i gotta suspicion everyone got a secret hoard of something they keep hidden from their friends let if its shoes and makeup or like teacups that shits fine and all but once i went to my buddy mikes house and like,, well i knew him for years since like fucking 2006, we talk non stop,used to be my bff of the year and what not, ya whatever, i hop to get something from his basement once and i turn on the light and its littered with not a handful, but at least 20 hand made dollhouses with little trees and paint jobs and everything made from wood he harvested from his fathers construction company, all he missing is furniture and little people like FUCK that fucked me up so bad, but thats not the point of my story here see, it didnt fuck w me as much as after i visited my not so much anymore freinds house in 10th grade and she had a collection of her friends hair and she asked me for a snippet becasue she never had blue before and i went home and blocked her number anyway she jsut messaged me on instagram 30 min ago and i had to like sit in my kitchen in the dark for a while jsut thinking about how scary it is to know people but not know them at all
heres some pics cuz i actually i love his little houses they just took me by surprise cuz he aint seem like the type
oh it aint me!!! i bitched to him that he got like 0 fucking people living in his fucking basement village so he was all, then fucking buy me some??
so i went on a miniture dollhouse website and bought him his first citizen and he laughed cuz it was this lil motherfucker
if u look closely hes the black dot in the first pic in front of the white house!!!
This is cute and I’m glad you were so supportive of something he was embarrassed of
That craftsmanship tho??? He has some incredible skills!!!
Which is why we have beer and sausage and cheese and pizza and swedish pancakes. Unless it’s only an issue of assimilation if people are brown 🙄
Literally this was the argument that white America made to justify the Chinese Exclusion Act, as well as refusing to allow other Asian immigrants to become naturalized/immigrate at all. The argument was “these people "refuse”/are “unable” to assimilate, so they should be kept out as much as possible".
them: SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST MEANS HUMANS MUST BE INDIVIDUALLY SELF-SUFFICIENT AND COMPLETELY INDEPENDENT
biologist:
Like literally the only reason we didn’t go extinct is because we are aggressively social creatures who community organized and helped each other when faced with disasters that drove other species over the brink.
(Like we’re so aggressively social that we looked at APEX PREDATORS and went ‘they look soft! Friend????’)
(The answer was yes because wolves are also aggressively social and they adopted the strange tall not-wolves just as eagerly.)
humans @ wolves: holy shit these things are so cute i wonder if they’ll let us pet them?
wolves @ humans: holy shit these things are so cute i wonder if they’ll pet us?
The fact that the location of the world’s oldest tree has to be kept secret encapsulates everything that’s bad about humanity.
There’s a story about that, actually.
According to the smithsonianmag.com, the world’s oldest bristlecone pine was a nearly 5,000 year old tree later named Prometheus. In 1964, a man named Donald Rusk Currey decided to use an increment borer to determine its age (a process that cuts a small hole into the center of the tree trunk, and is not intended to kill the tree). Unfortunately, the borer got stuck. He and a park ranger cut the tree down to remove the equipment, and when they counted the tree rings, they realized their mistake. Oops. This incident lead to better protection of the remaining bristlecone pines.
There’s some wiggle room about what can be called “the world’s oldest living tree.” The world’s oldest living single tree is the tree that the OP is referring to. Its name is Methuselah,and it is also around 5,000 years old. Since its location is unknown, nobody knows what it looks like. But it might be this tree here:
But technically, it isn’t the oldest living tree. Let me explain.
It turns out that root systems of trees can send up genetically identical saplings (aka clones) via their root systems. Like so:
Which means the original trunk can die, but since the root system is attached to other trees which give it nutrients, it lives on. The root system can theoretically do this indefinitely. So the tree trunks could be fairly young, but the roots could be large and very, very, very old. So the oldest “tree” isn’t a small grove, it’s a logic-defyingforest.
I’d like you to meet Pando.
This male quaking aspen covers 106 acres and is ancient. I’m talking an estimate of 80,000 years. The trees you can see are just “shoots” he sent up, and their average age is 130 years old. He is his own forest. If trees could talk, I’d love to hear what he had to say.
He might be dying, due to insects and drought (hmm, wonder what could have happened to cause that). A section of Pando is being studied in an attempt to find a solution. But in the meantime, we can enjoy him for his beauty.
The Supreme Court just issues a ruling allowing Ohio and other states to purge voters from their election registration rolls due to their failure to cast a ballot in previous elections.
This is a major victory for the Trump administration and the GOP, and a direct consequence of the Supreme Court being stacked with more conservative judges (the votes were 5-4). This is also a huge part of what Trump/the GOP were counting on to save them in the 2018 midterm elections, which is where Democrats have been hoping to take back a majority in the House, giving them more power to combat Trump’s abuses of power and Republican legislation.
What this means is YOU CAN NOT ASSUME THAT YOU ARE REGISTERED for the 2018 elections, just because you SHOULD be. Thanks to this decision, red states can purge voters’ registration based on their not having cast a ballot in even just previous federal elections, NOT just the national Presidential elections. Effectively, if you haven’t voted in previous senate races or for congressional representatives in the past few years, that’s all they need now to say you’re no longer registered and need to register again.
They’re deliberately counting on people assuming they’re still registered and so not checking until after registration deadlines have passed, or showing up to vote this November and only then finding out they’re no longer registered, when its too late to do a damn thing about it.
And this is absolutely targeted at marginalized communities, low income voters, disabled voters, and basically anyone who simply can’t always AFFORD to keep on top of every federal election and show up to vote in every senate race, etc. Which not so coincidentally happen to be all the communities and voters who have the most to gain from Democratic victories in the 2018 midterms and are the least likely to cast votes for GOP candidates at this point.
This was absolutely a calculated effort aimed specifically at keeping the GOP in power with a majority control of the government come November, and unfortunately, it has a DAMN good chance of accomplishing just that if it goes by unacknowledged. I’m not looking to alarm or panic anyone, simply to say:
If you are a registered voter in a red state at this point, please please please do not take your registered status as assumed. Check on your registration status, look up all relevant voter registration deadlines for your state and district, CIRCLE THAT SHIT ON YOUR CALENDAR, and check your registration status AGAIN right before those deadlines pass, so you can be sure of it before its too late to do anything about it til the next voting cycle.
use vote.org to check your registration status. use the form, or scroll down to find the resources for the state you live in.
Okay, so full disclaimer here: this is gonna be a kind of difficult post to make without any Native Audio recordings to explain this, since this is an explanation of phonetics. Bear with me though, cause this is something that can boost your Japanese accent a LOT, with relatively little effort. Also, there’s gonna be a fair amount of explanation here cause I have to teach you some words about how your voice works and stuff.
So what exactly *is* devoicing? It’s probably actually easier to explain voicing first, so I can get to explaining what devoicing.
Voicing
is basically just a fancy linguistics term for moving your vocal cords when you make a sound; try holding your fingers against your throat when you say “aaaa”. Do you feel it vibrating? Those are your vocal cords making sound. Try making a “t” sound by itself without a vowel, holding your fingers against your throat. You don’t feel it vibrating, do you? Try it now with “d”.
The only major difference between the sounds ‘t’ and ‘d’ make in English is their voicing; T is devoiced, D is voiced.
Japanese has 4 major pairs of Voiced and Devoiced consonants.
K · G
S · Z (J)
T(Ch) · D
H/P · B
If you know Hiragana, you can almost 1:1 correlate this to characters with and characters without tenten (ie た and だ)
So now that we have that out of the way, how do we put it to use to actually make us sound better?
In Standard Japanese, ‘i’ and ‘u’ get devoiced between unvoiced consonants.
That probably doesn’t seem like a large revelation by itself, but it can actually improve the way you sound by a lot!
Try saying the sentence ‘くたくただった’ without devoicing anything; it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, now does it? Now try pronouncing it devoiced, something along the lines of ‘k’tak’ta datta’.
It’s a lot easier to say, isn’t it?
Here’s a few more words to try out:
すかすか – Hollow (s’kas’ka)
すき – Appreciated (s’ki)
できた – Was Able To (dek’ta)
Here are a few more side notes, for those more interested in phonetics.
If the mora with the i or u is a downstep, devoicing isn’t a necessity; you can do it if you want, and a lot of natives do, but it won’t sound unnatural if you don’t.
If there’s an i or u at the beginning or end of a word, it may be partially or completely devoiced (This is why you probably learned to pronounce です as ‘des’. The u lies at the end, so it gets devoiced to “des’”.)
I’m sorry for this super rambly lesson! It’s my first post on Langblr, and since I don’t have any access to Native Audio, it’s really hard to explain phonetics stuff! I really want to go more in depth into Pitch Accent though, so please follow me on @aki-no-arashi if you want to keep up with any of that!
I had no idea there was like a technical term for this. This also explains why I had a hard time putting my finger on why some people seem to sound forced or stiff when speaking Japanese and others don’t. People in my Japanese class would ask for pronunciation help and I was like “this part is too long/stressed, you gotta shorten it”, but really they had to devoice it
Don’t let people make fun of you for liking japanese culture.
I am living in japan right now and let me tell ya:
There are people here who can’t speak or understand English who play nothing but Missy elliot and ludacris, even in businesses like housing offices and restaurants.
There are people who have cowboy hats and dead cow skulls in their home because they idolize what they assume American homes are like.
There are people who learn English strictly through music videos and American television shows.
There are entire karaoke bars with english songs often sung by people who have no idea what the lyrics mean.
Japan often takes American shows like the powerpuff girls and make japanese versions of them.
They often mistake common Americans for celebrities. I have been mistaken for Micheal jordan, tiger woods, Shaquille o’neal, Tyler perry, and saddest of all: queen latifa.
The act of sprinkling English into your japanese sentences is considered cute and cool and is popular with teenagers. Bonus points if you happen to use it correctly.
Japanese stores sell shirts with english on them and people buy them not knowing that most of those word combinations are nonsense.
Don’t let someone shame you for singing an anime opening, using japanese in your sentences, wearing clothing with japanese on it, ect. If anything, this is just one more thing that you have in common with them.
The American/Japanese cultural exchange is so pure and wonderful and I love it so much
OK BUT RESONATE WITH THE SHIRT THING THOUGH
My Chinese relatives buy me shirts from China with English letters on them hoping I think it’s cool
I have a shirt that says “Hi Quality Uality”
It’s amazing
It happens alot.
And then what’s really great is Americans getting tattoos of Chinese characters thinking they mean one thing when they really don’t
Also a topic where the reverse happens.
lemme tell you..i have been in a grocery store in Japan and heard the unedited Get Low playin over the intercom..it was literally a Katt Williams moment
Oh, unsensored songs are pretty common.
I should not be hearing an unsensored ‘Magic Stick’ playing at a family restaurant.
And the best thing is when literally no one shows that they understand what is being said.
I was in a Chinese cafe one time and they had obviously put on their “fuck you” playlist. I mean, uncensored versions of Fuck You by Lilly Allen, Fuck You by Cee-lo Green, etc. No one else had any idea.
Oh, also, I got my favorite shirt ever in a little tchotchky store in Sichuan:
More
that last one got me holy shit.
Yes to all of this, but as a Japanese american I think that the fetishization that happens on both sides is a problem. Like the sexualization of things/people that seem “exotic” is Very racialized. It’s one thing to appreciate a culture and its people. It’s another to idolize a culture/people and/or fetishize them. It’s dehumanizing and harmful. Lemme tell you guys with yellow fever are the worst. The infantilization of Asian men is rampant in America. And don’t even get me started on enjoyment of black culture while being anti-black (which is not uncommon in Japan and China)
Disheveled Mess 