No problem!

I should have gone deeper on the comparative method, but I didn’t want the wall of text to become even bigger. But it’s basically a task of finding patterns and working with them.

Proto-Human / Proto-World is an interesting case. Serious linguists reject it not because they know it’s false, but because there’s no way to know it at all. The method breaks once you go so far in time, even Proto-Afro-Asiatic (12~18kyo) is barely held together.

Glad you liked it!

It is soul-crushing tedious. That’s probably why Lucy is calling it min-maxxing, in any other game this stuff would be seen as a player ruining their own fun, but in Isaac it somehow gets a pass. And it gets worse depending on the speed stat that she mentioned, if it goes down the process becomes even slower.

That is not to say the game is bad, though. It’s surprisingly good for something initially made in Flash.

I don’t know what D6 is

A cubic/“normal” die with six sides. In Isaac it’s an item that, when activated, replaces the random items in a room with other random items. If the new items are good you pick them up, if they’re bad you reroll the D6, but to recharge it you need to complete other rooms. So you keep revisiting the same room, over and over.

I mentioned this in another thread, but I never ditched RSS. It’s simply too convenient to keep track of multiple sites, that you want to check regularly but would be a bother to do manually. Youtube channels, anime/manga/comics sites, even the communities you moderate.

I’m glad to see people picking it up again, though. Perhaps then Liferea will see a bit more love.

I joke this sort of work is like Neapolitan flavour: it’s vanilla, but it has one or two interesting twists (like you said, the vampire intrigue) to make it more interesting.

And I fully agree with what you said about the characters. Specially their interactions! Like, Kotoyama improved by a lot in this aspect, you don’t see Hotaru or Kokonutsu changing meaningfully because of the other, but Nazuna and Kou do. They grow, a lot like the ones in Sono Bisque Doll. (…that had a better ending. Yeah, I also agree the ending is a bit unsatisfying.)

Most people out there don’t know how IRC and the Usenet work. So even if this analogy is more accurate, it’s less useful.

In the meantime most people on the internet use email.

I mentioned this across the Fediverse, but recently I’ve binge watched Yofukashi no Uta (Call of the Night). Both seasons, and then I read the manga, and frankly? I had a blast, I loved the series.

The story is about a 14yo called Kou. He is a good student, or at least he was — eventually he got bored with school, and decided to sleep at day and roam the city at night. And one of those nights, Kou meets a vampire called Nazuna. He wants her to vampirise him, but for that Kou would need to fall in love with Nazuna, and yet he’s clueless about love.

The art style of Yofukashi no Uta looks like a refined version of Dagashi Kashi (from the same author, Kotoyama). But don’t expect the same gag humour as the later; it’s like they replaced the sugar with actual substance. And although it is a series about love, don’t expect all that emotional baggage and “woooosh” associated with romantic stories.

The soundtrack is filled with earworms from Creepy Nuts; in fact the story was inspired by one of them (that eventually became the ending song of the first season).

How do you know that? There wasn’t any context given.

We’re in the internet. In the internet “taking the red pill” usually conveys “accepting that alt right discourse as true”. It’s conventionalised here. We’re also in a federation of social media sites where your typical user is left-wing, and talks a lot about politics, further reinforcing the above.

So yes, there is context. And all other interpretations of their utterance (like referring to some actual red pill but never mentioning which; or a referential joke, but not sharing the reference) sound silly in contrast.

[From your other comment] Do you even know what that reference is from? The alt right didn’t invent it.

Origin (Matrix) doesn’t dictate current meaning.

Meet your neighbors, join a local group of any kind, find community in real life and proximal to you, not just online.

To add to that (it’s great advice BTW): when shit hits the fan, neighbours are usually more helpful than far away relatives.

Or neither. Just don’t play the game at all.

In this context “taking the red pill” would mean to accept all that alt right discourse; and “taking the blue pill” would be to keep yourself ignorant to it.

But both assume the alt right discourse is true and moral; it’s neither, it’s immorality built upon bullshit. The whole metaphor of “red pill, blue pill” is only there to distract you from the fact it’s selling you a false dichotomy backed up by irrationality.

Those are all things I wished I have learnt when I was younger:

1. Always ask yourself, “do I know this?”. If you don’t know, do not act as if you did.
2. Keep the distinction between how things are and how things should be crystal clear. Wishful thinking only causes harm.
3. Some people are best avoided. More on that later.
4. You will fuck it up, because you’re only human. Be kind with yourself and learn with your own mistakes.
5. Have moral principles and stick to them. They don’t need to be the same as mine, or of anyone else; but do have something to guide your actions and judgement.

On #3, I feel like it’s best to avoid people who:

• insist after you told them a clear “no”.
• keep fucking things up, and evoke in their own defence “but I thought that…” or “trust me” or “I had good intentions”.
• accuse you based on their assumptions. (You’re responsible for what you do/say; you are not responsible for shit the others make up based on what you did/said.)
• oversimplify complex matters.

Probably more. Point is, though, not everyone is a plus in your life.

I wasn’t aware of this podcast, so thank you for the rec!

I have this book. It’s by no means a bad book; it’s a great starting point, the info there seems to be well researched, and the main focus seems to be on the language diversity attested around the world. But yes, if you’re looking for depth it feels like missing stuff. (It doesn’t even mention the Macro-Ge and Tupi families ;_; )

Got it — then they have agency, much like anyone else. So they should be able to consent, and to get that consent violated by the spell.

Thanks for the info!

Are the atronachs from atronachy and atromancy identical?

If yes, I think consent applies to both. It would be like humans reproducing; a child still has their own agency, even if they were “created” by the parents.

If not… it depends, really. Hypothetically speaking, if you create one through atronachy, and release [it? them?] free, would [it? they?] be able to take autonomous decisions?

I don’t play Elder Scrolls so I had to dig this up.

Flame atronachs are apparently elemental daedra (divine beings who are not ancestors of human beings, unlike the aedra), summoned through Atromancy. Apparently they are able to make their own decisions, so they have agency, so consent applies to them.

But I couldn’t find how much the conjuration process removes their agency; if they’re forced to obey the conjurer’s orders to the letter, if they can creatively interpret those orders, or if it’s a single order.

Shamelessly plugging !linguistics@mander.xyz here. This topic fits well in that community.

Also, I apologise for the wall of text, it’s just this topic interests me by a lot.

Proto-Indo-European is a reconstruction of the common ancestor (actually two; more on that later) of multiple languages spoken in India and in Europe, that are clearly related to each other.

We know there are a lot of gaps in our knowledge about it, that people have been trying to fill since the 19th century, but ideally this reconstruction should be as close as possible to the real deal that we can reasonably get. For example:

• We don’t really know the true phonetic nature of the three series of occlusives of the language. But we know they were three; certainly not just two, and likely not as many as four.
• We don’t know all suffixes of the language. But we do know the language had ~eight noun cases, those cases were marked by suffixes (unlike position, as in English… or particles, as in Japanese), and worked in a similar way as they do in Sanskrit, Latin, and Ancient Greek.
• We might not have a fully solved family tree for the PIE descendants, but we have a pretty good guess on who’s a descendant (like Spanish, Italian, Hindi, German, Swedish) and who’s not (like Basque, Etruscan, Tamil, Hungarian, Finnish).

About the method:

The method used is called the comparative method. It boils down to looking for regular sound correspondences in the child languages and, based on sound changes we attested, coming up with hypotheses that would explain those sound correspondences.

It is not just assumptions; an assumption pops up when you treat the uncertain as certain. When using the comparative method you’re expected to come up with multiple competing hypotheses, keeping in mind they might be wrong, and look for info that helps you to ditch one or another.

And as messy it is, it has predictive power. A good example of that are the laryngeals, annotated *h₁ *h₂ *h₃. When Saussure (a linguist) proposed PIE had those sounds, nobody had direct evidence they existed; it was only indirect, based on sound correspondences found in the descendant languages (mostly the nearby vowels). Those laryngeals were shown to have actually existed once Hittite was discovered, because it actually preserved sounds in their place.

Another example comes from Proto-Romance. Proto-Romance is what you get when you apply the comparative method to the modern Romance languages, as opposed to their real ancestor, Latin. So by comparing the theoretical Proto-Romance with the real deal Latin, we can gauge how well the method works. And well, Proto-Romance is surprisingly close to what’s attested for Late Imperial Latin, specially the one used by poor people. (I can go further on that if you want).

About conlangs vs. reconstruction: PIE is not a constructed language. It’s a reconstructed one.

The key difference is that, when you’re building a conlang, you’re free to decide everything about it. This freedom does not exist for Proto-Indo-European or other reconstructions, you need to do it based on the data at hand.

You can of course create a conlang using that reconstruction as a basis; plenty people do*. And if you ever see “PIE being spoken” out there, it’s probably something like this. But note that you’ll need to add stuff not found in the reconstruction, if you want it to be actually usable, already crossing the line between science and art.

*just in this case, please PLEASE make sure to fix that unholy notation. I have an alternative one if you want, it makes the language look a bit more reasonable.

On being two languages:

When people started noticing the obvious similarities between Sanskrit, Latin and Greek, in the 19th century, the idea they had a common ancestor came up naturally. And then, when Hittite was discovered, it was obvious that common ancestor of Sanskrit/Latin/Greek was also the ancestor of Hittite.

But that doesn’t tell you the whole picture. What happened was something like this:

• you have a language. Let’s call it “A”.
• that language has two children. Let’s call them “Hittite” and “B”.
• language “B” has a thousand children. And grandchildren, and grand-grandchildren. Among their descendants you see Latin, Sanskrit, Greek, Russian, English, and a lot more.

Now. Which language is Proto-Indo-European: “A” or “B”? …tricky question! People use the term to refer to both languages. Even if there’s a gap of 1~3 millenniums between them. Yay, scientific precision! /s

When they see the distinction, and want to specify which one, they call A “Early PIE” and B “Late PIE”. But the mess still affects reconstructions a fair bit; it’s like trying to reconstruct Ancient Greek and Modern Greek as if they were the same language, you know? (Or, dunno, English and Old English.)

I believe some really weird shit we see in modern reconstructions is caused by this. Such as the weird *e *o *e: *o: vowel system; length is likely a late PIE feature, while this two-qualities (or three) system is from early PIE.

More than enough to falsify the hypothesis that those differences in behaviour are innate, and sex-based; otherwise they’d be more consistent across ethnic and racial groups.

It also shows that what’s expected from gender roles varies wildly. This is kind of common sense, but it’s good to have studies showing it.

Cool! Does it have AI? Also I want it to connect to a phone app, do not bring me an actual program, or a website (I don’t understand what’s a “browser”, is it Google?), bring me an app! I’m fine with a subscription model, or if the cube starts leaking ooze onto the counter without it. It’s also fine if the cube is expected to leak ooze two years from now, because some server thingamajig is gone.

/s obviously.

The article used the word “Microslop” thirteen times. I guess the author really wants search engines and bots to associate “Microslop” with “Microsoft”. Apparently Microslop is a term for Microsoft products, or perhaps even Microslop is an intrinsic property of Microsoft.

…'kay, I’ll stop it now.

It’s rather curious how MS babbles so much about “AI”, but its Discord server uses such a simple filter that can be evaded by 0N3 0F 7H3 0LD357 700L5 0F 7H3 1N73RN37 5H17P0573R one of the oldest tools of the internet shitposter: leetspeak. It’s almost like it knows it’s selling a dud.

Also, I guess this thing run so far they don’t even care about the Streisand effect any more.