis, which was so bad it had scarred his ribs.
The latest findings in a case that started in 1990 when his coffin was discovered in a gravel quarry in Griswold, Conn., are contained in a new report by, among others, experts at the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System’s DNA laboratory in Dover, Del.
4. I changed my mind about "We Sold Our Souls" -- it gets good after about the 40-50% mark. And Kris Pulaski -- a lead guitarist that makes me think of Joan Jett crossed with Jimi Hendrix is fun. I also, being a music nerd, appreciated the call outs to various bands and songs, both metal and soft metal. I'm basically all-around culture nerd -- and remember weird things and am familiar with weird things.
As my niece would state, "I'm weird but in a good way."
It has a definite High Fidelty vibe to it -- but more as a Metal theme pop culture horror thriller...that slices into over-reliance on "Wellness" Centers, Media Saturation, and selling one's soul for profitable gain -- creativity be damned.
5. Well this is interesting...it's a survey on whether or not you are rich that the NY Times nicked form Sweden.
Are You Rich? Or You may be richer than you think
Most of us prefer to call our incomes “average,” even when, statistically speaking, they’re not. But that assessment doesn’t really come from a deep understanding about our actual place on the income spectrum. For many people, it’s not even a quantitative question at all.
A 2018 YouGov study, for example, asked respondents what annual income would be required before a person could be considered rich. The higher a respondent’s income, the higher he or she set the bar.
“What people are doing is telling you how they feel about how much money they have,” said Keith Payne, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina who has written about inequality and income perception. “Do they feel like they have as much money as they need? Or do they feel like they don’t have enough?”
Pct. of Americans who call their income “average” compared with their actual income rank.
More than a third of respondents in the 90th percentile described their income as “average” compared with Americans in general
General Social Survey; based on Americans’ answers to the question, “Compared with American families in general, would you say your family income is far below average, below average, average, above average, or far above average?” Actual income ranks are based on inflation-adjusted self-reported household incomes
Some of this perception may be rooted in the lopsided nature of income distribution in the United States, in which the very top earners have made extraordinary gains. In a country where the top 1 percent earns about one-fifth of the national income, it can seem as if “the rich” really means “the megarich.”
When most of us assess our financial well-being, we typically refer not to data tables but to comparisons with the world around us: our friends, our colleagues and our neighbors. Wonderful as they may be, they do not necessarily make up a representative sample of the income distributions in our cities, especially when we are increasingly living among people with incomes similar to ours.
If Americans were perfectly scientific about assessing their incomes, we might expect the chart above to have symmetry around the 50th percentile — the true middle of the income distribution. But respondents in the 60th and 70th percentiles were more likely to call their incomes “average” than those in the true middle. And people near the very bottom of the income distribution were nearly as likely to call their incomes “average” as those near the very top.
This phenomenon is not unique to the United States. In 2016, researchers in Sweden published the results of an experiment in which they asked a representative sample of Swedes to guess their place on the income distribution.
The researchers found that a “vast majority” of their respondents believed they were poorer, relative to others, than they actually were. The people who thought they were right in the middle of the income distribution – perfectly middle class, you might say — were, on average, closer to the 75th percentile. And as a group, respondents whose incomes actually resembled the true median thought they were closer to the bottom fourth.
5. My mother watched the debates again. (I did NOT watch the debates. One of my college friends was upset they were on a cable channel and not widely available -- I thought it's July 2019, the election is in 2020...seriously? Anyone else remember the good old days when we only had two or three debates and they were held four months prior to the election??? Sometimes I miss the 80s and 90s. Not often, but sometimes.) I asked if she got anything from it..she said no, they just fought, it was highly frustrating. I told her that we had a year for it to work itself out. Far too soon to get worried. She said the fight was between the far left and the moderates. I said, well, yeah, that's the problem on both sides. No one agrees, and the extremists are winning. I prefer the far left to the far right, mainly because the far left is more humane. The far right is well...
REALLY not.
Meanwhile, I had a discussion on FB with an old ATPOBTVS pal, who lives in Britain and is politically active. She's been posting about British politics and works for an educational lobbying group in London. We both agreed that you can not have a political discussion with the opposition. The least unsuccessful method is to ask "why they voted the way they did" without judgement, and that way you can go about persuading them to change their mind, without them losing face. But even then it doesn't often work. That only hard earned personal experience would work -- and based on our shared history, that's not necessarily likely.
Also, we both agreed that this would have happened regardless of Russian interference. Even without Russia's interference, Brexit and Trump would have happened. It had been in the air for a while now.
I wish I felt optimistic...
On a brighter or more amusing note? To celebrate national mustard day, French's mustard created an ice cream flavor with an ice cream manufacturer in the City and unleashed it on people -- via specialty ice cream trucks. They even provided the recipe in the news. It, well, sounds weird and not very appetizing -- particularly to the news correspondents who were being forced to sample it. "Tastes like Cotton Candy and Bubblegum with mustard flavor..." eh, hard pass. It was served with a pretzel cookie.
Sometimes, I think people have grown bored and need to come up with new outlandish things to sell and market to folks.
Anyhow...
In case you didn't know this existed and there's really no reason why you should, heck I didn't know it existed or I did and forgot about it -- here it is The Internet Digital Library .
What is this? Ah...Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
[I'm beginning to feel like I'm wasting money on buying content to entertain myself, since there's all this stuff available for free. Also, various deals out there that I need to figure out how to take advantage of -- since T-Mobile is apparently paying for Netflix for various customers, yet not for me and I've been with them for years. Also, I can't figure out how to borrow electronic books from my library onto my Kindle. I'd done it once before, but I can't seem to get it to work again. Not that I necessarily need it at the moment -- there's no shortage of reading material on my Kindle. But I did want to borrow Little Fires Everywhere.]
And this weird book... Because, Internet - Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch
Because Internet is for anyone who's ever puzzled over how to punctuate a text message or wondered where memes come from. It's the perfect book for understanding how the internet is changing the English language, why that's a good thing, and what our online interactions reveal about who we are.
I'd be happy if they punctuated the text message at all. And I'm pretty sure I already know where memes come from...I was on the fanboards that created the damn things back in 2002 before we had all this other stuff.
2. Hmmm..it's that time of month (which was why I was so irritable and depressed aka hormonal the last few days, but oddly fine today), yes it is shark week (TM conuly, who I swiped it from because fitting, if I have to explain it to you, you obviously don't have a vagina.).
Anyhow...what's weird is on flist, I came across a bunch of interesting items...
* ...hmmm..the comic book version of the Kauma Sautra in scans daily, which has some interesting imagery. (Scans Daily pretty much provides scans from every comic on the planet.) Some interesting NSFW and NC17 imagery.
* Also, Smartbitches rec'd a new non-fiction book coming out by an ob-gyn about the Vagina, debunking myths and providing health related information on taking care of it -- regardless of age. (I've read some really bad books on the subject, so may take a wait and see attitude.)
*(BTW SmartBitches also had recs for Lesbian or F/F romances...it's not my thing, but it may be yours. [The lovely thing about SmartBitches is they are delightfully broad minded and progressive. You will find book, movie, television recommendations for Straight, CisGender, TransGender, LGBTQIA...etc. Mainly romance, but they rec other books as well. Hit and miss, I've found, but always interesting. I've found a lot of fantasy and sci-fi there, which is interesting.)
3. A vampire's remains were found 30 years ago and now DNA is giving him new life
Hee Hee.
He had been in his grave so long that when his family dug him up to burn his heart, the organ had decomposed and was not there.
Desperate to stop him from stalking them, they took his head and limbs and rearranged them on top of his ribs in the design of a skull and crossbones. He was a “vampire,” after all, and in rural New England in the early 1800s, this was how you dealt with them.
When they were finished, they reburied him in his stone-lined grave and replaced the wooden coffin lid, on which someone had used brass tacks to form the inscription “JB 55,” for his initials and his age.
Now, 200 years or so after the death of what has become the country’s best-studied “vampire,” DNA sleuths have tracked down his probable name: John Barber.
He was probably a hard-working farmer. Missing his top front teeth, he was no neck biter. He had a broken collar bone that had not healed right and an arthritic knee that may have made him limp, and he had died an awful death, probably from tuberculosis, which was so bad it had scarred his ribs.
The latest findings in a case that started in 1990 when his coffin was discovered in a gravel quarry in Griswold, Conn., are contained in a new report by, among others, experts at the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System’s DNA laboratory in Dover, Del.
4. I changed my mind about "We Sold Our Souls" -- it gets good after about the 40-50% mark. And Kris Pulaski -- a lead guitarist that makes me think of Joan Jett crossed with Jimi Hendrix is fun. I also, being a music nerd, appreciated the call outs to various bands and songs, both metal and soft metal. I'm basically all-around culture nerd -- and remember weird things and am familiar with weird things.
As my niece would state, "I'm weird but in a good way."
It has a definite High Fidelty vibe to it -- but more as a Metal theme pop culture horror thriller...that slices into over-reliance on "Wellness" Centers, Media Saturation, and selling one's soul for profitable gain -- creativity be damned.
5. Well this is interesting...it's a survey on whether or not you are rich that the NY Times nicked form Sweden.
Are You Rich? Or You may be richer than you think
Most of us prefer to call our incomes “average,” even when, statistically speaking, they’re not. But that assessment doesn’t really come from a deep understanding about our actual place on the income spectrum. For many people, it’s not even a quantitative question at all.
A 2018 YouGov study, for example, asked respondents what annual income would be required before a person could be considered rich. The higher a respondent’s income, the higher he or she set the bar.
“What people are doing is telling you how they feel about how much money they have,” said Keith Payne, a psychology professor at the University of North Carolina who has written about inequality and income perception. “Do they feel like they have as much money as they need? Or do they feel like they don’t have enough?”
Pct. of Americans who call their income “average” compared with their actual income rank.
More than a third of respondents in the 90th percentile described their income as “average” compared with Americans in general
General Social Survey; based on Americans’ answers to the question, “Compared with American families in general, would you say your family income is far below average, below average, average, above average, or far above average?” Actual income ranks are based on inflation-adjusted self-reported household incomes
Some of this perception may be rooted in the lopsided nature of income distribution in the United States, in which the very top earners have made extraordinary gains. In a country where the top 1 percent earns about one-fifth of the national income, it can seem as if “the rich” really means “the megarich.”
When most of us assess our financial well-being, we typically refer not to data tables but to comparisons with the world around us: our friends, our colleagues and our neighbors. Wonderful as they may be, they do not necessarily make up a representative sample of the income distributions in our cities, especially when we are increasingly living among people with incomes similar to ours.
If Americans were perfectly scientific about assessing their incomes, we might expect the chart above to have symmetry around the 50th percentile — the true middle of the income distribution. But respondents in the 60th and 70th percentiles were more likely to call their incomes “average” than those in the true middle. And people near the very bottom of the income distribution were nearly as likely to call their incomes “average” as those near the very top.
This phenomenon is not unique to the United States. In 2016, researchers in Sweden published the results of an experiment in which they asked a representative sample of Swedes to guess their place on the income distribution.
The researchers found that a “vast majority” of their respondents believed they were poorer, relative to others, than they actually were. The people who thought they were right in the middle of the income distribution – perfectly middle class, you might say — were, on average, closer to the 75th percentile. And as a group, respondents whose incomes actually resembled the true median thought they were closer to the bottom fourth.
5. My mother watched the debates again. (I did NOT watch the debates. One of my college friends was upset they were on a cable channel and not widely available -- I thought it's July 2019, the election is in 2020...seriously? Anyone else remember the good old days when we only had two or three debates and they were held four months prior to the election??? Sometimes I miss the 80s and 90s. Not often, but sometimes.) I asked if she got anything from it..she said no, they just fought, it was highly frustrating. I told her that we had a year for it to work itself out. Far too soon to get worried. She said the fight was between the far left and the moderates. I said, well, yeah, that's the problem on both sides. No one agrees, and the extremists are winning. I prefer the far left to the far right, mainly because the far left is more humane. The far right is well...
REALLY not.
Meanwhile, I had a discussion on FB with an old ATPOBTVS pal, who lives in Britain and is politically active. She's been posting about British politics and works for an educational lobbying group in London. We both agreed that you can not have a political discussion with the opposition. The least unsuccessful method is to ask "why they voted the way they did" without judgement, and that way you can go about persuading them to change their mind, without them losing face. But even then it doesn't often work. That only hard earned personal experience would work -- and based on our shared history, that's not necessarily likely.
Also, we both agreed that this would have happened regardless of Russian interference. Even without Russia's interference, Brexit and Trump would have happened. It had been in the air for a while now.
I wish I felt optimistic...
On a brighter or more amusing note? To celebrate national mustard day, French's mustard created an ice cream flavor with an ice cream manufacturer in the City and unleashed it on people -- via specialty ice cream trucks. They even provided the recipe in the news. It, well, sounds weird and not very appetizing -- particularly to the news correspondents who were being forced to sample it. "Tastes like Cotton Candy and Bubblegum with mustard flavor..." eh, hard pass. It was served with a pretzel cookie.
Sometimes, I think people have grown bored and need to come up with new outlandish things to sell and market to folks.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-02 03:25 am (UTC)That sounds...kinda awful.
Politics and food
Date: 2019-08-02 04:08 am (UTC)Mustard ice cream and pretzel cookie? I guess we can blame it on millennials. ;o) I had some "bacon wrapped jalapeno popper" potato chips yesterday. Tasted heavily of smoke, and faintly of jalapeno, bland jalapeno at that. Okey dokey, but they tasted nothing like a good cheesy jalapeno popper covered in bacon. I can't fathom wanting my ice cream and cookie to taste like a pretzel with mustard, both sets of things good, but together?
Re: Politics and food
Date: 2019-08-02 12:29 pm (UTC)I do wonder why in a liberal town like Tucson they wrote it in Russian in the first place... Wanted only us learned few to know? Wanted to say Putin wasn't theirs? I have no idea.
A Russian immigrant living in Tuscon? Otherwise, I got nothing. (I can't imagine the Russian immigrants who escape Putin voting for the American version. To be fair the Brits didn't vote for the British version, their idiotic Conservative Party did.)
I had some "bacon wrapped jalapeno popper" potato chips yesterday. Tasted heavily of smoke, and faintly of jalapeno, bland jalapeno at that. Okey dokey, but they tasted nothing like a good cheesy jalapeno popper covered in bacon. I can't fathom wanting my ice cream and cookie to taste like a pretzel with mustard, both sets of things good, but together?
The potato chips at least make sense...but they are awfully busy. A potato chip can't grab that much flavor. Bacon yes. Jalapeno yes. Both, no.
But why would you want to put mustard with "cream" and "sugar" ? Or pretzel with sugar and butter, etc? I get the idea of savory or spicy. And some spices such as the ones in Chai Tea, work really well with ice cream (nutmeg, cinnamon, a touch of curry...) but mustard?
Re: Politics and food
Date: 2019-08-02 02:10 pm (UTC)Re: Politics and food
Date: 2019-08-03 01:04 am (UTC)Honestly, why?
Language is about being able to communicate. No one really cares if you know Russian, just if you can communicate in it fluently.
I live in an area that is heavily Russian. About 20-30% of my apartment building is Russian -- as a first language, and half of them can't speak English. They speak Russian. I speak English. We nod and use body language to understand each other. Also the elevator used to have signs in Russian and English. This has since changed, as more and more of the old Russians have moved out and are replaced with young English speakers.
Also the co-worker that I trained and helped supervise is Russian.
It's his first language, English is his third or fourth, not sure which.
And my father took it in college -- he sucked at it. (My family is horrible at languages. Or my immediate family -- brother took Spanish (sucked at it), Mother took German (sucked at it), I took French (sucked at it.) Niece to date is the only one who is good at languages - she gets it from her mother's side. Although my Uncle the Spy was quite good at them. He knew German and Vietnamese.
Re: Politics and food
Date: 2019-08-03 02:50 am (UTC)I admit to being a bit snooty myself at times. One particular afternoon at Ohio State, I was walking down the stairs in the building where all the modern language offices were, with a fellow Russian grad student. Out of a side hall door came a pair of people, seemingly a professor and an advanced student, speaking German. Feeling mischievous, I turned to my friend and said softly in Russian, "Those stupid Germans think we can't understand them!" Of course, no reaction from the German speakers.
Re: Politics and food
Date: 2019-08-03 03:09 am (UTC)If you want to become a tenured professor - you have to have a second language.
But yes, I think Russian would be harder then German or the Latin languages, since the written vocabulary is quite different. It's not even recognizable. A lot of German, French and Spanish terms have made it into the English language, but not so much Russian. The Asian languages are also very hard to learn, because they are quite different, as is Arabic.
I hear over 100 different languages a day. It's gotten to the point in which, I don't expect to understand what people are saying half the time.
Also, I think the insistence on speaking a language different from the one that is typically spoken in a country sort of labels you as an outsider who will never be a member of that country. They will always look at you as foreign. It doesn't matter what country you are in or how bilingual the country is.
That said, I don't think a lot of people have much choice. My co-worker's wife, who is from the Phillipines, is struggling to learn English. She is taking English as a Second Language, so she can learn to be a nurse. But he's fighting with them to provide financial aid -- since they can't afford all her classes. It's expensive to take these courses. And hard to learn English. I remind myself of that, whenever I get impatient about it. I can only imagine what it would be like if I had to live in say Russia or Mexico and couldn't learn the language.
Re: Politics and food
Date: 2019-08-03 05:37 am (UTC)Russian vocabulary is, indeed, daunting to begin with. Spanish, French and English share a lot more words. But, for instance, it seemed like to me that German vocabulary got harder the more I learned, where as Russian got easier, because it used its word roots more consistently. Russian has some complexity, but the verb system is so much easier in Russian than it is in French, Spanish or even English it's mind boggling. No compound tenses, no subjunctive, very few irregular verbs at all... No tons of ossified slang (masquerading as idioms) that you have to memorize like there is in French. Learning any other language has its problems, but comparatively speaking Russian isn't so hard. English on the other hand is very difficult. Sounds that aren't in a lot of other languages, weird spelling, irregular verbs, tons of homonyms... Be glad its your first language, and you didn't have to learn it in school!
Re: Politics and food
Date: 2019-08-03 01:20 pm (UTC)Speaking it was harder. I could not differentiate between "S" and "TH" sounds and it wasn't until a High School Drama Course that I began to figure it out. Acting got me past my lisp. I still mispronounce certain words. And if I can't pronounce them, I will spell them. Because I can see the word perfectly in my head. I know how it should sound. But speaking it...somehow doesn't always work. I think it may be why I'm so analytical about things -- it was how I figured out how to read, speak, understand and communicate -- it still is.
So much of learning a language is dependent on how we think. For example? Some have to look up the meaning of words in a dictionary. I figure it out by the context or the words around it. It's how I figured out how to read, or what a word had to be. Doesn't always work -- Flashdance has a lyric that is "take your passion" and I always hear "take your pants off" -- wasn't until I saw the film that I figured it out.
French was difficult -- because it has a lot of soft consonant sounds. And it likes to put "e"'s on the end of a lot of words to denote masculine and feminine words. English doesn't care as much about the gender of words. As a result, when I learned French -- it screwed up my English, I started putting "E"'s on the end of everything.
Russian oddly sounds a lot easier to learn. Simpler in construct. Which may explain how Russian's think. Learning another language does get you in the head of the other culture better.
no subject
Date: 2019-08-02 01:30 pm (UTC)I am in favor of new flavors for things, and companies always want to make more money, but I find stunts like these just a waste. I guess it worked for them that they got press for it though, so as long as the news media continues to cover stunts it's going to continue.
I really like mustard (will be having it shortly with egg rolls) but just ugh D:
no subject
Date: 2019-08-03 12:58 am (UTC)It's funny one of the commentators on the News said the same thing -- they liked savory over sweet and loved mustard, but as ice cream?
(I got the feeling it wasn't their idea to talk about this or try it...but whomever pitched the story.)
I find stunts like these just a waste. I guess it worked for them that they got press for it though, so as long as the news media continues to cover stunts it's going to continue.
Agreed. The problem with our society right now is the amount of catering we do in regards to marketing and promotions. The News is basically 60% promotional/marketing and 40% actual news. Everyone is pitching something.
One of things I like about DW is there are no ads or marketing people. LJ began to drive me nuts because it was going in that direction, right along with FB, and Twitter, and everything else.
I live in NYC and I'm inundated with it -- although I can get away from it. It's not prevalent where I live (I live in a more residential zone that is less in the thick of it. No billboards, skyscrapers, or buses really. Most we get is ads on the top of cabs, and in the subway -- and the ads in the subway aren't that bad.)
But in Manhattan and other parts of Brooklyn -- it's everywhere. And it's exhausting.