7 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2022
  2. Aug 2022
  3. bluelander.bearblog.dev bluelander.bearblog.dev
    1. But look, if a state or any other kind of business names themselves after a real word but pronounce it weird, I'm going to say the word the way that it's said. I have way more respect for languages spoken by real people than the brand guidelines of legal fictions

      The "correct" pronunciation of the surname "Wagner" is best approximated in English by something between "VOG-neh" and "VOG-nair". It is a German surname, unquestionable derivation. But if I try to use that pronunciation for a guy I knew with the surname his family pronounced "WAG-nur", that makes me the asshole who is wrong. Names borrowed from other languages are weird, sure! Maybe there's an argument to translate everything into the language of use, like Catholics do (Pope Francis / Francisco / Franciscus etc., Mary / María / Maria / Marie etc. – so in an English sentence, the state of Snowy.). But while it is fair for me to think to myself generally that e.g. Kieran is an incorrect spelling of Ciarán, not listening to the people to whom a name is applied about what the name "correctly" is... well, it's a policy that leads down some pretty dickish roads. It's not about not acknowledging the language of origin, it's about acknowledging other context that also matters.

      I'd suggest that listening to the ads on Spanish-language radio is instructive here, because for actually local actual Spanish speakers, even within Spanish sentences, there are pretty sophisticated contextual patterns about whether a place name gets a Spanish or English pronunciation; it's not that one's "right" to people who know what's "correct".

      I will also note that despite being generally more open than most of my ilk to something like prescriptivism, I am a partisan here. There is a feeling of linguistic mob thrill I have never felt more than watching John Kerry come to speak at a packed Pioneer Square in Portland in 2003. Within his first couple sentences he said "OR-eh-gahn" to a gushing crowd and received widespread boos. The panicked confusion on his face: good, actually.

    1. In raccoon societies, asking this for any reason other than genuine concern about potential danger is considered the height of rudeness. The traditional response is "why does your face look like that?"

      re: "Why are you doing this"

  4. Jul 2022
    1. maya let me know that there is actually some history of composers recording piano rolls in the early 20th century (i.e. "classical" composers, not just ragtime or saloon music, which is the context in which I usually think of piano rolls being used)—and music-knowers don't think of them any differently than a traditionally recorded performance. Neat! Yet another reason I should've waited to blog about it instead of firing off a post, because I might've thought to look that sort of thing up first. Then again, I might not've. Don't know what I don't know, and all that.

      Another dynamic, though: I might not have thought to reply with the fun fact to a blog post, because it seems heavier-weight, less chattily conversational. I should likely adjust my tooling to make this easier, but I'll bet there are others for whom the difference in likelihood of response is even more pronounced. Maybe it's good to do one's tentative workshopping in public if you think other people chiming in might be useful!

  5. Jun 2022
    1. (anyway, it's interesting that these days there isn't really a strong brand association for sunscreen, at least not in the US. It's one of those rare fully genericized products; no one cares what brand of sunscreen they get, it could be the cheapest possible product on the shelf as long as it has a high SPF. One cynical point of view would be that this is a market niche just waiting for someone with a clever marketing idea to swoop in and make a name for themselves.

      I don't think this is true! A lot of people care about sunscreen in three ways:

      1. People who wear makeup have a real hard time with it not playing nicely with SPF, especially those higher SPFs, especially especially if water resistant. The exact texture ends up being important.
      2. There are real safety concerns and then also people getting ridiculous about particular ingredients, so some people get really picky about what's in their sunscreen.
      3. Fragrance. I cannot stand the smell of a lot of sunscreen, but I am a Real Pale Person so I can't just ignore it. Hawaiian Tropic has a loud floral scent to cover it up; the Supergoop play stuff smells like it's trying to cover it up with lemon candy; there are Whole Foodsy herbal variants; etc. etc.

      Sunscreen is one of the harder things to launch because of the testing involved; innovative formulations available in Asia and Europe are often unavailable in the US for that reason. However, there definitely still is someone trying to make a brand out of it: the Poolsuite.FM people have launched Vacation sunscreen (full screen video so won't play nice with that mobile data limit).

    1. Q: Why do you have a semicolon in your name? On raccoon typewriters, the semicolon was originally on the 2 key, where the @ symbol is now. It's a visual pun that only raccoons get, but m; is still pronounced "mat". Also, raccoons traditionally put punctuation in their names because they don't like to be tracked, and it foils government databases.

      This is fantastic. Internet persona lore. Who is brave enough to make themselves lore? Kicks has legendary-tier lore. (I still get mad thinking about hacker news dweebs failing to have even a single bone in their body capable of recognizing non-literal text, I am not cool, I have no chill, etc.) I like that this isn't quite a statement about bluelander themself, but about the context they inhabit.

      I'm somehow reminded of

      Now, when getting into book discussions with a certain kind of man, I often say “I can’t read” as soon as possible. This is a pretty transparent defense mechanism, but it works for me, sort of.

      from that essay on David Foster Wallace that I treasure in my heart more than I can explain. I love the idea of instrumentalizing one's angle on reality. Sorry, having this conversation with you in the frame you want to use is just not going to work for me. I can't read.

      Raccoons traditionally put punctuation in their names because they don't like to be tracked.

      Phenomenal.

    1. Because nobody but me would notice it, I feel weird about opening an issue on github. I know it's a bug, I know it's something the developer would want to fix if he knew about it, but something about it feels entitled, like "excuse me, you broke my toy, wtf are you doing." The new issue is, at least for awhile, right at the top of the issue page, implying that it's the most important. It feels like I'm making work for someone, for a completely trivial reason. I can live without the favimoji. Why make a big deal about it?

      FWIW I don't know your dev experience but mine has been that... it's easy for things to descend into chaos without a record of them. By creating the record of this unintended behavior, you're already doing some of the work for the maintainer. Every project has an implicit backlog, and making it explicit is tedious, so rather than "asking for a fix", you're "documenting a future item" (especially because like you're saying: they definitely intend for it to not work this way!)