Werekat @werekat@mastodon.acc.sunet.se
Humanities scholar, tech geek.
Current header image is by Yuumei, check her out! https://www.yuumeiart.com/
Joined Sep 2018
Contact lenses differ significantly from glasses when it comes to hand-eye coordination.
This message brought to you by my now fashionably-distressed jeans. :P
Much as I try, I find it difficult, if not impossible, to escape that cycle of "work (including fun stuff, like sports) like 12-hour days for 2-4 days" - "crash". I hate the crashes, because I literally can't keep the simplest things, such as phone calls or emails, straight. Minimizing their impact requires routine, and that is one luxury I don't really have when out afield.
Waking up to a headache on fieldwork day is the worst. XD Wish me a rainless poll day, because when it's raining people don't take kindly to being stopped in the streets and asked about things!
Biggest conference in the field now over. I am beat, but happy. :P
To the best of my knowledge, much classical music was "technical" music: serving as dance scores or other entertainment.
I'm listening to Masayoshi Soken's soundtrack to the latest FFXIV expansion, and wondering if I'll get to see the day when movie and video game soundtracks aren't just performed by symphonic orchestras, but are written into the general history of music.
It's probably being done already, but I'm so far from that field, I wouldn't know where to look!
Bah! I like my translation of a translation better than the original wording! Sucks to be me. :P
Finishing up research for a conference paper next week, tracing the last thing that I need. Failing so far, but finding amazing quotes.
"The person who gave me this system once told me that at one school they managed to make a sheep mindful. But it was still just a mindful sheep. I asked him what they did with the mindful sheep. He said they ate it."
Ouspensky, "Further notes", chapter 13, "Payment."
Ok, this is going to be a sinful facebook video, so gird your loins:
https://www.facebook.com/arkadij.kelner/videos/2075897315869799/
This is a Japanese version of a Sholom-Aleichem play, rendered in perfect Jewish form and in lovely Japanese. This is exactly what a respectful reimagining should look like, in my opinion. The cultures are also largely far away enough so that there is no recent (i.e. last few hundred years) bad blood, AFAIK, which to me is also important. The play looks amazing, I wish I got to see the full version!
Similarly, "wow, you're fat" said with a tone of admiration rather than sarcasm probably means "wow, you're good at this".
There are also negative connotations not linked to body weight at all, but rather to brazen, unsubtle behavior. "That's fat of you" means that you're barging through - either because you're not good enough to do otherwise OR because you are THAT good that you can afford it. As usual, evaluations are double-sided linguistic things.
One of the people on my friends' lists just reminded me that Slavic languages did not entirely lose the connotations 'fat' has with with 'power' and 'health'. Think similarly to 'fed carry' in team games, but only usable in everyday life. This is VERY informal, so unlikely to be used with nouns such as "expert", but "they are a fat [profession name]" means someone with a wealth of experience.
Then the rightwing took the science wars and ran with it, which eventually helped nourish the whole fake-news discourse." [end quote]
And another very frank, very direct admission:
"The science warriors who attacked us during the science wars were determined to paint us as social constructionists – that all truth is purely socially constructed. And I think we walked into that. We invited those misreadings in a range of ways. We could have been more careful about listening and engaging more slowly. It was all too easy to read us in the way the science warriors did. [cont.]
If you say, “Of course I believe in evolution,” you have lost, because you have entered the semiotics of representationalism – and post-truth, frankly. You have entered an arena where these are all just matters of internal conviction and have nothing to do with the world. You have left the domain of worlding." [End quote]
The idea that reality is a question of belief is a barely secularized legacy of the religious wars. In fact, reality is a matter of worlding and inhabiting. It is a matter of testing the holdingness of things. Do things hold or not?
Take evolution. The notion that you would or would not “believe” in evolution already gives away the game. [cont.]
My absolute favorite part:
"Anyhow. We were at this conference. It was a bunch of primate field biologists, plus me and Bruno. And Stephen Glickman, a really cool biologist, took us apart privately. He said: “Now, I don’t want to embarrass you. But do you believe in reality?”
We were both kind of shocked by the question. First, we were shocked that it was a question of belief, which is a Protestant question. A confessional question. [cont.]
This is a lovely interview, particularly for those who are afraid of Virginia Woolf... Sorry, postmodernism. I think I wanna keep this to give it to my students for context next year.
I sometimes really love reading the books my students will get to read!
"Doniger also had a stint in Moscow, where most of the Indologists were dissidents, and much of their conversation was conducted in Sanskrit for both political and practical reasons." p. 50, Bloesch and Minister.
That is totally believable, although damn me if I know how the hell she managed to get in there!
This joke probably deserves a microfiction at some point: "Exorcism is when you read poetry so well that the spirits come out to thank you for the reading."
A curious little piece of Russian slang (haven't seen this in other Slavic languages): there's a slang noun for "people you're responsible for/who work for you". That noun is "fighters", as in "I've got a few fighters with me [that I can command, but for whom I am also responsible, so take note]".
Ukrpol, far right, +/-
Humanities scholar, tech geek.
Current header image is by Yuumei, check her out! https://www.yuumeiart.com/
Joined Sep 2018
