Don’t take “no” for an answer!

There is some implicit notion that when a woman becomes more masculinity it is good, and trans men somehow embody the ultimate apotheosis of a woman (i.e. a woman who achieves manhood), it all just reeks of misogyny and transphobia to me. This thinking seems to hate femininity and it negates the male gender identity of trans men.

It’s certainly not a notion I hold.

My own stance on this is strictly from the “harm done” angle. Transitioning is already incredibly tough to do. You’re probably losing friends. You’re probably losing family. Everybody around you is looking at you with different eyes, many of which are hostile.

To suddenly lose an entire community that was supportive (presumably) as well? That would be nasty!

I … think that’s what I actually said?

… if you’re a trans-man who doesn’t (yet?) pass, it would be cruel to be forced out of connections …

Yes. Yes it is. I’m saying that if you’re in transition to manhood, being told “you can’t hang with us anymore because you’re of the icky gender” from previous friends and allies is cruel.

Oh, I’m all for including them. I was just surprised, no worries!

And yes, if you’re a trans man who doesn’t (yet?) pass, it would be cruel to be forced out of connections without commensurate connections being formed on the other side of the transition.

Computation NOW cannot replicate what humans do with our rather limited senses.

“Self-driving” cars are being made NOW.

That means it’s the NOW computation we worry about, not some hypothetical future computation capabilities. And the NOW computation cannot do the job safely with just vision.

Huh. I didn’t know trans-men were also on the list. (Not objecting, just news to me.)

I’m friendly to anybody but Nazis. And friends of Nazis. And people expressing ideas with passing resemblance to Nazis. And …

Well, you can see the pattern!

Killing animals for sport.

They even have special places for the ultra-wealthy to gamble respectably. They’re given a twee name. Something like “stock market” or the like…?

Ouch! The (accurate!) cynicism burns!

This voice sounds very familiar to me. Very shini.

I love Chongqing hot pot going in.

I loathe it coming out.

“My” argument. Yes.

So we’ll add “literacy” to your list entitled “things I cannot do right”.

Ah. I didn’t get past three episodes of that show so had no idea that existed.

I don’t get it. There’s like two movies and three TV series called Rising Tide or The Rising Tide and … I don’t see any way “was right” could apply to any of them?

MCU films are the same movie repeated endlessly for the most part. I gave up before the big Thanos set pieces—at about the time of either Black Panther or Captain Marvel, whichever came last—and I genuinely can’t recall which remembered scene or dialogue snippet came from which movie. (And increasingly I can’t even remember scenes or dialogue).

One that gets a lot of my friends angry with me: The best Star Trek was the original series. The second-best was Enterprise. The rest aren’t Star Trek.

Forrest Gump is not a movie about a kind-hearted, if slow, man whose perseverance and innocence allow him to succeed despite his limitations. It is instead a pretty damning portrayal of the “American Dream” showing that being lucky and being in the right place at the right time is far more important to success than is hard work or aptitude.

Thelma & Louise is not a feminist road movie and definitively not a bold statement about female friendship, liberation, and resistance against male oppression. It is instead a bleak view of how dominating patriarchy crushes every attempt to rebel against it to the point of self-destruction. The “triumphant” finale is not a liberating act of empowerment but the inevitable despairing outcome of those who would dare tackle the injustices of the partriarchal world order.

I find some of the best introduction to the whole jazz ethos is to go old-school with Big Band and '20s jazz in general. You can get people started down the path to radical improvisation by the tighter, more constrained forms of that era and then guide them toward the more … ah … challenging stuff.

I’m in the “little bit of both” camp here.

1. By definition if you’re a malicious manipulator you’re being a bad person. (Disagree? Look up what “malicious” means…) And bad people really should be punished. (But that’s not the end-all, be-all of things: good people should also be rewarded!)

2. On the other hand, you live in a world where bad actors exist. At some level you have to watch out for yourself instead of dumping that burden on literally everybody around you who in some form or another cares about you.

Where things get complicated for me is when the people who are victims of malicious manipulators have been manipulated through their own desire to be, well, malicious. The victims of 419 scams, for example, are sucked in by malicious manipulators through a desire to benefit through what amounts to malicious manipulation. They wanted to be scammers themselves; it just turns out that they were incompetent at it and got scammed instead. Here my feelings are mixed.

Maybe at the beginning. A lot of his alt-right-manosphere stuff started creeping (pun intended!) into Dilbert even before he went publicly Nazi.

There’s layers of hilarity for me.

1. The introduce German vocabulary, like the “Wesen” that are at the heart of the show. It’s the right word, note: it means “creature” or “being” or other such words. But they pronounce it like “VESS-en”, instead of the proper way of saying it which sounds more like “VAY-zen”. Thus they’re pronouncing what is arguably the core word of the show as if it meant “whose” instead of “creature”. This makes me laugh. Constantly.

2. There’s a whole host of comical errors in the “German” words for the “VESS-en”(🤣):

• Blutbad: The name for werewolves, translates to “bloodbath”. So far so good. Perhaps a poetic name to show the deadliness of the creatures. But in plural they call them “Blutbaden” which would mean “bathing in blood”. The word they were actually looking for was “Blutbäder”.

• Jägerbär: This is a werebear and is intended to mean “hunter-bear”. Which is fine. Except when it shows up in writing it’s spelled “Jägerbar” (and it’s pronounced that way about half the time too), meaning “hunter’s bar”. As in the place you get your drinks if you’re a hunter. (It also sometimes shows up as “Jagerbar” which … doesn’t seem to mean anything I can figure out.)

• Ziegevolk: Supposed to mean “goat people” but it should be “Ziegenvolk” (plural: “Ziegenvölker”).

• Fuchsbau: Supposed to mean “foxhole” but this is not a word that has any supernatural connotations in German. It’s literally the word for a fox burrow. (It’s telling that the rarely-seen German dub of the show changes it to Fuchsteufel: literally fox-devil.)

• And a cast of thousands. Most of the “Wesen” names are wrong. They’re what happens when someone comes up with a “cool name” in English and translates it word for word into German with a German-English dictionary, unaware that other languages aren’t just one-for-one mappings with English vocabulary, grammar, and idiom.

3. The real comedy sets in, however, when they started introducing real German speakers (and “real” German speakers) into the story. In the first two seasons or so, the only foreign languages they inserted for any length of time were French and Spanish. (I can’t judge the Spanish except peripherally: it seemed fine, but the French ranged from competent to exquisite.) But in the third season they set some things in Germany and had “native” (and native) German speakers talking. Some of these “German speakers” spoke such a badly-corrupted German it was impossible to work out what they were actually saying; it was somehow worse than the “Chinese” in Firefly(!). But the true comedy gold is when real German speakers had to speak the lines. Because for consistency’s sake they had to mispronounce words and misuse words that were already in canon … and you could SEE in their faces how uncomfortable it all was to say “VESS-en” for “Wesen”. (I suspect there were a lot of reshoots because the actual Germans kept screwing up their lines using correct German pronunciation, vocabulary, and syntax.)

Now don’t get me wrong here. I like the show. I’m enjoying watching it. I just find the cringeworthy German to be a layer of unintentional comedy gold atop a series that’s pretty entertaining in its own right. It’s just the victim of what commonly comes from unilingual writers in any language (though anglophones have a far higher proportion of unilingualism than most other language groups).

See, this is what happens. The writers come up with a neat turn of the phrase or a cool vocabulary item in their native language. (Fair enough. It’s literally the language they think in.) Then they ask the wrong question:

• How would I say <phrase/word/whatever> in <language>?

And they’ll go to a native speaker and ask that, without context. Or they’ll go to a language dictionary and translate it manually. Or they’ll go to Google Translate. Or these days maybe to ChatGPT. And what comes out is a literal translation (that might even be an accurate literal translation!) … that is nonetheless gibberish in the target language. (Pronunciation is another thing entirely, and I cut some slack there because actors are not going to always be polyglots; indeed rarely are.)

So to illustrate, let’s take a common English expression: “Who gives a shit?” I’ll translate it into three languages literally:

• Qui donne une merde ?
• Wer gibt eine Scheiße?
• 谁给一坨屎？ (Shéi gěi yī tuó shǐ?)

All three of these are 100% accurate translations of the expression. NONE of them have any meaning in their target language. French, German, and Chinese speakers, if they didn’t know the English expression, would blink uncomprehendingly at you trying to figure out if you’ve just had an aneurysm or something. See, the proper, idiomatic translation is more like this:

• On s’en fout. (Literally “we don’t care” but used in the space that “who gives a shit?” is placed.)
• Wen interessiert’s? (Literally “who’s interested?”) / Mir doch egal (“I don’t care anyway”) depending on which way “who gives a shit?” is being used. (Recall what I said about one-to-one mapping…)
• 谁在乎？(Shéi zài hū?) / 我才不在乎呢。(Wǒ cái bù zài hū ne) depending on how dismissive you want to be in Chinese. The first means “who cares?” and the second, far harsher, means “I don’t care at all”.

So for a show to not become an unintentional comedy like Grimm became for me, the writers would either have to stay in their lane and not try to introduce German, or they would have had to actively collaborate with a German native-level speaker to find out how actual GERMANS would say things.