Rosemary @Rosemary@awoo.space

@ValErie Oh my goodness you're adorable!

Trying to put hard rules on how English works is like trying to scoop up water with a sieve.
English is as inconsistent a language as we've ever seen with how it handles just about everything; almost any rule you make is going to have countless exceptions.
It's a Germanic substrate, covered up almost entirely by layers of Norman French, Latin, then non-Norman French, and a thin layer of Spanish, with chunks of Greek dispersed throughout, and a sprinkling of Japanese on top.

@Felthry Anden has returned! it's good to see them again. For the moment, if they want to say something, we'll just use the account of whoever's fronting and make it clear that Anden is speaking, I think. If they decide they want to have a more personal account, though, we'll make them one.

So... @Felthry and I might be getting a new headmate today or in the near future. We have a feeling that Anden, someone we knew from the first era (around 2012, iwrc) is returning. It'll be good to see them again! They never were interested in fronting, so it's unlikely they'll have an account here (though we might make one if they want to say something by proxy), but I thought we should mention it!

I had a sudden thought: When talking about Native American cultures, it's common to see the term "medicine man". Why not just use the term "pharmacist", which it sounds like is what they were and sounds less childish/primitive? Is it just racism?

I'm a big, fluffy firedog! <3

A hydra who has only one head, because for some reason everyone xe asks to do xem a favor by cutting off xir head suddenly remembers some pressing prior engagement.

when we ask wolfram alpha to do a computation involving "silicon bandgap", we do not in fact mean "silicone bandgap", why would anyone ever care about the bandgap of silicone?

We just learned that apparently an analyst at Goldman Sachs officially stated that curing patients is not good business. They want to make long-term therapy the norm, rather than single treatments that remove the problem.

Source: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/4/13/1756856/-It-finally-happened-Goldman-Sachs-asks-Is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model

Hm. Why the sudden wave of people referencing homestuck?

When dealing with alchemists, someone giving you an angry retort might just happen to mean you're the new caretaker of some sentient glassware.

What's the point of wikipedia articles having a "in popular culture" section?

Interesting fact: Apparently, the word for "louse" is one of the the most well-retained words, cross-linguistically, over time. It's very resistant to changing by contact with other languages or even by natural changes within a language--some rankings even list it as more stable than the first-person singular pronoun!

What do you do, I wonder, when an artist you really like only posts their work on twitter, yet you have reasons to want to never touch twitter with a ten-foot pole?

We're hardly going to demand that they post more on mastodon (that would be rude) but at the same time we don't want to miss their works.

Modular problems: Put on a dick you haven't worn in a while, instantly get hit with months and months of pent-up pressure.

For some reason I'm thinking of the phrase "decapitated but not incapacitated" and that seems like it would make for a good modular-related motivational poster of some sort.

Why do (US) banks say "Member FDIC", not "FDIC member" or "member of the FDIC"?

The mood on the mastoverse is fairly low of late. We don't know anything about what's happening and would, I think, prefer not to get involved, but I hope everyone is alright.