(Part 1 of several, because I managed to gather up a decent backlog, and it'll probably take me a couple hours to actually get it all copy-pasted.)
My Content
Context: A popular tumblrite feels guilty about taking discarded books, I infodump about why they're actually totally legally in the clear, probably:
#the last intentional crime i committed was nervously stealing books from a very wet dumpster #that was fun but a very guilty kind of fun
#weird facts I know:#the legal precedent for dumpster diving#I'm assuming it was out for collection and not behind a locked fence or something#PSA: trespassing is still usually illegal#also note that California v. Greenwood is at a federal level#your specific city might have its own ordinances
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Context: I chime in on a discussion of whether or not knowing English will help at all with learning ASL:
Knowing English will help you learn ASL in at least two respects: First, words which are the right combination of both short and rare are often fingerspelled instead of having their own signs.¹ ² Examples of these include: air, fog, fry, glue, lab, roof, and zoo to name a few.
Second, there’s the practice of initialization: using the fingerspelled letter that represents the first letter of an English word as the handshape for a sign. A few signs that do this are: family, aunt, yellow, blue, elevator, and protein.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flaksesomlys wanted to know if there really was such a thing as initialization discourse [Wayback]:I Am Not A Sign Language Expert, but the gist of it is that sign language speakers argue that initialization is often overused when coining new words, even to the point of detriment to the word’s understandability.
For example, there’s an initialized and non-initialized version of the sign for “single”. In the initialized version, it uses the handsign for “s” as part of the sign, whereas in the non-initialized version, it uses a single finger held up as the handshape. The argument is that the non-initialized version of this sign is more intuitive, conveying more information via its shape without the need for English language knowledge to interpret it.
I think I generally agree with this position? For most of the examples I’ve seen of signs with two competing versions, the non-initialized version has more inherently encoded information. (Take the proposed sign for “amino acid”. It’s just “a-a”. Why not have a sign that shows, say, the shape of an amino acid, instead?)
On the other hand, some people want to get rid of initialized signs altogether, and I think I disagree with that at least somewhat. If the choice of handshape is arbitrary, as in the case of “yellow”, it doesn’t seem to me like there’s any reason not to pick an initialized handsign. Yellowness doesn’t have an inherent shape, after all, so you might as well use the shape to encode the English word, since you don’t have anything else in particular you want to put there.
However, if the initialization is competing with other useful information, then I agree that the initial should definitely be the one to go.
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A true story, yes really, [Wayback], in reply to someone feeling bad about forgetting their Morse:
If it makes you feel any better, I mixed up the ASL letters for “f” and “s” for several months when I was learning to fingerspell.
And then I realized, and I was like, “ffs”.
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Not Mine
Look at this adorable geology infodump! [Wayback] But yeah! Rocks.
If you send a Homestuck character to Hogwarts, there's one thing you have to warn them about. [Wayback]
That’ll give you, er, bees. [Wayback]
It turns out that fan theory about that one Jupiter Ascending character was canon all along. [Wayback] [cw: discussion of canon-typical violence]
Look at these cute animals.
Also look at this cute eldritch abomination. [cw: trippy Deep Dream generated images]
Programming jokes.
A short story, including the phrase, "yote the shark." [Wayback]
A short story about a robot cop. [cw: discussion of profiling]
How To Fly A Plane Full Of Bombs (If Your Name Is Steve) [cw: Wonder Woman, Captain America canon warnings apply]
Neural networks, doing exactly what they're told. (I also recommend the linked paper for additional hilarity.) [Wayback]
An interesting Black Panther meta. [Wayback] [cw: cynical, imperialism]
A very funny illustrated Silmarillion meta. (Wab.) [Wayback]
Captain Picard takes a different approach to handling the tribbles. [cw: gun]
Trolley problem memes!!! [Wayback]
The Tiger, a very aesthetic illustration of several poems. [Wayback]
If you're a member of the OFF fandom, check out this cool animation compilation. [cw: canon content warnings all apply]
And apparently, the city of Los Angeles is suing the Weather Channel, because its popular app was misappropriating supposedly-private user data for purposes such as, "targeted marketing and analysis for hedge funds."
