…

Ok, so we’re just actually doing the infinite paperclip machine.

… fuck you, Clippy.

Another day living the dream… aaahhhh.

I think I’ll make some tea.

elemenonade

Tell me more about Alice’s brother Bob’s sisters.

Maybe they can help me find a new way to decompress.

Something like that, hahah.

Huh.

Ok… I think I have an explanation for ‘ya know’.

Its a zoomer/alpha thing, not a millenial thing.

PNW is kind of notoriously ‘way too online’ and we suck at / hate talking to people we don’t know already, in person.

I think the ‘ya know’ thing that you are talking about, I think that was basically a tiktok thing for a while, basically a meme.

So… that’s my guess there: its essentially a meme that worked its way into the vernacular of the ‘way too online’ zoomers/alphas of the PNW.

‘Pre-funk’… yeah I remember that starting to catch on, and being annoyed by it, lol, because it literally just is ‘pre-game’… I don’t use that phrase, but yeah, a lot PNW people do.

Also, its funny: I’m in the Midwest now… and because I am actually capable of striking up a conversation with people I don’t already know, in person, yeah, people do seem to guess that I’m from Cali, more than they guess Seattle.

So if you’re saying people assume 'talkative = Californian"… I guess that would mean that I actually have something resembling ‘normal’ social skills, at least in comparison to the PNW hikkikomori, hahaha!

I was talking with some older dude recently, with an accent … I think he said Kentucky… but goddamn it, after we got to be a bit friendly, he started rambling off … I literally could not understand a word he was saying, for like 30 seconds of him talking.

Accent was waaaay too thick for me to decipher.

No, its the opposite.

PNW accent is basically what happens if a whole bunch of Americans with originally different accents from different regions all try to cross the great divide either by wagon or train, to find either farmland or a ticket to the Alaska gold rush…

And then everybody who isn’t dead after the attempt more or less averages out their accents into a rough middleground.

Some linguistic evolution has been going on since then, beyond that, but thats what I mean by end point; the PNW was the literal geographic last stop on the physical colonization of the contiguous US.

Only thing that might be more ‘final’ than that would maybe I guess be Alaska, but I do not know much about an Alaskan accent.

Noob behavior.

You gotta do the side flip.

Aim at Sharjah, fullspeed ahead, then full reverse AND jump at the same time.

Blam, now you’re off the coast of Fujairah, and you looked cool doing it.

Ah.

I’m sorry.

I’ve loved and lost a cat as well.

… yeah I’m basically crying right now, don’t know what to say.

Yeah, I’m with trackball_fetish, that’s not really a PNW thing as much as it is a Midwest thing.

Now, in many ways, the PNW accent is a kind of… less exciting version of the Midwest accent, watered down Midwest.

The only time I can remember PNW people using ‘ya know’, its either because they just actually are from the Midwest, or they are intentionally trying to sound folksy.

A good portion of the PNW was originally settled (cough colonized) by… basically originally Germans and Nordics who moved from the East Coast to approximately Minnesota, but then moved even further east to basically either Portland or Seattle.

… maybe you could say ‘ya know’ is part of the rural/eastern PNW accent, as the sparser areas of the PNW today tend to be more affordable for a Midwesterner to move to, just by way of economics, relative cost of living.

All that being said, I would be interested in other verbal tics you’ve observed PNWers to have.

One tic I know I have is saying ‘like’ far too often when I’m basically exasperated, like, what am I even doing?

But, because I’m not Californian, I intone ‘like’ with much less emphasis, in a monotone way.

… the dude has done so many insanely unhealthy things, its the scene from the Simpsons where all the diseases in Mr Burns are fighting each other and have somehow achieved a semi-stable equilibrium balance.

… It does also at least attempt to provide you with choice, curated content as well.

I agree with you… its the people and the way they’ve basically conditioned themselves to act, not the LLM.

Also, to further confuse the metaphor:

You can’t dig your way out of a hole that you flooded, doesn’t matter how hard you pedal your mind bicycle.

… I must study and learn from your curious, foreign ways …

I think they’re literally just shoving shit out the door as fast as they can, and their initial production runs were … kind of done in the middle of rampocalypse/tariff nonsense, round #(i forget).

Because you’d have to be an idiot to not realize the world economy is headed for a Great Depression, therefore they need to make money ASAP on hardware, before people’s budgets contract dramatically.

I also think they seem have to have just genuienly underestimated demand.

I don’t think we’ll be seeing newly made Steam Decks soon, iirc, they retooled the actual Steam Deck facility … to make the Steam Controllers.

Probably more likely to see the Steam Machine and Frame, and then a Steam Deck 2 at some point in the future, presuming we do not at that point live in the Fallout timeline.

Oh my god, we need to make ‘Canadian units of measurement’ a thing.

It is my pleasure to confer upon you a totally real and legit Associates degree in Economics from the University of Lemmy.

I’m gonna try to say this gently:

Microsoft… is gone now.

The contradicted terminal corporate dementia.

They’re not going to be the same anymore.

… I used to work for them.

Something like was inevitable, given their highly cliquey and authoritarian corporate culture.

They’ve imploded under the weight of around two decades of accumulating technical debt, around two decades of the guys and gals that huffed the most farts getting the most promoted.

They are now primarily a member of the military industrial complex.

No, you’re right, we are essentially the… linguistic evolution end point of American English… the type O- blood of American accents, if you will.

Basically everyone can understand us, but we will have trouble accepting meaning transfusions from non type O- speakers.

As far as ‘unique’ things… well basically, my vote for most unique thing would be for the intonation patterns we use, or more accurately, basically the lack of them.

We tend to just stress all words in a sentence very close to the same, monotone.

We tend to have (at least what others call) falling intonation at the end of a sentence, that can make it so people don’t recognize questions… as questions.

Because they’re often expecting a tonal shift at the end of a sentence, or some other tonal pattern, as a cue that indicates a question is being asked.

Which is the opposite from a Californian, who do rising intonation on even non questions, which acts as the easiest giveaway that a transplant is in fact a transplant, beyond them having no clue how to pronounce most local place names, or referring to ‘I5’ as ‘the 5’.

It came from BookTok.