Took my tiny child with me to the Halloween store. Walked in and immediately realized it would be a terrible mistake.
They had those jumpscare machine things everywhere, lots of spooky noise machines, scary looking animatronic things, crazy decorations, just the whole 9 yards and then some. I immediately went to turn around and leave when I heard a noise coming from my arms.
My one year old child who gets scared if we cough…. was laughing.
She makes this precious “eee!” sound and starts vibrating when she sees something she really likes, usually an animal or a balloon, and she points right at the big zombie thing by the door and does that. I carry her in past a huge 10 ft tall Pennywise inflatable, and she smacks me to tell me to stop so she can look. She ponders him for a moment, and his glowing light-up eyes, then points at his hand and shouts “BEEM!” Which is her word for “balloon.” She made us stand there under Pennywise for at least 3 minutes, which is a really long time for a one-year-old.
Then, she begs to get down, so I let her loose and she just books it all over the store. Finds the creepy demonic looking babies and shouts “BABY!” then gets this confused look on her face and tries to wipe the “dirt” off their faces. Decides it’s not worth it, goes and picks up a severed hand decoration, hands it to me and says “hand.” Yes, my dear, it is a hand. And yes, that severed foot has “toes,” you’re very right.
Finds the wigs, runs down the aisle shouting “hair! hair!” and grabbing her own sparse little headfuzz so hard I think she’s going to rip it all out. Then she found the speaker in the wall that was blaring Monster Mash and she demanded I pick her up so we could “DANSSSE”. But she got distracted by the big spider decorations, which she christened as dogs by running toward them and barking.
She ran up and down the aisles of costumes touching the fabric and making her little “tss tss tss” giggle that she does when she’s having Much Too Good a Time. Every so often she’d stop, look back to make sure I was there, and point at something and vibrate with her aggressive “EEEE!”
A man turned a corner wearing one of the creepy latex masks. He immediately started apologizing to me, saying “I’m so sorry, I’m looking for my friend, I don’t want to scare her.” Meanwhile my child is standing there looking up at him with the most confused look on her face. Not scared, just confused, like he is so dumb and she can’t figure out why he would want to make that stupid face for so long. But he rounds another corner all hunched over, she flaps her arms and sighs, and takes off to go scream at the creepy lawn decorations.
When it was time to go, nothing could convince her to come to me willingly, so I had to promise her one last look at the balloon man while I picked her up against her will. Pennywise placated her, and we left the store with a smile on her chubby little cheeks. She demanded we wait and watch the big inflatable-flailing-arm-tube-man out front, the one that was bright orange and had a jack-o-lantern face, and she bounced and wiggled and danced in my arms despite its fan being louder than the loud motorcycles that scare her on our walks. She waved bye-bye to it as we left for the car.
Basically, that was the cutest thing that’s ever happened to me in my life, and it’s so crazy how so many things are culturally taught and kids are just… immune to that. All she saw was bright colors and things she recognized and could name, in a place she could explore and touch. She has no concept of clowns being scary or zombies being A Thing or what constitutes “creepy” and “spooky” and “gross.” To her, a severed arm with gore hanging out the end doesn’t represent pain or violence, it’s just “arm,” and it’s got some weird stuff on the end that’s funny colors. They’re just things, there’s no context for it.
The world is weird and beautiful and it’s so cool to see it through the eyes of someone who is so New to this planet and hasn’t been influenced by society and culture yet.
I live with it but don’t make a home out of it. I make space for it in my bed, we eat dinner together sometimes. we walk at night but it falls asleep before I get home and I forget about it. it comes out in loneliness, it comes out in anger, it comes out in desire for attention; and I remember that something is just hurting and make space for it to hurt. I listen to the birds sing. I pay attention to flowers growing. I let it exist with happiness because sometimes they are together. I make a point to become kinder to myself.
Finn: You’re going to scrap the remains of the Death Star for parts?
Rey: *sliding an arm over Finn and Poe’s shoulders while lifting BB-8 with the Force to also be included* No… We’re going to scrap the remains of the Death Star for parts.
South Carolina has much looser regulations around fireworks than North Carolina does, you can buy stuff there which practically borders on plastic explosives. It also just so happens that NC’s largest city sits right on that state border. In the run-up to July 4th, I and tens of thousands of other people from NC would drive across that border to one of several dozen warehouses of fireworks sitting directly on the other side, which exist in those locations for the sole purpose of selling to NCians. If you live in Charlotte, NC’s fireworks laws are nothing more than a subsidy for the fireworks industry of our less-fortunate neighbors
Regulatory arbitrage baybeeee
There’s actually a gas station right on the border which sells gas (lower taxes in SC), fireworks (looser rules in SC), and alcohol (lower taxes in SC).
Of course you can just tell that South Carolina has lower gas taxes the moment you drive over the border, because their roads are abysmal
I learned to speak Chinese with a Dongbei accent because I used to live not far from the OP (which definitely gets me weird looks as a white lady originally from Kansas.) Native Mandarin speakers are often SO confused by my accent. But yes…Taiwanese speakers do sound really melodic and beautiful. And I sound like I’m angry shouting all the time.
In Germany and Austria, the Swiss are well-known for speaking Scweizerdeutsch. For reasons unknown, they use diminutive forms of a ton of nouns. The result is that Swiss people speaking German sound like if you found a city in Appalachia where it was 100% normal to baby-talk to everyone, all the time.
On the flip side, no one can understand a goddamn thing coming out of a Viennese person’s mouth.
The dialect variance within the German language is insane at times
This is not exactly a new thing tho - here have a video from 1973 about it:
Thank you for the tag! That video about Chinese language variance is so funny and relatable, but regretfully there’s no German dialect that sounds melodic and beautiful. None. Sorry.
Also that video with the German accents is deeply deeplyuncanny because it’s from the 70s, before the wall fell, and it features two accents which don’t exist anymore today. Königsberg (which used to be the kingdom and later province Eastern Prussia) became Russian Kaliningrad after WWII and thus Russian-speaking; Breslau (in Silesia which got handed around between Bohemia, Hungaria, and Austria) was turned over to Poland and is now Wrocław. The German speaking populace of both places got sent to Germany and these accents are simply gone now. (Also for modern ears, the way the comedian is speaking in the Breslau accent sounds like a horrible racist caricature, I don’t know if the original accent really sounded like that). All the other accents are still around, but I’ve never heard those two outside of very old movies. I’m super intrigued that a sketch from the 70s is still placing these cities, with the old German names, on a map of German language speakers!
oh that’s so interesting! it’s true that those eastern dialects have all but died out but,as someone who works with elderly people in a region where a lot of people originally from silesia and eastern prussia settled after the war -
I know this! Obviously someone who has lived among people speaking a different dialect for 70+ years will have lost almost all of their og one. But those r’s, the melody of it - I know that! I know (or used to know) people who still have an echo of that in their speech! Isn’t that fascinating.
Just look at this german dialect map it’s sooo fun and confusing and there’s so many connotations attached to each of them.
(1. annie dillard, teaching a stone to talk 2. the deep underground neutrino experiment, a.k.a. DUNE 3. the large hadron collider 4. the sudbury neutrino observatory)
“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot
“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.
“you are functionally a conservative” is such a good and clarifying insult
Literally right after I saw this post, I saw another post in a discord chat for BOOK EDITORS in which an outspokenly liberal editor talked about how Nabokov should have never been published because he wrote about p*dophiles and described women’s bodies in ways that made her uncomfortable. She described his writing as “objectively terrible” and said she wanted to burn his books. And other editors were bringing up classics they didn’t like and talking about how they wanted to throw them in the trash. This wasn’t like a light “unpopular opinion!” conversation. This was actual book editors talking about how books should be destroyed and censored.
There is something so scary and toxic in global culture right now. The revival of fascism is influencing everyone’s mindset and approach to art, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.
I see far more books being censored today than when I was a kid. Librarians handed me The Catcher in the Rye, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Animal Farm when I was literally 8-11. My mom would never have taken a book away from me. I read everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Qur'an to atheist texts under my desk at school. Teachers thought nothing of it or encouraged it. Books seemed universally acknowledged as sacrosanct to me.
Now I can’t find any adults who don’t hesitate or want to make exceptions when it comes to censorship. Even the most liberal social activist librarians I know go, “well except for book X…”
Functionally conservative. It’s so important to have the language to express that.
So huajiao (sichuan pepper) is almost a citrus fruit. It’s in the same family but, tragically, doesn’t appear to be close enough to hybridise with them (naturally at least, could you futz this will some easy biotech? If so, you should. I want the Worst Orange).
Anyway, the bit of the plant we actually use, then, is more-or-less a citrus peel. Can we do any of the same things with it? Can it be candied? Can I make mar麻lade?
The lack of juice is an issue, but probably not insurmountable.
I deviated from the original idea for a few reasons. You can’t get fresh Sichuan peppercorns in the US. Also, I would like to be able to taste flavors other than “TV static” and “9v battery” in the near future. So this is mostly made up of blood oranges and sugar, but it also incorporates Tianjin chiles for heat, and Sichuan peppercorns for, uh, the bit.
The eating experience is pretty bizarre. First it tastes like normal marmalade. After you swallow, the heat hits you. And then after a couple bites, you realize something is wrong with your tongue.
this is by far my favorite safety/warning sign btw. they really went off with this one
No cuz I fucking love this sign. It’s not an actual barrier so it’s not like some sort of challenge it simply says “fuck around and you will find out”
Ohohoho I LOVE “fuck around and find out” signs, especially the really dramatic and ominous (but true) ones
(Context for the last one: it’s a WWII era sign posted around the soldiers’ washroom mirror, warning them to never discuss military plans in places where civilians could hear them and report back to the enemy, e.g. in restaurants and pubs in the country. “Loose lips sink ships”.)
I also love these two, which I would place in the category of “You already fucked around, now you’re about to find out.”
Aerated water is fucking scary. It’s water that has a fuckton of gas in it, which reduces the buoyancy to the point where you will immediately start to sink if you fall in.
ive been collecting these recently and wanted to add some of my favorites
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