southsamurai

Formality and standardized grammar.

At some point, when you’re involving teaching a language to a class, you need a systematic way of doing so.

Typically, that means going with dictionaries and that in turn is likely to be the most formal version of a language’s pronunciation. And, with grammar, you start with the simplest but also most standardized, codified version because that’s what the books are going to use.

You don’t worry about idiom and dialect until you’ve got a fairly good grasp of the formal. Since Castilian Spanish is more or less the oldest formal Spanish, we end up learning that first.

Like, I suck at learning languages. But I tried several. One of those was Spanish. School Spanish is kinda like school English, it’s taught in strict way. Vocabulary with pronunciation, grammar rules, verb conjugation. Conversationsal Spanish just isn’t what most schools are going to start with. One could argue whether or not that’s the best place to start or not, but it is the way most languages get taught.

I dated a girl from Mexico City during that time, and she said the books were essentially the same there at least.

Subscribe to all of them. It won’t be a problem.

It’s like if you followed #s of the same thing on Instagram, twitter, mastodon, bluesky, and whatever the equivalent of # is on Facebook, then a reddit sub with the same name. Different populations and user bases, but that’s a good thing.

There’s some degree of consolidation that happens, particularly when one community is on a bigger instance and would be better served by being hosted elsewhere. But there’s not really any barriers to using multiple. If you crosspost, you have better chances of it being seen anyway, and you’ll get access to any responses. If you’re wanting to comment, then the OP that crossposted is going to get your response no matter which ones it’s in.

Only drawback is that your comment in one won’t show in the others unless you copy/paste it. Which is perfectly valid if you want to, but most people would see your comment eventually anyway, so the conversation will still happen if it would have in the first place.

I kinda had issues adapting to it myself, but now I tend to prefer it when communities are spread out, because every instance has its own vibe usually. So you get different kinds of discussions than you would if there was only one community on one instance.

Some subjects end up needing a single community just to make it easier to find, but it’s pretty rare imo.

No, no it isn’t. If you aren’t just being a snarky bastard and want the difference explained, ask.

Depends.

Some are broken down for parts. Some get broken down and recycled. Some get used as a display piece and end up being inherited.

But, yeah, you can just chuck them in the trash. You aren’t supposed to, but it isn’t like an unloaded and busted up gun is dangerous. If you dump a bunch and the atf gets wind of it, expect some uncomfortable time spent explaining yourself. But a single gun? Nobody will even know unless they go looking through trash. But the atf does have guidelines for destroying firearms, and you can always turn them in to police or the atf and they’ll get the job done.

Right now, I have a shotgun that hasn’t worked in maybe sixty years. No parts available because it’s just that old and nobody makes them. I’d have to have someone make the parts it needs. But, it was my great, great grandfather’s, so I just keep it clean and protected.

But, I picked up some firearms a few years back from a lady that wanted to get rid of her deceased husband’s collection fast and for cash. One of them was not only in horrible shape, unsafe to fire, but it was illegal. Broke it down, recycled what could be, sold the few parts that were usable, then trashed the rest.

Truth is, most guns are going to last a couple of generations since the moving parts can be replaced for anything that’s popular enough. Like the 1911, as a perfect example. Some of the originals are out there, still in shape and safe to use because you only need some of the parts replaced as they wear out; the main body of the gun isn’t going to just fail in normal usage. Tens of thousands of rounds through some of them.

So the only time a gun wears out is when you can’t replace what breaks, or what breaks is the parts that would essentially mean you’re buying a new gun rather than repairing an old one.

There’s guns from the 1800s still being used out there. Not as many as there used to be because they’re fairly valuable, but still. Same with stuff even older, though the older they are the less likely they are to every be fired again, no matter what condition they’re in.

My cousin has an old garand my grandfather gave him that he still shoots weekly, and it was carried in action. That thing is damn near a century old, and has been all over the world. I’ve got an old mauser rifle from the same era that’s in great shape, if not exactly ideal since it was sporterized.

If you were asking because you needed to dispose of a damaged firearm, I’d say you should check your local laws first, and then hand them over to whatever state, province, or equivalent for your country’s law enforcement is. Mainly to cover your ass. But in the normal course of things, if you render it unrepairable, nobody is going to care what you do with what’s left

Those are the ones that led me to that opinion, but even the less typical ones and ones without laugh tracks get the stink eye too

Tbh, even the ones I like, that hold up over time, they’re just the ones that set up most of what made sitcoms so dead. Most of those were finished before I was even born though, and they still have the same kind of flaws.

I respect when shows try to break out of it all, but any time a show is situation comedy, it inherently limits what they can do. I think one of the best examples of that is always sunny. They broke a lot of the old rules, but it’s still so constrained by having to work within its situation that it still ends up masturbatory in its structure as it progresses.

Sitcoms suck, and while there are individual ones that break that rule, it doesn’t make it worth the effort of watching new ones

Mothman prophecies

I dunno, I’d say they’re as useful as any other terms.

I’ve herd multiple (pun intended).

Whisper, I’ve only seen rarely. Clowder almost as rarely.

The most common I’ve run into is a Pride, when folks aren’t just using a generic collective like herd or group.

But I have heard whisper used, though it was most often in a regular voice; neither whispered nor shouted. But sometimes it was whispered. Whispering about a whisper of whiskered cats just seems appropriate to me.

Imagine, you wake up and see a thousand cats surrounding your house. They sit, silently staring at your door. Wouldn’t you want someone to come up behind you and whisper into your ear “don’t open the door or that whisper will find its way in, and silently siphon our souls”? And then you could ask “why are you whispering, and how did you get in my house?”

And, of course, you would turn and there would be nobody there, only the fading outline of someone you can’t quite remember because their soul was taken already, and memory drifts away when one is stolen.

Considering your user name and it’s interesting history, I’m surprised you aren’t in the “language can be fun” camp.

And it can be fun we don’t have to limit ourselves to a single word for things.

You can say “group of lemurs” all you want, most people never even find out these constructed terms. The only place you might run into trouble is with the ones that have been around long enough to have entered common usage because people like them a lot, like a murder of crows. Worst case scenario, you call the hundred crows blanketing your yard a flock, and someone tells you that it’s a murder and gets a little pissy about it.

But, why are you using flock for crows, and not just group? Because they’re birds, obviously. We all know that a group of birds is a flock. How do we know that? Because at some point, people decided that it was useful or fun to have a separate word for birds.

You can trace the etymology of “flock” further back than “murder”, because it definitely predates it. But that doesn’t make it better. Just older in that usage.

We don’t have to make language boring and drab to be understood. Doing so would be a brobdingnagian task with no benefit. If you’ve never run into a word, or a word usage, you can use other words to communicate and discover what the person means. Like “dude, wtf it’s brobdingnagian and why didn’t you say massive or gigantic or any of the dozen or so other ways of expressing double plus big”

We don’t need more than one word for any given concept, we only need modifiers. But why the fuck would we limit ourselves that way? You really want to go around double-plussing everything? Or should we only use scientific nomenclature for everything?

I know damn good and well that this divide exists. Where people think that language should only contain single terms per concept, and other people think that relying on single terms is limiting too much, and rarely does one side of that convince the other of anything.

But, I’m firmly in the camp of making language and conversation a living thing, full of fun and poetry and interesting thoughts. We can save formal language for formal situations and not suffer any issues the rest of the time.

Well it is a little different because it won’t include instances your instance is defederated from.

But what you’re wanting is essentially why subscriptions are there

That being said, an instance curated feed alongside the all feed and local would be a cool option.

Using your example, literature.cafe having an admin selected feed of communities relating to writing would be awesome.

But, there aren’t actually many instances where that would be useful, since there aren’t that many focused on specific subjects.

The all feed is there for everything federated, and that doesn’t need to change. It’s a big part of how and why the fediverse is so cool. So fucking with it is a bad idea. Adding in options is nice, but the lemmy development has a roadmap that’s pretty focused on functionality and stability, so don’t expect this kind of addition soon

Word.

Even though I stopped taking opiates for pain management, I still keep a supply of naloxone. It’s just too easy to keep around when it’s so easy for people to OD.

Kill it with (gun) fire!

I’m gonna be really blunt here in the hopes that you take it in the spirit it’s intended rather than an attack.

But it isn’t important if it’s ethical, because it’s stupid. It’s a pointless endeavour and if you aren’t better than that, you should try to be.

You just lose access

That’s some silliness right there.

Using lemm.ee is using lemmy because lemm.ee is lemmy software being hosted on their hardware, and the activitypub that’s part of lemmy connects everything.

If you’re going to try to be pedantic, be right

Not inherently, no, what with school hours being absurdly early to start most places.

And that’s the goal, right? To make sure they get enough rest for school. So, you set bedtime, as in ass in bed, trying to sleep at an hour that they can reasonably reach according to current best practices hours of sleep.

Currently, the general recommendation is broad: 8 to 10 hours. Trying to shoot for ten hours of sleep, it isn’t realistic unless the kid on question is not functioning at the lower end.

So, if they’re expected to be in bed at 10, that would mean they’d be getting up at 6.

So, totally reasonable, if that’s when they’re getting up.

And, while nobody wants to admit it in their teens, having a schedule that’s stable when it isn’t a school night is a good idea. Yeah, you give a lot more leeway during extended time off, but on weekends, if you’re staying up until 1, that Sunday night is not going to work well trying to sleep at 10. So there’s a limit how long things can go on weekends regularly.

But, don’t be a dick. Special occasions, or even random occasions when they want to do something, it isn’t going to be much of a problem to be up extra late on a Saturday or Friday. Have the late day, use the next to adjust back

Another don’t be a dick thing. If you’re setting the hour arbitrarily, don’t. Sometimes, you gotta be arbitrary as a parent because you’re trying to teach something, but it really needs to be a limited tool, and you gotta be transparent about it. So, if you’re picking ten PM because you pulled it out of your ass, and it doesn’t match their actual needs, just rethink it until it does match their needs.

Our kid, during the week has to have their ass either in bed, or be ready to hop in and moving that direction by ten. They have to get up at 6 to have time for breakfast, bathroom needs, dressing, all that jazz before the bus gets here. We tried other times, and 6 is what makes sure they catch the bus, so 10 is their hard limit on school nights unless there’s a damn good reason otherwise. And it’ll be that way until they’re either 18, or graduate, whichever comes last. They know why, they know that they feel better, do better at school, and actually enjoy their afternoons and evenings more when they stick to that schedule.

So it isn’t even a thing when they want an extension, or want to stay with a friend when we know damn good and well they’ll be up all night. They cooperate with getting back on schedule the next day, and it’s all good.

But not every kid is the same, so you gotta be flexible. You gotta pick the battles that matter. Maybe if they wanna stay up late every night, they gotta do the work of making it work out, so their grades stay acceptable, and they aren’t neglecting other responsibilities. If they can make it work, let them. Extend the trust to adjust things until it either works, or it becomes evident it can’t work.

15 is a good age for a kid to have a say in things like this, with the understanding that there are expectations to meet. So have a talk, explain what you expect in terms of outcomes. Maybe they fuck up and it has to go back to ten. Maybe they make it work, and everyone is happy. Try again at 16, see what happens then.

Thing is, the fact that teenagers need sleep that’s regular and plentiful isn’t a subject that’s unclear. There’s decades of data on the subject, and it’s our responsibility to make sure they get it, even if they fuss and fight the whole way through. Most kids by 15, they can sit and have that conversation. But not all of them. You know your kid, I don’t.

Oh, yeah I was taken to the hospital. Kerry said he’d put his size 12 boot up my cracked ass otherwise lol.

I was the least injured other than Kerry, who only got some bruises and a scrape. I had some cracks in some ribs, my knuckles were kinda split but didn’t need stitches. Most of my injuries were blunt force stuff, basically deep bruises. I wanna say it was three ribs that had fractures? They weren’t bad, but they hurt like hell for a few months after.

Bulldog got the worst out of the squad. Broken nose, fractured orbital, concussion, split lip and her face was shredded from where she slid on the concrete.

The kid was fucked up though. Took him days to wake up. He recovered with no disability, but it was a long recovery. Broken ribs, skull fracture, jaw broken, I can’t remember what all else.

The asshole was worse off though. His trial was like a year after, and he was still fucked up. Missing teeth, couldn’t walk (though I suspect he was faking that some), mostly blind in one eye, some other shit that isn’t coming to mind. I know he wasn’t faking stuttering and messing up words. He did end up with brain damage. I wasn’t joking about Bulldog saving my life a second time, I damn near killed him. If she hadn’t stopped me, I probably would have, and it was most definitely excessive use of force.

Regarding bouncers and gear, it depends on where you live, but you have to be real careful with what you carry and use. Cops tend to not like bouncers, or didn’t back when I was still doing it. So you spray someone, you better have witnesses and plenty of them. I knew guys that carried knuckles, batons, even knives though, particularly at one of the rougher strip clubs. A few would carry a small handgun too, but it isn’t a good idea, imo. Legal, at least in my state, but not a great idea in a setting where you’re supposed to be keeping shit cool.

I dunno how often he checks in, but @kerriganindrag@lemmy.dbzer0.com , if he notices this, he might remember some of the stuff better, if he sees this any time soon

Oh hell

That one was the Bulldog. She’s still a good friend.

Short little thing, about 5’6". Cute too, and hates being reminded she is. She’s a few years younger than me, and had been working on fake id, but that’s a whole nuther kettle of fish

She was, and is, fairly butch, if that means anything to you. So her head comes up to about my nipple line, and my arm was bigger than her leg, and she wasn’t the most petite little thing, she worked hard and exercised.

But the first thing she said to me when I came out of the office was that if I ever picked her up like that, she’d feed me my balls on a stick.

That’s the Bulldog.

So, this is a drag club in the south in the nineties. Regular gay bars caught hell, but a drag club near a main road, with neon lights and parking lot full of some of the brightest flames it has been my privilege to see? It was a target for every cretin, redneck, and bigot for a hundred miles around the city.

So we’d end up having run-ins with gay bashers or at least assholes trying to act tough almost every shift during decent weather.

More than once, she would kneecap some fuckwit coming at me from behind, or when I was tangling with someone and couldn’t get loose. She was also known for tackling and choking the hell out of assholes, even when they’d just stand up with her hanging on their back; hence the nickname.

So, there were knives that didn’t get me, ball bats that never got swung because she had my back in every sense, and vice versa.

But the big one? Fuck me, it was bad.

A seriously crazy fucker went after one of my favorite patrons, this skinny, sweet little twink with nothing but love and hugs for anyone that would give him half a chance. But the kid was off property, halfway down the block, and we weren’t supposed to go that far.

Me, bulldog, and Kerry were on the lot and door that night. Kerry is a tall, lean but athletic ex marine and drag queen. He actually haunts lemmy to, so he might chime in. But when I took off running when I saw the crazy asshole come out from a shadow and hit the kid, Kerry starts cussing, but it was Bulldog that was right behind me first. Kerry was smarter, and stepped inside to call for help, and tell the inside staff to call the cops.

Cops always took their damn time showing up there.

Anyway, me and bulldog are running hard, seeing this kid on the ground, getting beat and kicked.

The nutjob grabs some junk from the lot he stepped out of, some rebar with concrete on it and pulls back to bash that kid’s head in.

I get there, thank the gods of speed for making my big ass run fast enough, before he can do it, and we go at it. I’m swinging wild, because this was back before I got serious about martial arts. I’d done some wrestling and a tiny bit of boxing, but never dedicated.

The nutter was fast, and hyped up on something. I was always slower. I got a few in before he caught me and I took a knee. He was cueing up for my skull when the Bulldog comes in growling, literally, and goes at him.

He swings with the rebar and smashes her in the face, and she goes down hard. It was fucking meaty sounding. I can see blood, so I fucked up and moved to her, and the crazy gets me in the back with the improvised club.

If Kerry hadn’t been busting ass, I’d have been dead because I couldn’t breathe

Kerry comes in and puts a boot upside the guy’s head, then steps back between all of us and him.

But the guy is lit up by whatever it was. He’s trying to get at us, and Kerry is having trouble because damn. Three people down, and Kerry ain’t budging, but you can’t cover everything like that.

So the dude slips by and tries to kill the kid again, after having feinted at me.

Kerry bumps him off target, and I get up.

That’s when it got ugly. I kinda lost my shit. Picked the guy up, slammed him and just went off. I don’t even know what I was saying, or even thinking, but Kerry tried to pull me off and couldn’t.

But Bulldog? She pulls herself up, comes over to me and gets in my way. Grabs my arm and stops me hitting the crazy guy again. She’s dripping blood, broken nose, plus other fractures that weren’t visible. But she was the one that put herself in the way and kept me from killing the guy. She did that half blind from swelling, concussed, and bloody.

She still has scars from that. Outside for sure, but inside too.

Saved my life two different ways in one night.

Worst fight I was ever in. Well, against a human.

But, yeah, her and Kerry kept my ass alive for sure. There were other nights I kept them safe too. That’s just how we did it.

At that time? She wasn’t even legal to enter the bar. That’s the night I found out she was using fake info, but that’s not really important. But we were young. The “kid” was around the same age as me, and I couldn’t buy a drink at the places I bounced yet.

It was a fucking crazy night. But our boss? That dude paid every hospital bill, not just for us, but for the kid too. I missed work at my regular job, and he just paid me like I was working full time for him. Told me I was an idiot, and not to do that to him again. But he hired on extra security so we could walk patrons to their cars when they couldn’t park on site.

The crazy dude did serious time, attempted murder, multiple counts.

Now, I gotta be honest here. I’ve told this story a few times between reddit and lemmy. Kerry tells me that none of them are fully accurate. That I keep getting things mixed up in the order they happened and such. I know that when I remember it, there’s a lot of blurry edges, and stuff comes to mind scattered. It’s flashes of stuff that was terrifying and I was flooded with adrenaline, fear, and anger, so it’s hard to be confident in the details.

I’m certain about Bulldog’s face, because it made me cry to see her like that. I know for sure that the kid was in a bad way, and almost died on the way to the hospital. I can remember his face too, when I rolled him over before the first ambulance got there. And I know I was fucking hurting lol. My back, my hands, my knees, my face, alllll beat up lol. It took me a few days to walk upright and not hobble.

Well, my first real job, meaning not a temporary thing in fast food with plans to GTFO ASAP, was as a nurse’s assistant.

My high soul school had a class for health care work prep. I had the goal then of being an RN. So I figured some of the basics might be nice ahead of time. Medical terminology, chances to have professionals in various branches of healthcare do talks, etc.

The last year, the program allowed you to take the state test to be an NA, and if you passed at over 95%, you could get the certification no matter your age. It involved also doing clinicals, at a wide range of facilities. One of the facilities was a nursing home, and it turned out that not only was I physically right for carrying patients, but I had a knack for helping the worst off patients cope with being helped. A lot of dementia patients can’t process what’s going on at all.

For whatever reason, I could kinda slip through their confusion and talk to them, and they’d be less combative, or more able to cooperate with what was going on. By the time clinicals at that facility was over, the director of nursing had contacted the instructor and I had a job waiting as soon as the state processed everything. So that’s what I did for the next twenty years as my main job, though I left that facility, and eventually all facility work within three years. I did go back to school for my RN, and life interfered. Then I went back for my bachelor’s in psychology, and that ended before I could finish.

But, as you may or may not know, nurse’s assistants get paid shit. And not just the literal shit we have to clean up, the pay rate is horrible.

So I had side gigs.

My most stable side gig was working as a bouncer, which led to security work in other ways.

I mostly worked for two guys. They each owned multiple bars. One guy had mostly LGBTQ focused bars, oxidizing including the drag club that was my main and favorite place to work of his. The other guy ran mostly strip clubs, which was not as much fun as you’d think, but I still enjoyed as a bouncer.

Anyway, the first guy was the one that got me into bouncing. My best friend is gay, and by the time I was old enough to get into bars and clubs, so were almost all of my friends. I just like the community. But we were at the club for a drag show. It may help to know that back in high school I had started power lifting, and had been picking up 400lb people out of showers for a good while at this point. I was a big ol boy lol.

So, you know how weekend drag shows can get. Everyone and their sister crowded in, trying to dance, get laid, and enjoy the show. Spats happen.

Well, one of them started getting bad. The staff was trying to get in and break it up, but it was wall to wall people.

One of the more inebriated patrons took it from just screaming and shoving into serious territory, grabbing a bottle and starting to swing with it.

I picked him up and shook him a little. He dropped the bottle and started crying and hugging me. So, since me doing that had kinda stopped the show and the crowd was now watching us I carried the dude over my shoulder to the bar and sat him down, while the bouncers on staff (one of whom later on saved my life a few times) made their way to us.

The owner was there that night, and saw it go down. Had the head of security ask me to come into his office. He gave me a blast of hell for risking my neck, and then offered me a job lol. I would work weekends here and there, some weeknights.

The other guy and him were friends since they didn’t really compete much, and I got introduced that way, and would work for either of them as needed for the rest of the nineties and into the naughties.

Between them, I also ended up doing some low grade security work too. Mostly escorting bar owners to make deposits at the end of the night, or being visible muscle when interacting with unfamiliar fellow business owners. Which had its benefits. I got a chance to talk to some interesting people that way, since once everyone was chill, the muscle tended to be superfluous, and just sit around drinking coffee, bullshitting. I got offered a job doing celebrity work, but didn’t want to travel like that. Closest I came to that was taking a few trips to other cities with some of the better known Queens that weren’t as friendly to the community.

Anyway, I pretty much fell into both jobs unintentionally. They weren’t the only jobs I did, but they were the consistent ones, and the ones that I miss.