Lady, EVOLVED @Lady@cat.family

@aescling i think it’s at least a little insensitive to take something deeply rooted in japanese history and culture (and a fair bit of trauma) and then go “this is about this thing me and my white friends do as a hobby”

@aescling hosting massive cons with thousands of attendees is a hallmark of societal rejection

@aescling what does this have to do with furries

@aescling how so

@coriander looks a lot like the library of congress’s version but who knows i guess when there were additional pressings https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcmassbookdig.evileyethanatolo00park/

@aescling @alyssa fucking your meowscarada is a grind?

@aescling @alyssa kimty i saw you posting every day about touching grass

@aescling @alyssa i play pokémon as an RPG not an esport

@alyssa @aescling no i just like dunsparce

@alyssa @aescling yeah i think “here is a somewhat limited selection of available pokémon and you have to make them work together” is interesting, but would PREFER a system that occasionally gave you “whoops, the only pokémon from dark cave you can use is the 1% encounter rate dunsparce”

@aescling why does anyone do any challenge run

@packetcat you can learn a fair bit of linguistics just from wikipedia, legitimately

philosophy is a lot harder; i don't trust the internet for that

@packetcat wikipedia has lots of examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class

@packetcat gendered nouns are problematic but the more general form—“noun classes”—can be kind of cool

indo-european languages settled on two classes, tied to natural gender—boring

but some languages have as many as 12, and some distinctions are a lot more meaningful—animate versus inanimate, for example (English has this in “it” versus singular “they”)

compare measure words—i’m glad we say “a drop of water”, not “a piece of water”, even tho there’s no reason for it—noun classes are just a further level of grammaticalization on top of this concept

but tying it to natural gender is silly; they should have not done that (there is evidence that the original distinction was “concrete” VS “abstract”)

@packetcat i agree; i think people like it because of (1) low barrier to entry, and (2) it gets you thinking intentionally about language and word choice in a way which seems “solvable” (as opposed to natural languages where you have miscommunications arising from differences in dialect and vocabulary, and these cannot be predicted in advance)

but you know, ultimately i think dialect is a good thing, even if it does produce miscommunications sometimes, and i don’t want to be a part of a language community which is too tightly-controlled to allow for that kind of linguistic diversity